by Andy Remic
“Trust me, Keenan, I can smell fire! It’s behind us. It’s approaching fast.”
“What, you mean, approaching fast? Like a train?”
Franco shrugged, and cast a glance at Cam. “Ask Mr MIR 3450 over there.”
“I assure you, there’s nothing moving on these tracks.”
Keenan had slowed the HTank, and suddenly realised that was a bad idea. He accelerated again, the lumbering behemoth pounding down the lines which weaved, gently left, then right; an underground umbilical from dead mother to abandoned abortion.
Something trembled. They felt it, rippling through the HTank’s chassis.
Keenan shot Franco a glance.
Franco shrugged, as if to say, Hey, who am I to argue with a PopBot?
Gradually, over the heavy rumbling of the HTank, a noise intruded at the seams of hearing. It was metallic, insect-like, a constant, ululating low-level scream. Keenan glanced at the rear visual scanners. Behind them, glimpsed then lost on a bend, he saw a glow of orange.
“Cam,” snapped Keenan, “Franco’s right. There is something behind us. On the tracks. On fire. Remind me of your promise?”
“I guarantee,” began Cam. But stopped. On the screen for all to see, and advancing rapidly towards them at a frightening speed, came a train, but not any normal train, this was an underground passenger juggernaut. It was massive, a blazing inferno of fire and pumping smoke which filled the tunnel, sucked along by its own mammoth burning vacuum. At the helm, at the train’s controls, tiny behind cracked and ribbed plasti-glass, were five or six screaming, wild-eyed zombies.
“Aiee!” said Franco.
Keenan slammed the HTank’s controls, and the vehicle lurched, accelerating on matrix with a howl of churning power. The train slammed at them, a glowing fireball, its elongated, pointed snout reaching out to touch their tail as they hurtled down the lines in sudden raging competition.
“We should have turned the HTank’s guns before we entered the tunnel!” wailed Franco. “We could have blasted it!”
“Too late for that,” snapped Keenan. Sweat glowed on his brow. He kept one eye ahead, one on the screen. The juggernaut train bumped them, sending the HTank careering wildly and scraping a scree of sparks from the wall. Bricks detached, flew off, bounced against the flaming train’s hull.
“Two klicks ahead,” said Cam, voice cool. “Our exit point.”
“Not at this speed,” snarled Keenan. “It’s too close! We’d never get off the tracks!”
They hammered, a close convoy, the flaming passenger juggernaut howling like a banshee as it bore down on the—by comparison—miniaturised HTank. Fire roared. Somewhere, a detonation rocked the tunnel, deep down, a bass concussion the Combat K squaddies felt through their feet and stomachs.
“Don’t like the sound of that,” muttered Franco.
Keenan reached out, grabbed a digital lever, and pulled. It moved on slick gears. Before them, the HTank’s twin guns started to lift, rising with hydraulic, ratchet thumps until...
“It’ll hit the roof!” wailed Cam.
The guns ploughed into the tunnel roof and bricks exploded outwards, back in a stream of violent smashing destruction. The HTank slowed, its guns yammering, juddering, buckling, but the fire-billowing train slammed them with a violent jolt urging them on as the HTank’s armour screamed and buckled, caught between the impaling guns and the force of the ploughing train. But the more the train pushed, the more the HTank’s guns smashed through bricks and concrete above, screaming and growling, steel mashing bricks which flooded behind in an accelerating stream until...
The tunnel’s roof collapsed.
With a roar like the ending of worlds a flood of debris slammed down, instant, flattening, impacting everything under the weight of billion-tonne buckling skyscrapers above. The train was caught by its mid-section, yanked to a sudden halt like a dog on a leash which sent the piloting zombies smashing and bouncing around the cockpit in a blender of living dead organics. The HTank, drunk, slewed ahead, bouncing from tunnel walls and slowing to a limping, buckled, squeaking halt as all around them the roar of collapsing tunnel boomed, and howled, and gradually, like a retreating, growling tsunami, subsided.
Keenan slammed open the hatch, lifted himself free, and jumped down to the tracks. Smoke and dust drifted over him. A roaring continued, muffled, as above an entire tower block shifted and realigned—sitting back and down on its haunches as it crushed the flaming passenger train in staggered compression crunches.
Franco hopped, yowling, across the red-hot hull of the HTank, his sandals poor protection against glowing metal. He dropped to the ground, scowling back at Keenan. Then he glanced ahead, perhaps twenty feet, where the platform—and their exit— waited patiently. Franco stared at the destroyed HTank, fully a half of its former length, its hull unrecognisable as a war machine. Its guns were buckled, cracked, glowing hot from their intimate integration with the tunnel’s roof. The HTank groaned, and with a sigh of escaping gas and spurting hydraulic fluid, squatted down on its arse like a dying metal dinosaur.
“That brought the roof down,” grunted Franco.
“As you can see,” Keenan pointed at the platform, “we will be disembarking in one minute. If sir would like to step onto the platform? I’m sure Cam will escort us promptly from this trap.”
“Very neat, Keenan, very neat. Just don’t milk it, lad. Nobody likes a smart arse. Reet?”
Franco led an ashen, coughing Xakus towards the platform. Cam followed, but Keenan gave a whistle—as one would to a dog.
Cam rotated; his black shell remained the same, but Keenan could tell he’d managed to irritate the Pop-Bot. He smiled, a grim baring of compressed teeth.
“I am not a canine,” said Cam, testily.
“I thought you said there were no trains.”
“Ha! What I actually said was that the lines had been deserted for a thousand years.”
Keenan thumbed the wreckage, and the growling wall of collapsed tunnel behind. Dust was settling, making the raging inferno hazy and surreal. “You call that deserted?”
“Tsch Keenan, don’t you think you’re being a little picky?”
“Getting fifteen thousand tonnes of flaming engine up our jackass is being picky?”
“I cannot attest for every eventuality. An eternity crystal ball, I am not.”
“Damn right,” snapped Keenan, striding onto the platform and towards the skewed, buckled steps where Franco had wrenched free a rusted gate, which lolled on broken hinges, squeaking forlorn. “But you’re certainly a ball. As in, a testicle.”
Keenan disappeared.
Cam surveyed the wreckage, his tiny AI mind whirring like precision clockwork.
“How rude,” he said.
~ * ~
The night air was chilling as they emerged. Green veins lit the clouds turning the sky into solid onyx. “Whats’ the hell’s going on with the weather system?” growled Franco.
Keenan shrugged. “The zombies have taken control. Could be anything. Who knows how a deviant’s mind works. Well, maybe you have a vague idea.”
“Listen Keenan. About this word. This Z word.”
“Zombie?”
“Aye. I don’t think we should use it.”
“Why not? They look like fucking zombies to me.”
“No no, it’s more, well,” he shuddered, “the more we see of them, the more I think of them, well, to be frank, I’m getting more and more uncomfortable killing them.” He eyed Keenan beadily. “They were human, right? Deviated and mashed out of all recognition, I’ll give you that, but still human at the core. And, if all this shit is down to biomods, then one day they might just get changed back. Zombie just seems the wrong word to use.”
Keenan slapped him on the back. “Shall we call them accidents? Will that make you happy?”
Franco brightened. “Yeah. That’s better.”
“This got anything to do with Mel?”
Franco nodded. “I’m missing her, mate
. I never thought a woman would get to me like this. I thought I was Mr Testosterone, a proper hero in tights, flitting like a star-struck magpie from one dangerous love tryst to the next.”
Keenan stared hard. “You need some tablets, mate?”
“Aye, aye, I’ll have one in a minute. What I’m trying to say, is, Melanie came to check my taxes, and I ended up wanting to marry her. It’s a funny old world, ain’t it?”
“She’s a tax collector?”
Franco nodded. “Yeah. Why? What’s wrong with that?”
Keenan grinned. “Oh. Nothing. I just thought, well, I thought you’d never paid any taxes.”
“I haven’t.”
“And she’s still alive?”
“That’s the funny thing,” said Franco. “Once I fell in love with her, I no longer wanted to blow off her head and bury her in a shallow grave. Call me Mr Old Fashioned, but that’s just the way I am.”
“So, you have used the L word then?”
“Shit. So I did.” He reddened.
Keenan patted Franco kindly. “Take your tablets, there’s a good lad.”
Cam, who had headed off into the black to reconnoitre, emerged from the gloom trailing smoke. “It’s up ahead,” he said. “And by God, this Hammer Syndicate Tower is big. And not quite... normal.”
“Not quite normal?” Franco’s ear pricked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like you, Franco, it has to be seen to be believed. Follow me.”
They trooped after Cam, Franco muttering in annoyance and hoisting heavy Kekras in gloved fists ready for any contact. He noticed Xakus starting to fall behind, and turning, dropped back to walk beside the ageing professor.
“You’re doing well, old man.”
Xakus smiled a weak smile, face ashen, eyes dulled. “This quest is taking its toll on me. I am not a soldier, Mr Haggis. I am not a warrior, not a fighter.”
“But you built MICHELLE.”
“She was not, primarily, designed for war, although I acknowledge it could look that way. I built her out of love, Mr Haggis. Love. But I find, worryingly, in this day and age one has to be able to protect oneself. Sadly, MICHELLE could not even do that.”
“She died for a noble cause,” said Franco.
“What? Discovering the root of this deviant problem? Helping to translate the junk’s SinScript? No, I don’t think so. You people, you could never understand MICHELLE. To you she was just some faceless, stony, emotionless terminator machine. But to me... I could see inside her, see the beauty within the mesh, the love within the shell.” He stuttered to a halt, overcome by emotion.
They were walking down a narrow, roofed tunnel created from derelict buildings, their pace slow, wary, observant. The warzone had mutated. Ahead, Keenan halted and crouched beside a tangle of sharpwire, gun to his cheek, eyes roving, picking out every tiny detail. Like a machine he missed nothing. This was his environment. His world. Whether he acknowledged it, or not.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Franco.
Xakus turned tortured eyes on him. “Oh but it was. I gave her life. And because of me, that life was taken. I killed her, Mr Haggis. I killed my true love as sure as putting a gun to her head and pulling the trigger.”
Shit, thought Franco, rolling his eyes. And they think I’m mad!
Keenan turned, staring at Franco. “Seems we’ve a long way to go to find Mel. This is no simple infil.”
Franco crouched, looking out across a field of sharpwire, towards—
“Wow,” he said, and he meant it.
The Hammer Syndicate HQ rose for three hundred storeys, its matt-black, rippling, undulating edifice like nothing the Combat K men had ever witnessed.
“That’s not a building, it’s a bloody dildo!” snapped Franco.
“More importantly, how do we get in?” Keenan searched his friend’s face.
“More importantly, do we want to get in?”
Keenan hissed, “She’s your missus, mate. If you want to rescue her, you have to get inside that damn place. You work it out.”
“How the buggering bugger am I supposed to do that?”
“That’s where I come in,” said Xakus, crouching beside them. He seemed suddenly infused with energy. His eyes had grown bright after their previous dullness; his face was ruddy, as if excitement coursed his veins. “This is an organotower.”
“An orgasm what?” said Franco.
“No. A tower, formed of living semi-sentient over-stretched molecules. It’s like a giant vegetable.”
Franco stared at Xakus with incredulity. With care, he finally said, “Is that the best the bloody Hammer Syndicate could afford?”
“You don’t understand. I’m not talking carrots and potatoes here; it’s an organic material from the Triclux System; an alien, if you will. It has incredible resistant armoured properties, and the benefit of being self-rejuvenating.”
“So a building that heals itself,” muttered Keenan.
“Yes.”
“But,” persisted Franco, “ultimately, it’s an alien vegetable. Right?”
“Yes.”
“How come I’ve never heard of it? I’ve walked these mean city streets for years. I mean, a vegetable dildo, the size of a tower block! I’d have noticed! It’s, um, something that would have caught my attention, I’m sure.”
“This unit is very rare, very expensive, and the Hammer Syndicate don’t advertise its uniqueness. You note the surrounding sharpwire of No Man’s Land? The whole structure lies under a shimfield. Move a few metres away, you won’t see it due to visual pressure waves.”
“It’s still a damn comedy vegetable,” said Franco. “Can’t we just take a peeler to it? Flush the bastards out that way?”
“I think you’ll find it’s a little more complex,” said Xakus. “Cam, can you clear us a path through the sharpwire?”
“It will take but a few moments,” said Cam. He sounded smug. “After all, I have a new-found advanced military status. I am, in fact...”
“Get on with it, gonad,” snapped Franco.
“Your rudeness has reached cosmic proportions.”
Cam eased ahead, spinning slowly, scanning, clicking. Then, low to the ground, he shot towards the organic wire and there was a soft snap. Coils sprang up, encompassing Cam for a moment. At the core, Cam glowed, a miniature sun, a mobile fusion reactor, and the sharpwire melted into molten droplets. Cam sped on, wire leaping up around him as he cleared them a path through the highly dangerous toxic deterrent.
“Ain’t nothing organic getting through that,” said Franco, in a grim and horrified awe.
“Reminds me of that thing we met. In the bunker on Terminus5. The Tangled.” Keenan’s eyes were hooded, unreadable.
“A similar technology,” said Xakus, standing and heading out after Cam. His boots crackled on crisped strands of dead sharpwire. “Only this is more benign. It has no advanced AI elements like a coil of Tangled.”
“You know your stuff,” said Keenan.
“I used to work for NanoTek,” said Xakus. “I did my bit of synthetic intelligence programming, bio-molecular engineering and artificial cell structuring. I know my control theory from my probability; my fuzzy systems from my hybrid neuroscience.” He smiled a bitter smile. “You could say I’m something of an expert. That’s why you brought the SinScript to me. That’s why we’re going to decode the son of a bitch up there.”
“They have the technology?”
“There is a likelihood,” said Xakus. “Hammer has always had a close relationship with NanoTek. They scratch one another’s scabby backs, if you get my meaning.”
“But this is an amoral syndicate, right?” said Franco. “I presume their relationship is financial?”
“Isn’t every relationship?” said Xakus. “There is also the option that Hammer Syndicate are in on the biomod hacking business. The pirates and the coders, hey? They’d need serious bank-rolling to undercut NanoTek. And yes, NanoTek would like us to think it was some backstr
eet small-scale operation, some bedroom genius, because that way less people would trust the hacked biomods. Well, let me tell you, a biomod takes a lot of cracking. That could also be one reason why these people have taken Melanie. There’s something different about her zombification. Something unique. Maybe their hackers want to examine her nanobots? Maybe Hammer Syndicate is on the brink of war with NanoTek.”
“An interesting concept,” said Keenan, voice cool. “Which would mean the Syndicate are stabbing NanoTek in the back, and using NanoTek’s money to finance a planned coup d’État?” He scratched his chin in thought. Then grinned. “I love it when the big boys play rough. Let’s hope you’re right.”