by Steve Feasey
Blake put his hand up. ‘How will you be travelling … Commander?’
‘I’ll be on foot. Try to keep up.’
The men looked at each other again.
‘We’ll meet at the vehicle depot in one hour. Dismissed.’
The sun was beginning to set on Scorched Earth as the ARM unit approached the edge of the Wastes, three hours after setting out from C4. The seven agents were travelling in an armoured troop carrier. Outside, running at about two-thirds of his top speed, Steeleye was enjoying his newfound freedom. His bionic enhancements worked even better than he’d imagined, and he grudgingly had to admit that Svenson had indeed done great job. He was still going to kill her at the first opportunity he got, but at least she’d die knowing she’d been at the top of her game. Running on an electronic treadmill inside an air-conditioned laboratory hadn’t prepared him for the sheer exhilaration he now felt. Off to his left, he was aware of the vehicle, but he paid it no attention. He was enjoying himself. Out here, despite the cold harsh wind, he felt alive in a way he hadn’t for months. The wind in his face made his human eye water and he blinked the tears away as he raced across the ground, his hair streaming out behind him like a tail.
Onboard systems scanned the landscape ahead, giving him constant feedback about the topography, superimposing the visual image with contour lines and highlighting potential dangers. Steeleye largely ignored the data. When he came to a group of pre-Last War relics – gnarled concrete and rusted metal – jutting out of the earth in front of him, he simply amped up his speed and jumped them. The highest of them was easily twice his height, but he knew from the data in his HUD that he could clear it. It was only as he was on his way down that he realised he might have overdone it. This was his first attempt at such a manoeuvre, and he’d misjudged the leap a little. Feeling himself tipping forward as he began to descend, Steeleye let out a shout, a wild mixture of anxiety and exhilaration. One foot crashed into the ground, and his leg, despite its tremendous strength, buckled under the impact. As the earth rushed up to meet him, there was no fear in the mutant; the computers had already made the necessary calculations about how best to deal with the situation, and Mange simply dipped his left shoulder, the metal arm sweeping down in front of him as if he was taking a high-speed bow. The forward roll he performed was perfect, and he was back on his feet and moving again almost without breaking stride.
The newly promoted Captain Blake looked out of the small viewing port on his side of the troop carrier, staring in amazement at the running figure of the mutant cyborg. The ’borg’s legs were almost a blur as he gobbled up the landscape in front of him. Blake couldn’t help but wonder what had got into the heads of the Principia by putting this … thing in charge of him and his unit. What he did know was that the cyborg didn’t care a jot for those in his command. The feeling was entirely mutual. At the first chance, Captain Blake would rid himself of the Mute, take revenge for what the freak had done to his predecessor and get this ARM unit back under the control of Pures.
Despite his hatred of the ’borg, he had to admit the thing was remarkable. He watched as it jumped over some ruins, quickly bringing the vis-gogs he held up to his eyes as he saw the Mute wasn’t going to make the landing. He smiled. Maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about his new commander after all because he was about to crash head first into the ground and –
When the ’borg rolled up out of the impact and carried on running, Blake could hardly believe his eyes. He zoomed into Steeleye’s face, expecting to see that smug look wiped off. He frowned, lowering the device. The cyborg was laughing like a maniac.
Rush and Tia
‘Try not to walk so funny,’ Tia said under her breath as the pair approached the entry gate.
‘I am,’ Rush muttered. ‘But for some reason, having my leg cut open and a microchip inserted into my thighbone has affected my usual ability to swagger fearlessly up to an entry point manned by half a dozen armed guards!’
‘Shhh,’ she hissed. ‘Unless you’ve forgotten, we are trying not to draw attention to ourselves.’
‘Seriously? In this stupid get-up? How could I not draw attention to myself?’ He gestured at the yellow-and-black jumpsuit he was wearing, the only item of citizen clothing Juneau had been able to find in the teenager’s size. ‘I look and feel ridiculous.’
‘Oh, please stop moaning. It’s all the rage.’ She paused, before adding, ‘At least, it was last year.’
‘You know what I think? This is the very outfit that the corpse was dressed in when they brought it in for Juneau to dissect? It makes sense – the guy must have died of embarrassment.’
‘Here we go,’ Tia said, her demeanour and bearing changing as they walked the last few metres separating them from the guards. To Rush, she seemed to grow in height in those last few strides, and if her leg was hurting her as much as his own was, she no longer showed it. He did his best to do likewise, but he found it hard not to be intimidated by the surroundings as he took one last look up at the Wall, the vast and forbidding barrier that separated the two surviving societies of the Last War. From down here, at its base, it looked even more intimidating. The entrance he and Tia were to walk through was about three metres long – the thickness of the wall here – and set into it at exactly halfway was a black metal frame, like a doorway with no door. Instead, a series of flashing red lights and figures shone out at various points across its surface.
‘Step through the detector,’ the man nearest the structure said. Although his voice sounded bored, his eyes never left the pair as they approached. Neither did the PEG weapon he held.
As Tia, closely followed by Rush, walked through, another guard, this one on the other side of the device, looked down at a screen. Tia had already told Rush that if they were going to be shot, this was when it would happen. Right now he kind of wished she’d kept that little nugget of information to herself. The teenage mutant’s heart was hammering away inside him, and he wondered if the tremors were visible through the thin, slightly shiny material of the jumpsuit. The guard behind the screen waved them over. When the man eventually looked up from the monitor, the expression on his face did nothing to assuage Rush’s fear.
‘Adams and Stark?’
‘Yes,’ Tia said.
The guard peered at Rush, eyebrows beetling as he did so. Juneau had managed to reprogram certain aspects of the CivisChip data, like the image of the civilian’s face that popped up when the chip was scanned, as it was happening now, but some things were not possible to alter. ‘It says here that Citizen Adams is twenty-four years of age.’ He left the statement hanging, as if there was no need to add anything further.
Tia was ready for this. ‘My friend’s father – he works at VieTech.’ This much she knew to be true from the information Juneau had managed to acquire from the CivisChips. ‘They’re working closely with Bio-Gen at the moment to produce what they’re calling the “Dorian Gray” gene, and lucky old Citizen Adams here is one of the first to try it. It’s supposed to considerably reverse the ageing process.’ Rush noticed the way Tia was talking to the guard. Ditzy and excited, she sounded younger and less sophisticated than she usually did. ‘Isn’t it great what the scientists can do? I wish my dad worked in one of the big labs. Adams here gets to try out all the latest stuff. I had the rate at which my hair grows changed last year so I could get it really long, you know? I wanted it for my prom.’
‘Dorian Gray gene? Never heard of it.’
‘Apparently it’s a reference to some ancient text.’ She waved her hand in the air as if batting the sentence away. ‘I don’t pretend to understand what it means, but from your reaction, I think the treatment must be working!’ She leaned in closer to the man. ‘My mother is already signed up for it. She’s an early adopter of most of VieTech’s stuff. She’s worried she’s looking her age.’
The guard looked over at Rush again, his expression still sceptical.
Rush joined in the conversation. ‘It’s got some weird side eff
ects though,’ he said, ignoring Tia as she snapped her head around to stare at him, her eyes wide. He was supposed to keep quiet throughout their entry in case he said something that would mark him out as a non-citizen. ‘I’m prone to vomiting. A lot. It’s like … projectile. Dad says it’s real important I don’t get sick on anyone else. Something to do with the sneckocites and the way they … ungh!’ He grabbed his stomach and groaned. ‘Oh no. I think I’m gonna chuck again!’ He puffed his cheeks out and clamped his hand over his mouth, looking urgently from the guard to Tia and back again.
His elaborate pantomime seemed to do the job. The guard, ignoring whatever data was still being displayed on his screen, hastily declared their CivisIDs were valid and waved them through.
‘Sneckocites?’ Tia said to him under her breath once they’d passed the last armed sentry.
‘It was the first thing to come into my head,’ he said with a grin. ‘Sounded good though, huh?’
‘Don’t keep doing that,’ Tia said. They were well clear of the entry point now, having emerged from the tunnel into a glass chamber where they were ‘decontaminated’ by various mists that were sprayed from all sides. Rush could still smell the stuff on his clothes and skin. It had a nasty, medicinal whiff to it.
‘Doing what?’ Rush said.
‘Gawping at everything as if it’s the first time you’ve seen it.’
‘Er, it is the first time I’ve seen it.’
‘No, it’s not. Because you are Citizen Adams, remember? At least, you are for the next twenty-odd hours we have inside the Wall. Adams grew up with all this stuff, so stop acting like you’ve just arrived here from outer space.’ She grasped his arm and pulled him out of the way of an unmanned road sweeper that he was about to step in front of, mumbling under her breath something about a ‘country mouse’ as she did so, although he instantly forgot about it when she nudged him on to a moving walkway, almost knocking him off balance in the process.
There was a sound, a deep sonorous gong. Rush looked up and saw a gigantic video-advertising panel dominating one side of a skyscraper not too far from where they stood. Moments earlier the thing had been clear, the windows behind it visible, but now it was filled with an image of an extraordinarily beautiful ebony-skinned woman who was staring out, a hint of a smile creasing her lips and eyes.
‘Bio-Gen,’ the woman said in a voice like silk. ‘We make you the people you were meant to be.’ The voice was accompanied by the image of a baby lying on a white blanket. This in turn was replaced by a series of images that faded, one into the next, of more beautiful people, until eventually these were replaced by the company’s logo.
‘Everything looks so new. It’s all so … clean.’
‘On the outside maybe,’ Tia responded, pulling him across the road and on to another travelator. ‘But scratch the surface, and the Six Cities are as grubby as anything you find outside their walls. And believe me, this one, C4, is about as filth-ridden as they come.’ She paused, giving him a brief smile. ‘Look, I’ll show you some of the sights if we get a chance, but right now I need you to look as if all this –’ she fluttered her fingers, taking in the looming towers and their vast illuminated hoardings – ‘is something you’ve seen a million times.’
‘I’ll do my best. So what’s the plan?’ He forced himself not to look at the woman with silver-and-purple hair coming towards them.
‘I need to hook up with my father’s friend Eleanor. If anyone can help me to help him, she can. Here,’ she said, taking him by the hand and stepping off at a gap in the side of the walkway.
‘Where is this?’ Rush asked.
‘This is Downtown. A5.’
‘Downtown?’
‘One of the poorest areas,’ she said, looking about her until she spotted a glass-walled booth not far from where they stood. On a sign above the booth was a white letter i in a blue circle.
‘Wait here,’ she said, moving towards the cubicle. ‘I just need to check something out.’
Rush stared about him. There were none of the looming glass and steel towers that he had seen on their way here, but compared to the terrible poverty and squalor of Muteville, ‘Downtown’ looked positively opulent. Clearly those inside the walls had too much wealth if a place like this could be considered ‘poor’, and this realisation made him angrier than he’d been since first entering the city. The citizens of C4 labelled this place as poor, while turning a blind eye to the terrible conditions endured by their mutant neighbours. What kind of world was this? He looked over at Tia in the booth, remembering what she’d said about scratching the surface of the cities to find out what they were really like, and realised that you didn’t even need to do that. All you had to do was recognise the chasm that existed between the two societies to know that this was an ugly place run by even uglier people.
A nearby shout made him turn around. Approaching a gap between two buildings, Rush peered down the alley to see what the cause of the commotion was. What he saw was a group of young boys and girls surrounding another, smaller child. The older group was teasing this individual, taunting him with a toy they’d clearly taken from him. One, the ringleader, kept holding the toy out, only to snatch it back when the target of their fun reached for it. Each time this happened, the other members of the group laughed and jeered until the bigger boy, finally bored with his game, threw the toy up in the air so it landed on a ledge far above their heads. The anger that had boiled up inside Rush moments earlier resurfaced as he watched the small boy start to cry. There was no hope of the youngster retrieving his property. Slapping the tall boy on the back, the bullies made their way up the alleyway in Rush’s direction.
‘That wasn’t nice,’ he said to the tall boy as he passed.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said that wasn’t very nice.’
‘What the hell has it got to do with you, hmm?’ The boy squared up to Rush. They were about the same age and height, but the bully was bulkier. He’d clearly never had to worry about where his next meal might come from.
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ the bully said with a sneer. He turned and began to walk away.
Nobody could work out how it happened, but as the bully approached the moving walkway it appeared as if one of the paving slabs lifted a little, catching his foot and sending him off balance, at the same time as a nearby refuse bin tipped over on to its side and fell into his path. There was a crash and the boy flew over the thing. The split lip and grazed forehead he suffered could have been much worse if he hadn’t got his hands out of his pockets in time. As it was – his friends laughing raucously at his extraordinary tumble – it seemed the damage to his pride was the worst of his injuries.
Rush turned his back on them and peered down the alley. The small boy, having given up on retrieving his toy from the ledge, was trudging away from it in the opposite direction.
‘Hey, kid!’ Rush shouted. The youngster turned fearfully, frowning back at the stranger who was pointing at the ground and asking if he’d ‘dropped something’.
Rush’s smile matched the boy’s as the youngster hurried back to retrieve his toy, hugging it to him before scampering away.
‘What are you grinning at?’ Tia asked. She glanced up the now deserted alleyway, then round at a group of youths who were busy picking one of their members up off the pavement.
‘Nothing. Did you find what we need?’
She led him to a shop called Cybergonk, the sign over the door looking decidedly amateurish: spray paint on two crudely joined panels, five metres in length. Walking in, Rush had to force himself not to stare again. The interior was poorly lit, but this didn’t seem to bother the dozen or so people inside. Neither did the entry of two new visitors, who barely drew a glance from most of the clientele, engrossed as they were on the high-tech machines in front of them. The devices seemed to be displaying an impossibly fast series of holo-images, text and symbols; these appeared and disappeared in the air before the user
s in what seemed a blur. The users, however, sat engrossed in this tumult of visual data.
‘What are they doing?’ Rush asked.
‘Gonking. You take a mind-altering drug that makes the brain believe time is being slowed down. The holo-images and data are transmitted at eight or nine times the usual speed, but to the gonker it seems perfectly normal. Most of these guys will be students. Gonking is a great way to get some seriously intensive study done without using up too much of your “real” time.’
‘It’s like Flea. How she sees the world in slow motion.’
‘Except to these guys it’s in real time.’
‘Is it safe?’
Tia gave a shrug. ‘The studies are inconclusive. Some people have flipped out while using the drugs, gone on mad rampages. Because of that the authorities have declared these places illegal. That’s why they’re unmanned.’ She nodded to the far wall. ‘The drugs are dispensed from that vending machine. If the authorities raid the place, the owners can simply set up somewhere else.’ She looked around, searching for something. ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ she said, nodding towards another device next to the drug dispenser.
Moving over to the machine, Tia waved her hand across the surface, bringing up a holopad into which she proceeded to enter a series of numbers and symbols. ‘Eleanor’s contact details,’ she explained to a bemused Rush. After a few moments a voice came through.
‘Yes?’
‘Eleanor. I’m sorry to be contacting you using voice-only, but I thought it best under the circumstances.’
‘Who is this?’
‘I’m the person who is now a marmoset,’ Tia answered cryptically, knowing Eleanor was one of only a handful of people who knew it was a marmoset monkey the girl had had her own CivisChip installed into.
There was a pause. ‘Where are you calling from?’