“We’re your… friends,” Dan said, almost choking on that last word. “There. I said it. We’re friends. And friends don’t kill friends. You know, unless they have to. Which you don’t.”
“Marvelous speech, Deadman. Sure, if that doesn’t convince her, I don’t know what will.”
“Then shut up and help me out,” said Dan.
“Help ye do what? This? This is yer plan?” Artur hissed. “This is a shoite plan. Sure, it’s not even a plan. It’s barely a feckin’ notion.”
“This isn’t the plan. I need to do this before we can do the plan.”
Artur launched into a curse-filled tirade about the merits – or lack of – of Dan’s still-unspoken scheme, but Dan squeezed him until he shut up. Ollie still had the look of a cornered beast about her, but she had made no move to annihilate them, which Dan was taking as a positive sign.
“Look, kid, I know you’re scared. I know having that thing inside your head wasn’t pretty, but you’re safe now. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Dan told her. “So how about you shake it off, and we all go home.”
Ollie’s breathing slowed. Something more familiar flickered across her face. “H-home?”
“Well, I mean… for now. I’m not saying it’s permanent, and you probably shouldn’t go getting too comfortable, but…”
Artur bit Dan’s finger hard enough that he felt it.
“Fine. Yes. Home,” Dan said.
Ollie sagged a little, then straightened. She shook her head, then shook it again more violently. She clenched and unclenched her fists, then regarded her fingers as if seeing them for the very first time. There had been an energy aura buzzing around her, which Dan only now noticed because of its absence.
With a few blinks and a couple of gasps, Ollie’s features shifted imperceptibly. The hard edges that had carved themselves into her expression relaxed and smoothed over, turning her face back into the one that Dan knew and…
He frowned, pushing the rest of the thought away.
Knew. The one that Dan knew.
“Home,” Ollie whispered. “Let’s go home.”
“You got it, kid,” said Dan. He had a damn good go at a reassuring smile as a tank skipped past the window like a pebble across a lake. “There’s just one tiny thing we need to do first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Aranok swarm was evolving. For the past few minutes it had been forming increasingly more complex shapes as the demon inside it got to grips with all the individual elements of its collective shared consciousness.
At first, forming even a simple sphere had seemed impossible, but once the Inhabitant had mastered that, everything else quickly slotted into place. It wasn’t about trying to control all the different nanobots at once, it was about guiding them into place like one would a limb. Granted, these limbs were all smaller than the eye could comprehend, flying around the place, and numbering in their trillions, but the principle was more or less the same.
What surprised Aranok most of all was that he could inhabit the cloud in the first place. His ability to possess a living host had always depended on… well, having an available living host. As far as he could tell, the nanobots themselves were not alive, but somehow their hive mind was. Or alive enough for him to inject himself into, at least.
He twisted his myriad components into their most complex form yet. It was a form that would only be recognizable to a select few individuals, all of whom had died horrible, agonizing deaths soon after seeing it. It was the physical form of Aranok himself, only several thousand times larger.
The general shape was mostly humanoid, with the addition of two tatty-looking wings on his back, both of which had seen better days.
His head was an ugly knot of features, as if several different heads had all been melted together into a tangle of eyes and mouths and ears and noses. A single curved horn jutted up from the back of his head, bent at such an angle that it couldn’t possibly serve any useful purpose whatsoever, besides possibly hanging a coat on.
Aranok’s arms were thin and elongated, and ended in grasping fingers that looked to be little more than bone. His legs were unpleasantly frog-like, with thick thighs that tapered to painfully thin ankles, before giving way to large, flipper-like feet.
The demon threw back his head and opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. His features shifted jerkily, like bad stop-motion animation, then he tried the roar again. This time, several trillion nanobots all screeched at once, the sound stretching off across the city in all directions at once.
“Hey!”
An explosive round detonated against the side of the demon-bot’s head. Aranok jerked around to find Dan sitting astride a mag-bike, gun raised. Ollie sat behind him, holding onto the bike’s passenger handles.
“You mind keeping the noise down?” Dan shouted up to the thing. “Some of us have work in the morning.”
He squeezed the trigger again. Aranok’s arm rose to deflect the shot, but he couldn’t move quickly enough. The bolt exploded on his chest, leaving a deep crater in the center. It quickly healed over, and the demon’s grotesque face strobed into a different expression.
“Ooh, I think ye made him angry,” said Artur from inside the breast pocket of Dan’s shirt. “Sure, look at the face on that. Have ye ever seen anything like it? Other than when ye look in the mirror, I mean.”
“I want him angry,” Dan said. He pulled the trigger again, but Mindy let out a depressed-sounding bleep. “Damn. Out of charge,” he muttered, shoving the gun back in its holster. He raised his voice until it boomed out over the ruined street. “You want me, you piece of shizz? Come get me.”
Dan twisted the throttle of the mag-bike. It was one of those moments that would have really benefited from the throaty roar of an engine, but the bike just hummed softly as Dan spun the back end towards the giant nanobot-demon and powered off between the mounds of debris, burning vehicles and dismembered Tribunal troops.
“These things fairly suck the drama out of a good getaway, don’t they?” Artur said, struggling to hear the bike’s whisper-quiet drone. “Sure, it’s practically silent. Where’s the fun in that, I ask ye? Where’s the excitement?”
Dan lurched the bike sideways as an enormous fist smashed down, obliterating the tarmac.
“Oh, there it is now,” Artur said. He ducked down in Dan’s pocket. “Whatever yer plan is, I suggest ye hurry the feck up and put it into action, Deadman, because that big bastard does not look happy.”
“Ollie, hold on,” Dan said. When he got no response, he raised his voice and spat out her name. “Ollie!”
Ollie shifted in the seat behind him. “Huh? Oh. What?”
“Hold on.”
Ollie looked down at her hands. “I am.”
“Right,” said Dan.
“Otherwise I’d have fallen off.”
“Right. Yes,” said Dan. “But hold on tighter.”
“Why?”
The bike shot forwards, narrowly pulling away before a froggy foot slapped down with enough force to jolt an upside-down Tribunal tank several feet into the air. It landed directly ahead of the mag-bike, forcing Dan to swerve around it.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Artur asked.
“It can, but I don’t want it to,” Dan said. “I need to keep this son of a bedge following us.”
“It’s following us,” Ollie confirmed. “It’s definitely following us.”
A snake like appendage sprouted from Aranok’s arms and stabbed down at them. Dan swung the bike left, debris spraying up around the bike.
“And now it’s attacking us,” Ollie pointed out.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Dan grunted. He leaned lower on the bike. “Ah, fonk it. Let’s just hope it can keep up.”
He gunned the engine. The tone of its humming shifted up a third of an octave, but once again failed to let out the throaty growl he’d been hoping for.
“Fonking mag-levs,” he muttered, then he squinted into the oncomin
g headwind as the bike streaked along the street with Aranok thundering along behind it.
The bike similarly failed to emit a satisfying screech of rubber on asphalt as Dan skidded it onto the adjoining road. Several cars had been abandoned here, their occupants huddled in knots of nosiness at various vantage points, all trying to get a view of whatever the fonk was going on the next block over.
They scattered as Dan raced towards them, then dived for cover when the nanobot giant stomped around the corner behind him, its flat feet pancaking the vehicles in its path. The screams of the people below caught Aranok’s attention. His head lowered, the movement much smoother than it had been just a few moments ago.
“Shizz. Ollie, get his attention,” Dan barked, slowing the bike as the nanobot-demon lurched to a stop.
“Hey!” said Ollie. “Over here!”
“Not like that,” Dan said, turning in the seat. “Zap him.”
Panic flared in Ollie’s eyes. “What? No. No, I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“Yeah, ye do,” Artur said. “I mean, ye nearly fried both our heads off back at the pub. And as for what ye did to all that alcohol… I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive you. I’m sorry, but I’m not.”
Ollie looked at her hands, then gripped the bike’s handles again. “I can’t. I can’t do it,” she insisted, tucking her chin to her chest and avoiding all eye contact.
“Damn it,” Dan spat, so suddenly it made Ollie jump. He shoved a hand into his coat and pulled out his gun. “Mindy. Kill shot.”
The cylinder spun, but no lights illuminated. Dan cursed, then tried again. “Stun shot.”
There was a series of clicks as the cylinder rotated again. As before, the lights failed to illuminate.
“Shizz. What else? What else?” He wracked his brains, then let out a little grunt of hope. “Oh. Mindy. Flare.”
Once again, the gun’s cylinder spun. When it locked in place this time, a single red light blinked on and off. It wasn’t much – it was barely anything, in fact – but it would have to do.
Taking aim, Dan fired the gun. A ball of burning red arced through the air towards Aranok, then exploded harmlessly across his chest. It did no damage whatsoever, but it served its purpose. The Inhabitant raised his vast head, the people scurrying around beneath him now forgotten. He made a dive towards the bike, his twisted body becoming a hurricane storm of flying nanobots as he abandoned his physical form in favor of something more efficient. It spiraled along the street like a sideways tornado, hurtling towards Dan and the others.
Artur swallowed. “I think now ye can safely go faster,” he said. “Ye’ve got its attention this time, alright.”
The bike droned calmly as Dan opened the throttle all the way. Ollie’s grip slipped on the handles, but she caught hold of Dan’s coat in time to stop herself falling. “I told you to hold on,” he called back over his shoulder, but Ollie’s reply was lost among the blaring of horns and screaming of pedestrians as they skidded onto another street with the nanobot cloud closing quickly.
“Trucks!” Artur cried. He needn’t have bothered. The only way Dan could have failed to notice the two hovering juggernauts hurtling towards them would be if he was dead. More dead.
There was no way of switching lanes in time. The trucks were side by side, probably twinned together and auto-piloting their way through the city. Their hefty metal grilles bore down on the bike, their headlights blindingly hot.
“Keep your arms in,” Dan warned, leaning right and aiming the bike straight between the trucks. In his front pocket, Artur pulled his limbs in tight. “Wasn’t really talking to you,” Dan grunted.
“Better safe than sorry,” Artur replied, the last syllable becoming a long, drawn-out and somewhat hysterical laugh as the bike shot between the juggernauts, sparks flying whenever any of its components skimmed too closely to the much larger vehicles.
With a sudden burst of speed, the mag-bike emerged from the Valley of the Trucks and shot straight across a busy junction. There was a lot of noise from around them. Shouts. Screams. The growl of metal meeting other metal. That sort of thing.
Behind them, meanwhile, the nanobot cloud tore through the trucks, Swiss-cheesing thousands of varyingly-sized holes in them. As the bulk of the bots forced their way through the widening gap, both enormous vehicles were forced outwards. They toppled in opposite directions, crashing down on much smaller cars in the lanes on either side.
“So, is yer plan just to drive around until this fecker has destroyed the whole city?” Artur called from Dan’s front pocket. “Because that’s kind of the impression I’m getting.”
Dan shook his head. “No. That’s Plan B.”
He mounted the sidewalk when he saw the road ahead was blocked with traffic. Luckily, most of the people who had been walking here had run like fonk when they’d seen the giant silver cloud knock the trucks over, and the final few stragglers all had enough sense to dive for cover when the mag-bike came zooming towards them.
“Then what the feck is Plan A?” Artur asked.
“Assuming I haven’t lost my sense of direction…” Dan began. He spun out the back end of the bike, powered along an alleyway, and felt that pang of disappointment again when the engine whispered politely beneath him.
They emerged onto a much quieter stretch of road lined on one side with tall metal fences topped with laser wire. A few hundred feet ahead, a faded sign read: Scrap ‘n’ Shizz.
“This is.”
“It’s coming!” Ollie urged. She knew this because huge chunks of masonry were raining into the alley behind them as the cloud forced its way between the buildings. “Hurry!”
Dan hummed along the street towards the junk yard entrance, the nanobots tumbling and spiraling out of the gap behind them.
“Wait, this is where we chased those other two bastards,” Artur realized. “Sure, what are ye coming here for?”
He clicked his fingers and straightened up inside Dan’s pocket. “Oh! The big magnet! Ye’re going to catch that fecker with the big magnet. Genius plan, Deadman! Fecking genius! That is the plan, right?”
“No.”
“Oh, thank God for that,” said Artur, visibly relaxing. “Because I broke the big magnet getting the car down, and didn’t know how I was going to break it to ye.”
The wire mesh gates had been chained together. In an ideal world, Dan would have been able to blast the lock off with his gun, but Mindy was now deader than he was. Instead, he barked an order for everyone to hold on, then braced himself for the impact as the bike slammed into the barricade.
The chain held, but the hinges didn’t. Both gates crashed inwards, in what was one of Dan’s few lucky breaks of the evening. The mag-bike droned softly into the yard. Dan pointed it towards the far end of the long central corridor that ran between the stacks of rusting metal, then hit the cruise control.
Grabbing Ollie, he rolled off, then kicked and dragged them both into the mouth of one of the much smaller passageways that ran off at right angles to the main artery.
“Hey, watch what—” Artur began, but Dan slapped a hand over his breast pocket to silence him, then pulled Ollie in tight against the wall of scrap. The Aranok-controlled cloud swarmed in above the fence. It tumbled end over end as it chased the speeding bike. Dan clamped his other hand over Ollie’s mouth as the heaving mass passed by just a few feet away, only releasing his grip when he was sure the coast was clear.
“I hope there’s more to it than this,” Artur whispered. “Sure, it’s not going to chase that bike forever. What the feck did ye bring us here for, Deadman?”
Dan ignored the question, and turned to Ollie. “How you holding up?”
Ollie frowned. “How am I holding what up?”
“Good enough,” Dan said. “I need you to do something.”
Ollie shifted anxiously. “Oh. What?”
“I need you to destroy those fonking nanobots.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Ha!”
; Dan’s face remained stoically blank.
“Wait, what?” Ollie said.
“You can do this. We’ve seen you,” Dan told her. “You can flash-fry the shizz out of those little bamstons.”
“No. No, I can’t,” Ollie insisted, shaking her head. “I don’t know how.”
Dan put his hands on her shoulders. He smiled with a sort of fatherly compassion. “You’ll figure it out,” he said, then he shoved her out of the passageway and sent her stumbling into the main path. Shoving his fingers in his mouth, he let out a shrill whistle, then heaved on a rusted pipe and partially collapsed the alley mouth before Ollie could get back through.
“Wait! No, don’t!” she pleaded. “I can’t!”
Dan saw her through a gap in the scrap. Her irises were surrounded by acres of white in all directions. Tears were already pooling, and her purple-ping skin had turned several shades paler. Her head snapped around to the left, then jerked frantically back again.
“Let me in. Help me. It’s coming!”
“I’m sorry, kid,” Dan said, sounding like he actually meant it. “This is the only way.”
Ollie opened her mouth to reply, but the nano-cloud slammed into her before she could utter a sound. One second she was there, the next she was gone, replaced by a hurtling mass of liquid silver.
“Oh great. Ye’ve killed her,” Artur said. He drew in a breath. “Well, back to the drawing board, Deadman. Any other bright ideas?”
“Wait,” Dan whispered, shrinking further back into the passageway as the flying worm of demon-bots continued to wriggle past the entrance. He lowered his voice further still. “Come on. Come on.”
A red flash reflected off the metal around them and briefly turned the ever-present blue glow a shade of purple. Ollie made a sound that was part way between a scream and a roar, and a jarring ripple passed through the nano-cloud as if it had just met some immovable object.
“See? Didn’t kill her,” Dan said, although he failed to hide the note of surprise in his voice. Several short flashes of blue strobed across the junkyard, each one changing the pressure in Dan’s eardrums. He crept closer to the partially collapsed alley mouth and peeked out through a gap.
Dead Inside: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 2) Page 21