Biohell (60 page)

Then he saw the PAD in Keenan’s
hands, and he raised his eyebrows. “You sending?”

“Aye.” Keenan nodded.

“What you sending?”

“An open Panic Burst. On the old
Combat K frequencies. I’ve also sent one on Fortune’s private number; if he
still lives. I’ve not heard from him for a few years.”

Fortune was a rogue mercenary AI
wanted by the Quad-Gal authorities. Once hunted, Fortune travelled from hiding
place to hiding place within the Sinax Cluster. Occasionally, and for the right
fee, Fortune would act as NMH Bridge—Navigator, Monitor and Hacker. This gave
whoever paid the right fees access to the Quad-Gal Military Factory Class
Database, and Fortune could sometimes get Combat K out of situations by
employing his awesome technical hacking skills. He had been quiet for a long
time now. Privately, Keenan thought he was dead. .

“You asking for help?”

“Yeah.” Keenan grinned through a
pall of smoke.
“Any
help right now would be much appreciated. That’s if
there’s any Combat K guys left out in the smush.”

“Olga might...”

Keenan held up his hand. “Don’t
even go there, Franco. I doubt very much she’ll manage to find that which you
sent her for. But—don’t worry. If we escape this shit, I’ll make sure you two
get back together for a sweet reunion.”

“That’s not what I meant,”
mumbled Franco, face flushing red.

“Sure it’s not, buddy. Sure it’s
not.”

Keenan shut down the PAD and
checked his weapons, then his WarSuit. Franco’s was malfunctioning after his
escapade with the disco zombies, but was still vaguely functional—and better
than going in without any armour at all.

Cam buzzed over. “Keenan. I was
thinking of journeying ahead, scouting out the land.”

“Every time you say that, we end
up in the shit.”

“It’s what I’m designed to do.
And in all actuality, I don’t foresee you having another contact before you
reach the Black Rose Citadel.”

“On a long enough timeline, we
all run out of luck.”

“Yes,” said Cam, “but you have
here a fine Apache Gunship. You know your destination. No. I am quite confident
you are safe; I will zip ahead, gather what intel I can for a smooth and speedy
infiltration. What do you think?”

“Go on then. Just don’t get into
trouble.”

“I’ll be careful,” said Cam,
primly, and dropped neatly off the edge of the skyscraper.

“That little yellow chicken-shit!”
snapped Franco.

“You think he’s scared? He’s our
scout.”

“Yeah yeah, sure he is. Probably
gone for some PopBot sex. Or something.”

“You taking your pills?”

Franco popped a green one, and
crunched it. It turned his teeth a frothy green and he grinned as if in the
throes of a rabid, pus-drenched fit. “Better believe it.”

From over by the power source,
where Xakus worked with eyes and mind focused decoding the SinScript, there
came a heavy bass
whine.
Both Keenan and Franco stared.

Xakus looked up.

“Something wrong?” said Keenan.

“We’re out of power.”

Franco snorted. “How can an
entire
power block
be out of power? Don’t be ridiculous!”

Around them, a sudden swathe of
blackness washed over the buildings which remained illuminated. Dark flowed
like liquid. Distantly, a variety of clunks, whines and growls emerged from
machinery closing down, shutting down,
dying.
Darkness seemed to sweep a
mammoth quarter of The City.

“Impossible,” said Keenan, voice
gentle, cool, eyes shining with understanding. Then, voice carefully measured,
he turned and stared out over the black horizon where tiny zig-zags of purple
flashed and yellow tracers streaked like strobes. “Xakus. Get your kit
together.”

“Why, Keenan? I can re-route...”

“We’ve got company.”

Franco whirled, eyes straining. “Boss?”

“Get the chopper started.
Now!”

Franco ran, leapt aboard the
Apache and fired the engines. The rotors started to run, scything snow, and
Keenan hoisted his MPK, checked the weapon, and lit a cigarette. Smoke engulfed
him. Calmly, he waited.

Xakus, with kit packed, sprinted
to Keenan. He handed the SinScript to the battered soldier for safe keeping,
and Keenan stowed the valuable disk beneath his WarSuit. He laughed. Yeah, he
thought. Until the next time.

“Have you seen anything?”

“Get in the chopper.”

They slammed, screaming through
blackened skies, rotors thundering, fire flickering from exhaust ports: Three
Black Tiger KAZ Gunships, howling as they sped into view and roared overhead,
rotors whirling, banking in close formation as Keenan sighted down his MPK and
unleashed a long, hard volley of bullets, turning, tracking the choppers as
they circled, banking steeply again, their targets now identified...-

“Franco, I need that chopper!”
roared Keenan. He changed mags, allowing the first heated alloy strip to tumble
to the ground. It clattered brittle against concretealloy.

There came a whine, then a
whump.
Keenan stood, legs braced, teeth in a snarl, and unleashed another stream of
bullets, watching the rocket detach from the Black Tiger and roar towards the
roof... and his fragile shell.

Keenan rolled left and hit the
ground hard amidst puddles of melted snow as the rocket slammed the roof thirty
feet to his right—where seconds earlier Xakus had stood. A green fireball
billowed, raged into the sky on a volley of erupting building chunks and
severed cables. The explosion sent a wash of steam broiling over Keenan.

Keenan crawled as the Black Tiger
Gunships smashed overhead, gunfire rattling. Bullets slammed Combat K’s Apache;
sparks smashed a firework display.

“Come on!” cried Franco.

Keenan leapt in the Apache as
Franco thrust at controls like a mad monkey. Engines screaming, they leapt into
the air and Keenan grabbed the heavy mounted machine gun, an EMF5000, and
buckled himself in. His head snapped round. “Xakus, strap yourself tight. We’re
in the shit.”

Xakus nodded, face drawn in fear,
and struggled against physics to the far wall where he locked himself to the
internal buckles of the machine.

“Going down,” said Franco, who
despite claiming to hate flying, was actually a pretty accomplished pilot, only
superseded in skill by Pippa—although he would never admit it. Franco dropped
the Apache from the summit of the skyscraper and roared towards the ground. “What’s
on our tail?”

“Black Tigers. Three of them.”

“Bastard. Not the KAZ models?”

“Yeah. I think.”

The Apache roared ground-wards
and behind the Black Tigers were jostled into single-file due to the narrow
streets; guns roared, and Franco pulled up, cruising along in a blur a few feet
above street level. Bullets raked the streets. Stray cars were caught,
punctured, lifted and tossed, hammer-blows which left them squatting on
destroyed suspension and curling flames. Several exploded, and Franco banked,
taking an intersection and whizzing between towering skyscrapers, flashing
through balls of acrid smoke.

“I can’t use the gun down here,”
shouted Keenan over the flapping, smashing noise from the open door. “We’re too
enclosed!”

Franco nodded. “If I rise above
the streets they’ll flank us.”

“Here, we’re a sitting duck.”

Franco nodded again, slamming the
chopper right down another intersection. Rotors thrummed, reflected from glass
and alloy walls. In close pursuit, the lead Black Tiger growled, lurched
forward, and started to gain.

Keenan grabbed Franco’s pack,
pulled free a BABE grenade. He pulled the pin, shuffled to the edge of the
chopper so his legs were hanging out over the flashing, stroboscopic ground. “Make
a left,” he shouted.

Franco slammed them left, and as
they banked Keenan squinted, tears streaming down his face in the slipstream,
and hurled the BABE. There came a hiatus. Then a
boom,
and a blossom of
purple flames. The three Black Tigers slammed through smoke. Machine guns
roared, and bullets slapped along the Apache’s flank.

“Hold on!” screamed Franco, and
the Apache’s nose lifted dramatically and they soared skywards, g-force pinning
them in place as engines screamed and groaned and wall panels rattled. Reaching
the summit of the nearest skyscraper block, Franco pulled a massively tight
turn, soaring in an arc through the sky and coming around towards...

A wall of glass.

“No!” growled Keenan as they
flashed towards the skyscraper, and Franco blasted an AAAM rocket. It detached,
roared, and detonated a hole in the side of the skyscraper. The Apache slammed
into the smoking maw and for a few seconds Keenan caught glimpses of flaming
chairs and blackened desks, scorched computer terminals, internal walls and a
flashing flicker of a bizarre detonated office. Another
boom
signified a
second rocket and then they were out in the black, snow-swirling sky as Franco
jiggled the Apache around...

“Get on the guns!” he screamed.

The three Black Tigers were
arraigned, searching for the Apache. Keenan, gripping the EMF5000 in two
sweating fists, unloaded a hardcore smash of bullets that streaked across the
sky on trails of fire and cordite. Bullets ripped into the first machine,
spitting sparks from rotors and sending it spiralling down in a stream of
billowing, blue smoke...

In the punctured cockpit, Keenan
had seen flailing, panicking...
zombies.

You’ve got to be kidding, he
thought.

Shit.

“The zombies are flying the
choppers!” he snarled. “How’s that possible? How, I ask you?”

He continued to fire the EMF in
heavy bursts, but the Black Tigers had manoeuvred and missiles streaked towards
Combat K. With a squawk Franco dropped the Apache out of the sky, cutting power
and they fell, chasing the plummeting, spiralling Black Tiger out of control
and heading groundwards at an incredible, terminal rate...

The damaged Black Tiger fell. And
as it fell, zombies disgorged from the side door in what appeared an attempt at
escape—and Franco screamed, suddenly, as a zombie flashed up at him, slammed
the Apache’s cockpit with a pus-riddled maw trailing ooze and slime, then slid
free and through the rotors, distributing fine minced zombie cubes over a
kilometre wide area.

“What the fuck was that?” snarled
Keenan, shaken by the ferocity of the impact which had rocked the entire
chopper.

“A flying zombie,” yelled back
Franco, hard on the vibrating, almost-out-of-control, controls. Below him, the
Black Tiger disgorged more panicking, free-fall zombies. Only now Combat K’s
Apache was travelling faster, vertically, than the zombies could fall, and
despite Franco veering left and right and spinning them around various axes,
still more zombies splattered against the web-riddled cockpit windscreen with
thuds
and
crunches
and
cracks.

“No no no!” muttered Franco,
trying desperately to avoid this random sky-kill.

“What the hell’s going on?”
bellowed Keenan.

“It’s a zombie apocalypse,” spat
back Franco, before wrestling control and veering the groaning Apache around on
a wide arc that shaved the roof from an abandoned street-level juggernaut like
a tin-top from a can of spam, and left the Apache without landing gear.