Biohell (67 page)

Ahhh, he thought.

So
that’s
where I am.

Inside The Sump.

The base of the entire cooling
system for NanoTek HQ.

Cam strained harder, his actions
tinged by an edge of atomic panic. With a
pop
one motor burned out,
smoke pluming from Cam’s case to be absorbed by coolant. Then another died.

Then a third.

Working now at under 50%
efficiency, Cam limped around the bottom of the central coolant cylinder known
as The Sump—like a dying goldfish with one fin going round in circles at the
bottom of a bowl. And the only problem with being a dying goldfish at the
bottom of the bowl was that, well, all the other goldfish were cannibals, and
it was only a matter of time before they clocked terminal distress and closed
in for a good ol’ feed.

Warily, Cam scanned his
surroundings.

And with a jolt, realised he wasn’t
alone...

~ * ~

The
SIM advanced on Keenan, whose arm came back and sent the narrow blade speeding
with unerring accuracy to pierce under the SIM’s left mechanical eye. The SIM
went down on one knee, letting out a gasp. But, despite the knife piercing its
brain, it glanced up, mouth a sour line, and bared its teeth at Keenan... who
charged, growling, and leapt, both boots smashing the SIM’s face. It toppled
back, sliding to one side, legs cartwheeling over the abyss and pulling its
body after it. The SIM slithered across steel, nails dragging along metal with
screeches, then with an outstretched arm it fired a line which whipped around
Keenan’s legs and brought him crashing to the ground. The SIM slithered off the
high H-section walkway, the line buzzing from its forearm as it swung,
pendulous, and Keenan grunted with pain, hunched, taking the SIM’s weight.

“Bastard,” he hissed, and again
tried to scrabble for his MPK. Again, he could not work the weapon free.
Slowly, he slid in several painful jerks towards the edge of the walkway, his
locked boots kicking and pushing. He glanced down at the SIM, which swung. It
was laughing.

“Let go!” he snapped.

“What?” The SIM looked up, Keenan’s
blade protruding from the front of its face like some bizarre sculpture. “And
deprive myself the satisfaction of knowing you, too, will die in the fall?” The
SIM chuckled again. It was an evil, binary sound.

Keenan glanced around, panic
rising within him. The line was growing tighter and tighter about his ankles,
just below his WarSuit, cutting off his blood-flow. His boots, whilst solid,
did little to halt the compression of three hundred pounds of SIM.

Then he saw it. The SIM’s knife.
He leant, grunting, and almost lost his grip on the precious ledge. He
stretched, muscles screaming, and shuffled millimetre by millimetre towards the
curved, gleaming blade—and salvation.

Keenan’s fingers closed around
the weapon. With a triumphant scream, the blade slashed down, only to bounce
from the line. Savagely Keenan hacked away at taut fibres, but it simply would
not part.

“TitaniumIII, an interwoven mesh
line,” said the SIM conversationally, from where it swung above the frozen
zombie army. Blood had run down its face, giving it a blood mask in an inverted
V.

Keenan stared down, past the SIM.
Still the zombies were motionless, despite the battle above. It’s as if... they’re
dead. Laughter welled manically in his throat, in his brain, vying with the intensity
of pain in his ankles. Keenan hurled the SIM’s knife, but the SIM twitched to
one side, and looked down, watching the blade flash over and over to half-sever
a zombie’s head far below. Still, the distant, deviant creature did nothing. It
stood, head hanging half-off, lolling to one side and showing pink sliced
tendons and a lode of squidgy neck fat.

“Pull me up,” said the SIM.

“Get to fuck.”

“Or we both die.”

“Then we both die,” snarled
Keenan.

“I am prepared to meet my maker.
He stamped the back of my neck with a laser logo. However, Mr Keenan, are you
ready to meet
your
fictitious God?” The SIM laughed long and loud, but
Keenan caught the sound. The laugh was fake. Ersatz. A SIM had no emotions. It
didn’t know how to laugh. Its comedy was a mimicry of the human shell it so
despised.

“How,” said Keenan, staring down,
“do you know my name?”

The SIM gazed up, mechanical eyes
clicking. It did not speak.

“What game is this? Tell me what’s
going on.”

“The simplicity of the human
mind. The simplicity of human trust. It’s what will instigate your downfall as
a species, Mr Keenan. It’s the factor that will doom your race.” The SIM
smiled. Its teeth glinted with blood.

Keenan worked his way into his
WarSuit, and pulled free his PAD. Now it was his turn to smile. He activated
the laser, and then glanced down at the SIM; it shrugged.

“Even your PAD laser won’t cut
through Titanium-III interwoven mesh line,” said the SIM, voice almost smug,
blood-masked face curled into a snarl of contempt. “You really are pathetic.”

“Who said anything about cutting
the line?” growled Keenan, and directed the high-intensity short-range beam.
Leather and armour sizzled, followed by the stench of cooking flesh as the
laser ate through the SIM’s arm. There was a squelch, a moment of hiatus, then
arm and SIM parted company. The SIM fell, clutching its cauterised stump,
tumbling down over and over and over to eventually slam the ranks of motionless
zombies far below. The SIM spread itself over quite a large area.

“I
hate
fucking
bureaucrats.”

Keenan pulled up the line still
attached to the severed arm and WarGlove, and with a grimace he unwound the
leash from his numbed feet. He tossed the arm after the splattered SIM, then
stood, and toppled over with a cry. His legs wouldn’t take his weight.

Keenan crawled along the beam,
and watched tiny stick-men in white coats rush to the splattered SIM. They
glanced up at him, and he resisted a sardonic urge to wave with grinding teeth.

So much for covert entry. But
then, the SIM knew his name. Which meant...

“There he is!” Bullets whined,
slapping sparks from the beam. “Don’t move pep motherfucker, or I’ll cut you in
half!”

Keenan glanced left, then right.
Ten SIMs had moved onto adjacent beams. They all bore guns, trained on Keenan’s
trapped and helpless figure.

“OK, OK.” He rubbed at his
useless legs, realising that even in death the splattered SIM must be laughing.
He’d condemned Keenan as readily as cutting off the soldier’s feet.

Two SIMs worked their way to
Keenan. They removed his weapons, bound his hands with raze-wire, and took his
weight, shuffling along the beam and into a wide corridor. The walls and floor
gleamed like polished granite. The SIMs surrounded Keenan.

“What now?” he said.

The butt of an MPK smashed his head,
dropping him to the ground where he glared up, through blood and strings of
saliva.

“The pep not talk or we put
bullets in the pep’s skull. The pep is to accompany us to The Palace. If pep
try to escape, we have permission to kill the pep. If pep try to be funny
wise-guy, we have permission to kill the pep. If pep try to take our weapons,
we have permission to kill the pep.”

“OK, dickhead, I get the idea.”
Keenan climbed to his feet, spitting blood and a sliver of tooth.

“Wise-guy shut up. Wise-guy need
to walk. Now! Or...”

“Yeah yeah, I heard. You have
permission to kill the pep.”

The SIM leered close to Keenan,
and poked an MPK barrel against his teeth with a
clack.
“The pep learn
fast,” growled the SIM, and nudged Keenan along with a growl.

~ * ~

Franco
was dragged for what seemed like miles by the GKs, and it hurt his neck to keep
his head up so in the end he stared at the passing floor tiles. They changed in
colour, radiating through the spectrum from yellow to pink to red to green to
blue and finally, to black. Tiny inset jewels sparkled deep in the black. Ever
the mercenary, Franco wondered if he’d be able to get a knife inside to prize
one free.

With a violence of shock, the GKs
dropped Franco to the floor and he banged his nose. Pain flared through his
skull, and he felt blood roll down his nostrils. “You buggers! You could have
warned me! That was bloody buggering unfair, that was!”

He rolled to his side, and
realised nobody was listening. The GKs had their backs to him, smooth black
bodies resting and at ease. And that made Franco’s blood boil. “Well, of all
the damn and bloody buggering cheek! Those little stick-men can-openers! I’ll
bloody show them, I shall!” He surged to his feet, and for a long, long moment
all thoughts of violence and damaged pride were expunged. Franco stared from
his high vantage point in... awe.

Pippa turned. She gestured to
Franco, and he staggered forward, arms tight behind his back, and stared down
at...

“This is The Palace,” said Pippa,
voice a gentle hum. “Beautiful, isn’t She?”

“I’d rather have a naked fat
whore...” began Franco, but his voice petered out. He had to admit it. The
Palace, at the core of the NanoTek HQ, was stunning indeed.

The chamber was big. No, BIG.
From their high vantage it soared away as far as the eye could see, and it took
a while for Franco’s beleaguered brain to work out it was at about 1:5 scale.
He squinted, recognising some areas from vid, but unable to put names to them.

“What’s that one, there? It’s
from Old Earth, right?”

“That is Babylon, Mr Haggis.”

The voice oozed from behind, and
the man walked with precise steps as Franco turned. He wore a glass suit, and
was small, slim, a delicate man. Franco eyed the bald head, the brown eyes, and
then, as Oz smiled, the pointed, gleaming teeth. They shone red. They dazzled.
Franco calculated their worth with the practised eye of a jajunga thief.

“The other proud cities you see
ranged before you, in perfect miniaturised scale, are London, New York, Cairo,
Sparta, Alexandria, Rome. It took my historians twenty years to assimilate the
data needed for this model; they travelled the Quad-Gal, visited tens of
thousands of planets, talked to relatives of relatives of relatives who had
once
walked
our ancient birthplace, cradle of humanity,
Earth,
and
had been witness to stories passed down through thousands of generations. It
took my engineers another
ten years
to build the place. If you look, you
can see each city is divided by a natural rolling plain, a barrier, so to
speak. Each sector has its own micro-climate, its own miniaturised people and
animals... although nothing as populous as those real cities would have
possessed during their correct existence.”

“You’re Oz, right?”

“Your intuition astounds me.”

“Where’s my Melanie?”

“All in good time, Mr Haggis. You
will get to see your beautiful little Melanie very soon, although my, hasn’t
she grown up recently?
Matured,
you might say, into an almost perfect
killing machine.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Me?” Dr Oz smiled. The smile was
worth a billion dollars. “I did nothing. I simply allowed vanity and greed to
perform the invitation; and the nanobots did the rest.”

“So the biomods
did
transform
people into zombies!”

Dr Oz laughed, nodding his head
as he steepled his hands before his chest. “Ah, now I see why Quad-Gal Military
think of you as such a prize possession, Mr Haggis! A specimen worth
treasuring, no less! Although I, obviously, have my own misgivings regarding
this whole venture.”