Cabal of Lies

by Michael Anderle

  “Yeah, always new, messed-up stuff to kill and smell,” he commented.

  “Better to kill and smell than die and smell nothing.” Jia surveyed the corpse-filled hallway with a mix of fascination and horror on her face. “You know, if you had mentioned nanozombies were in my future a couple of days ago, I would have asked what you had been taking. Now it’s starting to feel like a normal Tuesday, and I’m wondering what I need to start taking. I don’t know what that says about my life.”

  “It says you’re a survivor, and that’s the best thing you can be.” Erik loaded a fresh magazine into the TR-7 and looked at his sleeve. The teeth marks were surprisingly deep. “The nanites must strengthen everything, not just their muscles and pain tolerance.” He held up his sleeve. “The average person trying to bite into a tactical suit would more than likely break a tooth. I’m almost impressed. If they weren’t brain-dead, they might be a serious threat.”

  Jia turned her head back and forth, her eyes narrowed. “I still hear growling, but it sounds farther away than before.”

  Erik listened for a moment and nodded. “Let’s take this chance to get to the warden. He’s our best bet until Emma comes through.”

  He had no doubt the AI would, if only to prove something to her fleshbag partners, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a backup plan. Every minute that passed with nanozombies running loose meant more people could die.

  Erik and Jia broke into a jog, weaving between the piles of bodies in the hallway. The poor bastards had all once been men. Not good men, given they were in prison, but at least human.

  The nanites had reduced them to mindless, ravening beasts.

  “This shit smells like Talos,” Erik noted. “Using technology to make people into enhanced killers?”

  Jia glanced over her shoulder as they left the final body behind. “Moving up from full-conversion cyborgs? I didn’t even know this kind of thing was possible. I’ve read all the horror stories about medical nanites going wrong, but those were just people dying painfully, not getting stronger.”

  “I think it’s less about it being impossible and more about why anyone would want to use this under normal circumstances.”

  “You’re right.” Jia grimaced and swallowed. “It’s not like no one anticipated this application. They’ve made it difficult and illegal to pull off, but that’s not the same thing as impossible.”

  “Exactly,” Erik replied.

  They turned the final corner leading to the warden’s office. Dead guards were intermingled with a smaller number of dead nanozombies and non-infected prisoners. A heavy wooden desk lay on its side in front of the door, blocking the entrance to the office, covered in deep gouges and bloodstains. The nanozombies were nothing if not persistent.

  “Anyone alive in there?” Jia called out. “It’s Detectives Lin and Blackwell! We have weapons that can kill those things.”

  No one replied.

  Tension suffused Erik’s shoulders. He wouldn’t be surprised if the warden was dead, but he’d hoped he wouldn’t be. The situation was barely stable as it was.

  “Cover me.” He slung his TR-7 over his shoulder. “I’m going to move it, even if I have to get loud.”

  “You think that’ll attract more of them?”

  Erik shook his head. “If the constant gunfire didn’t, I don’t see why this would.”

  Jia backed away from the door, looking up and down the hall for advancing enemies. Erik wasn’t worried. Even if his efforts attracted more of the creatures, they’d hear the nanozombies coming long before they saw them.

  He advanced on the desk and used his left arm to push, but it wouldn’t budge. He brought back his fist and slammed it into the desk, cracking it. Several more blows launched chunks of wood into the air and produced a nice fist-sized hole. He shook out his hand.

  Erik peered through the hole. Chairs and a large wooden table had been jammed in between the desk and the wall to hold it in place. Warden Harris and a couple of guards were slumped against the wall, covered in blood, their clothes ripped and wounds on their chests and arms. Despite their awful state, they still seemed to be breathing. There was hope.

  “Okay, time for the real effort,” Erik muttered.

  He backed away from the desk and charged forward, his left shoulder leading, and slammed into it with a grimace. The arm might feel reduced pain, but that wasn’t the same thing as none. He backed up and collided with it again. A loud crack accompanied his fourth hit, and the desk toppled over. Jagged pieces of wood from the chairs, table, and desk showered the floor, victims of the cybernetic arm.

  Erik reached into his pocket to pull out all the medpatches he had on him. “So much for the warden helping us.” He applied the patches to the man’s most grievous wounds. “It’s better than nothing.”

  Jia produced patches from her pockets and applied them to the guards. “I hope these will keep them stable. If we don’t regain control of the system soon, it won’t matter. Right now, we don’t know how many of those things are out there. If most of the prisoners have been infected, we’ll run out of ammo before we stop them all.”

  Emma’s holographic form appeared. She looked down at the warden with a frown. “This is, some might claim, fortuitous timing, but I think it’s simply a reflection of my vast superiority as an intelligent being.”

  Erik stood and walked toward her. “You’ve got control of the prison?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve regained partial access to some systems, including the cameras and doors. I don’t know the exact method the hacker used, but much of the underlying systems code has been completely obliterated, and actively sabotaged in others. It was surprisingly thorough and destructive. I’m trying to actively rewrite it all, which will lead to questions later, but I assumed you’d prefer successful system access over plausible deniability.”

  “You’re right. We’ll worry about that once we don’t have a bunch of nanozombies trying to eat our faces.”

  Jia wrinkled her forehead. “Wait. You’re here, and we’re not in line-of-sight. Does that mean the jammer is down?”

  Emma nodded. “Yes, I located the device once I restored the camera feeds. It was connected to the main power grid, so I killed power in that area. Don’t worry, there’s no one there.”

  “What about the bots?” Erik asked. “They’re not great, but we could at least use them to swarm them like you did with my drones.”

  “I’m prioritizing door and cameras,” Emma noted, “due to the previously observed ineffectiveness of the security bots, as just noted. The gas might be useful, but it’s suffered even higher levels of system damage, and there seems to be physical damage near the storage tanks.”

  “Sabotage,” Jia hissed in irritation.

  “I’d assume.”

  Erik looked around the office. “I hope we can find the son of a bitch responsible for all this.”

  “I had Cutter send a distress call.” Emma snickered. “That way, there are fewer questions about him later, and he doesn’t have to remember the details secondhand. We used wide broadcast mode, but we’ve made it clear this situation is beyond mere reinforcements from other prisons. We’ve also requested active military intervention from any Fleet assets nearby.”

  “Good try, but it’s not that simple.” Erik shook his head. “The Fleet’s not going to send a ship over here just because of a prison riot.”

  “I had Cutter be selective with the truth. I had him say terrorists had smuggled yaoguai into the prison. I thought they might doubt the truth, despite the unsettling nature of its reality. Uniform boys can be so stiff in their thoughts.”

  Jia eyed Emma for a moment, her look of confusion turning into one of respect for the AI. “It’s close enough to the truth. Good job.”

  “Even if they believe Cutter, it might be a couple of hours or more, depending on where they are.” Erik inclined his head toward the warden. “And he’s out, so it’s up to us to keep things from getting worse.”

  A three-dim
ensional holographic map of the prison appeared, filled with scattered white, blue, and red dots. There was a heavy concentration of blue and white dots in a large room in the central portion of the station, with a thick grouping of red dots surrounding them.

  Emma pointed to a white dot. “Non-infected prisoners.” She moved to a blue dot. “Prison staff. The red dots represented infected. I’m locking anyone alive in a room where they’ll be safe. I’ve tried to seal infected off, but most of them have already converged on a central location. It’s like they’re calling to each other.”

  Jia nodded at the map. “And where is that?”

  “The cafeteria. Prison staff and noninfected are working together to fight off infected. It’s almost heartwarming.”

  Erik frowned. “Can’t you seal it?”

  A flash of irritation crossed Emma’s face. “I’ve been trying. There seems to be physical damage to some of the doors in that area, and there’s unusually severe damage to the systems code concerning that part of the station.”

  “That sounds like more sabotage.” Jia stepped closer and circled an area on the map with her finger. “This is where we are?”

  Emma nodded, and two golden dots appeared.

  “There are no active nanozombies left on this level,” Jia noted. She quickly pointed to scattered red dots. “And it looks like you’ve got them mostly trapped, except for the cafeteria.”

  “That is an accurate assessment.”

  Erik frowned. “We still don’t know how it’s spreading.”

  Emma summoned a large data window. Prisoners and guards stood side-by-side, bracing tables stacked together as barriers. Others punched, kicked, or slammed stun rods into nanozombies that were trying to clamber over the makeshift barrier. A nanozombie cleared the table and leapt onto a guard. A prisoner rushed over and kicked the monster off before shoving a shiv into his head several times and yelling in triumph.

  “I reestablished partial camera feeds before killing the jammer,” Emma explained. “Most of them are direct lines. I had time to observe, and I haven’t noted any active conversions since then, regardless of the nature of the contact.”

  “They can’t pass it through bites or the air,” Jia surmised. “Or if they can, there is a major delay before the transformation takes place. For all we know, they could have all been exposed weeks ago. It could have been when Conners visited.”

  “We should have just brought our breathers,” Erik suggested.

  Jia blinked and laughed. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.” Erik nodded at the door. “They need our help in the cafeteria. If we thin out that horde, that should buy us all enough time until reinforcements arrive.”

  “Assuming we survive,” Jia replied.

  “Yeah, always a big assumption.” Erik chuckled and traced a path on the map. “We’ll come from this approach. That should give us the most targets, and a better angle to shoot at the zombies without hitting the survivors.”

  She looked at him, a small smirk gracing her lips. “Ever miss when gangsters were our worst problem?”

  He smiled. “Nah. This keeps things interesting.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  What started as distant snarls and growls grew in volume until it sounded like an entire zoo packed with rabid, out-of-control animals was nearby.

  The screams of dying men and yells of those refusing to die joined the noise. The din swallowed Erik’s and Jia’s heavy footsteps as they sprinted toward the cafeteria and granted them an unexpected element of surprise.

  Bloodstains and crimson foot- and handprints grew more common as they drew closer, along with bodies. They were mostly non-infected, although not as many as they would have expected.

  Occasionally, they spotted a collapsed security bot or a downed drone. Whether it was superior wisdom to have less staff and potential victims or arrogance that led to a lower chance of controlling the bizarre situation remained unclear. For now, it didn’t matter.

  Jia and Erik were the only ones in the entire prison with effective weapons.

  “If we start taking down the nanozombies, they might leave the others alone,” Jia suggested between breaths. “But that means they’ll come after us.”

  “If not, it’ll be easy to pick them off, and I kind of expect them to come after us. They’re idiots. We can win.” Erik nodded ahead to an upcoming intersection. One more right turn would bring them behind the largest concentration of nanozombies in the entire station. He slowed and looked at Jia. “You ready for this? I’ll try to trip some and hope we get lucky, but mostly I’m going to stick to headshots.”

  “It’s just a horde of nanozombies,” she joked. “They don’t have missiles or giant sentry bots. It’s like taking on a room full of schoolkids.”

  “Nanozombies are like schoolkids?” Erik stared at her. “Your fancy elite schools must be far scarier than I thought.”

  “You have no idea.” Jia jogged to the intersection and flattened herself against the wall. “Any of them moving our way, Emma?” She’d not realized just how used she’d gotten to Emma providing active tactical information via her smart lenses.

  A woman never appreciates a military-grade AI as much as when she is facing off against a nanite-infested horde of ruthless, bestial killers.

  “No, they are continuing to attack the breathing fleshbags in the cafeteria,” Emma replied. “Who, I should admit, are mounting a valiant defense, all things considered.”

  “Three,” Jia began. “Two. One.” She pivoted around the corner, rifle at the ready.

  Dozens of zombies growled and clawed at survivors and their barricades. Despite the hundreds of noninfected men in the cafeteria, the horde was pressing them in with sheer intensity. Dead, mauled bodies lay strewn about, most lacking the mottled skin of the advanced nanozombies. Prisoners and prison staff continued to punch, strike and stab at the horde with makeshift weapons, but every enemy forced back left two or three men wounded or dead. They wouldn’t survive without aid.

  Jia and Erik lifted their weapons and moved to the side of the hallway. They needed to aim so their bullets wouldn’t pass through the barricades. This was as much about saving lives as it was ending zombies. Without a countdown, they both opened fire simultaneously. One nanozombie’s head popped like an overripe fruit. Another who had been climbing over the barricade lost most of his neck and tumbled backward, losing his head when he hit the ground. Cheers erupted from the prisoners and staff.

  “Yeah, take those things out!” screamed a wiry prisoner. “If I had a gun, they wouldn’t be doing so well. I can tell you that.”

  The horde spun almost as a unit toward Erik and Jia, their snarls and shrieks reverberating off the walls. The nanozombies rushed forward, loping on all fours again. Jia’s stomach knotted at the inhuman sound of their shrieks and growls, but it didn’t slow her response. Wherever and however she died, it wouldn’t be at the hands of a bunch of mindless monsters on a prison station.

  If she did, her mother would follow her to the afterlife to complain.

  Jia backed up slowly but took her shots quickly, moving from target to target with practiced ease. Erik’s TR-7 spat a river of bullets on full automatic.

  He aimed low, the bullets ripping into the legs of the front of the horde. Zombies fell to the floor, stumbling over their fallen allies. His plan was working.

  He slapped another cartridge in and continued his torrent of death, concentrating on slowing them while Jia delivered the coup de grace: a shot to the head. They could do this.

  They could win.

  The horde continued to move forward, and Jia’s jaw tightened.

  Well, maybe not.

  There were far more than they’d fought near the warden’s office, but there was nothing to do now but fight and win. There would be no mercy from the enemy.

  Her body moved on its own as she shifted from closest target to closet target, barely hearing her gunfire or the enemy. The TR-7’s loud bellow c
ontinued beside her, the sound almost sweet, given the situation.

  Missile explosions would have been nice, but she understood the logic of avoiding hull breaches in deep space, especially when the grav and oxygen fields might not be stable.

  Erik and Jia continued to back up, leaving a trail of casings and empty magazines close to them and bodies farther away. They’d already thinned the horde by half. Jia had never been so grateful for the mindlessness of an enemy.

  Her partner’s gun fell silent after two bursts ended with two kills, giving the enemy a chance to advance. A nanozombie pounced at him, but he batted it off with the TR-7.

  Jia twisted and put three bullets through its brain before it hit the ground.

  More enemies surged forward, shrieking for blood. A trigger pull followed, then another. The former men fell, spared their hellish existence.

  Jia fired again, but her gun had run dry. A zombie closed to within a couple of meters before Erik’s freshly reloaded rifle added a new large hole where a brain had once resided.

  “This is intense.” Jia ejected her magazine and yanked another from her carryaid. She slapped it in and started shooting again, almost without aiming.

  The convergence of her fire and Erik’s shredded the remaining nanozombie vanguard, leaving them on the floor either dead or twitching before dying.

  The horde and survivors were now silent. The hallway and the cafeteria were also quiet, except for the ragged, short breaths of exhausted men and one woman. Then a round of cheers ripped through the cafeteria and corridor.

  Erik crept forward. “How we doing, Emma?”

  “All infected have been neutralized in your immediate vicinity,” she reported. “I’ve successfully contained the others that are spread out over the station, but combined, the remaining strength represents one-fourth of what you’ve just defeated. I have now restored normal function to all door systems.”