Xenoform (25 page)

‘I’d been doing odd jobs for them for years. I never knew the name of the organisation, I just took jobs from contacts.’

‘They never told you who you were working for?’

‘No. I took work from one contact for years. He died and I met with a new contact – Hex, he called himself – and the fucker set me up.’ He looked up. Everyone was looking back at him. ‘Sent me into the servers of a company called Cyberlife Research and Development to steal their research data and suchlike. They’ve sent me into a lot of tech-companies to do the same thing over the years. I always imagined that my employer was a tech-company itself, hence their narrow band of interest. I wonder now if they
were
Cyberlife all along.’

‘What?’ asked Spider. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘Well, maybe they’d been working on this AI all these years. Perhaps it evolved natively and they tried to nourish it, perhaps they coded it somehow, perhaps it was grown from a seed they got from elsewhere. All the data I stole for them helped with this process. Then they sent me in to give it a final lesson. I wonder if they knew about the new technique I’ve been working on – though how they would, I don’t know. I don’t think I ever told anyone about it – I don’t really have any confidantes. Then, because I knew of its existence, they tried to kill me.’

‘
Fuckin’ harsh, man,’ said Sofi, getting herself a beer from the fridge. Whistler watched her but didn’t comment. ‘I thought
our
employers were tight.’

Debian laughed – a dry, humourless cough – and said, ‘Yeah. If it’s true. I don’t know – it’s just a theory. They could have been anyone. I should have been suspicious when my contact changed.’ He sounded like he was inwardly berating himself.

‘Didn’t get you, though, did they?’ said Tec.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Fuckers aren’t going to, either,’ insisted Whistler. ‘Not with your sort of money.’ It was supposed to be a joke but nobody laughed. An uncomfortable silence fell.

‘Right,’ said Roberts, breaking it. ‘Let’s go, Spidey. Go and take this bloody gun in.’ He slammed his empty bottle down onto the table and stood.

‘Let’s,’ agreed Spider, also standing. He stretched hugely, arching his broad back and grimacing. The two looked an unlikely pairing as they made their brief farewells and headed off down the stairs.

After some brief deliberation Whistler mentally shrugged and got herself a beer – a real one, not that synthihol shit. She sipped it carefully at first, managing not to feel too hypocritical. It was ambrosial. Tec offered her another smoke. She took it and smoked it as some apocalyptic industrial jungle began to play on the satellite audio stream.

Doctor Rushden heard the commotion developing in the hospital lobby as he was trying to seal a particularly jagged gash in the forearm of a most attractive young woman.
Shit!
he thought.
What now?
He was suddenly concerned that he might have said this aloud, but the patient didn’t seem to have heard it if he did. Doctor Rushden was beyond exhaustion now, but somehow still running on a mixture of Get-Up and nervous energy.

‘Sounds like you might be needed elsewhere,’ said the young woman – one Miss Karlile. She had been injured when a computer-controlled HGV had swerved off the road and ploughed a merry path across the pavement in south High Hab. She had been one of the lucky ones. She was looking closely at him and smiling now, shaken but not stirred by her ordeal. The flesh-foam had taken well and the finish was perfectly smooth. Rushden felt a small thrill of pride looking at it, overshadowed only now by his new sense of dread.

He wiped his brow with the back of one hand and gave her what he hoped was a debonair grin. ‘I’m afraid that might be the case, Miss Karlile. Sorry. Back in a minute.’ Although he knew that with things going the way they were right now this was a promise he may be unable to keep.

Raised voices guided him to the lobby where he found a new and disturbing scene unfolding. This was what you got for turning your bloody back for a moment! Soldiers of some sort – he couldn’t tell if they were a police urban combat unit, central army or some security force – had swarmed the lobby and seemed to be pushing all members of the public back out into the street. Injured and uninjured alike were locked in a desperate scrum with the black-clad invaders. Many of the civilians were shouting (indignant, not aggressive – not yet) and pushing, trying to force their way through the human blockade that now stood between themselves and treatment or loved ones inside the hospital.

The soldiers were forming a perimeter just inside the large main doors, encircling the check-in desk, now unattended, and more were storming through the office doors into the emergency department proper, flushing out recalcitrant civilians. There was a stink of human sweat and fear in the air. Rushden stood, mouth agape at the end of the corridor as dark figures swarmed past him into the hospital, jostling him as they went. ‘What the–’ he managed to utter before a huge, burly man with modded weapon arms strode self-importantly up to him and cleared his throat. ‘Um. Yes?’ managed Rushden. He was aware that he looked like some post-apocalyptic refugee, his clothes crumpled and smeared with blood from the day’s festivities.

‘
This hospital is being closed,’ bellowed the man, without introduction. He wore some sort of insignia on one shoulder – an emblem that Rushden hadn’t seen before – a kind of crooked star on a red sunburst. Unlike the other soldiers he wore no helmet, which was a shame because it would have concealed his ogrish visage. ‘Except for GDD cases everyone is being shipped out. Staff will, of course, remain. Under our supervision. Which means
my
supervision.’

‘I don’t think so!’ exclaimed Rushden indignantly. ‘Over my dead body! There’s a crisis developing here. It’s not just the greenshit – I mean the GDD – there are all sorts of freak accidents occurring, all over! We can’t close the emergency department!’

‘
Not just the emergency department –
all of it
. Who’s chief of staff here at the moment?’

‘I am! Where are my receptionists? What have you done with them?’ Some part of Rushden’s mind was warning him that he should be careful here, but his indignation overrode it.

The protesting civilians had been mostly ejected onto the street now, where more soldiers were disembarking from gunmetal-grey APCs. People were being roughly escorted from the hospital in ones and twos, some trailing IV-lines or nano-conduits, some leaking blood as they went, some having to be carried. The ejectees were falling back across the road, merging with the crowd of horrified onlookers. The soldiers out there looked to be readying themselves for the moment when the crowd would become a mob. This was all happening too fast.

‘My superiors have ordered this building turned into a storage and observation facility for GDD patients. Everybody else is to be removed. Your staff will continue to treat the remaining patients as best they can, under my instruction. Don’t worry, Doctor.’ He grinned a wide and toothy grin – the sort of grin you could lose a finger to. ‘I’m eminently qualified.’

‘What about my other patients? Where will they go? You can’t just throw them out like that – some of them will die!’ Rushden began to feel this situation slipping away from him. Outside, the dark spectre of a gyrocopter came swooping between the towering buildings, through the wide plaza, blades chopping the air into bassy lumps. Civilians scattered away from it as if it might land on them.

The officer fixed him with a dark stare. ‘A lot of people are going to die,’ he said heavily.

‘But–’ The officer cut him short with a silencing finger and held one hand to his ear. He grunted with satisfaction.

‘My troops have secured the building. We will have all unwelcome guests out within ten minutes. You will make an announcement to your staff that we have assumed control and that no treatment is to be given or withheld without my permission. Nobody from your staff is to leave the hospital until further notice. Nobody unauthorised by me will enter the hospital until further notice. Call your people to conference. Not here, in sight of the public. Do you have a meeting room?’

Dumbfounded, Doctor Rushden could do nothing but nod.

‘Good, tell them to report there in five minutes. All of them are to drop what they’re doing and be there. First item of business is to make sure everybody’s clear about where they stand.’

Rushden considered that although there were many things he was unclear about, where he stood was not one of them. Where he stood was rapidly becoming apparent, and he didn’t like it.

‘Five minutes?’ he repeated.

The officer grinned and by way of answer said: ‘Major Krohn,’ and actually had the gall to stick his hand out to be shaken. His forearm was bunched with assorted gun-barrels like cords of black muscle.

Rushden looked at the extended hand with loathing. He declined to shake it. Major Krohn shrugged as if this didn’t bother him in the slightest. ‘I’ll get my staff together,’ said Rushden resignedly. The major nodded.

Rushden made the announcement over DNI as soldiers led the remaining civilian patients out into the street and turned them loose like dogs. Some simply fell at the doors where they were released. More soldiers came and dragged these away. Rushden wondered where to. The lobby was rammed with the black-clad invaders now. Their heads were encased in smooth insectile plastic bubbles and their forms were bulky and sexless. One of them was setting up sentry guns – small, tripod-mounted ones – on the reception desk. Scrambler-baits were being affixed to the exterior walls of the building and Rushden wondered what was expected to happen here that the soldiers wanted to go unseen. A battle-bot –
a fucking battle-bot!
– was clumping slowly into the lobby from the corridor that led to the storage rooms and offices. It wore a diagonal slash of fresh blood across its thick cylindrical body like a garland. Yellow slit-eyes glared from its heavy carapace evilly. Rushden dreaded to think what the awful contraption had been up to back there.

Major Krohn stood over Rushden as he made the summons over DNI. Instantly his head was filled with confused enquiries and protestations. He screened out a call from his head nurse, dropped the rest, and opened the channel.

Doctor Rushden, what’s going on here? There are soldiers all over the place. They’ve ejected most of the patients! Where are you?

Listen, Wil, I don’t know why, but they’re saying this place has been shut down – we don’t know who by as yet – and they’ve come to assume control. Looks like we’re to be made into a dedicated GDD facility. Everyone is to come to the meeting room and that includes you, I’m afraid.
He glanced up at Major Krohn, who stood with his massive arms folded and his face set, staring at Rushden as if he were a bug in a jar.
I don’t think they’re messing around
.

I can’t just leave the patients here with these fucking stormtroopers, boss. They say that they’ll guard the ward, but I know the sort of guarding they mean. They mean the kind where any patient who plays up gets shot. Not all of them are sedated, and those that aren’t seem to be getting a little agitated.

I’m sure that’s true, Wil. But I think that the kind of meeting they want to call is the kind where anyone who doesn’t turn up gets shot. Leave the patients with the soldiers, if that’s what you have to do. Just be there in three minutes, now, and make sure everyone else is there, too.

Okay.
Wil sounded pissed off, even over DNI.

Rushden turned to Major Krohn. ‘My people will be there. Listen, Krohn, I don’t want any mistakes while we have this little meeting of yours. I don’t want any of your boys murdering any innocent people while my back is turned. I think, that when this whole giant nightmare is over, that is the sort of information that a military investigation panel would be interested to hear about. That’s the sort of thing that will be remembered. Even if you are setting up spyfly baits. I promise you that.’ He was acutely aware that the other man towered over him by a clear foot.

Major Krohn laughed, a thick vein in his neck pulsing. ‘Military investigation!’ he exclaimed as if this were some unusually rich joke. ‘We’re not military, Doctor, but I take your point. Also, I don’t think those things are strictly people any more. Shall we go?’

Rushden led Krohn into one of the wide lifts. Behind them in the lobby, sheets of ceramicarbide were being glued over the large windows. Four soldiers peeled away from the throng to follow the major, two paces behind and silent, sleek rifles held across their chests. Rushden felt as if a portal had opened in the floor and he had tumbled through into an alternate reality.

There were several members of the hospital staff in the lift already – heading up from the basement level where the vehicles were stored (and presumably now impounded), all flanked by armed militiamen. Rushden recognised Gila Barden, a quiet young cleaner who had only started last week and Stanner somebody, one of the motor-pool techs. Both looked in fear for their lives. Stanner nodded to Rushden, who returned the nod, trying his best to smile.

‘Don’t worry, folks, everything will soon be under control here,’ boomed Major Krohn as the lift doors sighed shut and the lift began to move. The major seemed blissfully unaware of the funereal atmosphere this remark created.