Biohell (73 page)

Franco skidded next to him,
panting, and they focused on the GKs. All three machines were motionless.
Waiting?

Pippa knelt on Oz’s chest, yukana
against his throat. Blood trickled from a fresh cut.

They had reached an
impasse.

“I assume the Mainframe is a
baddy?” Franco said, voice low, eyes never leaving the GKs.

“It’s part of Leviathan. An
extension.” Keenan grimaced. “We have to destroy it.”

Franco glanced up at the mammoth,
kilometre-high structure, with its jagged towering peaks, its green-glinting,
crystalline, splintered towers. He hoisted a fistful of grenades. Grinned a bad
grin. “I predict a riot?” he suggested.

“Damn fucking right.”

Dr Oz’s voice was cool and smooth
under the pressing yukana blade. “If you all lay down your weapons, you may
just survive this encounter. GreenSource will not tolerate your misbehaviour.”
He watched from his prone position as Franco sidled to Mel, and with the G
Knife, parted the HotWire which imprisoned her. She unrolled in height,
stretched muscles long compressed by deviant pyro-wire, and her small, mottled
head lowered on a long corrugated neck and she grinned at Dr Oz, then leered
over towards the three GKs.

Mel took a weaving, threatening
step, and Franco skipped back, out of her way.

“I think she’s pissed!” snapped
Keenan.

“Are you surprised? Look what
they did to her! Now she has somebody to
blame.”

Franco fired a few more shots
from the Makarov. “Keenan, you out of ammo?”

Keenan nodded.

Two things happened at once. The
GKs, black, glossy, thin-limbed, sculpted, roared in high-pitched digital
mimicry, the sound of tortured bandwidth, and moved fast... charging Keenan and
Franco with weapons rippling, poison dripping from long slim jaws containing
row on row of needle-thin teeth. Beneath Pippa, Oz squirmed and
flowed
away
from her, standing to stare at her suddenly off-balance, kneeling figure.

Franco pulled a BABE grenade pin,
yanked back his arm, but it was too late as the GKs sprinted fast, jaws
clacking, and they would be on him in an instant mashing, tearing, injecting...

Pippa swept out the yukana, but
Oz leapt the sweep with incredible agility, dodged left, then right, avoiding
the hissing blur of blade. He accelerated, was beside Pippa, arm slamming down
and making Pippa gasp at the impact. She head-butted him, and Oz’s jewelled
teeth impaled her head drawing blood. She slashed out, yukana singing, but Oz
ducked and twisted, side-kicked her in the belly with stunning force, tossing
her backwards across the volcanic rock platform to roll, dangerously close to
the edge.

“Aiie!” screamed Franco as the
AIs were on him, bringing up his arm before his face as something large, and
brown, and thrashing and growling connected with all three GKs in one terrific
launch and sent them spinning like skittles across the rock, thin limbs
rattling, poison arcing like incontinent piss. Mel stood, brutal, massive,
glowering, and growled back at Keenan and Franco who exchanged worried glances.
Mel ran at the GKs, and Momos rose, twin yukanas whirling, but Mel stepped
between them, swaying, claws lashing out and grating against alloy.

“She can’t kill them all,” said
Keenan.

“We have to help her!”

“No! We destroy GreenSource.”

Franco turned tortured eyes on
his friend and brother. “I... have to help her.”

“This is her sacrifice,” snapped
Keenan. “Focus. Bombs?”

Franco grasped his pack before
him. “Enough High-J to put a Shuttle into orbit.”

“Let’s do it.”

Pippa danced with Oz, blade
hissing and slashing, balanced on the edge of the precipice. Franco turned eyes
on her, again wanting desperately to help his friend...

“Just do it, Franco,” snarled
Pippa, shaking sweat from her shoulder-length black hair. “I’ve got this fucker
sorted.”

Her eyes met Keenan’s. He ground
his teeth. Gave her a nod. Without her, they could not destroy GreenSource...
Without Pippa, without Combat K
as one,
they could not free the people
of The City from their biological entrapment.

They were a machine.

A simple, well-oiled unit.

Franco ran, a few steps behind
Keenan. They reached the edge of the GreenSource Mainframe, took hold of the
soft, jelly-like substance, and started to hoist themselves up, boots and
sandals kicking into the moving, rolling substance, hands grabbing and tearing
as they climbed with grim faces and clamped, tortured jaws.

They climbed for a few minutes,
powering up the flank of the widest tower. Below, Mel was battling with all
three GK AIs, her claws pounding and hammering, jaws twisting and grinding. The
two men paused, glancing down. Mel picked up Momos, and with a roar flung her
into the abyss. Momos twirled, black-enamelled limbs glittering as she fell,
and disappeared into the molten lake far, far below.

“Atta girl!” roared Franco.

“Keep climbing.”

“I’m shagged, Keenan!”

“Keep
climbing!”

“But Keenan, it’s like climbing
up a great mound of wobbling tits!” said Franco. He considered this. “Actually,
I suppose in some ways I should be mightily thankful.”

“Be thankful,” snapped Keenan.

They pushed on, faster and
faster, faces red, sweat dripping, muscles screaming with fatigue.

Below, Pippa was not faring well.
Oz had grasped one of Momos’s discarded yukana swords and they duelled, blades
clashing and ringing, sparks flying.

In her years of violence, Pippa
had fought many opponents. Only a few had been her better. But here, now, in
this place, Oz was a demon, skilled like nothing she had ever experienced.
Pippa fought with every ounce of talent and strength and experience, used every
trick she knew; and still Oz played with her, a cat with a hobbled bird, a
shark with an injured fish.

She was outclassed. And,
bitterly, she knew it.

Blades clashed, discordant music.
Pippa leapt back, Oz’s yukana a hair’s-breadth from her face, then she closed
on him and his sword opened a line across her ribs, making her gasp; but she
was in close, too close, her sword twisted at a strange angle and she reversed
the cut, blade sliding through Oz’s neck in a bright spurt of arterial gore.
She stepped neatly away from her dark, death-lover’s embrace, ripped her sword
sideways, viciously, and decapitated Dr Oz with all the savagery of the
betrayed. Panting, bathed in sweat and blood, she dropped to her knees, her
yukana clattering at her feet, hands clasping her opened rib-cage with a yelp.
Blood pulsed through her fingers and she twisted, peering down at her sliced
uniform and the pale, exposed flesh—her interior flesh, and yellow fat
sub-strata—beneath. She could see the ivory of exposed bone. She shuddered.

“That son-of-a-bitch,” she
mouthed. And realised. Something was...
wrong.

She glanced up. Dr Oz’s body had
failed to fall. It stood, headless, swaying, as if modestly inebriated, the
bloody, black-bladed sword still clenched in Oz’s neatly manicured and almost
effeminate
fingers.

Pippa looked over to the severed
head. It was glassy eyed. Dead.

Why doesn’t the body fall? she
thought.

More blood pumped through her
fingers, oozing.

Why doesn’t the fucker collapse?

Her eyes passed Oz’s oddly
behaving corpse, watched Mel batter the GKs, holding one in each powerfully
bulging arm and swinging them round and round by their ankles to finally slam
against one another with a clash and crash of buckling TitaniumVI casings and a
scatter of loose rivets.

Pippa winced.

Looked up again.

And allowed a deep hiss through
wet lips. She gritted her teeth and reached slowly forward, searching for her
sword.

A dark mist had appeared, rising
from Dr Oz’s neck. It swirled up, billions of tiny particles coalescing and
forming slowly, agonisingly, into the shape of Oz’s recently departed head.
Artistically, like metal melting over a wire-work mesh, Oz’s head reformed,
flushed slowly with colour, and was suddenly
real.

He blinked. Gasped. Touched at
his own throat as if testing reality. Then, he lowered his head, eyes staring
out at Pippa with new, refreshed, rejuvenated life.

“A wonderful thing, these
biomods,” Oz said.

~ * ~

Mel,
despite appearances, was fighting a losing battle. In the raging inferno of her
mind something started to register. It was a weakness; a weakness flooding
through her system and she realised, as the GK’s slender jaws tore at her,
ripping flesh, tearing skin, snapping her bones... she realised with a dawning,
primeval understanding that the AIs were gradually
poisoning
her...

Mel grabbed Nyx in a head-lock,
rolled with the flailing machine kicking legs and slashing sparks from volcanic
rock, then with Nyx’s head in both clawed hands she bashed the machine’s skull
repeatedly and violently against the rock. Five times, six times, Mel felt it
buckling under the might of her superhuman deviated muscles...

Lamia landed on Mel’s back,
blade-arms attempting to cut Mel’s throat but Mel twisted fast, catching the
blades in claws and attempting to bend them, to snap them—as Nyx hit her in the
lower back at full charge, buckling Mel who heard several of her own spinal
discs
pop
and crack and she grabbed both machines, hatred a bottomless
well and they were a symbol of NanoTek a representation of the monolithic
corporation who had abused her and deviated her and changed her from a sweet
human woman into... this.

With a GK under each arm, Mel
roared and charged the edge of the abyss. She leapt, both machines thrashing
against her, slicing her, cutting her, and all three fell suddenly, swiftly,
into the dark.

For long moments, all was silent.

Then, a scrabbling sound came
from the edge.

In the green glow from
GreenSource towers, stones rattled. Something moved at the edge of the
precipice. Something black, and enamelled, gleaming against a lip of volcanic
rock. Moving fast, accelerating with thumping hydraulics, a teardrop head
appeared with matt black discs for eyes, and a long thin-limbed arm reached up
as Nyx dragged her battered AI body from the pit.

She crawled on battered, twisted
legs, then stood. One arm had been torn free, and the shoulder joint trailed
organic-looking tendons. Her head swivelled, staring at where Pippa was about
to die... then looked up to the frantically climbing figures of Keenan and
Franco.

Nyx sprinted, leapt, and with
swift, elegant movements, and leaving a trail of toxic poison from rows of
needle-thin teeth in her wake, she began to climb.

~ * ~

Franco
glanced down. Saw Mel go over the edge with the two kicking, thrashing AIs. “No!”
he screamed, face suddenly stunned, eyes wide in disbelief.

Keenan grunted, and halted his
ascent.

Franco’s head slammed up. “What
is it?”

Keenan had both arms, up to the
elbow, trapped inside the GreenSource tower. As Franco watched, Keenan was
yanked
close to the wall, where suddenly his face pressed against the glutinous
substance and the tower itself started to drag him in...

“Shit,” hissed Franco. “Wait
Keenan! I’m coming! Don’t get sucked in! Franco will save the day!” He took a
great handful of jelly and felt a curious twisting motion; with a squelch it
sucked in his hand, his wrist, then twisted him in up to his elbow sending pain
shooting through his joints. Franco yelled in surprise, pain and fear. Then
felt his sandaled feet suddenly overwhelmed, sucked at, pulled
into
the
tower... where it twisted his knees against their joints and made him howl and
yammer in pain...