Eclipse Phase- After the Fall
Page 17
All these details he took in after the back wall, though. In one corner was a heavily shielded incinerator—the kind that used magnetic containment and a blast of plasma to vaporize whatever was in it and then vaporize it some more. Next to that was a bio-containment chamber: a wide, white-lit, glass-fronted enclosure about five meters wide and three deep. There were three figures—or rather two figures, and a … thing—secured to the back wall of the enclosure with a multitude of heavy straps and room for two more.
One was Bobdog’s morph, a tall bonobo with dreadlocks. It was horribly emaciated but still breathing. Tumescent lumps studded its waist. The second figure was human, probably a ruster, but its skin had gone dead, nearly translucent white. Around its midsection writhed a double ring of stumpy tentacles surrounded by puckered scar tissue.
The third thing had only the vague outline of a humanoid shape. The legs had fused into a barrel of muscle ending in a wet surface like the belly of a gastropod, and the head and arms had disappeared into the trunk of the body. The tentacles on this one were more active but similarly stumpy and scarred; looked like its keepers’d been trimming them back as they grew.
Kim sucked in a breath. “Damn it, Park, I don’t know why I do favors for you. You get me into the weirdest shit. Is that radioactive?”
Park looked at the exsurgent. “No. And ain’t your job patrolling a zombie graveyard for robot monsters?”
“That’s got nothing on the kind of stuff happens every time I go on one of these runs with you. And this takes the cake. What the hell is this?”
“Stuff nobody oughta see.” He edged up to the door and opened it, “Should be safe enough behind an enclosure like that, though.” He went inside, and she followed, Smoke in tow.
“I hope you’re right. What kind of operation you think this is? They’re not cooking up tabs of hither in a setup like this.”
Park said, “Trying to improve on bear bile, you want my guess. Mind watchin’ the door, Captain?”
He put Bobdog down on a lab table.
Bobdog pointed at his morph, signed,
He tapped at the window separating the room. “Hab window glass. Ideal.” There was an airlock with a decontamination shower leading into the enclosure and a few clean suits on a rack. The set up was basic but looked like it’d work.
“Ideal for what?” Kim asked.
He walked once around the enclosure, estimating its strength. “Blast containment.”
He started poking around, found a workstation with a rack of tiny quantum computers next to some of the lab equipment. [GiGi,] he asked his muse, [Can you get into this?]
[Mais oui,] the AI messaged, and started throwing exploits at it.
The baboon was having another cigarette. Thank goodness for bad habits, Park thought. There was another door leading farther back. If the schematic they built up on their flyover was any good, it lead to an exit.
Kim checked the back hall for herself, then asked, “I really need some answers about what’s going on in here, Park.”
Park started pulling on a clean suit. “You ain’t seen enough illegal activity yet?”
“Human trafficking, animal cruelty, assaulting a ranger, possession of a biohazardous substance, possession of TITAN relics … Yeah, sure, I can throw the book at that old man if I pop his stack and take it in.”
“Doubt it.” Jake buckled on the boots and started checking the seals. “Bet you his stack’s wiped. He’s the type’ll have a dead switch on a throwaway body like that. Or he wasn’t that important.”
“Then so it goes,” Kim said, “But whatever’s going on here, it’s the low end of the food chain.”
Jake sealed the helmet and ran the clean suit’s diagnostics. [Probably true. I figure they’re working on a way to infect more people. Can you do a visual inspection on the seals on this suit?]
[OK.] She went behind him, checking seals, then came around and gave him a thumbs up. [You think someone’s trying to weaponize it?]
He dragged the storage cylinders into the airlock with him. Frost came away where his gloves touched them; they were self-refrigerating. [Maybe. Gotta look for the big fish now.]
Bobdog’s clone tried to look up at him as he cycled the lock and entered the enclosure. He looked away; he couldn’t meet the neo-primate’s eyes. He suction cupped an incendiary charge to the window in front of Bobdog, then in front of the human. Finally, he set one up in front of the whipper, giving it a wide berth.
He squirted scrapper’s gel on the storage cylinders. He stepped away as the gel burned through and blood began oozing from the cylinders. Three incendiaries would be plenty in a chamber this size.
When he glanced out, Kim was smoking, too. He’d thought the cigs were just for the monkey. [Shit, Park. We can’t help him?]
He cycled the airlock. The chemicals from a decontamination shower hissed off the suit before the outer door opened. [You want to try? You know TQZ containment procedure.]
Park got out of the suit, letting the pieces drop to the floor, and found the atmosphere controls for the bio-containment enclosure. He adjusted the mix to hypersaturate the chamber with oxygen.
“What now?” Kim asked.
“I’ll be done here in a few. We burn the stuff in there so it doesn’t infect anybody else, and after that you can do whatever cop stuff you want to this bar.” The exsurgent in the enclosure had grown restive in the oxygen-rich chamber; it squirmed and whipped its stubby tentacles around. He sealed the oxygen line to the chamber; didn’t want too big an explosion.
Kim said, “I still want more answers. They got infected by a TITAN virus, I take it?”
GiGi reported her intrusion complete. He spread out an AR window on the lab table next to Bobdog and showed her. “Thing farthest left we call a whipper,” he said as he scanned the text, “Used to be a person; ain’t anymore.”
The chemical and biological data was mostly over his head, but what they were doing with it wasn’t too hard to suss out. The yakuza were intentionally creating exsurgents, milking them for bile and other fluids, then shipping the goop somewhere for processing.
“Who’s ‘we,’ Park?”
“Huh?” He stopped reading.
“You said, ‘What we call it.’ Who’s ‘we?’ Are you a fucking Oversight spook or something?”
Park laughed, “Nah. I work for the good guys. Least, that’s what I think most days. I was kinda hoping you’d sign up.”
GiGi messaged, [J’ai tous les données,] into the AR window.
She raised an eyebrow. “Your muse speaks … is that French?”
He grinned, closed the AR window, picked up Bobdog, and made for the door. “What? It’s sexy. She’s got all the data. C’mon, I can explain the rest when we’re safe in the air.”
They put a breathing mask on Bobdog, wrapped him in a heavy blanket, and walked right out the front door. The yak in the cage cursed at them as they passed, but they let him be. The pleasure pod bartender and bar patrons had fled the front of the bar, so they weren’t around to hear the muffled explosion from far back in the maze of shipping containers. The camera Park had left in the room showed that the containment unit held; inside was nothing but ash.
Kim’s prowler touched down, Gloria peering at them out the front windows. Park wasn’t sure whether a yakuza cleanup crew or Kim’s ranger buddies would get
there first, but in the scheme of things, that wasn’t so important. They were in the air, and headed for the hills.
—
“So you ain’t surprised, guy we’re going to see knows me by Jake Carter,” Jae Park said.
“I don’t care if he calls you Sun Mi Hee,” Kim said, “As long as when we’re done there we get a clean bill of health. Anyway, I like ‘Jake’ better. My grandpa was named ‘Jae.’”
They were flying over the Noctis tablelands, heading for an off-grid genehacker facility. The badlands spread out invisible below them, but an AR topo display showing their position hovered over the central instrument panel. Rank of captain meant Sage Kim could requisition better engines than most Ranger prowlers had. They were cutting up sky; wouldn’t take long to get there.
It was hours ’til dawn, but Cagehopper would be awake; the genehacker didn’t sleep much. Even when he did, he kept a fork up to tend to his living experiments.
“What do you care if Bobdog and I get a clean bill?” Park asked, “You going all soft on me, Captain Kim?”
“No,” she said, “But I wouldn’t want to have to shoot you for coming up zombie, all the same.” Her tone measured zero-percent sardonic wit.
“Wouldn’t worry,” Park said, “This is containment protocol. Pretty standard. Just a precaution.” He said that, but he was covering. He had that itch in his neck, that crawling feeling in his stomach he always got after facing an exposure risk. The fear never went away, and that was a damned good thing. He’d seen more than a few researchers who got stupid about the exovirus shot into red smears on Firewall turn-and-burn ops. Hell, he’d done for a few himself, though he didn’t savor it any.
“How you doing back there, Bobdog?” Park craned his head to check on the neo-primate. Bob huddled in the acceleration couch, breathing normally but looking gray.
Bobdog made the Warlpiri sign for “shit.”
“Hang in there, man. We’ll be at Cagehopper’s soon.”
Kim had locked her police baboons, Gloria and Smoke, in the back cabin. Too much chance of Smoke throwing a nicotine fit and tearing one of Bobdog’s long, spindly neo-bonobo arms off. Park didn’t like the baboons much, but they’d come in handy dealing with the yakuza back at El Destino Verde.
“Be interesting to finally meet Cagehopper,” Kim said, real casual.
Well, shit, Park thought. “You know him?” he asked, keeping casual himself. He’d thought “Cagehopper” was a name the genehacker only used with Firewall. That she knew it set him on edge, but of more worry was the simple fact of a Ranger and a black-kettle genehacker being in the same room.
“Tried to arrest him a few times, sure.”
“Complicates things,” he said.
She reached over the center console and play punched his shoulder. Bit more than a play punch, point of fact, but probably not intentional. Kim was a ruster, but her body was heavy on the augments. He’d give her even odds against your average fury. “Don’t fret, Jake. I don’t give so much as a rat’s tail about this guy, so long as when we’re done he tells me I’m not gonna end up a barrel-shaped mass of mucus membrane with tentacles for a tutu.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
He believed her, for now. Cagehopper was well outside her jurisdiction, but the guy got around. She probably knew him from his dealings with the Arsia Mons smugglers. Didn’t matter, anyway; he had to bring her to Cagehopper one way or another.
—
Cagehopper’s place was dug deep into a gorge in the tablelands. Kim’s flying truck had to squeeze onto a landing pad that was way too close to the gorge walls for comfort. There were no trails, but there was a space between some rocks just big enough for a buggy to crawl out. The outer garage door blended into the surroundings almost perfectly thanks to a programmed coating of chameleon materials. He’d never have found the place by visual.
They were probably being watched already, not that you could spot any sensors. Cagehopper would have microdrones scattered around, and he might be hip to the Maker trick of using lizards as camera platforms.
An AR alert flashed up in Park’s peripheral vision. Telefono.
[Carter? What the fuck, citizen? You’re heavy a few bodies.]
[Heavy a few on account of we all got coughed on during the last run. Need you to take a look,] Park messaged.
[And you show up in a cop truck?]
Park messaged, [Look, you’re not gonna like this, but my shotgun on this ride’s a Ranger.]
[Perceptive, Carter. You’re fucking right I don’t like it. Not at all.]
[Look, Cage, I got Bobdog LaGrange here in a bad way, and we’re all several of us exposure risks, right down to the baboo—]
[Baboons! Carter, you rock lizard’s cloaca, I desire no fucking police baboons in my place of establishment.]
This reaction was cantankerous even for Cagehopper.
“Problem?” Kim asked.
“He doesn’t like baboons. I didn’t know.”
She sighed. “They can stay in the prowler, long as we don’t take too long.”
Park thought about that. All in all, Kim’d been too acquiescing by half. Helping bust a yakuza front, sure, all in a day’s work. She was the law, right? But agreeing to go in and meet a guy who’d have a list of felonies for unlicensed genemods a klick long on his rap sheet without her monkeys … It was too even-handed, even for a Ranger like Kim. He’d have to watch her close.
[Cagehopper, how about this: the baboons’ll stay in the prowler. They’ll make nary a peep, unless it turns out we’re infected. Then we need you to check them, too.]
A long chunk of dead air followed, but then the camouflaged garage door scrolled up into the rock face, letting a gust of warm humidity out to briefly fog the chill, dry Martian air.
Inside was a dimly lit loading bay. Cagehopper had a flying car and a buggy parked inside, leaving only a little space for the big Ranger flyer. The place was clean and orderly. Park saw a few rats, probably smart animals, scurry away as the garage door closed and he stepped out.
Park got Bobdog from the back seat, carrying the neo-bonobo again. Bobdog looked even weaker than before; he shivered in the cold air of the garage. Couldn’t Cagehopper afford an airlock? But space was at a premium. Looked like it’d been part of an underwater cave system, formed back in the time when the Noctis tablelands were at the heart of a great, winding alluvial system. As they would be again, if Park and the rest of the TTO’s army of terraforming workers had their way about it.
Kim got out and made cop eyes at the cave. “Not much for sensors in here,” she observed.
“I think he figures anyone gets in the front door, he’s already screwed,” Park said.
“Public AR,” Kim said, and started walking toward the back of the garage. Park flipped over to the lab’s public AR channel himself. A trail of red dots led in the direction Kim was headed, so he followed.
[Stay on the path,] Cagehopper messaged.
After going through a decontamination airlock, they followed the red dots through a maze of narrow corridors cut into the rock. Cramped as the garage’d been, the rest of the place sprawled. They crossed dozens of silent, unlit intersecting passages and an equal number of heavily reinforced doors. The stone, rather than echoing, drank up their footsteps. Lot bigger than he’d expected after the cramped garage.
[What’s he need all this space for?] Kim asked.
[Never wanted to know,] Park messaged back.
The dots ended at a heavy metal door that slid open to reveal a sparsely furnished octagonal chamber. In a circle of light cast by an overhead surgical fixture, several metal tables gleamed. A doctor bot stood motionless at the head of one, and several rolling tables of diagnostic equipment stood by the other two. Other than the tables, there was no place to sit.
Cagehopper came out of a sliding door o
n the far wall. “Sit on the tables,” he said, and they did. His neo-neanderthal morph was shorter than Park or Kim, thick-browed, with a barrel chest and hands that looked like they could bust rock. Cage went to work, injecting Park with what he figured must be diagnostic nanomachines to do blood work, then took throat swabs and dropped them into a sequencer.
[What’s he doing?] Kim asked Park.
[He’ll work with all the displays visible only to him,] he messaged. [You can’t risk someone with an advanced infection knowing you’re on to them.]
Cagehopper took a swab from Bobdog, frowning at the treatment Bob’s morph had taken, then dropped that swab in the sequencer, too.
“The hell happened to him, Jake?” Cagehopper asked.
Park said, “Yakuza using neoprimate parts for traditional Chinese medicine.”
“I don’t want to hear more.” Cagehopper went back to work.
[Why’s he even in the room with us?] she asked.
[Ain’t his real morph. He’s put up a different face every time I been here.]
“What kind of tests are you doing?” Kim asked.
Cage’d been scowling at an AR window. The outline of it was visible so that they could see he was reading, but to anyone but him, the contents were a misty blur. Without turning, he said, “Tossing your junk DNA, looking for jabberwockies. For starters.”
Cagehopper got a bunch of tests running, then fixed up Bobdog a little. Once Cage’d put nanobandages on the worst of it, Bobdog put his hand to his throat and looked at the neanderthal. Park wondered how long severed vocal cords took to heal.
“I don’t have a quick fix for that,” Cagehopper said. “I can put you in a healing vat for a few days, or I can drill in some new implants and resleeve you.”
Bobdog looked at Park and signed, “New body,” in Warlpiri. Cagehopper glanced over at Park.
“Says he wants a resleeve,” Park said.
“I’ll trade you this one,” Cagehopper said, patting his chest. “By the way … you’re all clean.”