Biohell (66 page)

“What you doing here, pep? You
not look like maintenance staff. Are you maintenance staff? Give me your name
and rank serial, so I can check if you maintenance staff, silly little pep
staff straying out of the main service route where only maintenance staff are
allowed.”

Keenan’s heart sank. What? Up
here?
No, it couldn’t be...
But it was. Keenan turned. The voice
belonged to a Justice SIM. A Justice SIM with an MPK
machine gun...
Keenan
smiled weakly. “Hi,” he said cheerily. “I was just looking for the cooling
chambers. I had a routine maintenance job to do. Should I not be up here?
Sorry. Sorry!”

All the time he spoke he was
moving towards the SIM... which frowned, mechanical eyes clicking, face
impassive and emotionless. “We don’t have any cooling chambers,” said the SIM.
Its gun snapped up. “You stand there, pep, you illegal, you illegal immigrant,
how you get in? You not able to get in? I’m scanning now... you not have...”

Keenan’s Techrim
boomed,
three
times, and bullets kicked sparks from the MPK which smashed from the SIM’s
gloved hands and went sailing out over the sea of motionless zombies, a few
bullets rattling from a hastily trapped trigger. Fire blossomed from the
barrel. The gun turned. Keenan ducked as bullets
whined
overhead,
pinging erratically from metal beams.

The SIM charged him...

Keenan fired off a few more
shots, scrambling back, but the SIM’s armour absorbed bullets with little jelly
whumps.
A fist slammed Keenan’s face, and he ducked a second swing,
dropping to one knee, powering a blow to the SIM’s groin which
cracked
metallically.
The SIM kicked out, the blow lifting Keenan and sending him staggering back. A
second kick sent his Techrim flying out after the falling MPK. Keenan glanced
down, watching his trusted weapon disappear. Below, none of the zombies had
moved; none looked up. None seemed the slightest bit interested in the fight
taking place over their heads.

The Justice SIM
smiled.
And
that was unusual. They normally didn’t have the personality.

“I’m going to make you hurt, pep.”

“Come and show me, dickhead.”
Keenan was edging back across the beam. A quick glance told him his retreat was
blocked by waist-thick pipes. He’d have to go for his MPK holstered on his
back... and even then, he knew, the fight would be a hard one—

SIMs didn’t die easy.

He went for the MPK as the SIM
charged, but it was too fast. Keenan lashed out with a combination of punches,
all of which connected and rocked the SIM. It staggered, then smiled, eyes
clicking. It pulled out a long knife from an embedded compartment at its
waist...

Keenan was grappling, trying to
pull free his MPK, but something had trapped it against his pack. Had it been
the fall? The rush through high-pressured cooling tubes? Whatever, the gun was
jammed, wouldn’t tug free, and Keenan dropped to pull a slender knife from his
own boot. In comparison to the SIM’s blade, he might as well have held a
toothpick...

Man and SIM faced one another.

Keenan was sweating, and he wiped
it from his eyes.

The SIM started forward. Slow.
With care.

Keenan retreated, until his back
slammed the pipes. They vibrated with a hollow, clanging reverberation.

“I’m going to gut you like a
fish, pep. Your kind are inferior, pasty, so weak and brittle and easily
broken. You were the template for the SIM; yes, but look now how superior we
are! And yet, still you are arrogant little man, patronising, think you so
superior. You...
humans...
you make me sick.”

~ * ~

Franco
fell down and slapped along through thick gunge, flapping his arms like a
madman. “Aarrghie!” he screamed as the pressure spat him, and he sucked in a
mouthful of gunk that made him choke and splutter and splurge. Everyone was
gone, Keenan, Cam, Xakus. He flowed like a drug in an arterial system, slammed
along at a fair old rate spreading his own special brand of Franco
high.
“Get
me out!” he screamed. “Get me out of this place!” He zig-zagged through more
pipe junctions. “Get me out! Get me out of this trap!” He sped and rushed,
hands flapping, trying to slow his accelerating insanity. His hands juddered
from the insides of the rubberised pipes and were nearly ripped off at the
wrists. “Get me out! Get me out of my brain!” And then, as the speed seemed to
shiver and hum through every single vibrating atom of Franco Haggis, making him
weep and scream and wail and want to die with every pounding pressing crushing
second, so—a miracle happened.

“Get me...” he began.

And it did. It got him out.
Ejected him like a bout of diarrhoea from a colitis-riddled giant. Franco
sailed onto a metal platform, high in the air, and rolled over and over and
over again, rattling to a stop and staring down at knurled alloy. He was
panting. He was sweating. His WarSuit was making funny erratic clicking noises.
Franco glanced right, to where gunk poured under high pressure and fell into a
velocity well far below. If he’d gone down with it, he would have been
instantly
crushed. Thanks be to God!
he praised.

His head turned the other way. To
see gleaming boots. “Ahh. Haha. Yeah, right, sure, it was never going to be
that
easy,
right?
Bugger.”
His eyes blinked a few times, and his depth of
vision returned. Behind the boots were... metal legs. Three sets. They looked
solid, well-crafted,
sculpted,
even, in a kind of sturdy, efficient,
robot-killer kind of way.

Franco looked up, sheepishly.

He blinked.

And blinked again.

A hand reached down towards him.
Franco took the hand, and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. A big,
beaming smile smacked like a kipper across his face. His eyes went wide,
glistening in happiness. His nostrils twitched involuntarily at her natural
perfume. The scent of the wild
woman.
The aroma of the
sexy
bitch.

“You are one lucky son of a
bastard,” said Pippa, still holding on to Franco’s gloved hand. “Three feet
less, and you’d have gone into the grav, your whole body compressed to the size
of a pin-head.”

“Pippa!” he roared, and embraced
her in a swathe of gunk-smeared clicking WarSuit. There came three hardware
clunks
and Franco met the eyes of the GK AIs, Nyx, Momos and Lamia. There came a
rush of noise, like ice-hail on a windscreen, like machine gun bullets against
corrugated steel, and five thousand needles rippled across Nyx’s arms and torso
as her sculpted head lowered, and the discs of her eyes fixed on Franco.

Franco held up a hand, palm
outwards.

“OK, OK, no need to get frisky,
doll.” He took a step back, and looked Pippa up and down. “By God, girl, it’s
damn good to see you! And I don’t even mean that in a sly sexual way, although
of course, you know how it is with little old me, and if you do change your
mind you know I’d be the first one to jump into a bath of hot marmalade with
you, despite being on a mission to save my beloved Mel!” He grinned. Slapped
her on the shoulder—at the same time she slammed cuffs around his wrists.

“It’s good to see you, Franco.”
But the smile wavered, and disappeared from her face. “It’s a shame things have
changed for the worse. I have a new job now.”

Franco stared at the cuffs
incredulously. He tugged at them, not quite believing they were there. “What?
WHAT? What’s this, Pippa? Who do you think you’re betraying? What you doing
here in NanoTek? And with them bloody buggers who tried to smash us up back at
that library?” Franco’s face relaxed. He released a breath. He nodded. “So. The
Big Boys got you on payroll now, eh girl?” He grinned, only this time it was
removed from the grin of friendship he’d offered a few seconds earlier.

“This is my job,” said Pippa,
stiffly.

“This is
me,
Franco.” He
shook his head. “What the fuck’s going on in your head, girl? After all the
shit we’ve pulled? All the hardtime missionwise we went through? Pippa, you’ve
got your head on all backside fucked.”

“This is my
job!”
she
snarled, moving close to Franco, cold grey eyes narrowing. “How can you
criticise
me}
After the K Jump went wrong, after we went to...
that
place.”

Franco’s voice was cool. “I just
know we all had to be strong,” he said. “It was a bad time. But we worked
together to break free. We worked as a team. We are a
team.
” He eyed the
three advanced AIs standing dangerously languorous behind the woman. “But I see
some things have changed, right? Killing Keenan’s family... well, that’s fucked
with your skull. Now you’ve took up with some new slick fresh-oiled meat.”
Franco leant over, and spat at the AIs. They did not move. “Man-murdering
meat-fuckers.
I thought MICHELLE ragged you all over the place. A shame to see you still
standing.”

Pippa took a step back, gestured
to the AIs. “Take him.”

Momos and Lamia moved, like
flowing liquid, smooth and seductive animation that was not lost on the horn
that was Franco. They grabbed him, roughly, one under each arm. Their heads
turned, the matt black discs of their eyes fixing him; enamelled jaws smiled on
sliding greased pistons.

Pippa strode ahead, down a
high-roofed, alloy-floored hallway. Behind, the gunk from the coolant system
faltered and suddenly dried up; as if a simple tap had been turned. A passageway
closed. A job well done.

Franco dragged along, boots
bumping. “Pippa! Pippa, don’t do this! We’re still a team... hey? Still Combat
K! You can never change what you are! Never kill what lies in your heart! You
were
born
Combat K. And you’ll
die
Combat K.”

Pippa halted. Turned. Smiled a
tight, cold smile. She eyed the GK AIs with cool compression. When she spoke,
her voice was melting ice over frozen alcohol. “Nyx, Momos, Lamia—if the,” she
savoured the word,
“prisoner...
speaks again... then hell, please feel
free to kill him.”

She strode off, boots clacking
down the hall.

~ * ~

Cam
felt his strands ripped free from direct contact inside Xakus’s brain; and as
the old professor slammed off down a pipe, Cam knew instinctively that the old
man was dead. Sadness swamped him—for a nanosecond—until reality kicked his
small AI brain into gear and he focused on his dangerous situation. It was a
massive surprise to be swept away, each of them jerked in different directions and
sent spinning down separate coolant pipeways. Cam spun fast, at first trying to
fight the flow, then relaxing into a current too powerful for his motors to
drive against without burning out, or at least becoming seriously damaged. Cam
flowed, zipping down pipes, along pipes, even
upwards
if his gyroscopes
were to be trusted. He coolly logged his direction, speed, co-ordinates. He
monitored for Keenan and Franco... but, worryingly, could find nothing. Had the
pressure killed
all three
men? Cam cursed in machine code.

He sensed the vertical cylinder
full of gunk before he was in it; it slammed his sensors with its power, its
pressure, its ferocity. With a sudden intuition Cam fought his direction of
flow, realising instantly the danger into which he was being sucked... only too
late, he was squeezed through an ever-narrowing complex network of tubes, the
pressure building and building and building and he was forced unceremoniously
into the cylinder where he was dragged down and fed into a circular loop. Gunk
compressed his shell with a
crackle.
Under intense pressure, Cam started
to quickly become very, very hot, and he fed heat to his outer-shell and
allowed the coolant to do its job. But, conversely, it didn’t seem to be
working. Cam felt himself growing hotter, and hotter, and hotter as he spun
around the base of the cylinder in an entrapped circuit. His motors whined,
trying to eject him from the drag. He could not escape. With the heat buildup
reaching 600°C Cam started to feel the extremities of circuits malfunctioning.
Growing desperate, he began to pump heat into the surrounding coolant and
suddenly realised why it wasn’t working as his synapses slowed and his
multi-core CPU began a binary twitch. The coolant outside was
hot.
Hotter
than
him.
Which probably meant he was near the core of whatever was
being cooled. Cam tried to think. Images jagged across his sliver-spitting
memory. He thought of Xakus. Which path did the dead man’s body take? Had it
been compressed? Or maybe boiled, like a lobster in a pot—the current fate
being applied to himself? Cam cursed again, and with a final, heavy-duty surge
he attempted to escape the coolant cycle in which he was trapped... at the same
time, cycling through a million blueprints until he found one, and it stopped,
revealed to his inner senses: