My arm spasmed. Muerte tilted her head at me; inquisitive silence.
I shook mine.
“They must have started emptying this area first.” Tashi pointed down one line of glow rods. “There’s a faint line of something that way. Discarded, I think.”
Great. “Another dead end,” I muttered. I rigged up my Valiant, withdrew the Manticore I’d stashed from Reed’s van. No Adjudicator still. “Asshole.”
“Riko, Muerte, go check it out.”
“I’ll go,” Reed countered, voice as cool as ever. He and Tashi should get together. Make beautiful icy babies.
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll go too.” Hell if I’d let him tread on my shit.
“Do it.”
We both pulled flashlights from our gear, turned them on and held them crosswise under our guns. We paced each other. His light swept the area side to side, mine lit the way ahead. We both walked softly; he surprised me every moment in this shithole. I spared him a sidelong glance from beneath my helmet. Full circle coverage had its benefits. “Why the shit are you here?”
Reed’s faceplate turned my way, but like I’d done earlier to Muerte, he said nothing. Not until we were closer to the outline Tashi had pointed out. My light slid over it, deepening shadows in the twisted shape and elongating one along the corridor behind it. “A body,” he reported.
It splayed out like it had been discarded, flopped awkwardly within six meters of the corridor’s entry. His face was turned down, chest crooked on one shoulder, legs scissored. Missing an arm.
No blood spattered around the corpse. No signs of a fight.
“Seems clear,” I said as Malik’s light flowed side to side. The others followed our trail across the cavernous interior. I tucked a foot under the body’s armpit and rolled him over.
Bone, stained brown with dried blood. Skin flapped around one eye as he rolled, stuck to the floor it had been pressed against and tore off. Muscle peeled back with it, but clung to the shattered remains of one cheekbone and jaw.
One eye started blankly at the ceiling, orb exposed in its socket. The other had punctured, exploded in a putrid gelatinous circle. A spike of metal protruded through it, dotted with joints and with fine lights gone dark inset along it.
“Madre,” Muerte gasped.
Reed bent, used the barrel of his heavy pistol to pull the corpse’s jaw open. Wires, tangled and charred black, spilled from the body’s throat. Along with it, strings of black ichor.
For the first time, Reed startled. He jerked his hand back, grunting.
Tashi made a sound caught between surprise and disgust.
Me and Indigo, we did neither. We looked down at the twisted, alien face of a body gone necro and said in unison, “Not again.”
I added, “Fuck my life,” to mine.
41
“This is not where we want to be,” Tashi said flatly. She stood as far away as she could and still be in cover distance, watching the body with what I assumed was suspicion. And horror. “Nobody said anything about necros.”
We hadn’t. On purpose. A stupid hope gone real wrong.
I stared deeper into the corridor, trying to see through the pressure squeezing my eyeballs. The dark and the tension surrounding us did me no favors.
“We’ve come this far,” Muerte said, surprising me. Nobody had told her about necros either. “If they went to so much trouble to hide this, there’s a reason.”
“The reason,” Tashi retorted, “got that fucker converted. No way am I next.”
Malik finished studying the corpse, rose to his feet and turned. “I intend to push on.” A simple statement. Matter of fact. Fuck what the linker intended.
Not a team player.
Then again, I struggled with that too. “I want to know what the tits,” I announced.
“Fuck you,” Tashi snapped back. Her voice rose an octave; the closest thing to scared I’d ever heard her. Guilt tapped on my brain.
I shut it down hard. “Tashi–”
“We have no choice,” Indigo cut in, his faceplate tipped up to the ceiling. Blue light danced along the tempered surface, catching the occasional sharp feature and angling it into deeper shadow. “The way back exploded. The only way out is in.”
I heard teeth click audibly. Then, a less pitched, “Fine. But we kill anything that moves.”
“Finally,” I said, smiling grimly. “You’re on my side.”
“Shut up, Riko.”
“You love me.”
“Get fucked by a railgun.”
Muerte laughed her graveled laugh and Indigo sighed.
I’d heard Tashi say worse. And this time, I trusted her at my back. Knives and all.
“Riko and Reed, point. Muerte with me, Tash covers our backs.” A clip snicked as he slotted it into place. He carried a Sauger 877, like Tashi. They seemed to be one of Mantis’s favorites – excellent security work, and even better necro-chewers. “We’re going to keep this nice and steady.”
Because last time, we’d all but walked right into a necro nest and gotten our flesh peeled off for it.
My hands shook. Rigging up my Manticore took more effort, and repeated efforts, than it should have. Indigo pushed my fumbling hand away from my back, slotted the heavy pistol in place for me. Of the five of us, only Reed noticed.
He bemused me. Saying nothing, he turned away again, prepped his own Manticore.
Digo bumped my shoulder with a light fist.
Silent reassurance. I squared both shoulders, shaking out my flesh arm. The tech replacement, so far, behaved.
Muerte stepped into line. “You really should grab something heavier,” she said on the comm. “A pistol will only piss these things off.”
“Aim better,” he replied, and left it at that.
Humor cracked through my fear. Split enough of a canyon through it that I could take a deep breath. Snorting, I claimed space front and center and primed the Valiant for fuck shit up. The light I carried fastened to the barrel, providing easier light at the cost of weighing it down a little more. Nothing I couldn’t compensate for.
And I’d be damned if I remained in the dark.
“Stay on guard,” Digo said flatly. “And aim for their chipsets. Only way to stop these things is taking out their processors.”
“Great,” Tash muttered, and I couldn’t blame her.
“Go.”
Malik and I set the pace. We both held our weapons at the ready, though I felt laughably on top with my Valiant 14 next to the pistol his large hands made look smaller. Silence reigned around our parade of nerves and determination. Only our footfalls disturbed the eerie quiet, creating faint ripples that vanished in each direction.
No doors on either side this time. An entry corridor?
No. There’d been others leading away from that large vault.
Clink. I flinched. The edges of my light jerked.
“Stay calm.” Malik’s voice. Quieter. He’d switched to closed comms.
I openly growled at him.
When he chuckled, I seriously contemplated turning the Valiant on him and adding another corpse to the scene. “Don’t fuck with me right now,” I said quietly. “You have no idea my hair trigger.”
“Believe me when I say that I do.”
My teeth ground.
We closed in on the end of the hall, and another door sealing it. It didn’t open as we approached, though its sensors for approach had been installed at the top of the door instead of at the panel beside it. Like it’d needed the top down view to scan.
“Locked,” I said without checking.
Bypassing Reed on the right, Digo checked the panel and nodded. “Hold it.”
As he worked his magic, pressing his gloved hand against the panel and tapping out commands with the other, Muerte and Tashi sidled up closer. “You really think there’ll be necros?” Tashi’s voice. Low and, fuck me, scared.
Smart merc’s worst nightmare, right?
What was even worse than that was that I knew
something they didn’t. And as Digo’s helmet turned to me for the briefest of moments, I knew I had to share. “I don’t know,” I said, “but there’s one thing–”
“Don’t get injured by them,” Malik cut in. Smooth as hot oil, sharp as Tash’s knives. “Especially the ones that leak.”
“Leak?” Muerte asked, just as Tashi made a gagging sound.
Tough cunt any day of the week, but necros cracked that shell, apparently. Smart.
“After the Vid Zone’s blight,” he continued like neither had made a sound, “preliminary exams suggest they’re learning to infect via nanos.”
“No shitting way.”
Muerte shifted, returning her attention – and the direction of her Insurgent – behind us.
“That’s why we take them down fast and at distance,” Indigo said, withdrawing from the panel. At the top of the doors, the scanner came to life. Green lines projected out, turned into a grid that took us all in.
It winked out. The doors audibly unlocked, then slid open with a hiss of compressed air. Kssh.
Ice rolled down my spine. My tech hand clenched on the barrel of the Valiant; numbers spiked in my left eye, threatening the structural integrity of my favorite gun. I struggled to unclamp each finger. Stared into the open space as dread speared sharpened talons through my eyeballs.
“Ai,” Muerte breathed, little more than a croak.
Tashi’s boots thumped as she jumped back. “What the fucking shit!”
Digo, Malik and I remained silent. Me because I couldn’t speak – those cunting hornets had crawled out of my brain and into my throat. Swallowing stung all the way down. Shaking my head rattled my brains so hard, I saw thunder.
Indigo, maybe he’d been prepped.
As for Malik? Pride. Or maybe he really was as cold inside as he was out. Suddenly looking at a floor covered by the dead should have invoked something.
The smell hit us first. My nostrils flared, then my throat closed around the choking pressure surging up from my chest. I expected rot. I expected to smell the puke-inducing stench of fermented intestines and putrid flesh.
Instead, something metallic and substantial filled my nose. Freshly butchered meat. Recently shredded muscle.
A grotesque field of tangled arms and legs, shattered tech, and coagulating rivulets of blood. And bile. And probably worse. Acid underneath the meat; urine a faint burn under the copper odor of blood.
I closed my eyes.
Get it off!
Screaming. So much screaming, raw and terrified as nails and teeth and bare fingers peeled off armor like it was nothing and tore flesh from muscle and bone. Blood and gore, smears of rot, pus leaking from every wound and chipsets sparking as they hit the bloodied, gory ground.
“–ko?”
Eradicate. The word screamed in my brain.
Abort. More depth to it, like multiple voices screamed louder.
Shut up.
I sucked in a staggering breath.
“Riko!”
Shut up.
Abort.
“Get your shit together!”
Eradicate.
“Shut up,” I croaked.
Hands grabbed my shoulders. Shook so hard, my neck popped as my helmet wobbled back and forth. “Riko.”
Eradicate!
“Shut up!”
Cold air slapped my sweaty cheeks.
I’m sorry.
And then a fist.
Hurry.
I spun with the impact, stumbled to the side. My helmet clattered to the ground, one foot sliding in gummy fluid. I barely caught myself before landing face first into something that’d squish when I hit it.
My stomach sloshed. Twisted. Throat expanded as it prepared to puke up whatever was left of the ramen I’d consumed earlier.
It was Tashi that jumped my shit, literally leaping onto my back so she could reach my neck. She wrapped an arm around my throat and jerked back so hard my face tipped towards the high ceiling. “If I can’t,” she growled in my throbbing ear, “you can’t!”
“Come on, Riko.” Digo, risking the soles of his boots to catch my left elbow. “Back it up.”
“Oh, it’s backing up all right.” Muerte, the bitch.
Malik passed us all, picking his way around the corpses and squashing anything soggy on the way. “We’re wasting time,” he said, flat on the comms. In my ear, it sounded as if his voice hit a padded wall and stuck.
I swallowed hard against Tashi’s arm. “Got it,” I rasped. “Got it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I managed.
She let me go, sliding back down to land with her usual grace. Squish.
My head hurt. My eardrums felt like somebody had played tug of war with both sides, and I’d lost my shit. Again. A subtle click on the comm. “Hey.” Indigo’s voice. Too quiet for anyone else to hear through his helmet. He still had hold of my arm. “You OK?”
Without my helmet, I couldn’t answer without being heard. So I shrugged. Then nodded. Then withdrew my arm and took the Valiant he held out for me.
I couldn’t explain it.
All I could do was forge on, searching for answers I didn’t know the questions to. This time, when we closed ranks, I was very much aware of the others at my back.
One more burst like that, and I was afraid I would do to them what I’d done to a surge of necros in the Vid Zone. I couldn’t remember what that was specifically, but everything had been splattered when I came to.
Eradicate, huh?
I set my jaw. Tightened my grip on the Valiant and forged through the swamp of flesh and guts. This time, none of us had anything clever to say. Even Malik seemed stiff, shoulders rigid and footfalls hard.
As we all swept our lights, left and right in unified cover, doors inset on each side came into view.
Indigo swallowed. Audibly.
Get it off!
I shook my bare head. Hard.
“Do we check them?” Muerte asked, voice hushed.
“Do they lead out?” Tashi replied in the same tone.
“I don’t–”
“They don’t,” I said, and then bit my tongue when all of them paused to stare at me. I grimaced. The shadowed space gathered up every sound, bounced it back and forth in eerie whispers. Felt like they jammed cold hands down my armor and grabbed my spine.
“Riko.” Indigo’s voice. Worried as hell.
“Placement,” I snapped. “Use your fucking heads.”
Made as good a sense as any. I could practically feel their combined relief as they accepted it.
Fuck me. I lied. Part of me knew that.
The rest of me had no answers.
Hurry.
When we reached the end of the vault, we all let out an audible breath. Even Malik. “I half expected them to start getting up,” Indigo said, relief thick as the blood gelling behind us. “I never want to do that again.”
“Has anyone asked why we had to do this in the first place?” Tashi, sounding spooked again but calm. She pushed up beside me as a large door blocked our way. She hooked her modified Sauger on her rig – with less trouble than I’d had – and reached up to brace both palms on either side of her helmet.
It came off with an audible click, and lights around the rim of her collar flickered out. Her cheeks had gone burgundy, face dripping with sweat. She glared up at me, the irises and whites of her eyes eerily blue from our lights.
I frowned back at her. “Because MetaCorp is involved with Nanji’s death in the Vid Zone and–”
“Yeah,” she cut in, “I got all that. But what the hell is this?” She gestured back at the wall-to-wall dead. “Were they necrotech?”
Yes. “I don’t know.”
“What would you have done if they were?”
Eradicate. Heh. My mouth twisted into a grim smile. “Shoot them to pieces.”
She thought about it. Turned to look at Indigo, who reached up and removed his own helmet. Sweat plastered strands of his dark hair to h
is forehead and cheeks. “We knew the Vid Zone was crawling,” he said, “so this was a risk. But it was a working chopshop until recently.” He shook his head, dropping his own helmet to the floor. It, unlike Tashi’s, landed in something that squished. “Whatever happened here, it either happened fast or just happened to be contained when it went tits up.”
Muerte coughed. “About that…”
Malik followed our examples and removed his, too. His face was neither sweaty nor reddened. He’d worn his own temperature-modulated gear. Asshooooole.
“We should move if we intend to get out,” he said calmly. “If the authorities suspect an infection, we’ll be burned down with the rest of the area.”
Muerte pointed at him, her helmet still on. “What tall, dark and delicious said.”
“Thank you,” he replied, baritone mild.
I took a moment to press in on both temples with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. Everything throbbed, but none of it in the kind of pain earned in a fight. My nanos had taken care of those. The hum in between both had settled somewhere around hammer to the forehead levels of noise. But it had faded.
Sucking in a breath that didn’t help, I nodded. “Oh-kay. Digo, break this bitch open.”
Tashi backed up again, re-engaging her Sauger. We all did the same, sans helmets. Too hot. Too constricting.
Malik had no such excuse. He put his back on, and whatever the fuck he meant to imply, I read it as self-righteous. Because he didn’t care if his vitals were recorded. Orchard already had scans of my brain going supernova in the middle of a necro blight. I did not need any more data in her – or Malik’s – hands.
Digo’s digital magic didn’t seem to have any issues with the system down here. This time, he had it within seconds. Another hiss of air. Another click. The doors slid wide and every one of us braced ourselves.
42
CHECKPOINT 4
Bold letters in bright red painted the side of the wall. Beside it, the same kind of door we’d been cracking since we got here. The hall continued past, towards a larger entry with its doors wide open. Air steamed from the compressors, shooting a stream that hissed faintly from the sides.
I glanced back at Indigo. Deep blue eyes met mine, flicked to the checkpoint entry.
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