by Andy Remic
Only one man had the resources and the technology.
“Oz,” hissed Voloshko, spittle at the edges of his thin-slit mouth. “You have betrayed me!” Oh the irony, he thought. Before I could betray you!
Voloshko whirled, in time to catch a flash at the edge of his vision—as Cam hurtled into the chamber, did a single fast circuit reconnoitre, then slammed at Voloshko with all the speed his upgrades and military combat training would allow. Cam hit Voloshko centrally between the eye clusters at about 70,000 pounds per square inch. Voloshko staggered back, stunned, head caved in with a crunch, and stepped backwards from the fluttering lips of his bombarded organotower with a stutter and a fall...
There came a whoosh of air.
Voloshko was gone.
More explosions rocked the tower, and Cam spun, sped to Keenan and Franco, and slammed an EMP through their metal-invaded flesh. Inside, the wriggling skeins halted instantly as electronic life was blasted into an electronic coma.
Franco groaned.
“Quick!” snapped Cam, “we haven’t got much time!”
Franco opened his eyes. The tower rocked, and deafening squelches could be heard, deep and muffled. Past the quivering hole in the wall, through which a cold wind gusted, huge chunks of charred flesh fell.
“What hit me?” groaned Franco.
“You’ve got to get up! Come on! You’ve got to carry Keenan! The skeins have crushed his heart!”
Franco rolled onto his belly, pushed himself to his knees, stared in horror at the black veins standing out across the backs of his hands. “I remember.” He spoke slowly, slurring a little. The wires were in his brain, interfering with motor function. “What happened... to Voloshko?”
“Took a long walk off a short plank. Hurry up!”
Franco staggered up, grabbed Keenan’s arms, but did not have the strength to lift his comrade. Instead, he grunted and dragged Keenan, bumping his friend’s body across the organic floor as he limped after a fast retreating Cam.
Xakus rushed in, grabbing at Keenan and helping Franco lift the stocky soldier. Between them, they staggered on.
“What the fuck happened to you, Mr Judas?” snapped Franco, glaring sideways at the old professor.
“I am a man of peace, not violence. I was stealing the machinery we need to decode the junk’s Sin-Script.” He lifted a small, colourless, glossy box, which gleamed and seemed to squirm in the black man’s fist. “A CryptorBox. We all had our specific jobs to do. I did mine. Now let’s move, and stop your moaning!”
“Hah!”
“We’re near the roof,” said Cam. “Voloshko has a squad of Apache choppers—if the damn DetBots haven’t wasted them! We can get ourselves an airlift.”
Panting, sweat gleaming on his face, Franco stopped, knelt, and was sick.
Cam swerved back. Dropped to Franco. “If you don’t move your arse, soldier, we’ll be dead in two minutes. There’s thousands more detonation Pop-Bots descending on this tower right now! Do... you... damn well understand?”
Franco wiped his mouth with the back of his skein-infested hand. Subcutaneously, they gleamed. He nodded. Stood. Took his hold on Keenan.
“How long has he got?”
“Three minutes. Which is academic. Soon, Franco, we’ll all be sushi.”
Franco limped after Cam, up several sloped floors, and between him and Xakus they managed to get Keenan onto The Hammer Syndicate’s roof. Cold air blasted them. The wind howled a mournful song. Snow danced diagonal jigs.
Deep down, beneath boots and sandals, more explosions detonated like muffled ordinance. The organotower shuddered. It swayed beneath them, and the whole chassis quivered constantly, as if in terminal seizure.
As Cam predicted, many Apache choppers were nothing more than glowing shrapnel, parts scattered like comedy dice across the hole-infested roof. The two men staggered with Keenan towards an unmolested vehicle, skirting wide, quivering gaps in the floor showing twitching bone and gleaming gristle.
“Quick!” howled Cam. “The main wave is here!”
Deep below, near the organotower’s foundation, hundreds and hundreds of detonations ignited simultaneously. The Hammer HQ swayed dangerously, a dying erection, and started to slide, slowly, flapping over in a slow-motion stop-motion topple—
Franco dragged Keenan onto the Apache, clambered into the cockpit, and slammed the starter. Rotors began a slow turn. In the back, Xakus unzipped Keenan’s WarSuit and stared with horror at the mesh of wires beneath the soldier’s bruised and inflamed skin.
“You perform heart massage, I’ll extract the wires,” said Cam.
The organotower, in its lazy slide, began to actually scream, a deafening, squealing, gnashing sound interspersed with millions of crackling, snapping bone cracks. Still the DetBots exploded, ignited, detonated, blasting flesh and gristle and sinew and bone. Fires burned. Raged. The stench of scorched vegetable flesh flowed up through the snow like a mushroom cloud.
“Come on, come on!” snapped Franco. The rotors were buzzing, dicing black snow.
Franco felt himself start to shift. Before him, the tower swayed and tilted in a nauseating parody. The Apache began a slow slide towards the edge of the bomb-blasted roof. Franco frantically tried to take-off, but the Apache gave a simple warning buzz. No, it seemed to be saying. Go and find another chopper.
Cam, rotating beside Keenan’s chest, inserted a needle. Something glowed. Cam flowed inside, flowed with the dormant skein wires using their own micro-molecular pathways. He observed a spiral of thousands of strands encasing Keenan’s heart, a black coil suffocating an electric motor. Tutting, Cam began to burn away the wires from inside Keenan’s chest cavity; with digital winces, he tried to ignore the scorching of Keenan’s actual heart fibres.
Outside in the snow, once again Franco tried to panic-leap the Apache into the air. Again, it buzzed at him and he scowled his legendary Franco scowl, all eyebrows and squinty hatred.
“Bastard machine! Fly you bastard of a bastard’s bastard!” He thumped the console. “Come on, I say, fly you bastard!”
The Apache reached the edge of the roof, runners grinding. Below, in darkness and gloom and falling snow, the whole of The City seemed to rear up like a million-headed snake to mock Franco with each and every lisping head. Franco stared at his own ghost-reflection superimposed against the Apache’s cockpit, a HUD mannequin. His face was nearly entirely black, hundreds of minute swirls beneath his face giving him the appearance of suffering a bizarre tattoo epilogue.
More detonations rocked, deep down below... and this time, they did not stop. On and on they boomed, thousands of final concussions slamming the remaining fabric holding the monolithic structure in place. And with a shudder like widow’s grief the organotower, finally, died...
Agonisingly, it tilted.
The Apache slid free of the summit.
And with a scream Franco fell...
~ * ~
Voloshko hit the ground bard. Six-hundred and ninety-eight floors was a long way to fall. His body slammed the earth, compressed, and within his organic sack he felt the sickening crunches as his bones and chassis collapsed, crushed, disintegrated, many components ground into powder, floating like dust in blood both human and alien: mingled and combined. Voloshko felt his spine compress to become an organic corrugation. He felt his skull flatten, bouncing from concrete to give him instant brain damage; a total pulping.
He lay, contorted at impossible angles, fuming.
He watched the organotower fall, as if in slow-motion, through swirling black snow. It keeled over, crunching through various other buildings and taking them down with it. The last of the straggling, final detonations boomed through darkness until only a gentle sound, as of running water, remained; that, and the blanketing, muffled silence, of the snow.
Voloshko tried to move. But his spine and limbs no longer worked.
He settled his burning anger on NanoTek. On Dr Oz.
Had Dr Oz discovered Voloshko’s plans
to overthrow him?
Had Dr Oz realised Voloshko was behind the bio-mod hacking and piracy?
Or was the total annihilation of The Hammer Syndicate simply a cheap shot attempt at removing Keenan from the face of the planet?
It mattered not. The Hammer Syndicate had served its purpose. And NanoTek had used a premiere war machine to put the syndicate out of business.
Voloshko frowned, the look strange on his metallic face. He tried again to move, but could not. Frustration gnawed him like a maggot, eating his heart from the inside out.
Come on, he thought. Where are you. Where are you? What’s taking so long?
A terrible thought flowered in his brain. If it was NanoTek who had betrayed the Syndicate... then maybe the gift was also a betrayal? A final mockery? A two-fingered salute to the most powerful ruling Syndicate on the planet?
Time. It was supposed to take time.
Voloshko relaxed. Sighed. He allowed his pulped and liquid mind to swim, drifting lazily back through long hot centuries, always hot, to the days with his brother Mr Max... and the others of their clan, their breed, their tribe.
He floated along distant timelines, half-forgotten. To their youth, on the planet which one day became known as Sick World... The world for the ill, the deformed, the dying and the dead. The place where he had developed his Seed Hunter abilities. The place where he had ceased to be human, instead having to wear a human skin which in itself mocked him with ersatz physiology. To masquerade as that which you had been born! The shame. The shame burned him...
He awoke, to find the burning was real. Inside his bones. Inside his metal bones. Inside his crushed spine. Inside his eyes. Inside his pulped and gooey-liquid brain.
Carefully, the nanobots began to rebuild Voloshko.
Carefully, they began his restructuring.
~ * ~
“Aiiieee!” screamed Franco, waggling the joystick and slapping at buttons randomly. They slammed through the snow, the organotower falling after them, behind them, and then above them. Franco checked his rear-view mirrors. Shit. Yep. There it was. Several billions of tonnes of dead organic slab chasing him vertically through the atmosphere. Stubbornly, the Apache still refused to operate, despite rotors whamming round in a blur of slivered snowflakes...
“It’s the red button, retard,” came Cam’s drawl.
Franco slammed the big red button, marked helpfully in white letters that read: FLY.
The Apache lit afterburners, banked, and screamed low through the city streets. Franco was pushed back in his seat, veined cheeks wobbling as far behind the organotower slammed the ground like a billion tonnes of raw meat on the biggest butcher’s slab ever carved. Franco, fully awake now in fresh air and fresher fear, tugged and jerked on the joystick like an automaton as they smashed a random, insane dance ten feet from the ground following roads filled with zombies and burning, overturned cars.
“Arrrhhh!” he managed after a while, as he rounded a corner, rotors taking alloy shavings from the edge of a building, and yanked back on the controls to send them searing like a rocket up up into cold high brittle heavens.
A minute later, Franco finally had the chopper under his control, and hovering steadily, humming. He released a pent-up breath. Then he beamed, grinning back at Cam and Xakus. “I did it! I got us out of there! I’m a hero, I am! The man of the moment! I saved the day!” Then his eyes fell on Keenan, and he paled, despite the dead skeins beneath his own, quivering, rancid skin. “Will he be OK?”
“He’s breathing,” confirmed Cam, and even as the PopBot spoke Keenan’s eyes flickered open. They were laced with black swirls. He focused on Cam, then Xakus, then a grinning Franco who bounded forward, dropped to his knees, and hugged Keenan.
“Whoa, mate,” croaked Keenan. “I’m still a bit... tender.”
“It’ll take another hour to remove all the skein strands,” said Cam mellifluously.
“What happened to Voloshko?”
“I helped him learn to fly.” Cam sounded smug.
“And the organotower? Why the detonations?”
“They were DetBots. NanoTek’s finest. We can only assume NanoTek had some grievance with The Hammer Syndicate and decided to go to war.”
“Yes, I can confirm NanoTek certainly has the technology. It’s a common misconception the computing giant is simply an over-exaggerated software house.” Xakus sat, one hand run halfway through his bushed white hair, his face weary with exhaustion and fear. “NanoTek uses and abuses. Believe me, it has teeth. Whatever the reasons, it matters little to us know. We have the CryptorBox. I can use it to analyse the junk’s SinScript... although it may take a little time, and I will need a massive power source.”
“We have time,” said Keenan. “It’s a long walk to NanoTek.”
“You still plan to invade?”
“We’re going to stop this shit. We’re going to find out what’s gone wrong.”
Franco lifted his hand. “Is it OK if I get these worms out of my eyes first? They’re really starting to irritate. They’re all itchy scratchy.” He shivered, scratching his beard. “It freaks me out. I’ve never felt so... wired and weird before.”
“Haha,” said Cam. “Very funny. Anyway, we certainly need to remove the wires before they reactivate.”
“What?” hissed Franco, eyes widening.
“I used an EMP. I disabled them. They’ll... no, I just can’t say it.”
“Say what?”
Cam took a deep breath. “They’ll be back.”
“Put us down on that rooftop, over there,” said Keenan, nodding. “We’ll let Cam do his micro-butchery on us and we can re-group, and plan. I know what you mean, Franco, about feeling this shit inside my veins and my flesh—I feel like a doper permanently wired on a bad cocktail.” He shivered. “I feel like every atom has been raped.”
Franco went back to the controls, and eased the Apache through heavy falling snow. Warily, he touched down on the rooftop, and with Kekras primed, climbed out to secure the area.
“I can use the power source here to start decoding the SinScript,” said Xakus.
Keenan nodded, flinching as Cam extracted wires from inside his eyeballs. Pain flared through him like molten metal. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Go ahead. Lets find out what the poisonous little junk fuckers are up to.”
Xakus met Keenan’s gaze. “You might not like what I find,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper.
Keenan stared off through the snow, eyes stinging. He breathed deep. It felt good to be alive. Bizarrely, he thought of Pippa. Remembered what it what was like to hold her. To touch her soft skin. Kiss her ripe lips. “Hold me, Kee,” she said in his mind, words a distant haunting echo.
Keenan shivered. “Not like it?” He laughed, his laughter the sound of an alien metal wind across a desecrated, dead world. “I’m betting on it,” he said.
~ * ~
It took an hour for Cam to remove every last strand of fried biological skein wire from Keenan, and a further hour to replicate the procedure on Franco. As Cam operated on Franco, Keenan gave himself painslashers, vitboosters and brain and heart stims from the Apache’s medical box. Then he lit a burner, out beside the Apache, and boiled some water for a brew. Xakus had moved away across the skyscraper’s roof, connecting the tiny CryptorBox to a 90,000 volt mains power cable, where tiny electric teeth burrowed through insulation like an electronic parasite, and stole power. Keenan watched Xakus insert the stolen SinScript. There came a massive bass whine from deep down below in the building. In its heart. In its soul. Emergency lighting around the rim of the skyscraper dimmed.
“Powerful, for such a tiny thing,” said Keenan, walking to Xakus and handing him a pot of steaming coffee. Xakus took the drink with a nod of thanks.
“Size has never been an indication of power.”
“Don’t mention that to Franco. You’ll hurt his feelings.”
Holding his own coffee, Keenan climbed into the Apache and stared down at Franco, lyi
ng on his back on an unrolled sterile med-stretch. Cam was silent, humming, extracting wires from within Franco’s flesh. As Keenan watched, a ten metre element was drawn slowly, painfully, carefully, from one of Franco’s eyeballs. The little ginger-bearded soldier squawked in a long-drawn low-level agony, then blinked rapidly, eyes smarting.
“It’ll hurt for a while,” said Cam.
“Story of my life,” snorted Franco, then looked up and saw Keenan. “Ahh. At last! The basic staple of the old-fashioned honest-to-goodness squaddie.”