Game, Set, Deathmatch

by Edwin H Rydberg

  * * *

  Figment would have considered the tiny corridor to be a maintenance duct, if he believed any maintenance was necessary in a self-assembling organic base. Its purpose was largely unimportant, however, and he had soon crawled through it to stand again in a full-sized tunnel.

  Now, where to go? Before him, the hall divided into three branches; each seemed identical to the others.

  Part of leading was feigning knowledge, supplanting ignorance with confidence. He had led the two Cowgirlz through the base, up and down long tunnels and through winding corridors until he found something recognizable. The trio of portals was certainly the hub of the base, which his previous wandering had suggested was segmented in three: two conversion chambers, with associated barracks, and one command wing. The rest of the facility seemed only to exist as transport tunnels beneath the city — and perhaps as partially processed material for new weapons?

  In truth he’d had no idea which tunnel led to which objective, but he’d come to suspect that nothing happened within the Nekroid labyrinth that didn’t have the guiding hand of some mind. His prior encounter with Preemptive Strike led him to believe that, regardless of which path he, Bodybag, or DaemonS had chosen, they would reach their objectives... where they would face their strongest challenges. Their only hope for success lie in being underestimated.

  Figment jumped through one sphincter at random and kept running. And running. Like the last time, the corridors were long, twisted, and devoid of other beings. As he hurried through the snaking paths of the complex, he had the feeling he was being toyed with. Finally, he stopped.

  “Alright,” he yelled to the walls, “I’ve run around your maze long enough. You can let me in now.”

  The wait was just long enough for Figment to begin doubting his own thoughts, then a sphincter formed on the wall across from him. He tightened his grip on the pulse cannon, took a deep breath, and stepped through.

  “Welcome back,” said a familiar face before him.

  * * *

  Bodybag raced through the broad tunnels as they sloped deeper into the Earth. The voices surrounded her, beating on her mind like a drum. Iron will and a pin-point focus were the only things that allowed her to ignore them — that and a die-hard practicality. The Nekroid had been using her as their play toy from early in the tournament and now it was time to extract her revenge, nothing would rob her of that pleasure. Saving humanity was just a nice side benefit.

  She swerved left around a bend in the tunnel before cutting right, across the corridor, and into another passage. With no idea where the pool was, she thought it best just to run until something presented itself. Her instincts were rarely wrong on such matters.

  Another sharp turn, another long corridor. This one was unusual in that it had numerous circular portals strewn along both sides. Could one of them house the conversion pool? Bodybag stopped at the first, listening. Apart from the familiar low throbbing of the base itself, there was no other sound.

  The sphincter snapped open at her approach but beyond, there was only darkness stretching into the unseen distance. She tried the next — it was little more than a closet. The third also lacked promise but she was determined to try them all.

  The middle door on the other side of the corridor opened to a bright room and Bodybag stepped through. The room was spacious and empty save for several monitors that seemed to have grown out of the wall, a large human suspended in the air whose hands and feet were encased in the bulbous ends of tentacles extending from the floor and ceiling, and two tall thin humanoids who were alternately prodding the human and checking the monitors. The wall glowed faintly, innervated by what seemed to be a network of black veins.

  Bodybag only needed a moment to recall that the human was a matcher — one of the new Legion — and even less time to recognize the telltale beginnings of the conversion process at work: the small bony protuberance above the shoulders and the faint discoloration of skin on the arms and face.

  One of the thin humanoids — a technician? — turned, seeing her. Bodybag knew without question that, despite the different form, it was Nekroid. Apparently, a specially modified form of some distant, conquered race. The knowledge came to her, as did anything she knew about them, through the din of mental voices. It was as if, for a brief moment the random chattering all focused on one thought and a word, name, or idea erupted briefly from the cacophony.

  The knowledge was irrelevant.

  She pumped a grenade straight into its chest and the frail creature exploded in a shower of green tissue. Lunging forward, she rammed the barrel into the back of the second and pulled the trigger before it could react. The creature promptly vaporized, its innards raining down upon the floor.

  And then she looked up to the large man suspended by the tentacles and hesitated. Self preservation told her to leave him, he was already gone. Once the process was begun, it could not be reversed. She turned to the portal as a faint moan escaped his lips.

  “Help me,” he plead. Or at least that’s how she interpreted it.

  There was a time in her life, before joining the Cowgirlz, when she would have left him hang there. She would have simply focused on her job and abandoned him to his own fate. But she was a different woman now. The Apocaplypz Cowgirlz had taught her the importance of Camaraderie and teamwork and that no one deserved an unjust fate. They had gone out of their way to help her, how could she do anything less for this poor soul? Even if it might mean his death in the ender blast, anything had to be better than what he was facing now.

  “Help me,” he said again, in a hoarse whisper.

  She turned, raised her flak cannon, and fired. The tentacle she aimed at twisted out of the way and the blast was simply absorbed into the soft wall behind. She fired at another tentacle with the same result. This was going to require some thought.

  She couldn’t pump a grenade at the tentacle because she would probably catch the guy in the shrapnel. The flak cannon obviously wasn’t working for direct assault. But there had to be a weakness. She glanced around the room.

  It was empty. Not surprising with the Nekroid. Like most of their technology, the room seemed almost alive, it wouldn’t be a big leap of imagination to believe that the room itself could be doing most of the information processing. That would explain the emptiness and the monitors protruding from the walls like eye-stalks. It occurred to Bodybag that the tentacles also protruded from the wall at an area near the monitor stalks.

  “This might hurt a bit,” she told the man as she targeted the wall. Hopefully the ricocheting shrapnel wouldn’t do too much damage to him; or her.

  The grenade exploded amid a network of black veins and a scream pierced her mind. Black fluid burst forth from the wall as both the monitor stalks and the shackling tentacles writhed, snaking violently before falling limp and then disintegrating. The man, no longer suspended, dropped like a stone to the floor.

  Thick skin seemed to have protected him and Bodybag had only to pick a few shards, shallowly embedded, from his back before flipping him over. He moaned but otherwise remained motionless. Taking one arm, she succeeded in half lifting, half dragging him onto her shoulders, staggering under his weight as she carried him from the room.

  He moaned again as she set him down on the corridor floor, propped up against the wall. He would be safer here than inside the room where he would have been surrounded by a carnivorous cavern. She had yet to see any evidence that the tunnel walls had the same property. Regardless, Bodybag had her own mission to continue. The others were counting on her and this man was much too heavy to bring along.

  She turned down the corridor when another moan interrupted her. “Don’t leave me,” his weak voice pleaded.

  A glance and she saw slight movements in his arms, little more than impotent twitches. Still, it was possible he would recover more quickly than she had expected — not fast enough to come with her, but fast enough to escape? What to do?

  “Sorr
y, I can’t take ya where I’m goin’,” she said, before unstrapping the machine gun from her back, “but I suppose I can leave ya wit’ dis.” Bodybag laid the machine gun across his lap. The flak cannon should be enough for anything she would encounter. If it wasn’t, chances were an extra gun wouldn’t be useful anyway.

  With a final look to the Legionnaire, she turned and raced off down the corridor.

  * * *

  DaemonS could almost feel the tissue knitting together in her wounded shoulder as she jogged along the passage. The pain was still there, still helping her block the voices, but it was lessening. What would happen when the healing was complete? Could she resist the persistent mental incursions? She would have to find a way or the entire journey would be for nothing.

  The corridor walls passed in repetitive sameness. Once the novelty of their appearance wore off, there was little difference in running through a facility made by either Nekroid, Global Earth, or a mega-corp. Stripped down to the basics, they were all unending mazes, networks of passages hiding barracks, research labs and command centers.

  She paused at an intersection, checking around the corner before choosing her new path. There hadn’t been evidence of a single Nekroid since the trio entered the base, but that didn’t mean the creatures would continue to stay hidden — they had to be somewhere.

  Another intersection, another set of empty corridors. She stepped into the center, looking down each tunnel for clues as to which way she should go. There was nothing, until she glanced to her right and the babble of mental voices boiled over. DaemonS clutched her head, holding it against the din and struggled to regain control. After long moments of torment, she succeeded in narrowing her focus to the corridor, partially blocking out the voices once again. As much as she would have liked otherwise, there was no denying which path she must take. She moved down the right hall.

  As she jogged through the new corridor the voices remained agitated, but controllable. Distracted by maintaining her mental barriers, it wasn’t until she’d run several hundred meters that DamonS noticed the change in the walls. Instead of the smooth skin surface, they now glowed with a stronger luminescence making them almost white. And there were small transparent portals that were flexible to the touch. She stopped, peering in one of the windows on her right.

  The room was bright but narrow and there were three tall thin technicians within view. They seemed busy monitoring a cluster of flexible screens that protruded from the walls and floor. The room stretched out of sight to her left and DaemonS moved to the next small window.

  Two more technicians were adjusting an object on the wall and pointing at a nearby monitor. For a moment, she thought this was a conversion chamber that produced weapons or small vehicles. Then the technicians stepped away.

  The shock pulsed through her system carrying fear and disbelief. There, on the far wall, was the motionless form of Ch’Kandra from The Helldivers. She was supposed to be dead, destroyed during the match accident. How was this possible? She ran to the next window and saw, stretching off to the left, the rest of the team, including — could it be? — VinD!

  Suddenly she understood the full implications of the horrible events of the Death Match. Of course, it had long been obvious that Figment’s boss had set them up and that he worked for Halandri, but only now that she saw The Helldivers being rebuilt here, in a Nekroid base, did she realize how deep the deception went. Halandri, or at least their high-ranking representative, must be working with these monsters! That suggested that all the problems of the Death Match had been instigated by this coalition. And that, she realized with horror, suggested that Geneslicer had been a Halandri plant from the start, somehow included in their team for the express purpose of disrupting the tournament. With that thought came the memory of the Genilon technician’s words that seemed a lifetime ago now.

  “They’re modeled after Halandri Infiltrators... same exo-skeleton, same cyber-neural wiring, same everything, basically.”

  From what she had seen, it was easy enough to get inside his wiring, so a simple reprogramming wouldn’t have been difficult. After the primary version came online, the new code would be automatically downloaded to the backups, meaning the entire suite of Geneslicers would change allegiance. It explained a lot, but it didn’t tell her what she should do now.

  Did she need to do anything? The technicians would likely be destroyed in the twin Rapture blasts and The Helldivers, well, if they could be rebuilt once, they could be rebuilt again.

  As she watched the technicians moving from android to android, checking monitors, prodding arms, she noticed a familiar glean on their metallic skin — Nekroid tissue. That was all that the world needed, semi-organic androids.

  Gripping her flak cannon tightly, DaemonS rushed through the portal. Two rounds of flaknel finished the five technicians but she didn’t pause, pumping grenade after grenade into the chamber as she retreated backward, staying out of range of the explosions. Tentacles snapped, writhing in the air, and androids toppled to the ground, fragmented.

  She stepped backward through the portal, taking a last look, through the smoke of destruction, at the carnage she had wrought. Just for a moment she glimpsed a one-armed VinD, the other arm blown off by one of her grenades. In the crackling of biomechanical circuits from the walls and the strobing of the room lighting, it almost seemed that he turned one red eye on her. And then the portal snapped shut.

  DaemonS turned and ran off down the hallway with new urgency, certain her handiwork would draw attention. Her heart raced and her mind reeled as she absorbed what had just happened. She had destroyed the Helldivers — fragged them while they were in maintenance!

  They were being turned into Nekroid, she reminded herself. But it didn’t matter, it still felt low; as if she had walked into their safe zone and opened up with a rocket launcher.

  No! She couldn’t allow those thoughts, those doubts, to grow. She had saved them from a terrible fate. The Helldivers would be back, rebuilt free of contamination, they had to be. But before that could happen, she would have to complete her mission.

  21

  “Why am I not surprised,” Figment said. “Somehow I knew I didn’t kill you last time.”

  Before him, seated on a throne of dark tentacles, was Pre-emptive Strike, or whatever his Nekroid name was. The only part of him now recognizable was his face, the rest was a dark mass that writhed and squirmed. His body was seemingly composed of a horde of tiny snakes — organo-metallic tentacles, Figment realized.

  “But my dear Mr. Figment, of course you killed me. That was your purpose. Without death I could not have ascended to everlasting life and you were the perfect vessel to bring me that gift.”

  One end of the room was wrapped around PS, enclosing him almost as one might expect a womb to enclose a child on the verge of birth. The entire oval chamber, however, was high and spacious, with walls that exuded a faint luminescence. Was it Figment’s imagination or were they vibrating softly, almost purring? Above, the ceiling tapered to a trio of bright, glowing circles that seemed to be innervated by a dark, pulsing conduit that stretched down the far wall, ending at the floor behind the throne.

  “You mean, to activate the conversion process?”

  The tentacles raised PS from the throne, suspending him over the ground as if he was floating. “I see you are aware of it.”

  “Vaguely,” Figment had to keep PS talking, stall him as long as possible to give Bodybag and DaemonS time to arm the Raptures. “Something to do with animating inanimate matter?”

  “Only in the most simplistic of descriptions. The process is a means to rearrange matter into a form or purpose that suits our needs. In practice this has meant the creation of hybrid semi-living matter — organic technology — if you will. We can literally grow buildings, breed weapons and vehicles, and....”

  “Bring the dead back to life?”

  “Yes, I suppose you would see it that way. To us, however, we are simply r
eanimating an expired or outdated machine. While you see your machines and equipment as synthetic tools, and humans as living creatures, we view all as simply machines of different forms. Some are organic: built from carbon, nitrogen and oxygen; some are inorganic, created of alloys of iron, aluminum and titanium.”

  As he spoke, PS flowed from side to side across the floor. Writhing tentacles beneath him seemed to flow from one point to the next, adding themselves to the front, removing from the rear, as they carried his amorphous form through the air. “When a Stinger stops functioning, do you immediately throw it on the scrap pile? No, a mechanic repairs it. We are simply universal mechanics. We can repair all machines — organic and inorganic. True they are not the same as they were to begin with, but why rebuild a flawed machine to the same specifications?”

  “Is that what we are to you, flawed machines? Tools to be fixed and used?”

  “I prefer to think of you as components that can be adjusted to fit our needs. There is a complexity inherent in the development of sentience that the conversion process has difficulty replicating. Despite incorporating information from our earlier studies, conversion pools are, with a few notable exceptions, only able to create sub-sentient states.”

  “Sub-sentient?”

  “Animalistic, if you will. Creatures that respond to stimuli in a controlled and predictable manner.”

  “Like a household pet?”

  “Possibly, or like incredibly lethal guard dogs.” PS had stopped his motion near the far wall. Back turned, he was interfacing with a cluster of small tentacles that snaked toward him from the surface.

  Despite the obvious opportunity, Figment remained motionless. Somehow this moment felt like a test, as if PS was watching him even with back turned. Instead, Figment continued their discussion. Who knew how much of this information might be useful to Global Earth forces — if he got out alive. “So I’m to understand you’ve been studying us for sometime?”