"Hmm. Uh-huh. Yeah, okay," Ratt mumbled as he carefully moved the slide back and forth, adjusting the focus on the scope. He could see the blood cells, healthy specimens to be sure. Rich, strong and plentiful. White and red. He continued to scan, moving the slide to the far end, where the off-color drop from the separated vial had been placed. There! He stopped moving and focused. That's them! That HAS to be them!
Dozens of virus shaped machines—for what else could they be?—floated in the plasma before his eyes. Every one looked the same, like a cross between an elongated Apollo Lunar Module and a cut and polished precious stone. "’Ello, sweetie," Ratt said in a mock-British accent. "So, what makes you tick, eh?" Sitting up for a second, Ratt frowned in concentration. Then his eyes shot wide and he bolted off the stool so violently he sent it rolling across the room. "I got it!" he announced to no one and then left the lab.
Five minutes later he returned carrying something heavy in his arms. It was, in fact, a pre-Storm car battery, with a few attachments. Although rare in the world at large, many residents of the Shanty had managed to salvage car batteries and learned how to maintain them. Most used them to power small electric lights and the other rare appliance. Ratt kept a stash of them, and when he thought about it, worked to refurbish and rebuild more. He plopped the battery onto the table next to the scope with a heavy thud. Attached to the terminals were tightly wound copper wires. The wires stretched out a good meter, and each was then similarly wrapped around two medical needles. Ignoring the slide, Ratt poured the rest of the blood from the vial into a nearby petri dish, giving it a quick blow first to clear it of dust.
"Let's see how you react to a little jolt o' juice," he said, finding his stool once more and picking up the needles in each hand, careful not to touch them together. "Just a little bit..." Doing his best imitation of the surgical robot arms, Ratt lowered the two probes into the dish of blood. There was a snap and a hiss, a fizzle, and a small amount of smoke. Then Ratt hastily flung the probe out and off to the side as he moved the dish to the microscope to observe what changes, if any, there had been. What he saw stole his words.
The nanobots were multiplying, self-replicating. The growth was fast and exponential. "But nothing comes from nothing..." Ratt mused and frowned. What were they using for raw materials? He looked closer and got his answer. The nanobots proved to be viral in more than simply shape. They were attacking the blood cells like a swarm of hungry piranhas, methodically cutting apart each organic cell they came to, almost down to the molecule, and then using the raw material, the carbon-based building blocks, to manufacture more of themselves. More amazingly, like stem cells, they were producing different varieties of themselves. They were building something.
They're building a Spartan.
Ratt shook his head slowly and smiled. So, it IS electricity that triggers them, he concluded, satisfied with himself. When he heard the leather straps on the table behind him burst, he began to doubt his findings. He turned around, consternation blocking any further theorizing, and his jaw hit the floor.
Chad was transforming into a Spartan before his very eyes.
"Oh shit."
The door to the locker room slid open, and Hegna stepped through the gap. He saw the eyes of his men suspiciously checking out his medical bandages and missing eye. The fact that he had been wrecked by esoterrorists could make his men doubt his abilities as a Hopper-jock and therefore doubt his command.
"What are you looking at, pukes? Never seen a real man before?"
"I'm looking at that thing wrapped around your arm," one of the men, Corporal Treston, said, "I didn't know they made feminine napkins that big."
The room belched with raucous laughter and snickering.
The cruel giggles hadn't even subsided before Hegna bolted across the room and caught Treston's jaw with a right uppercut. The corporal had been sitting on one of the humble benches that dotted the hallway-like floor plan of the locker room and flipped head over heels, off the bench and onto the tiled floor.
"Next time you want to mouth off to me, or any New Breed for that matter, you’d better watch it," Hegna warned. Everyone else in the room stopped laughing. Treston was groaning on the ground, legs tangled on the bench, neck craned on the floor, but the bulk of his torso pressed up against the wall of lockers. He was struggling to at least get flat, if not right himself, when Hegna stepped over him, reaching into the corporal’s open locker. All eyes were on him as Hegna, after some quick digging around, pulled out both a pair of boot-socks and Treston's unlatched lock. "I know you're the forgetful type. Being last-gen and all, you don't have the superior brain that I have from engineering. You're just what you are; a fluke of nature. A product of animals rutting." Everyone watched in silence as Hegna delivered his soliloquy, stuffing one sock inside the other before dropping the heavy steel lock down in. "Your mom was probably more of a dumb cunt that you are. It's not your fault." Hegna took the open ends of the stuffed socks and wrapped them once around the back of his hand and then made a fist around it. The weight from the lock caused the socks to droop some and were now stretched out to a good half-meter. "This should help you to remember your place."
Gasps and groans escaped the lips of wincing and averted faces, while Hegna went to work. Treston moaned like a heifer giving breech birth to an oversized calf. Hegna rained down blow after blow on the crumpled soldier. After what was surely the longest minute of Corporal Treston's life, Hegna finally stopped. The white cotton of the sock was now stained a deep red. Treston moved and moaned, still alive.
"Get your miserable ass off this floor and report to the sick bay. Go get yourself some feminine napkins."
Hegna tossed the bloody sock into Treston's locker, stepped over the fallen man and the bench and scanned the troubled faces of his squad.
"Now then—" he began, then stopped. His body too, not only his words, were frozen. Hegna twitched as if he had been stung or bitten by some unseen insect. His eyes widened in concern, if not in fear.
"Sir?" one of the men asked cautiously. Hegna stiffened straight up, ignoring the man and staring into space. When his body began to go from slight twitching to full on upright convulsing, his men grew alarmed, and, coming to their own feet, pulled back as far as they could without actually leaving the room. Hegna's mouth opened and issued forth an unnatural sound, somewhere between a pre-Storm dial-up modem and a Drop-Beastie's animal roar. The men screamed in alarm and confusion. Then, before their very eyes, Hegna's flesh began to ripple and bounce. It appeared as if there were a thousand leaping insects just under his skin. The color of his flesh began to darken, first in patches, then all over. Hegna sucked his stomach in and hunched over. His unearthly scream continued but grew louder. The men watched in horror as the fabric of their commanding officer’s shirt tore open in the back, ripped by bone-like protrusions that seemed to be growing out from inside him. Hegna's scream reached a zenith and stopped, and he collapsed in on himself, taking a knee on the locker room floor, head down. Oily gray smoke, offensive to the nose, wafted out from the kneeling form. When the smoke cleared, what had been Hegna slowly stood.
A jet black, metallic, stylized skeleton stood in the tattered remains of Hegna's uniform.
"What in the name of the Chairman?" one of the men sputtered.
The demonic robot turned to face the door at the far end of the locker room. While no longer truly human, the Spartan that had been Hegna knew that these last-gen soldiers would soon be swept away by the Purge and therefore posed no threat to the new way of things. Leaving the doomed men to their fate, the Spartan strode past their horrified and paralyzed faces and into the Hopper hangar bay beyond. There were troublesome esoterrorists out there; the order from High Command had informed him of it the very second he had completed his metamorphosis. And somewhere, deep down inside, the small part of him that remained Hegna wanted a rematch.
"Shoot it again, dammit!" Even from eight stories below, Jon could hear Lucy screaming at Carbine to keep trying.<
br />
Jon nearly gave himself whiplash jerking his head back and forth between the as-of-yet undamaged orb and the scene unfolding atop the stacked shipping containers.
"Shoot it!" He heard Lucy scream again.
Giving one last glance around to make sure the coast was still clear, Jon threw caution to the wind and abandoned his post at the brothel’s entrance and moved deeper into the courtyard, peeking up through the tangle of rope bridges to better see his friend. The Mini-Mech stood motionless.
Why isn’t he shooting?
Maybe he had cracked the orb and just needed to finish it? Lucy was as far from Carbine as she could be and still be up there on the roofs, on the far side of the circle of containers. Frustrated with the lack of response to her orders, Jon watched as she began to sprint and leap from connex to connex, making her way to Carbine. The other six freedom fighters were equally spread out up top, but none made a move towards the Mini-Mech. Jon stole one more glance at the entrance, saw that no one was coming, and decided he needed to get up there and help out.
Finding the stairway on the far side of the now ruined bar, Jon began to retrace the steps he’d taken up to the upper level of the bizarrely built brothel. Once up where the pod room was, he would stay on the perimeter and climb the wall of the topmost container. He was halfway there, just coming up to the fifth level when he heard another exclamation from Lucy above.
He looked up just in time to see Lucy closing in on the stationary Mecha and then have it spring to life, sweeping its railgun wide like a baseball bat.
Although caught off-guard, Lucy was wired for this kind of shit. She deftly fell to her knees, and her momentum kept her body moving forward in a slide while she arched her back over backward. The heavy, club-like railgun missed her jutting chin by a centimeter and passed over her. The second the weapon cleared her dipped forehead, her legs straightened, and she rose from her skidding kneel back to a fully upright position. She bobbed to her right, drawing Carbine's attention, then slipped back to her left, nimbly dodging the incoming backhand and effectively closing the gap between her and the Mech. Jon saw a glint of morning light reflect off her pistol.
"No! Don't!" he yelled from three floors below. There has to be an explanation! Carbine wouldn't betray us!
Lucy grimaced but held her fire. Instead, she darted up onto the back of the Mini-Mech and, holding on tightly with straddled legs, tail and lower arms, she leveled her pistol and aimed it at the cockpit.
"Explain yourself, Jarhead!" she hissed, but no reply came. "That's it. I don't know if you're a Statist traitor or if you've just lost your damn mind, but you are compromising this mission. Now open up!" Keeping her pistol leveled on the narrow viewport that wrapped itself horizontally around the Mini-Mech’s face, she used her free hand to attempt to open the suit by way of its manual override control panel in the base of its neck, while Carbine willed the suit left and right, in short, jerky motions, attempting to throw her off.
Afraid that his friend might get more than an ass-kicking once she peeled him out of the suit—however well-deserved—Jon resumed his ascent.
"Hoppers!" one of the rebel fighters called out.
Can this get any worse? Of course, Jon knew it could, in fact, get worse. The mission was botched, but the Purge hadn't happened yet. Perhaps they would have another chance before it was too late.
He reached the top level and jumped, catching the edge of the uppermost connex's roof and pulling himself up just in time to see Lucy succeed at overriding the power armor's lock. The armored chrysalis that protected Carbine split and folded itself open.
Only the pilot wasn't Carbine. Both Lucy and Jon were stunned into momentary shock. Jon had watched his friend go into the suit, but it was not his friend coming out.
"No. Oh no," Jon muttered, horrible realization dawning on him.
Lucy was naturally the first to recover. Once she had green-lighted the override, she had released her multi-limb grip on the machine and rolled off it backward. She’d knelt behind the Mech, pistol at the ready, and had stood by, expecting to find either a traitorous or insane Carbine. When she beheld the demonic, slightly skeletal machine-man of blackened alloy instead, she knew that her Lady's warning had borne fruit. Carbine had transformed into a Spartan.
"It can't... it can't be!" Jon stammered.
"He's gone, Jon," Lucy said determinedly and took aim. The thing that had been Carbine hissed and began to rise from the exposed cockpit of the Mini-Mech.
"Lucy, no!" Jon called.
Lucy would have ignored Jon—did, in fact, ignore Jon. The trigger was pulled. However, at the same moment, a salvo of mini-missiles ripped into the connex they stood on as well as the ones around them. Screams from some of the freedom fighters were quickly drowned out by the deafening cacophony of explosions and crumbling metal towers.
With everything around him collapsing, Jon’s fingers failed to find any purchase, and he slipped backward until he was free-falling. Before he was swallowed by the mushrooming cloud of dust and smoke below and around him, he spied a squad of Hoppers pass by overhead. No doubt they were the ones who’d fired the missiles, and no doubt they would make another pass and finish off everyone who survived the fall.
When Jon opened his eyes, he saw his arm stretched out before him. He was lying on his chest and belly; the air was dark with dust. A slight glow emanated from under his skin, pulsing softly until it slowly faded, like a countdown. Surprisingly, he felt little pain. Casting the thought aside, he pulled himself to his feet and surveyed the scene. Half of the stacked towers had fallen. All the rope bridges and suspended domiciles had been torn down by the falling containers. The courtyard was buried under a pile of rubble. What remained of the containers looked like aluminum cans that had been used for target practice and then run over by a tank. From under the one closest to him, Jon could see the twisted and bruised arm of a rebel fighter sticking out, hand open, palm raised, as if he had died reaching out for someone to help him. Jon shuddered.
"Jon." He spun around to see Lucy, unpinning herself and crawling out from under half a wall of corrugated steel.
"Where's Carbine?" Jon demanded. Anger flashed in his mind like a second round of explosive missiles as he recalled the callous way she’d attempted to execute his friend.
"He's gone, Jon. He's Warbak's toy now. A killing machine. And take it from me, that's not something you want to be. I was doing him a mercy."
"Mercy my ass!" Jon bellowed.
"He is the enemy. Get that through your head."
Their argument was interrupted. Not by the wail of Hopper engines, who had yet to return for another pass, but by a low, deep throbbing hum, bass so loud and deep that Jon felt his bones begin to rattle. Volume, as well as strength, began to increase, and Jon and Lucy both were forced to raise their hands to their ears for protection from the growing discomfort.
"What the hell is that?" Jon screamed over the deafening drone.
"I don't know!" Lucy called back.
Something clicked in Jon's mind.
Carbine, New Breed, Spartans. The Purge!
He looked up through the gap in the demolished brothel tower to behold the closest obelisk and the great glass orb atop it. It was as he feared. No sooner had his eyes come to rest of the smooth curves of the opaque ball than suddenly a great, brilliant flash of green light erupted from it. A quick glance told him identical flashes had come from the other three towers, and now were spreading out down the skinny sky-bridges that connected each of them to the Ziggurat like a looming tsunami.
"Is that...?" Lucy asked quietly, realizing as she asked that the thundering bass rumble had ended.
"Yes," Jon replied, dread sinking in him like a swallowed stone. "The Purge has begun. It’s heading to the Zigg first, but we need to get out of here."
The four beams of light all struck the Ziggurat simultaneously, then began to spread, like a cancerous tumor, over the entire mass of the colossal pyramid.
As soon as
the entire city-fortress was awash in the sickly color, the light jumped out from the confines of the Zigg and began to spread outward in all directions slowly.
It’s coming.
Jon gulped in horror.
The wave of growing light washed over the land like a wave of green—mercifully slower than actual light, but still alarmingly quick; Jon could see block after block of Shanty neighborhoods falling under its glow with each passing heartbeat. The wave was nothing if not relentless, and a quick calculation told him that in less than a minute the expanding light would reach all the way out to each sky-ramp’s lower guard posts, casting all of Home, the Shanty, and the Ziggurat completely within its spell.
Like a western gunslinger, Lucy drew the com-link Ratt had given her from her leg’s secret compartment and mashed the button.
"Ratt, mission failed, abort mission. We are standing by at Elena's, ready for portal out. Repeat, we are ready for my Lady's portal out."
Only the dead hiss of static came as reply. Jon's eyes met Lucy's. Something was wrong.
Jon turned and watched the wall of light close in on them. From behind him, he could hear Lucy repeat the call for extraction in vain.
How could we have come this far, only to fail now?
Candice watched the pair of transport pilots get up and leave. She glanced down at the time-piece strapped to her wrist. About damn time, she thought to herself. It was five minutes till the end of her shift. The pilots had taken their sweet time eating, and Candice still had to buss and clean their table before she could finalize her paperwork, change her uniform, and go home to her unit, three floors down. She blew out a long breath and felt her shoulders relax some. What a day. An unusual number of customers paired with the fact that their best line cook, the old vet Miller, hadn't shown up for work in two days, had made for more than the customary amount of work for Candice and her other coworkers. If only I had scored better in the Academy I wouldn't have to serve food for life.
The Goddess Gambit Page 32
