by Andy Remic
They shouldn't be able to walk! screamed her brain, as she tossed her D5 to Keenan. He caught the weapon and blew the knees from a corpse, which hit the ground on its face and continued crawling at him. Pippa drew both swords from sheaths behind her pack, and calmed her raging mind as the corpses meandered around her, towards her, arms stretching for her, and she felt herself slip into the zone and started to dance, slowly at first, swords a bright silver blur slashing left, right, in arcs, in circles, each yukana forming glittering webs and each stroke cutting free fingers and hands, arms and feet, knees and heads, and with each twirl there came a thud and a shudder but Pippa worked the jarring impacts into her dance, turned them into a beat, into a bass rhythm as she moved forward, before Keenan and Franco who were panting, drenched in sweat, faces lacerated from clutching fingers and old black claws...
Pippa moved with grace, a dancer, her face serene, her breathing rhythmic, and before her fell five, ten, twenty of the corpses, forming a waist-high mound over which more grey sagging monsters climbed to leap at her... and now she was retreating, away from the launch-pad of dismembered bodies, and Franco and Keenan moved back with her, boots thudding white tiles, Pippa their defender with her glittering web of lethally sharp yukana blades.
"Head back to the oxygen cylinders!"
"Why?" came Pippa's slow, lazy voice, and her voice was distant, dream-like as the lethal yukana blades whirled and corpses lost limbs and heads.
"Big Bangs!" said Franco, eyes gleaming bright.
They altered course, a tight unit of whirling death amidst a baying moaning crowd of grey-skinned undead. Flat feet slapped white tiles in an urgency to get at Combat K, to rip them apart, to tear the skin from their ripe skulls.
"Nearly there!" panted Franco, and fired off a few rounds over Pippa's shoulder, taking a corpse in the face, exploding skull into a mush of brain-shrapnel.
"What's the plan?" snapped Keenan.
"Watch," said Franco, and whirled, his body tense inside his tight-fitting PVC nurse uniform. He grabbed an oxygen cylinder, hoisted it over his head, and flung it into the horde of corpses. The cylinder thrummed overhead, through pools of green light, and Franco's Kekra snapped up and he aimed with the eagle-eye of the sniper.
Crack. KABOOM! The oxygen cylinder exploded in a rage, and a bloom of fire and metal shrapnel savaged the corpses, slamming perhaps twenty to the ground in a mushed mushy-pea mess.
"Brilliant! I'll throw, you shoot," said Keenan, hoisting a cylinder. He launched the makeshift grenade, and Franco tracked it through the gloom. His gun cracked, and again fire ravaged the corpses. Several caught fire, their dry hair going up in streamers that made Pippa falter in her dance of sword death...
"Again," snapped Franco.
Again Keenan launched an ancient oxygen cylinder, and Franco tracked it with expert eye. He fired, and there came a ping, then the cylinder rattled off amongst slapping corpse feet. "It was a dud!" wailed Franco, and glanced behind. So much for his bright idea!
"It's like trying to hold back the ocean with a spade," said Keenan, a sheen of sweat on his battered face, dirt and oil smeared in his skin, but his eyes lizard-cool. Pippa leapt before him, swords hissing and thumping. "There's too many of them! We either need something far more lethal, or we need to find a way out of this shit-hole."
"If only I had my pack!" wailed Franco. "It had blocks of T7 and Tramp8 explosives; it'd make mincemeat of these dead suckers."
"Yeah, but it'd take us with them," said Keenan, coolly, brain ticking like clockwork. "What about that?"
"What?"
"The Leksell gamma-focus - around your hairy neck. Can you attach it to an oxygen cylinder? Will it focus and enhance the blast?"
"No." Franco's eyes gleamed. "I have a much better idea that that. PIPPA! BACK TO THE CANKER XRD ANALYTICAL X-RAY RESIDUAL GAMMA STRESS ANALYSER!"
They started to move, Pippa their shield. But she was tiring now, tiring fast, sweat soaking her, her movements blurring. She was lethal, she was deadly, she was a killer - however, she was ultimately human.
"You said the CANKER XRD can be used as a big bomb? That's no good," snapped Keenan, loosing off more rounds. Corpses slapped to the floor, to be trampled by their uncaring comrades. "It'll detonate us, as well. We'll never escape the blast. And if we run, we take the corpses with us."
"No no no," said Franco, rubbing his eyes. "Watch! And learn from the greatest detonations expert the Quad-Gal has ever known! They don't call me Franco 'Triple Bang' Haggis for nothing, y'know!"
They reached the huge X-RAY machine, and Franco ripped the Leksell gamma-focus from around his neck. He clambered up the front of the machine like a monkey on speed and, hanging from the huge head with its four flat circles, he screwed the Leksell into the centre, then gave it a pat.
He dropped to the ground, ran around the back of the CANKER, and leapt up onto the control plate. He looked like some dirty ginger big-gun operator, only wielding medical equipment instead of a weapon in his greasy hairy hands. He tugged on several levers, and there came a high-tension whine. The CANKER jerked, and the mechanical arm whirred into life with Franco at the controls. It moved, jerking, and aimed at the crowd of corpses...
He winked at Keenan, and hit the switch.
In the chamber, there came another, massive whine, and all the green lights went out leaving the vast space in a total, chilly darkness. A smell of ozone washed over Combat K. And the CANKER machine singularly failed to deliver its payload...
"Great," snapped Keenan, face contorted in the glow of his gun-light. "You're damn right they don't call you Franco 'Triple Bang' fucking Haggis for nothing, mate. They should call you Franco 'Limp Dick' Haggis, or maybe Franco 'Can't Get It Up' Haggis the complete dickhead!"
Franco jumped down from the useless CANKER X-RAY machine. He held up a hand. "Whoa, brother! Just needs more battery power!" He ran to another CANKER, this one in a greater state of rust and degeneration; he kicked open a dented panel, and pulled out what looked to Keenan suspiciously like a set of red and black jump leads, which he spooled across the floor to the first machine...
Pippa stumbled back, to stand with chest heaving beside Keenan and the CANKER XRD Analytical X-RAY Residual Gamma Stress Analyser. "I hope you've got a good plan," she wheezed, "because I'm all out of juice." Both yukanas touched the floor, and scratched the white tiles. Pippa was totally exhausted.
The corpses had fallen back, and were reforming lines with their ten-foot leader at the centre. Many were grinning, and they knew Combat-K were tiring fast; were finished, in fact. Eyes watched Franco clamber up onto the CANKER with interest, but no fear. After all, what damage could an X-RAY machine do? It took photographs of bones, right?
Again, Franco fired the Analyser with a thump and swung it down low, aiming at the corpses. They roared then, a sour ancient dead roar emerging from rotting stumps of smashed teeth as grey fingers flexed and gleaming eyes focused on the living... the living, soon to be dead.
"Duck!" screamed Franco, and hit the detonation button as he swung the Analyser from left to right in a quick, savage movement of mechanical joints. The CANKER whined, but did not fire, made no machine-gun rattles, no booms of explosion, just emitted a silent and deadly beam of concentrated gamma rays...
Before them, a line of a hundred corpses were sliced in two in a rapid and vaguely diagonal acceleration. Flesh slapped the tiles, corpse halves slapped the tiles and Franco, like a madman on a crazy gun-turret, lined the CANKER up again as the second row of dazed and confused corpses stared in confusion at their massacred comrades... again the machine whined as Franco slammed it along their ranks, and the wide-field surgical gamma-knife cut through another hundred corpses and left their coagulated remains slopping across the white tiles...
The rest turned and ran for it, toe-tags slapping all the way back to the safety of their drawers. All except -
The leader. The ten-foot nurse.
She grinned, through cherry lipstick. And leapt... Pip
pa launched herself forward, ducking a swipe of talons and ramming her first sword through the creature's heart. The Matron of the Morgue shuddered, then laughed a cold corpse laugh and reached down for Pippa, who sidestepped, the second yukana whistling as it cut free her head.
The headless corpse hit the tiles, and Pippa stood on her sternum as she pulled free the first weapon without a word.
"I don't get it," said Keenan, breathing deeply, face weary, exhaustion mastering him. "It's a fucking X-RAY machine. What did you do to it?"
"It was developed for surgery," said Franco, leaping down and picking up his Kekra quad-barrel machine pistols. "It's called gamma-knife surgery, where intense and multiple concentrated beams of gamma rays, the most dangerous form of radiation in the Quad-Gal, are directed on a single spot. The beams are aimed from different angles to form an infinitesimal point of impact. This fucker could cut through a planet crust." He beamed, and winked. "Not bad for a simple cheese-eating squaddie, eh lad?"
Keenan laughed, and whacked him on the back. "Not bad, mate. Not bad at all."
"So now to VOLOS?" said Pippa.
"Yeah." Keenan's eyes hardened. "Now on... to VOLOS."
They squelched through dismembered corpses, with only the lights on their guns for guidance. It took another forty minutes to cross the Morgue, and every minute was a nerve-jangling experience as they waited for yet another, second wave of undead to attack and rip off their heads. But it never came; the corpses had returned to their sanctuary; to their peace; to their rest.
The door, when they found it, was small, fashioned from a single piece of mineral, a black slab like a coffin lid. Keenan stopped, seeing the door but hearing a tiny clattering noise behind. Combat K turned, in an agony of fear, and from the blackness, the stygian gloom, creeping into the edges of their gun-lights, emerged...
First, a buzz, as tiny insects flickered around the dancing beams of light. Pippa hissed, lifting her yukana swords in defence, for these were Morphs: the insects created from tiny hypodermic needles, from back at the hospital where she and Betezh had been stung, and taken prisoner. They flickered, swooping and whining like mosquitoes on bad acid. But even as they jittered, from the black came more enemies... nurses, tottering on legs made from hypodermics, crutches, scalpels, their peroxide hair curled, their lips bright and red, teeth snarling... there were doctors and surgeons, many with their own internal organs hanging on strings and chains, and each bearing medical weapons of exaggerated proportions... there were patients, squaddie patients, many with three legs or five arms, cam-cream on their faces, their green backless gowns flapping forlornly in the damp dour gloom of the Morgue. There were patients in straightjackets, gibbering and drooling and grinning, and yet more nurses with bags and pans for heads, eyes slopping around in colostomy sack faeces... there were Cryo Medics with thick black masks and ice-throwers, their breathing coming in short rasping bursts, and then flickers of blue shot through the darkness accompanied with the buzz and spark of the cackling battery-mouthed Convulsers. More nurses came, some on fire, the flames lighting up the darkness like torches and revealing revealing a huge and endless rolling wave of bodies, of twisted mutated medical deviations of every possible size and description... across the floor jumped and crawled babies, their wails squawking out as sick drooled and little black eyes fixed on Combat-K and thousands and thousands of medical staff, hospital staff, they all filled the Morgue from end to end as they advanced on Combat-K with a singular purpose...
"What shall we do?" squealed Franco, like a girl.
A roar went up, a roar so loud it deafened Combat K.
"Be calm, my son," said Father Callaghan inside Franco's head. His Temple Pill throbbed. "Use the core of your Wisdom, my son."
At last! thought Franco. He's earned his $19.99! Reaching into his mouth, Franco clicked free the two tiny WiT bombs, armed the dets, and hurled them into the fast accelerating medical ranks... the boom was incredible, and a couple of hundred medical bodies shot up and out, nurses and doctors, babies and mutations all spinning into a powerful tornado flurry of merged and mashed limbs and faces, and Combat-K turned, sprinted, and heaved through the coffin-lid doorway, leaping through into a smooth tunnel beyond where walls gleamed with tiny crystals and veins sparkling through stone.
The door slammed behind them. There came a savage thud, and the door began to shake as Keenan coolly threw three huge bolts into position.
"How long will it hold them?" Pippa's voice was small, her face ashen.
"Let's move," said Keenan, shrugging, and Combat-K moved forward, onwards, ever down... with muffled distant booms and shrieks and clatters and squeals and shouts and squawks following from The Morgue.
The end of the tunnel glowed with a bright black light, so bright Combat-K had to shield their eyes on approach. They stepped out onto a ledge, perhaps six feet wide, where the avatar of VOLOS waited, in silence, hands clasped before him.
Holding hands protectively before faces, they tried to look into the vast edifice before them, but could not. It was black, but not black. It was every colour and it was no colour; it was every colour not yet invented, every colour never before witnessed by human eyes, and thus incomprehensible, even to a relatively advanced mammalian brain.
"Welcome," said VOLOS. "Although you have led the hordes to my core."
Franco poked Keenan with his gun, and Keenan stepped forward, almost reluctantly. He knew; here was something so powerful, so strange, so alien, that what could three simple soldiers with machine guns possibly hope to achieve? They could never kill VOLOS. All they could do was talk. But would he be willing to listen?
"Why did you try to kill us?"
"I did not." The voice was soft, lilting, almost musical. It came, seemingly, direct to the brain, without involving complex organic audiometric equipment. It was neither too loud nor too quiet, and had no sexual attachment. It was just a voice, a beautiful voice, a powerful voice.
"Well we weren't playing a game back there," snarled Keenan. "You put us through your pointless tests to see if we were worthy to meet you, face to face. Well, we're here. We're pissed, and we want to see you, fucker!"
"You look upon me," said VOLOS. "Your eyes cannot properly interpret what you see. However, let me explain a little. I am not a creature, a lifeform, as you would understand it. I, VOLOS, am the planet."
There came a stunned silence.
"Like, as in the whole planet?" splurted Franco. "That's damn bloody impossible! How can you be a bloody big buggering planet?"
"My head and heart are the core of the world," said VOLOS, and the voice seemed now more gentle, more intuitive as it linked to Combat K's brain-patterns. "The mantle is my flesh, my muscle, and the crust is my skin. My veins are the faults that run through the rock, the magma that flows through the billions of channels in my flesh; earthquakes are my shudders, my pain, and the sun warms my face every day for eternity."
Combat K were silent. Stunned. Confused.
"Impossible!" persisted Franco, clutching his Kekras to his chest like a small child holding a stuffed teddy. "Nothing so big can live!"
"Fool," said VOLOS, and only now did they perceive a hint of human emotion, of frustration, of annoyance, of anger. "What is life? What deserves the right to be called life? I think, I feel, I construct, I create, I destroy. I am not flesh and blood as you consider life; however, you stand here conversing with me, deep down near my heart and soul and mind, and it causes me great pain to converse with you, to focus everything on such a narrow spot."
"Why not use the avatar?" said Keenan. "Why go to all this trouble to bring us here?"
"I have a problem," said VOLOS, choosing words with care. "And I would ask for your help. But we must be swift, for even now the twisted medical hordes are marshalling their strength. I can only keep them at bay for so long."
"Then why try to kill us?" snapped Keenan, losing his temper. "Since we landed, you've thrown every fucking thing you can at us! From deviant nurses and doctors
and patients, with their twisted medical technology and fucked-up genetics, to earthquakes and cryo-soldiers, battles between armies of deviant mutations, and even down to your pathetic tests of mercy and savagery, twisting our minds and fucking with our brains... this has been a damn hard exercise in survival, VOLOS, for somebody who simply wanted our help. You're fucking lucky we got here at all. And we've... lost friends along the way." Keenan was scowling, into the weird black light, not bothering to shade his eyes now as he felt the pulse of alien blood in his veins and felt the heat of the Dark Flame glowing in his heart.
"I have lost control," admitted VOLOS, and they felt a huge pulse of sorrow emanate from the world. It eased through them, like treacle through honey, and they felt his, or its, incredible sadness. "Once, a million years ago, I was strong. I was powerful. But with every passing second I grow weak. Yes, once I watched as the junks were created, even helped the suckling Leviathan create his army; but the Junkala were a plaything to me, that is all, and I wished to supply a twisted lesson to a proud and arrogant alien race who Leviathan wished to educate. The Junkala were cultured, and beautiful; yes. But they had designs on conquering the Galaxy, on invading, to create a vast and powerful Empire! Their arrogance was awesome to behold. You met Elana, yes?"
"I did," said Keenan, voice low.
"She has the facts twisted. She said they were like gods... and that Leviathan created me, VOLOS, to watch over them. Such a petty misguided angle of view; to be so narrow, so channelled. I knew Leviathan, yes. But I am far older than Leviathan. I saw his birth, and if you help me, I will watch his death."