S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) (6 page)

Reggie chuckled. “So you'll get your implant replaced. What's the big deal?”

“I don't want it replaced.”

“You'd rather run around infecting people?” He gestured to her side where she'd been bitten. “We both know it's not a matter of
if
, but
when
. Both you and Kelly.”

That was the other thing they both seemed completely unconcerned about. They had both been infected, then treated by Father Heall's blood. But the treatment only lasted a few months, and Father Heall was dead. They acted as if they had all the time in the world.

Or maybe they know something you don't.

Jessie ignored his question. “Don't you think it's a little suspicious they're doing all this now?” she asked. “First the outbreak drills during homeroom, then this new initiative.”

He shrugged. “The drills are mandated—”

“When's the last time you remember doing them?”

“I don't remember. A few years ago, I guess.”

“And you don't think that's strange they're suddenly doing it now?”

He sighed. “Manhattan's still in lockdown. Everyone's just a bit touchy.”

“Everyone's in denial, Reg.”

He shrugged. “I've heard rumors. But nobody puts that much weight on what they say on the black streams. Arc says there's nothing wrong.”

“And you buy that?”

He hesitated a moment before shaking his head. “I don't know what to believe anymore, Jessie. We know about Manhattan because we caused it. But St. Louis?”

Jessie choked. “What's going on there?”

“Some people are saying it's an outbreak. You haven't heard?”

Jessie shook her head.

“It's just one. But there have been a lot of small local network outages, civilian Omegas dropping off the streams.”

Jessie stared. “A lot? Here?”

Her brother would have told her, but he hadn't said a word about anything like that. Then again, he'd been putting in a lot of hours at work.

And you thought he was just avoiding you.

‡ ‡ ‡

The Greenwich Waste Treatment facility had been on-line fewer than ten years, so it boasted the most advanced monitoring technology and a minimal salaried staff. With a zero casualty rate, it could also claim a perfect operating record.

Until today.

Leased from ZedPower Staffing Services, a contracting arm of Arc Properties, were a half-dozen Controlled Undead whose full-time role at GWT included facilitating the remote inspection and manual degreasing of the sewage intake ports. In an environmentally-controlled room in the center of town, nearly six miles away, sat three Operators. Their jobs were to make sure that flow of material through the system occurred at maximal efficiency, which they achieved by maneuvering the CUs through the toxic environment of the aeration pools. This was accomplished using cybernetically-linked controllers not very dissimilar to the one in Reggie's garage.

At shortly past three that morning, an alarm had been triggered. All six CUs simultaneously disappeared off the plant's tracking systems. After attempting to locate the missing units using the company's remote surveillance system, the three Operators finally realized that the video playback they'd been watching for two hours was stuck in an endless loop, most likely as a consequence of the same software glitch which had taken the CU controls off-line in the first place. ZedPower was immediately notified, but, in a breach of safety protocols, neither they nor GWT relayed the alert to the Necrotics Crimes Division of the local police department.

One Operator was selected to perform an eyes-on inspection. The security logs showed that he arrived at the remote site on Dunhill Road at precisely 5:29
AM
. When Arc finally managed to get a software patch installed eighty-six minutes later, their implant activation alert system immediately lit up. The unfortunate Operator had almost certainly been dead long before then, because he'd already reanimated.

Sergeant Eric Daniels, head of the eight-member Necrotics Crime Division of the Greenwich P.D., was standing on the metal walkway overlooking one of the six aeration pools. The body of the former Operator was between his feet. Thick, congealed blood still leaked from a single shallow bite on the victim's throat. A chunk of muscle was missing, perhaps no larger than a small kiwi fruit, probably made by a single well-placed bite.

Eric wasn't a coroner, so his opinion was essentially worthless, but it was his estimation that the bite hadn't killed the man. He guessed from the presence of a deep gash in the victim's skull (correctly, as it would later turn out) that death had been instantaneous, delivered by the sudden forceful meeting of the back of the man's head with the lip of the top metal step just inside the large aeration enclosure. The blood, hair, and chunks of flesh deposited there further supported this conclusion. So, either the Operator had fallen backward, or, more likely, he had been pushed.

The bite probably occurred immediately post-mortem.

Eric had stunned and bound the deceased Operator, so he posed no risk to the facility's staff or himself and his team for another fifteen to twenty minutes. Arc's network continuity was at one hundred percent and the new CU's implant had been fully activated; it was now under complete neuroleptic control. But a crime had been committed and it was standard procedure to fully incapacitate all Reanimates known or suspected to be involved while the investigation was still active. It wasn't like they could be interviewed anyway.

The operating procedure also mandated the application of a facemask to prevent biting, as well as wrist and ankle restraints for immobilization. These had been applied by one of his deputies without difficulty.

Eric glanced down and shook his head. It was actually a stroke of misfortune that the blow to the back of the head hadn't been a few inches lower. A blow of that force in such a vulnerable location would almost certainly have severed the spinal cord. With its skull half crushed like it was, this new Conscriptee would probably end up pulling border patrol somewhere down south or, more likely, explosives detail at one of the shipyards.

Eric had one hand on the EM pistol on his hip, not because he expected to need it, but because it helped relieve some of the discomfort from the broken rib he'd received a couple weeks before. As an extra safety precaution, he'd also chained the CU to the railing, although this wasn't required by procedure. He'd had enough close encounters with Omegas during his time in the Marines to know it was better to err on the side of caution.

With his other hand, he cupped his Link communication device up close to his mouth. His chin was pressed into the hollow of his opposite shoulder in an attempt to block as much of the stink from the sewage tanks from his mouth and nose as possible. Neither the stench of the place, nor the roar of the pumps, was bad enough to send him outside, but they did make communicating and breathing unpleasant.

“The shift supe has confirmed that the controller stream is fully back on-line,” he relayed to his supervisor at the police station, “and all but two units have been recovered.” He tried not to shout; he was sure the captain could hear him perfectly fine, but the roar in his ears from the pumps and fans was loud enough that he could barely even hear himself.

“Escaped?” Captain Lynn Harrick asked. Her look of worry turned to alarm.

Eric shook his head. “Facility access logs are on a separate stream, one that was unaffected by the outage. They recorded only a single entry-exit event prior to our own arrival, and that was the dead man's.”

“Is it possible a CU got out when your vic entered?”

“Negative. There are three auto-locking barriers here. The victim made it through all three in succession and was found here in the aeration chamber. If one of the missing units happened to have gotten as far as the gate, protocol dictates that the guard immediately alert someone of the breach.

“But we know they've already broken protocol.”

He sighed. “True.”

The tension on Captain Harrick's face deepened.

Eric was well aware what was worrying her. Confirmation, or even a strong suspicion, that an uncontrolled Reanimate had been inadvertently released into the general population required them to activate the mandatory “shelter-in-place” warning system, and that could be a royal pain in the ass to clear. Lower Manhattan had called their own S.I.P. situation nearly a month ago, and it was only just now getting ready to clear it.

Eric knew she was waiting for him to declare the situation fully contained. He wished he could oblige her, but he couldn't. Not just yet.

“Of the six units in the facility inventory, I'm still waiting on visual confirmation of two of them. We've traced signal from one implant, but not the other. The shift supe believes the implant device may have been destroyed.”

“Why would he think that?”

“He says there's a blockage at one of the outflow valves, so it looks like the last unit fell into the pool and got sucked into a pipe. The tracked signal localizes to the same pipe, suggesting they're both in there. Arc just sent authorization to send a third unit down into the pools to get a visual.”

Captain Harrick's face tightened. “Can't they just drain the tanks? Wouldn't that be quicker?”

“Draining's not the problem, it's diverting the inflow material. The Second Street plant is down for repairs, so this site has taken up the slack. Apparently it could take up to eight hours to bring enough spare capacity online to reroute all the waste flow.”

An edge left the captain's eyes. Now she just looked tired. The recent spate of Undead-related issues that had cropped up in the past four weeks had taken their toll on her— on them all. “It's been ten hours since they first went off-line,” she reminded him. “If we don't clear this up soon . . . .”

Eric shrugged. He knew she was looking for him to throw her a life preserver. Ten hours was an awful long time not to resolve a CU problem, but the lack of sightings of the fluorescent green jumpsuits used by the Omega civil servants worked to their favor. There were no reports of attacks, and, most telling, Arc's implant network hadn't picked up any new death clusters which couldn't be explained by other causes. If an unlinked CU had gotten loose in a populated area, they'd almost certainly have heard something by now.

“Let me know when you have confirmed visuals on
both
of the missing units,” the captain said.

“We may never get a visual on at least one of them,” Eric warned.

“Why not?”

“I think one got pureed,” the supe chimed in nervously, leaning in toward Eric and speaking directly to the captain through his Link. Eric pushed him away.

“What's he blathering on about?” Captain Harrick asked, her frown deepening.

“The missing signal,” Eric explained. “There's a mechanical grinder underground for processing large chunks of solid material,” Eric explained. “It basically pulverizes everything. If a CU got into it, there'd be nothing left to ID. The system reported a small pressure spike at—” He checked his tablet. “At ten-oh-seven this morning. It's consistent with the explosive capacity of an implant's self-destruct mechanism. I sent Officer Vanne down with the other Operator to check for damage and to see if the outflow filters caught anything, scraps of uniform, implant pieces. He hasn't reported back yet.”

Harrick stared at the screen for a moment before shaking her head. “How long?”

“Once they drop the search and recovery unit into the tanks, they estimate two hours to run a complete system sweep. My hope is we'll get confirmation much sooner than that. Like you, I'm eager to close the book on this one.”

“And the vic?”

“I'll take him over to Post-Mortem for cleaning and processing on my way back into town. They'll swab the bite for DNA and make a positive ID of the biter. Arc can have him after that.”

“I'll send over a bus.”

“No need. He's contained. We got this.”

The small man standing at Eric's elbow shifted uncomfortably. He'd been up since nine o'clock the previous evening and had been running on adrenaline all day. But now the excitement was giving way to fatigue and worry.

“I was hoping I could go home,” he began. “My wife—”

But Eric cut him off. He wasn't interested in hearing the man's excuses, and the fact that he actually thought he'd be going home after what had happened here only irritated him all the more. He and the other guy, the one checking the filters with Vanne, were both going to spend at least one night in a jail cell while the investigation continued. And depending on what the interviews yielded, maybe quite a few more nights. They should've reported the system glitch immediately.

Eric rubbed a hand on his cheek. He was also tired and eager to get home. He needed to check on Jessie, make sure she was doing all right. It was killing him to watch her drift away the way she was, from her friends. From Kelly. She was in so much pain, and it was clearly eating her up inside.

He realized Harrick was speaking:

“— an isolated glitch. We've finally received official confirmation of system failures in at least two other cities over the past twenty-four hours.”

“Public works?” Eric asked, the uneasy feeling in his stomach quickly expanding like a bad gas bubble. “Or military?”

“So far it's just civilian facilities. Mostly isolated to remote sites with older stream hardware. Arc is activating more units to get everything updated within the next two weeks.”

“That makes a ton of sense,” Eric said, frowning. “Like throwing gasoline on a fire to douse it.”

Captain Harrick winced. Eric knew that she would've put him on notice in the past for speaking out against Arc, but the rules seemed to have changed in the past few weeks. No longer did Arc exert the same power over the citizenry anymore. Or the government. In a surprising turn of events two weeks before, a senator from Idaho called for a congressional investigation into mismanagement and abuses of privilege by high-ranking executives in the company. He accused Arc of diverting profits meant for upgrading their systems so they could pay outrageous salaries and bonuses. The allegations themselves weren't terribly surprising, just the audacity of the senator in making them so publicly.