I passed other doors. Two opened as I triggered sensors, but they remained dark inside. Finally, as I reached the end of the strip, red lights reflected off precisely aligned letters spelled out on the wall in front of me.
B L O C K – C.
Block. Like cell block?
All personnel to be armed beyond this point.
Oh, great.
Footsteps pounded down the hall behind me. I spun, muscles tensing. A bad move. My stomach sloshed, then seized. I locked my jaw when my throat expanded in preparation for vomit I didn’t have, fresh sweat spreading like a stain across my chest and shoulders.
“Get to the uplink lab,” snapped out a voice that echoed from the sporadic black. “All units, disconnect from main generators! Backup sources gamma-four. Do not connect to main sources.”
I shoved myself into the only corner available, my heart slamming as two, then four, then six men in black BDUs passed at a dead run. The lights glanced off visors and heavy-duty assault rifles held at the ready. Sauger 877s, bearing 5.56mm caseless rounds. Some serious firepower. Those are crunchers, spitting out half a thousand rounds in seconds. It chews through a magazine at an ungodly rate, but anything not outfitted with heavily reinforced dermaplating wouldn’t make it past the first burst.
I wasn’t dermaplated. No real fortification. Hell, I wasn’t outfitted with a lot of the illegally available upgrades. I’d made the conscious choice to keep my tech streamlined to the necessary – and a few nominally risky cosmetics – out of sheer self-preservation.
The men filed past in triple-time, boots thumping the floor. The double doors pulled wide, then closed again behind them. Their footsteps vanished into the new corridor.
Whatever was going down at the uplink lab, it was big enough to need six men geared to the teeth with killing power.
I didn’t have to wait long before the seventh sec monkey, the talker, made his entry. He hit the ground hard with every step, a full-on sprint that emphasized what looked like borderline panic to me. Grim, bloody panic. “Pull everyone off the street if you have to,” he barked, his eyes wild beneath his raised visor. Like his buddies, he wore body armor and black fatigues, but didn’t carry a Sauger. Coordinator, I’d guess. The corp version of a linker but with more bureaucracy up the ass. “Code six, do you morons hear me? Code six. This is not a fucking drill, get those goddamned sweepers down here!”
I held my breath as he darted past me. The door in front of him slid open again, hummed a note that grated a disconcerting counterpoint to the beating inside my skull.
Unlike his pals, he didn’t roll through. He hesitated.
His head cocked.
Motherfucker.
2
I was already in midair when he turned. I launched off the wall, my tech arm pulled back for a textbook swing. It should have been the cleanest left hook in the world, aimed for that soft spot on his jaw that usually lands a man out cold – or at least spewing up his guts from the vertigo.
Instead, he jerked back over the threshold and caught my metal fist in his cheekbone when I overcompensated. The jarring miss rocked fingers of jagged regret through my brain. His skin split, bone cracked. Blood burst from his lip and nose in a crimson spurt made vivid by the lighting.
He didn’t try to go for the weapon holstered at his hip. No time. Smart man.
He shifted to the side, swallowing the pain like the competent security agent he seemed to be, but I was already spinning on the ball of one foot. My momentum was good.
The lucky bastard got an eyeful of my snatch before the top of my foot connected with his helmet. Pain spiked through my bones; I didn’t pause. I’d spent years conditioning my body.
I bet it hurt him more.
The visor cracked, the joint giving way to drop the disconnected faceplate to the ground, and his twitching body slammed into the wall. He got no chance to figure out his shit. As he slid to the ground, his eyes wide and more than a little crosseyed, I rode him all the way down, my fingers in his collar, knocking his helmeted head repeatedly into the wall to keep him off-balance.
I would’ve given good cred to know what was going through his brain. With a lapful of naked merc and the adrenaline of whatever crisis was going down, he had to be one giant flesh bucket of confusion.
I pinned him in place with my knees, slipped his gun from the nylon holster at his side as he struggled to force his limbs to coordinate. One hand grabbed my breast, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on purpose. A knee drove up hard against my ass in an effort to buck me off. He grunted as I pulled my synthetic forearm up in an arc, colliding with the wrist of his grabby hand and forcing him to let go.
That caught my piercing. I flinched. “Hey, shit for brains,” I panted, jamming the pistol against his forehead. A Phelps & Somers Manticore. A decent paramilitary piece, usually carried by serious corp security. Not great for pointblank range, mostly because of the mess, but if you let a runner like me close radius, you’re already dead.
I opted for a shot at answers. “Where am I? What is this place?”
He froze, his eyes widening on either side of the barrel. One dilated, just as three separate optic panels winked open underneath his lash line – a thin flash of silver. He’d just taken my picture. Shit. I couldn’t let him upload it.
“Stupid,” I snarled, and pulled the trigger.
The guard’s head exploded like a beer can left in the sun too long. Blood splattered across my face and chest, fanned out in a messy, pink-stained circle behind him. It was hellishly warm.
At the same time, something jerked loose in my head. A full-blown, ear-piercing echo that sent me staggering to my feet, gun-hand pressed to my ear. “Fuck!” I snarled. Only half of it penetrated the shrieking resonance rattling my skull.
I needed out of here. Now. Whatever else was going on, I wouldn’t make it with strained reserves and shorting tech.
Stripping the dead guy of his clothing took longer than I wanted, but I needed the gear. I dressed fast. The cargos bagged, and the top half of a long-sleeve black skinsuit was much less tight than it should be. Both would provide fuck-all protection against bullets. It was temperature-modulation gear, comfort zone equipment, not armor. Problem was, his actual body armor was bulky as hell and his boots were too big for me to run in. I had to leave them.
But hey, I had his Manticore and a belt to keep the pants up. The rest was frosting.
I left him half naked and slumped over in a pool of his own blood, beyond any help his nanos could have given. Even if he’d gotten them upgraded, that much ruined brain matter was a one-way ticket to vegetable dreamland.
The smiley face boxers were a nice touch, though.
I had to pause long enough to roll up the stolen pants, which was awkward since I kept trying to throw up every time I bent over. I couldn’t get a full breath. My ears buzzed, cutting through my mental faculties like a fifth of vodka with none of the fun. I’d picked up the angry wasps version of tintinnabulation.
Was this the worst situation I’d ever been in or just the weirdest? I couldn’t decide.
I get around.
Once I got out of this nightmare, I’d retrace my steps. Figure out what the hell had gone down. Until then, it was all I could do to put one bare foot in front of the other. The gun weighed down my meat hand, my dominant hand, and I left it pointing at the floor. It took too much energy to keep it at the ready. Not ideal, but it was all I could work with. My world narrowed down to one step at a freaking time.
The corridor I followed wasn’t as busy as the last. Everything seemed eerily still. Shadows leapt and flickered under the flashing red lights, but that was all. I passed large dark windows, black and empty. I didn’t know what they looked in on, but the whole thing had a sinister horror vibe that I didn’t like.
When a frantic flutter of anxiety nudged at the fringes of my awareness, it shot icy fingers through my battlefield calm, merged with a bone-deep case of the shakes. That was seriously bad. It meant my nan
os were exhausting their stores of energy, tapping so far into mine that I was running on fumes.
I blinked away traces of black clustering in my field of vision and tried not to notice. Freaking out would only force my nanos to work harder. Anxiety already made for nervous hands, strained calm. I was one bad call away from losing the shit I needed a handle on. If I didn’t find the exit soon, my nanos would cannibalize me in the effort to fix me. If I hit nanoshock down here, I could kiss my tattooed ass goodbye.
It takes a hell of a lot to push a body this far.
Tech corruption is what happens when you get uncomfortably close to your tech threshold. Hitting corruption isn’t necessarily terminal, but if you push farther and clock in to your threshold, it means you’re dead and stupid.
Newly integrated tech can present corruption symptoms, but doesn’t always. Nanoshock does. I’d pushed myself so far that the nano agents in my body were duplicating faster than they were dying off. That detritus overwhelms the system, clogs the machine, which boosts the risk of corruption beyond safe levels.
Not a deal breaker, if you catch it early.
Corruption is like the tech version of a fever. A trip to the local chopshop, recalibrate and recharge, and everything’s fine.
Let it go too long, implant with more than your body can assimilate, or get rolled too hard for your nanos to deal, and that fever hits fatal. The tech corrupts the only processor available to it – the brain. Within a few hours, even minutes if it’s aggressive enough, the human body converts entirely, becomes nothing more than walking hardware for the tech that wears it. We call this ambulatory wreck a necrotech – an obscene fusion of necrotic flesh and working tech with a viral need to kill.
Not that the risk stops people like me from getting implanted. It doesn’t even stop people stupider than me from putting more in than they need. Augmentation is supposed to be highly restricted, but the corporations hand tech out to their own meat without the same regulations the rest of the world has to plow through. They started this arms race, upped the stakes until illegal chopshops started cropping up all over the city. More tech, more risk. More risk, more reward.
More reward, the more tech is needed to jack it, defend it, lock it, or kill it.
It’s all part of the charm of running off-grid.
The universal rule is that street docs keep a failsafe armed at all times, which involves frying any potential conversion to a crisp long before it finishes cannibalizing itself. Anything less is necro roulette.
Outside a chopshop, smart runners carry energy boosts to recharge our nanos when we push them too hard. Whatever had landed me here had cost me everything I’d carried.
Like I needed more of a reason to haul ass.
Sweat poured off my skin in rivulets. I couldn’t decide if I was hot or cold; all I could do was ignore the way it dripped down my shirt. I rounded a corner, sagged against it for a shuddering moment as the strip did a sudden dive in front of me. I cleared my throat, dried to a husk, and ran my cold metal hand over my face in a bid to stay focused. It only sort of helped.
A pale swath of blue light flickered from one of the wide windows on the left, and I forced myself upright. Change in light was good. It meant a change of scenery. Maybe even a way out.
Loping along as best I could, I managed to reach the closest edge of the viewing window before falling heavily against it. It thudded under my metal arm, but didn’t give. Double-paned, heat-tempered. The unsteady lateral display in my eye told me I’d be shit out of luck if I needed to get through it. Not even a Sauger 877, fully emptied, would pierce that glass.
Which meant that the blue flames behind it wouldn’t melt it, either. It was warm, but it wasn’t fragile.
“What the shit.” Not a question this time. It tasted more like surrender, and that wasn’t okay. “Move.” My breath condensed on the tempered glass, only to vanish a second later.
My legs buckled instead. My forehead hit the glass and smeared. A flash of white and red tore through my vision.
My own voice ricocheted from somewhere far away, like a dream I didn’t remember.
Just great. Nowhere near an exit and I was cracking.
I gasped for air, struggled to keep upright. Behind the tempered glass, the lab lay in shambles. Tables had been overturned, wires sparking – which probably set the fire along the far left edge. A pipe had burst somewhere beyond it, the vapor from inside it causing the flame to go blue. White powder drifted inside like snow, some kind of fire retardant that kept the flames at bay, but whatever fed it wasn’t letting it die.
I forced myself to focus past the glass. Four bodies bled out where they’d dropped. The red lights turned blood to black smears, painted flesh in shades of blue and pink and sickly combinations in between. Computers flickered, a series of bolted screens filled with white and blue feedback. An open set of doors at the far end led into a room too dark to see into.
Whatever had gone down here, it happened fast and without warning. At least one corpse had fallen in a way that told me she’d managed to stand before whatever it was took her out. Now she was so much wispy hair over a crushed, viscous mess, dotted with dingy gray snowflakes.
White spots appeared in front of my face.
I stared at them in blank confusion. Too much oxygen? Or not enough.
Three more spots appeared, and tiny chips of dust exploded in a blue-tinged puff.
A figure darted past the open doorway in the back. Still mired in the eerie, muffled noise plugging my ears, it took me too long to figure out the orange bursts inside came from gunfire.
The glass caught stray bullets in front of my face.
I jerked back, swearing. I’d found the uplink lab. At least, I thought I did. If not, this shit was spreading, which was even more of a reason to forget everything else but get the fuck out.
I made it two awkward steps down the hall before something crackled through my shriveled brain. I staggered, pain snapping like a white sheet over my eyes, and caught myself on the window.
Thud! My body against the glass.
Thud, thud!
A shape slammed against the other side of the tempered pane. The last of my adrenaline, sapped down to bone and gristle, spiked. I whirled, Manticore pointed on pure reflex. My shoulder strained, palm sweaty with nerves and effort, but my grip was sure as I aimed the killing end of my stolen gun between two terrified blue eyes.
Familiar blue eyes.
“Holy fuck.” My fingers went numb. The gun fell from my clammy grip, clattering inches from my bare toes. “Nanji.” I barely managed to get her name out – it sounded fucking wrong echoing in this stark hall.
She mouthed something I couldn’t hear, her cheeks bloody and tear-streaked as she palmed the glass between us. I closed the distance, pain forgotten, the swarming ache in my head shoved aside. Shock drove me, sheer confusion and an anger so raw it burned in my gut.
“Baby, hold on!” I shouted it, knowing that the glass was soundproof, but I didn’t care. Didn’t care that she’d never liked it when I called her baby. Too anonymous, she’d said. It was one of those things I never remembered. People were “baby” when I fucked them, and that name stuck.
She hammered on the glass, mouth moving, words I couldn’t hear streaming from her as she battered at the barrier. Her olive skin had gone sickly yellow around the edges, her lush mouth stretched thin with fear. She was shorter than me, had always been curvy where I liked it, but blood plastered her tied white tunic and baggy pants to curves that looked thinner than I remembered. Her ink-black hair, thick and always braided back in a long tail I enjoyed stroking, had been shaved down to a fine fuzz.
A cut over one eyebrow dripped into her eye, oozing black sludge that collected white flakes from the fire-retardant drift. She slammed the glass over and over, until the skin of her left palm darkened and split. Plasma diluted by a dirty tinge smeared.
I flinched. “Stop.” My hands hit the glass where hers struck. “Baby, stop. Stay the
re!”
She shook her head. She couldn’t hear me, either.
Her fingers flattened against the barrier. I opened mine over them.
So close.
Too far. The glass between us all but throbbed from the heat. The lab on the other side had to be sweltering.
She mouthed something else I couldn’t read, something with her brother’s name in it – Indigo. “Where?” I demanded. “Is he here?”
She shook her head again, this time pointedly. He wasn’t. Relief swamped me.
The room behind her disgorged three men in the same black uniform I was almost wearing. I hit the glass over her head. “Look out!”
Her eyes widened. The whites tinged gray, another sign of nanos at the breaking point. Maybe like mine. I couldn’t tell. The black spots popping in my vision looked too much like the black sludge at her eyebrow.
She spun around, arms wide as if she’d shield the glass I stood behind. As if she were tall enough, strong enough.
Whole enough.
She wasn’t.
Ice splashed into my stomach, froze fury and fear into a wad of nausea so thick I couldn’t breathe around it.
Metal shaped her spine, thrust from her smooth flesh like alien vertebrae, precisely machined. Tubes and wires looped from joint to joint, then screwed into her skull in an immaculately clean shell cupping the base of her head. Jacks dotted the plates, drilled into each side like some kind of nightmarish hook-up. The flesh around the implant was perfect, seamed into the metal like it had always been there.
It hadn’t. Yesterday, Nanji had been one of the few SINless on our team who’d sported nothing more technical than nanos and a chipset capacity for photographic memory. Her back had been smooth, unmarred but for the lotus tattoo between her shoulder blades, twin to her brother’s.
That ink was gone now, swallowed by the kind of cybernetics that earned a runner a bullet on the street. Her shoulders hunched like the weight was too much for her to carry. The wiring along her back rippled, reflecting back blue sparks in the shattered light.
Necrotech Page 2