Mardock Scramble

by Ubukata, Tow

  Screams of despair filled the airtight chamber.

  Still Mincemeat managed to stand, and even as blood and vitreous humor poured from his body, he managed to find the strength to charge the shutters like a frenzied bull.

  With a violent crash the shutters buckled under the impact of Mincemeat’s shoulders. Blood splattered the duralumin surface, and as he peeled his hands off it a string of liquid lingered behind.

  He charged the shutter again.

  The gunfire had already stopped, but he was no longer interested in that.

  Then, without warning, the shutters opened, retracting into the ceiling.

  Mincemeat became vaguely aware of a small, shadowy figure.

  Gathering the last of his strength he screamed and charged at the silhouette.

  He became aware that the figure had multicolored hair dangling down over a pair of sunglasses.

  By the time Mincemeat realized that he knew the face under the hair, the figure’s butter knife was already embedded deep in his heart.

  ≡

  Rare was overcome with shock, but he managed to wriggle himself out from under Mincemeat’s dead body, which had collapsed on top of him.

  He looked at his own knife, then screamed into the transmission device in the piercing voice of a little girl.

  –What’s going on? I thought you’d managed to trap the PI in there? Why is it little Minty? Do you want me to come over there and kick the shit out of you? What were you thinking, Flesh, you stupid fuckwit!

  –Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.

  –What?

  –That is the PI, right there.

  Rare’s pale face darkened as the blood rose to his head.

  –You fucking hacker! I’ll tie you down and have you gang-raped by pigs, you piece of shit!

  Rare ranted on in this vein for a short while before bursting into tears of anguish and pulling the Hutchinson Knife from Mincemeat’s chest.

  “Oh, you poor, poor thing, little Minty, all because that fuckwit Flesh didn’t notice that we’d been hacked…you poor, poor little darling.”

  Suddenly there was a click in his ear, and a transmission began.

  –Come in, Rare.

  –Is that Well? The real one? Not the piece-of-shit hacker?

  –Yeah, it’s me. Flesh is doing all he can to restore our secure line. What’s the situation over there?

  –Little Minty…

  –They got him?

  Rare howled an unearthly wail as an answer.

  –…I see. According to Medi, the target has run down to the basement along with the PI. They’re protected by thick shutters—Flesh is trying to find a way to open them. You head downstairs and meet us.

  –Okay, Boss. Are we going to sell little Minty’s body off for parts too?

  –No, we’re a band of brothers. We don’t sell our family members off. Those of us who want to use Mincemeat’s parts have the right of first refusal. Right?

  –Of course. That’s right, Boss.

  Rare gripped his knife tightly and meandered down the corridor.

  –I’ll see you downstairs in the basement, Boss. Could you beam me through the floor plans, please?

  Rare’s eyes glinted red. Tears fell, blood-red under the reflection of the colored light.

  He followed the route toward the basement, wobbling from side to side, all the strength drained from his arms.

  –Head into the room to your left, Rare. There’s a shortcut.

  Rare did as Welldone said, opening the door on the left-hand side. He descended the stairs and entered the room.

  –Lock the door behind you.

  Rare was about to do so, then came to with a jolt.

  “What did you say?”

  Rare looked around, grinding his teeth.

  A large number of lockers lined the wall. Evidently some sort of storage room for corpses—and no sign of anything that could resemble a shortcut.

  Gripping the hilt of his knife even tighter, Rare glared at his new surroundings.

  The electronic lock on the door behind him shut automatically.

  Rare snapped back to look at what had happened, and he saw a ridiculously long release code flash up on the display of the electronic lock.

  He tried the numbers several times, but there was no trace of a response. He kicked the door with a high-pitched whine.

  “How dare you, you piece of shit! Where the hell am I? Flesh! Flesh!” He carried on kicking at the door, apparently not even noticing that he was now yelling out loud.

  –You’re in the Archaeozoic Era.

  Well’s voice—no, a voice identical to Well’s—from deep inside his own ear.

  –And now you’re in the Proterozoic Era. And now Paleozoic, Cambrian, Mesozoan, and finally the Diluvial Epoch.

  Rare spun around in surprise.

  –You’re in a sea of fossils.

  Countless numbers of spirals flashed before his eyes.

  Ancient shells that had become one with stone were now appearing here and there and everywhere—all around the mortuary, buried in the lockers—giving the distinct impression that they were in some sort of prehistoric deep sea graveyard.

  Rare jumped into action, bringing the knife in his right hand down on the nearest wall.

  The metal melted where the blade touched it, and part of the locker slid to the floor with a thud.

  The spiral shells kept on appearing and disappearing as before. Proof that there was a projector somewhere, sending the images around the room.

  “You and your fancy tricks! Come on out, you pig! I’m going to rip you to shreds and fuck the pieces!” Screaming, Rare raised his right hand, now balled into a fist.

  The unusually thick bracelet that he wore on his left wrist started jangling. Without warning it fired strands of metal in every direction.

  A crackling noise, and blue-white sparks followed.

  Thin strands wound back into the bracelet, and the pieces of metal clinked and subsided.

  In a few moments the lockers in Rare’s vicinity had been reduced to pieces, collapsing into heaps on the floor.

  “Wire whips.” A voice from the shadows of the lockers. “Wires that emit charged particles. What a brutal weapon.”

  Rare turned toward the voice and without any hesitation pointed the bracelet in its exact direction and fired his weapon again.

  A blue-white flash tore through the room, and with the sound of a dozen screaming whips, the fossils were ripped to shreds over and over.

  For a second he saw a white figure caught in the wires, but it disappeared back into the darkness.

  A hit, a palpable hit…

  But Rare’s facial expression tensed. The bracelet’s rewinding function failed.

  The display on the bracelet was going haywire, flashing randomly, and it wouldn’t respond to Rare’s instructions.

  “Electromagnetic waves causing interference? Shit…” Rare tut-tutted, and was ready to throw the bracelet away as useless when, without warning, it started moving of its own accord.

  “Remote control?” Rare stood there, astonished, and could only watch as the wires snaked across his left hand and wove an intricate path toward his body.

  Rare shivered in terror, his face suddenly pale.

  The very next moment the wires returned to the bracelet at breakneck speed, and Rare’s left arm—from the elbow joint down—was diced like a steak, shredded into small pieces that dropped into a pile on the floor.

  A scream—neither quite from a man or a little girl—gushed forth from Rare’s mouth.

  Rare tumbled into a heap, watching as the wires flew into the air once more before igniting in a mass of sparks and disintegrating along with the bracelet.

  Blood oozed slowly from the stump where Rare’s arm used to be before its amputation.

  “I’m going to kill you…” Rare’s voice was full of venom but was masked by the sound of gunfire.

  A bullet pierced Rare’s shoulder with
pinpoint accuracy.

  Rare collapsed head over heels but used his remaining good hand to scramble for one of the pull-out lockers, using it as a makeshift shield.

  Even as he did so another bullet pierced his left leg.

  Giving a half-crazed yell, Rare still managed to move quickly and precisely, using the pull-out locker as a stepping-stone to get a better view of the figure hiding in the shadows, the figure that he had almost hit earlier. He leapt at it.

  Bullets flew through the air, scoring direct hits on his right elbow and knee.

  But Rare didn’t stop. He descended on the figure, plunging his blade downward.

  More sparks lit up the darkness.

  The blade, blocked firmly by two guns being held in a crucifix shape.

  Steel melted, and the sparks lit up the room, allowing Rare to finally see his tormentor’s face.

  “Looks like he has an artificially reinforced bone structure. The odd gunshot here and there isn’t going to be enough to bring him down.”

  A voice. Oeufcoque’s voice.

  But the only person standing in front of Rare was that actress from the kiddie porn flick, all cherubic and innocent.

  Pressing the gun barrels away with his knife as hard as he could, Rare gritted his teeth and squeezed out the name from the corner of his mouth. “Rune-Balot?”

  At that very moment Balot relaxed and let go. She knew exactly what needed to be done to throw the enemy off his footing.

  She let the crossed guns slip downward to the right, and Rare stumbled.

  She would have shot him in the back as he fell, but she couldn’t—the gun barrels were now half-fried.

  Even as Rare collapsed to the ground he used his reinforced legs and loins to wrench his body around, facing Balot.

  The tip of his knife sped toward Balot’s flank.

  More screeching and violent sparks.

  Balot blocked the knife with her left-hand pistol. The incandescent blade ground into the body of the gun.

  Rare stared at the girl, a confused expression on his face, as if to ask What’s going on?

  “Is she a PI who’s had her features surgically altered to make her look like her client?” Rare voiced out loud, having decided that this was the only possible explanation.

  Balot didn’t answer—she just thought back to Oeufcoque’s words, let go to get go.

  She parried, sidestepping Rare like a toreador.

  Rare’s feet tripped over themselves, and his blade made a red-hot arc that rent the air.

  But he’d be back up, thrusting the knife right at her again, in just a moment.

  Balot snarced the guns in both her hands.

  The guns melted, fused together, and turned into a Hutchinson Knife, the exact same model that Rare wielded.

  Rare’s expression was a sight to behold—but he didn’t stop swinging his blade for a moment.

  Balot switched the knife’s powers on and used her knife to block Rare’s blow.

  The two highly magnetized blades collided, and an eruption of sparks burst in the space between Balot and Rare. Two bodies went flying.

  Rare braced himself for his landing, gripping his knife the other way round now, while Balot consciously relaxed her muscles and flopped to the ground.

  Rare brought his knife down on her, and Balot nimbly thrust her knife upward.

  Incredibly, the two knifepoints met exactly, in an infinitesimally precise head-on collision.

  The knife flew out of Rare’s hands.

  It twisted violently in midair before plunging into Rare’s chest.

  “Gah…” Rare moaned as he staggered backwards into the locker-lined wall.

  The knife was buried deep in his chest.

  Frantically he tried to gain purchase on the hilt to pull the blade out, but the impact of the electromagnetic current caused his fingers to flail uselessly.

  He slid down the wall into a heap.

  The stench of burning flesh emanated from his every orifice.

  Balot grimaced at the vile smell. She almost vomited.

  Before long Rare’s mouth was gurgling, overflowing with blood. The fact that the blood wasn’t evaporating was proof that his knife’s electromagnetism had just about faded to nothing.

  Rare was at death’s door but still conscious.

  “Including you there are four intruders total, right?” Oeufcoque asked, and Rare looked at Balot with an expression somewhere between rage and tears.

  Then his jaw twisted in a strange way. He opened and closed his mouth, and a reedy voice just managed to escape. “I’ll have you gang-raped by pigs…princess…”

  A gruesome sneer descended over Rare’s pallid features and Oeufcoque cried out, urgently, “The smell of death! Balot, retreat!”

  Balot understood immediately. Telecommunication equipment and reinforced sinews weren’t the only things implanted inside Rare’s body. She leapt away from him, snarcing Oeufcoque to cover her whole body. Oeufcoque responded as rapidly as he could.

  Light filled the room.

  There was a thunderous roar and a blast of pressure.

  For Balot this was the worst sort of scene imaginable—one that she had already experienced.

  Rare’s body exploded. The lockers were crushed flat, the ceiling warped, and the images of the fossils were wiped clean by the blazing inferno that swept the room and the corridor outside, blackening all the walls.

  A large elliptical object emerged from the rubble, bouncing with a plop, then rolling across the room. It looked almost like a giant white rubber ball.

  A crack opened from the top, and from it emerged the figure of Balot, hugging her knees tightly to her chest. She jumped down to the ground.

  The rubber ball-like object spat out a snow-white garment that started slithering back into place around Balot’s body, hugging her tight, like leather bondage gear. Shock-absorbent material peeled off, sprinkling the floor like a cracked eggshell.

  “Balot, are you all right?”

  Balot surveyed her surroundings, scowling, staring at the still-flickering flames.

  –I’m never having my body go up in flames again. I hate it.

  Then she kissed her silk gloves, showing her gratitude to a shell of her very own.

  –So, where’s the last of our prey? The basement, they said?

  “Don’t refer to them that way—you’re not supposed to be enjoying yourself. Are you?”

  Balot laughed.

  –I don’t know if I am or if I’m not. All I know is that I’m doing just what you two taught me to do.

  “But I…”

  –And I want to get better. Like that guy just then. Close up.

  “And the idea of hand-to-hand combat doesn’t scare you?”

  –Why should it? It’s what I’ve got to do, right?

  “Well, yes, but…”

  –What a half-baked little thing you are, my soft-boiled Oeufcoque.

  Balot impishly called out his name, a play on words, playing with him, and kissed her other hand.

  –Don’t you worry. Trust me. I’ll pull it off, she informed him, matter-of-fact, smiling.

  03

  Welldone reached the bottom of the stairs and arrived at the basement in front of the door to the garage.

  All of a sudden the whole building seemed to shake.

  –What was that vibration?

  Welldone raised his gun as he asked the question, but Flesh’s reply was bemused.

  –It doesn’t make sense. The sensors just showed a heat reading large enough for an exploding bomb, but it came from a room that had absolutely no heat readings up till now. No one could have been in there. Maybe a trap that they set—something could have triggered it?

  –But those vibrations tugged at my chest. Almost as if one of us had blown himself up.

  Welldone was transmitting in a whisper now.

  –Surely not, Well! After all, everyone’s heading right your way just this moment!

  –Everyone…?

&n
bsp; –Medi, Rare, Mincemeat…

  Flesh hesitated.

  –But according to Rare’s report, Mincemeat’s gone down, right, Flesh?

  –That’s true…but all my circuits are secure now, so all our info should be completely safe from the hacker.

  –The enemy could have extracted Mincemeat’s transmitter from his head. The marker with Mincemeat’s name—that’s him.

  –I guess so…

  –Or possibly—the same thing could have happened to the others too…

  –Huh?

  –Will this damn door still not open, Flesh?

  –Wait a second longer—I’ve just got the lock off. Boy, this is some security system. I don’t get it; it must be so inconvenient to go through all this on a daily basis…

  Welldone ignored Flesh’s words and watched the barrier walls as they opened out to both sides.

  As a wall, it really was quite something. According to their calculations it was up there with a full-on nuclear shelter in terms of strength and impact resistance.

  Welldone passed through the door and stood in the parking lot.

  It looked like a perfectly run-of-the-mill lot, with spaces for about ten cars, delineated by thick pillars and steel frames. There were two freight elevators lined up side by side, and one of these had its door left open.

  There was a set of shutters down at the car park entrance, but nothing compared to the incredible gate he’d just come through.

  The moment Welldone noticed the shutters at the end of the parking lot he stopped moving toward the meeting point and swung around, looking back at the entrance he’d come in through.

  It was a completely ordinary door.

  Just a normal automatic door, and it even had a transom on top—the shutters on your average twenty-four-hour convenience store were more solid.

  –Our visual circuits have been hacked! Welldone yelled angrily at the back of his brain. He kicked the door in frustration. One side of the door bent with a loud crack and its hinges flew off, clattering down the corridor.

  –It’s just an ordinary automatic door! I was standing there with my dick in my hands, waiting in front of a door that I could have just pushed open! Flesh, give me a reading on the others’ positions!