Hardcore - 03

by Andy Remic

  "Well, look at Keenan and Franco! Hell, even yourself! You attract trouble like a hamburger attracts ketchup. If Steinhauer had even the slightest sniff of illegal intel, then it was going to happen, Pippa, like night follows day, like... like Franco follows hookers."

  "Why send us so under-equipped?"

  "You call Military Grade DropShips which convert into BaseCamps under-equipped? We have enough weapons and bombs to start our own little war. Giga-Buggys, QGM comms, no, this was no simple infiltration. Steinhauer had an idea something bad was going on down here; he might not have realised the extent, but he has your files. If something was going to be uncovered, then you're the guys to do it."

  "We've uncovered shit," snarled Pippa. "What have we found out? That there's a deviated medical population? That there are desolate hospitals, earthquakes, and lots of fucking twisted doctors who want to experiment with our flesh?"

  "At least you know it ain't no picnic. And the minute you start giving Combat-K questions..."

  "Yeah." She laughed. "We'll go looking for answers."

  "In the words of Van Gok, ding dong!"

  "I'm still confused."

  "You're supposed to be. That's the nature of the beast. But we're on the right path, Pippa, I promise you. I can smell it."

  "This your Internal Affairs sniffer-dog nose at work?"

  "Yes. They don't call me Harry 'Bloodhound Snout' Betezh for nothing, you know."

  Pippa snorted a laugh, and slapped Betezh on the back. He beamed from behind his Frankenstein-stitching facial scars. "You're a dickhead, mate. But at least you can make me laugh."

  "I'll be laughing a lot more when we vacate this heap of shit ship."

  "One step at a time," said Pippa, voice low. "I want to know where it's going, and what it's doing. For now, we need either the pilot, or the captain."

  "So we need the SLAM's Bridge?"

  "Yeah. It's this way," said Pippa, her good humour evaporating.

  Using cunning and stealth, Pippa and Betezh had avoided any extra excessive conflict on their journey to the control centre of the rumbling SLAM Cruiser. As doctors and surgeons surged up and down corridors, many deformed, many bearing extra limbs or bizarre examples of human-alien cross-surgery so that all manner of physicians had tentacles and horns and tufts and suckers, much to the wide-eyed open-mouthed horror of Pippa, and the cynical deep breathing of Betezh (been there, done that, bury me in a Y-shaped coffin baby), so the two Combat-K operatives leapt into deserted side-chambers, or hid in narrow gaps between steaming pipes and smoking engine units. The urgency on the SLAM Cruiser seemed to have increased; they could only surmise somebody had found the bodies.

  They spent a while, crouched by a small portal staring out from the SLAM Cruiser's flanks. Below, forests and lakes rolled by and they felt the Cruiser bank, the ground shifting beneath them. "Look," said Betezh, finally.

  "What am I looking at?"

  "Snow," said Betezh.

  And he was right. Ahead, the forests were tinged with ice, and the edges of lakes gave way to crackling sheets.

  "It's getting colder," said Betezh.

  "We must be approaching another continent," nodded Pippa.

  Forced from their sanctuary, they'd made their way deeper into the ship, towards the Bridge, the control centre, and the helm of operations. They pounded galvanised walkways, slipped through narrow apertures blasting hot oil smoke in their faces, and slithered on their bellies under oil-dripping tanks. They were smeared, blackened, ingrained with filth. Pippa caught sight of herself in a mirror, her hair lank and oil-drenched, and she gritted her teeth, scowling. This was not the way it was supposed to work out.

  "I look like shit," said Pippa.

  "Don't worry. Doctors will fuck anything."

  "That's not a very funny joke."

  "Who said I was joking? Har har."

  They continued through the mechanical hell of the SLAM Cruiser's rough internals. Now, only minutes from the Bridge, their lives had gone from bad to worse to hell. "I told you not to kill so many doctors," whined Betezh, as they hung by their fingertips under an oil-smeared bridge, whilst above their heads boots thundered, followed by the sucking slug-squelches of some unfortunate human-slug hybrid wearing a surgeon's mask and carrying twin scalpels in slug-sucker appendages. "All you did was raise our profile. Now the entire bloody ship's looking for us!"

  "Listen, dumb arse," growled Pippa, "what was I supposed to do when confronted by a sword-wielding maniac? Roll on my back and let him tickle my belly?"

  "All I'm saying," persisted Betezh, wriggling, his fingers slipping and sliding on the slick galvanised rail as his legs kicked above an awesome drop to certain death, "is that by killing so many surgeon bastards, you made things a lot worse."

  "How can I possibly have made it worse? If I hadn't killed them, we'd be dead!"

  "But you're missing the point," said Betezh.

  "Dickhead," snapped Pippa. "Now I understand why Franco carved chicken nuggets out of your face. You're the most irritating son-of-a-bitch I've ever had to suffer a mission with."

  "That's a little harsh," said Betezh, pouting.

  "Why? You look like Granny took her knitting needles to your face. I've seen better looking models in a morgue."

  "Some wear our scars on our face," said Betezh, voice solemn, "and some wear them in our hearts. Look inside yourself, Pippa, my pretty little pretty face. When it comes to God's good-person roll call, I know where I'll be standing. What about you?"

  Pippa ground her teeth, but as she was about to reply, a beam of light shone on them. Both looked up, and saw a small nurse-soldier type creature, crouched, torch aimed from the barrel of an MPK held in seven fingers. He grinned, with five sets of teeth. "What have we got here, my little, bloody, sterile swab-creatures? Hiding under here, are we? Trying to escape from us, are we?"

  All around the gantry, faces started appearing. Or rather, what approximated to faces appeared. Small stubby arms held guns, and eyes peered from slick damaged faces which Pippa and Betezh couldn't quite place in the gloom. One thing was for sure; there was something wrong with these soldier-types; something horrible.

  A myriad of cackles emerged.

  "Good hiding place," muttered Pippa.

  "Hey, it worked for a while, didn't it?"

  "Just not long enough," said Pippa.

  "Get the Net," said one of the stubby little soldiers.

  There was a fizz, and a pop, and something elastic and gelatinous and encompassing splodged and swirled around the duo. It spread, like a fast-growing opaque shroud, covering the Combat-K squaddies and nipping at their fingers until they let go. With yells, they fell, and hung suspended, swinging gently beneath the gantry.

  "A JellyNet," said Pippa. "Great. I'll never get this shit out of my fucking hair."

  "Stop moaning," said Betezh, pulling at his glooping fingers which were sticking to the all-encompassing, stretching, quivering mass, "it could be worse, we could be dead."

  "If you don't stop pacifying me, you soon will be," muttered Pippa, and shuddered as the still-expanding JellyNet spread over her face and into her eyes, ears, nose, throat, anus and vagina, creeping swiftly down the lining of her Permatex WarSuit and hugging her like a second skin of jelly strands. The JellyNet, biological AI entrapment device that it was, invaded her every orifice, locking her rigid with a sudden tightening pull, and Pippa felt sick deep down to her core. JellyNets were reputed to be made from the coagulated souls of sexual deviants. A JellyNet enjoyed its job. In every hole.

  She shuddered again, and felt them hoisted up from their dangling and dragged along the floor. Little legs stomped in stumpy boots, but that was the only sound Pippa could distinguish as she bumped along the ground, the JellyNet inside her, massaging her, hugging her, caressing her in a sickly fashion.

  Slowly, the JellyNet retreated. And as Pippa coughed and choked, rolling on her back like a beached turtle, she scooped jelly goo from her eyes and focused on -

&
nbsp; Dr. Bleasedale.

  "That bitch," she growled, and lunged forward. There came a barrage of clicking, locking machine guns in a circle around her form, and Pippa glanced down, where the JellyNet still locked her wrists and ankles together. She was still trapped: a prisoner. She looked up, grinning at Bleasedale, and with slightly manic wide eyes. "It's your lucky day."

  "Indeed it is, my dear! Ya, haha, daarling!" Bleasedale grinned from behind her purple facial burn scar. She removed her small peaked white cap, ran a hand through short curly hair, then replaced the cap. She still wore a starched white doctor's uniform and high leather boots. She still carried her short black stick, which she whacked across Betezh's head with a crack.

  "Ow!" he said, rubbing his head with jelly-manacled hands.

  "I should have you instantly minced!"

  "Oh yeah?" snarled Betezh. "How the hell you gonna do that?"

  Bleasedale pointed with the stick. "I have an industrial Becker & Harris Limb Mincer in the corner. There. You see? The big stainless steel box."

  "You mean a lamb mincer," said Betezh.

  "No no, a limb mincer." She smiled. "Used after amputations to dispose of the waste. I am reliably informed it takes a whole human carcass. Whether it be dead, or," she savoured the word, "living."

  "That's sick," said Betezh. "You mean you'd mince someone alive?"

  "Oh yes," smiled Bleasedale. "And we have done so, on... what would you say the Mince Count is so far? About seventy-six Stringers? Is that right, Glob?"

  "Yeah yeah yeah," growled Glob in a husky voice, hopping from one military-shined boot to the other, and for the first time Pippa and Betezh focused on one of their diminutive captors without the disability of jelly-gunge in their eyes.

  "Holy shit," said Betezh.

  "He's like a fucking Oompa-Loompa!" snapped Pippa.

  "Hey!" growled Glob, "less of the insults. I'm part of a refined and cultured culture, I am. So cut it out with the crap. No, I haven't seen Snow White. I haven't worked in a chocolate factory. And I'm not the bearded bloody brother of Gimli. Right? I'm a Porter."

  "A Porter?" Pippa frowned. "Like, in a hotel?"

  "No, you slack-fanny mop-bucket, like in a hospital. We, you know, take patients to and from the wards, down to theatre, help out, jip about, have a fag, mince and moan, that sort of thing." He stared hard at Pippa, and she couldn't help but notice his face was a flurry of open sores. She shuddered. Glob winked.

  "How about it, chicken?" he said.

  "Um, I don't really fancy any chicken right now, thank you, on account of being bound and incarcerated by a raving lunatic with a Nazi-uniform fetish."

  The Porter moved close, his eyes widening amidst his horrific facial sores. Pippa caught a whiff of putrefaction, and noted some of the Porter's wounds were heavily infected, tinged with green and black. She half-imagined she saw the curl of a maggot's tail in one wound. She shuddered.

  "I was calling you a chicken," breathed Glob, heavily. It was the laboured breathing of the rapist.

  "You mean, what, no way mate, you mean that was a fucking line?"

  "Hey, us Porters are renowned for being sex on a stick. Bulging in the bean-pack. Ferrets in the sack."

  "I don't want a ferret in the sack. I want a man whose face isn't entirely made up of necrotic tissue."

  Glob leant close, almost conspiratorially. He nudged Pippa in the ribs. "Look around you love, babe, chick. I'm the prettiest one here! A pretty boy, for sure." He beamed, showing black teeth. "It's been clinically proven a hospital porter is the most sexually active creature ever created. A true sexual athlete, for sure. It's also been proven we can pull anything. Oh yes. You'll be coming to me soon enough. And coming on me, if I'm not mistaken. I can tell. You're begging for it, right now, here and now. Gagging for it. Let me put something huge and wholesome in your mouth babe-chick."

  "Over my dead body!" snapped Pippa, looking sideways at the freak.

  "If that's the way you want it," smiled Glob. "Living, comatose or dead, I'll pork anything that moves. Or doesn't. Takes more than a stiff to scare away my, err, stiff."

  Glob wandered off, presumably on an important mission, and Pippa did indeed stare at the other porters, and did indeed note that Glob was, indeed, the prettiest pretty boy of the bunch. In their manic Brownian-motion trajectories, it was hard to spot their disease-laden faces at first; but then Pippa's eyes focused, and locked, and she noted how the Porters carried facial sores like a badge of rank, or something to be proud of. Many had faces that were, simply put, one huge open necrotic wound, with eyes peering out from peeling reddened pus-green flesh like dinner-plates floating on a murky shit-swamp. Many Porters sported lumps and bumps on heads, necks and arms, but it was faces that drew Pippa's horrified vision back time and time again. Sores, incisions, boils, warts, scattered and layered, sores on warts, boils on sores, pus leaking from burst spots and all filling happy little sexually-leering faces like a chameleon cloak of putrefaction. Pippa shuddered, watching the Porters' many pointless activities. They seemed, like many an office worker, to have perfected the art of doing absolutely fuck-all.

  Seemingly ignored for a moment, Betezh and Pippa gazed around the Bridge. They were on the SLAM Cruiser's main control deck, a wide, flat, open room stacked around the edges with complex computing containing clocks and dials and pumps and gauges, some dribbling steam, and many used for controlling the vintage spacecraft. One huge curved wall was flex-window, showing the ever-increasing snowy wilderness outside. Even as Combat-K watched, the trees dropped down a long flowing slope to the sea, and they powered out over a choppy, violent ocean.

  "Where are we going?" asked Betezh.

  "To battle, daarling!" Dr. Bleasedale turned, tapping her stick into the palm of her free hand. She seemed heavily preoccupied, and ignored the scampering capering little Porters who seemed to be running around on a million pointless missions, criss-crossing and jumping over one another, some pushing rattling trolleys with a dicky wheel, some empty wheelchairs, many just lounging and smoking and leering.

  "What kind of battle?" asked Betezh suspiciously.

  Bleasedale leant close, her breath bad like used alcohol cotton swabs. "A battle between continents! We are at war, you hopeless ignorant fool. Sick World is a battleground! And we will be victorious! We will quell our enemies!"

  "What enemies?" scowled Betezh.

  "Our enemies!" screeched Bleasedale, gesturing wildly with an arm in the vague direction of the ocean. "We have been at war for hundreds of years, ya? The three continents, Yax, Kludek and Second Djio. Sometimes, we conduct raids, either by ocean or air. Sometimes we organise pitched battles to settle the score - once and for all."

  "And that's what this is?" said Pippa.

  "Yes! We will win! We will crush the enemy! Storm their trenches! Take down their machine gun nests! Conquer and slay and maim and kill!" She stared hard at Pippa. "Why the hell do you think we're short of organs, daarling?"

  Pippa shook her head.

  "It's our Bullet-Wound Guarantee Replacement, Standard Policy v4.7. If you get more than two rounds in an organ we replace it, ya? After you pay your voluntary excess, of course. And providing you have some No Claim Discount."

  "Your soldiers have their organs insured?"

  "Standard Kludek Guts Policy. After all, we are specialists in Medical and Surgical Care, and Rehabilitation Treatments for our lucky, lucky patients. Aren't we?"

  Pippa caught Betezh's eye, and gave a little shake of her head as thoughts rioted through her skull. Battles? A war? What the hell was going on across Sick World? A war of dominance and power between deformed and deviated doctors and nurses? What kind of sick world was this? She spotted the global joke. She couldn't bring herself to laugh.

  Huge engines throbbed in the bowels of the SLAM Cruiser, and Pippa and Betezh found themselves increasingly to the rear of activity as hundreds of Porters flooded the Bridge and went about spinning dials and valves, turning wheels, pressing buttons, tapping
on keyboards and pushing the odd wounded doctor across the platform in a wheelchair, usually with a comedy leg stuck horizontal and banging into things with comedy yelps. WHACK! "Sorry!" the Porter would say, his sore-ridden face all screwed up and panting pus. WHACK! "Sorry! Sorreeeee!" WHACK WHACK CLANG!

  "We've got to get out of here," whispered Pippa, shuffling closer to Betezh.

  "Yep. And kill Dr. Bleasedale."

  "Why is that a priority?"

  "Because it is," said Betezh, scowling. "Some life-forms just don't deserve to exist."

  "They'll be distracted when they go into battle," said Pippa. "Wait for my signal, then we'll kick-off royally. You think you can reach the yukana sheathed on my back?"

  "Only if you get down on your knees."

  "Yeah. Right. Just don't get any ideas."

  "Wouldn't dream of it, Pippa. After all, I ain't a pretty boy, like these around us."

  The SLAM Cruiser groaned, engines droning and thrashing deep in the craft's bowels. They banked again, and a land mass hove into view, a jagged, fractured landscape of broken ice and snowy peaks. The SLAM lifted, clearing the mountains, then dropped towards a vast, endless ice-field and as they drew close, like a mammoth lens coming into focus, so the world and the battle preparations and the armies came sharply into view -

  "Wow," said Pippa.

  "Hell," said Betezh, and he was right; it was a vision of hell.

  Two vast armies faced one another across the icy plateau. Each faction, separated by perhaps a kilometre of No Man's Land, numbered perhaps twenty or thirty thousand... troops. Only these weren't soldiers in the traditional sense, for these were legless nurses, straightjacketed mental patients, doctors with external organs, Porters with wheelchairs mounted with guns, and a whole host of deviants merged with alien and metal and implements and equipment. It was like a gathering of lunatics. It was a gathering of lunatics. They carried swords and spears and machine guns, which they brandished regularly like amateur fanatics, waving them above their heads and firing off rounds in a clatter. Edging closer, Pippa saw that vast trenches had been dug and carved out of the ice, facing one another ready for battle, and each army stood behind their trench in what could only have been described as the most pointless gathering of proposed trench warfare ever devised.