He started and looked over at me. He nodded, clearing his head. “I’m fine…I’m fine, just hungry.”
I nodded. Slim slipped into the control chair before a bank of monitors, plugging his gestalt system of commlinks in.
“Drek!” he shouted. “My agents didn’t get to him before he sent out an update on their situation. I’ll try to bull them long enough to keep reinforcements away, but we’d better hurry!”
Pretty sprinted back down the stairs to get the van and bring it in. I crouched next to Slim as he connected his cyberdeck and went full VR, plugging into the security rigger’s system to adopt his persona and try to bluff Mitsuhama.
“Slim, try to pull up an inventory. You’ve got to tell us what to grab and where to get it. Open the door for Pretty when she gets back. Also, don’t forget to erase any records of us. Erase the whole day, just to be safe. Find out if the goods have tracer tags, just in case, and keep us updated with the reinforcements’ ETA.”
His body seemed to roll its eyes as his voice emerged from speakers in the bank of monitors. “Is that all? Want a massage while I’m at it?”
I grinned wickedly and ran downstairs to see what looked good to line my own pockets with before Pretty got back.
I took the steps two at a time before jumping to the bottom. I love the kid-in-a-candy-store appeal of a robbery. My eyes scanned over row after row of boxes. Sorted by type and labeled in complex numerical strings and bar codes, I had no idea what might be in any one of them. I had hoped we’d have more time to sort through things, and I usually like to keep things neat and professional, but help was on the way, and robberies have a tendency to get messy.
I pulled a knife and started cutting boxes open. I figured each stack would be sorted into different product, so I moved on, box after box, so that I knew what to look for.
From across the room, a double door buzzed as locks activated. Muffled pounding and shouting came through as a faint hiss sounded. The noises subsided and my commlink crackled with Slim’s voice. “Two guards knocked out. The third is locked in the john, but I’d still hurry.”
By my third box I’d hit paydata. A dozen smaller boxes labeled Soonan Simsense, with a picture of a sleek sim unit. I pulled it out of the box and jammed it and its various manuals and peripherals, into a pocket. Moving down the line, I found boxes of sim chips for foreign languages, entertainment, and music. I grabbed handfuls and kept moving. I was about to slice open another when Slim’s voice came though on my commlink.
“Red, move seven boxes to your left. Needles, get the ones on your right over to the garage door.”
I did as he said, coming to a stack of boxes, each labeled for distribution to separate stores. I sliced one open and nearly whooped for joy. Inside, carefully insulated, were half a dozen midrange commlinks, probably worth about 2K each. I grinned at a nearby security cam, knowing Slim would see it, and started loading them near the door.
Four boxes of those and whatever Needles was grabbing. Slim directed us around the warehouse, grabbing two more smaller boxes, another four that were heavy as hell, and then two that would easily take up a quarter of the space in the van. Slim then asked if there was anything we wanted personally.
“Microsensors, Slim. We can use those for a dozen little things.”
I found them two crates over. Button-sized up to handheld wands and scopes, they were exactly what we needed. I grabbed another two boxes, snatching up smaller boxes for sensors of every kind. As I did so, I saw Needles grabbing some of the boxes of chips and simplayers I had been at earlier.
The garage door opened, and Needles and I dove for cover, guns ready. Pretty’s superior grin made me feel like an ass as I loaded our loot into the back of the van. Needles climbed in back, hauling things forward and stacking them as well as he could to fit it all in. Pretty got out and ran to help.
Slim’s voice came over the commlinks. “Trouble. I can’t fool them any longer, they’re sending someone over to check on things. We’ve got forty-eight seconds before a satellite is in position to scan the area. We’re out of here by then!” A small countdown timer appeared in my HUD.
The lights flickered as Slim came bounding down the steps, sides heaving as he panted. I shakily started tossing boxes into the van.
“Thirty seconds!”
I threw one last box in and shoved Pretty into the driver seat. Needles jumped into the passenger side. Slim looked in back. “There’s no room!”
I grimaced and grabbed him, shoving him flush against the boxes before slamming the van doors shut.
“Go!” I shouted. “I’ll get out on my own, go!”
Pretty’s eyes in the mirror showed a moment’s hesitation before she slammed the gas, sending the van skidding into the night.
My eyes flicked down to my PAN.
00:00:20
Fine.
I blitzed out the open garage door. This was an industrial district, not many public places to hide out.
00:00:15
The doors were all flush with the walls of other warehouses, each most likely with their own security. The streets were long, and it would be a while before I made it to a residential neighborhood to blend in to…
00:00:10
I looked up at the sky. Somewhere up there was a satellite that was about to zoom in on me. There was no way for me to hide. I didn’t want to mist form or I would lose all the gear, and being naked in the midst of a corp town post-run was a horrible idea. I was royally screwed. My head slumped…
00:00:05
…and I saw I was standing over a sewer grate. I drew forth my essence, willing it into strength and snapping the lock in a second. I jumped down, falling into shadows…
I landed with a splash in fetid darkness, the smell of waste. Switching off my commlink, I slid into a pipe large enough to hold me and waited.
Screeching tires above set my heart pounding. I double-checked that my commlink was off. Voices, Japanese and agitated, echoed dimly down. I tried to make out what they were saying.
“What happened? Why is this door open?!”
“Weapons ready, something’s wrong.”
The rest of it was too fast and complex to follow. I thanked my lucky stars to be without a SIN and untraceable, and turned around, crawling through the pipes in one direction until I felt safe.
My worn trench coat over my LS uniform, I traveled to our meeting point. Deep in the old Containment Zone, in a vault beneath an old Washington Bank, Slim had spotted an area completely dead to the wireless net. The walls were charred black from a firebombing years before, when Knight Errant had cleaned out a small bug nest. From the abandoned looks of things, no one had taken up residence since. I climbed out of an air duct into the basement and met them there.
Slim and Needles were unpacking boxes as I entered. Neither saw me.
“Rick!” Pretty ran up, then stopped short, uncertain before becoming impassive. “You got out. Good.”
I smiled and turned back to the others, who had stopped to look at us. Slim grinned and went back to checking a roto-drone with a bug scanner. We’d chosen this place so we could find and disable any tracer RFID tags before bringing the swag back to the warren.
“How’d we make out?”
“Two drones, eighteen midrange commlinks, four on special order with attached bundles, three crates of linguasofts, tutorsofts, and music/media, sixteen sim modules, twenty security cameras, and four full-range sensor packages. Two more dedicated medical sensor packages, and enough spare commlinks and mainframe parts to wire up the warren for Christmas.” Slim was grinning like an idiot as he listed the haul.
“Not too bad,” Needles said.
“What were those four on special order?” I asked.
Slim reached into an open box and pulled out a slim, sleek commlink with a smaller box. “The Fairlight Caliban, crème de la crème of commlinks. Plus it’s been wizzed out with upgrades straight from the box.”
I opened up the smaller box. A pair o
f earbuds and a contact case fell into my palm. “Stuffed to the brim with enhancements. Not amazingly expensive, just hard to put together. The commlink’s full of sensors, too. I think these four were for a special customer looking to do some surveillance or something. They’re clean.” I smiled. “I’m keeping this one.”
We stepped out of the ruins an hour later. Slim had discarded all the packaging and gone over everything with his gear, even using one of the Fairlights to double-check. A few bugs later, and we were on the way home.
An hour’s worth of tunnel navigation brought us and our very heavy prizes back to the warren. No sooner had we passed through one of the reinforced sewer hatches than Menerytheria manifested before me, looking for all the world out of breath.
“What, what is it?”
“North surface entrance. One of Barnes’s gang.”
We dropped out gear off and sprinted for the north entrance, a basement in a dilapidated house. Mene stopped at the door, holding the others back.
“What?”
“He’s covered in Strain-III. I couldn’t touch him. Alice and Smooth are getting clean suits to pull him into the showers.”
“How long has he been there?” Needles demanded.
“About five minutes. Just before you got here.”
Just then a pair of the mothers pushed past in yellow chemical suits, holding another between them. I followed close behind as they walked up the stairs into a blown-out living room. The ghoul was sprawled on an ancient couch. I remembered his name was Goolah. I opened my astral sight and saw he was covered with the bacteria, eating into his blind eyes and growing in all his joints, under his arms and between his legs. He moaned with incoherent pain, opening his mouth to take wheezing breaths, glowing in the astral with Strain-III particles. They sprayed him with anti-bacterial solutions, praying they could stem the growth before it got too far out of control. Once he was doused, they swabbed his arm and pressed a needle in, depressing a cocktail which would hopefully clear out internal infection.
Needles shouldered past me, gas mask on. He bent down to the writhing ghoul, who seemed to recognize him beneath the mask, and pulled close.
“Barnes hurt,” he rasped out.
“What about the others?”
“Take… Bugs take. Gone to hive.”
“Where?”
“Hive…” Goolah swallowed thickly. Predatory, to be sure, but definitely one of the simple-minded ones.
“Where is the hive?”
Goolah seemed to think for a while, coughing up blood in thick, discolored globs. “Cermak. The hot place.”
Needles nodded, ran a gloved hand on the ghoul’s brow, whispering thanks and praise. Goolah smiled, then the two suited ghouls picked him up on a worn stretcher, and headed for the chemical showers and makeshift sickbay. Needles pulled off the glove and tossed it to the two ghouls to be decontaminated, as well, making his way back to us.
“Think he’ll make it?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s got a better chance here than anywhere,” Slim said with hope. “We’ve got so much practice at this, after all.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to burden him with my opinion of his chances.
“So what’s the plan?” Pretty asked Needles. Needles looked at her steadily for a long moment.
“We go after them.”
“Even after Barnes threatened you and the others?” Slim asked.
“We don’t leave our own behind. Most of them are just too hungry and stupid to know any better than to follow him. As for Barnes himself…” Needles paused. “We’ll just have to see how he feels about life on his own.”
“We’re gonna need more guns,” I said.
We ran to the armory, loading up on all the equipment we could carry. Hardened armor jackets, Ares Alpha assault rifles, Predators, flash-bangs, most of the good stuff was what we took from the Stars, but some assorted bits from Knight Errant, warlords and insect shamans had made their way into our packs. A few serrated knives and a sword from the Bloodcats gang, several quarts of insecticide in two jugs and various bug bombs, and a pack full of plastic explosives scavenged from a demolition/reconstruction crew site. Going into a hive usually meant an opportunity to do some real damage against honest-to-spirit monsters, and what better method than high explosives?
“We got enough?” I asked, racking the slide of my SPAS-12.
“We’ll just have to find out,” Needles replied with a sinister grin, hefting a pair of Ares Alphas.
Chapter 12
Hive
The Chicago Zone’s shattered nature made it hard to travel fast. It hadn’t been a picnic when it had been in one piece; now it was a nightmare. A hour’s fast march gave us plenty of time to recognize that we were probably too late to save anyone. After all, a sick, half-starved ghoul had staggered to deliver the message. How long had that taken? How much longer could any survivors hold out? I pushed that out of my mind and pressed on.
We looked like a Lone Star Fast Response Team team hustling across the ruins, still in the LS uniforms and now wearing gas masks and wetsuit-like contamination rigs. Thankfully they came standard with the LS FRT uniform in Chicago, protection against gases, radiation, and Strain III for those unlucky Awakened patrol members who were still stationed here.
“Something about this bothers me,” I whispered to Needles as we trotted along a stretch of dilapidated roadway.
“What, just one thing?”
“Seriously, now. The Cermak Blast created one of the world’s most famous mana warps. All those bugs dying in the midst of so many investitures, plus the massive ritual and the nuke…”
What’s your point?”
“Needles, a dual-natured creature like a ghoul or insect spirit shouldn’t be able to survive being in a mana warp. It ought to kill them, the closer they get to the center.”
He looked at me, confused. “So how could they be there?”
“Exactly.” I shrugged, worried. “If there really are bug spirits at Cermak, I have no idea.”
“And what about us? Won’t the warp hurt us?”
“It’ll probably scramble magic, but the fact is the bugs aren’t minding it. We ought to be—”
“Boss!” Slim hissed over the intercom.
“What?”
“I’ve been monitoring Lone Star frequencies since we left on that job. They just deployed two squads to scout the Cermak area, and are mobilizing a full platoon to follow on their order.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. Maybe they’re after the bugs.”
“Good thing we’re wearing the uniforms,” I said.
“Unless they recognize the modifications,” Pretty said.
We didn’t talk about that afterward, and doubled our pace instead.
From the outside, the hive didn’t look any different from any other dilapidated building in the city. Sure, it was more demolished than most, being the center of the infamous Cermak Blast more than twenty years ago, but it also had the dubious distinction of being the site of the world’s largest recorded hive. For whatever reason, they kept coming back, even with the residual radiation and Strain III floating around.
“Over here!” Pretty called out from the burned-out husk of what might have once been a Chinatown market. We stepped over the charred remains of a wall and into an old kitchen. She stood over a sewer hole. Needles and I pulled it up, revealing a dark pit going two meters down.
I shouldered my shotgun, holding my hands out and reaching out with my senses as I opened myself to the astral. I stretched further and further—
—Chittering, squirming, writhing, clawing, build, build build feed growCHANGETHEMALLfeedreproduceEVOLVE—
My two eyes opened as the third closed. I was on my back, with Needles holding me and shaking me back to consciousness.
“You okay, Red?”
I gasped for breath, wiping the sweat off my brow and nodding. “What was down there?” he asked.
“Trouble,” I said. “Bugs, that
’s for certain. Termites, if I had to guess. Probably only one queen, I only heard the echoes of one set of orders. But…”
“But what?”
“I heard something else down there, too. Something that wasn’t the bugs, but…it was wrong. Twisted.”
“Twisted?”
“That’s the only way I can describe it, Needles. It wasn’t natural. Even for bugs.”
Needles looked down into the hole. Somehow it seemed deeper, now. Darker. I had wanted to know if this was the way to find survivors. Now all I was sure of was that it was a certain path to Hell.
We dropped down, guns ready. Needles looked both ways, then addressed each of us in the narrow sewer corridor.
“Okay, Red, you and I are point. Slim, you’re in the middle, keep monitoring transmissions to see how far the Star is, and try to get us a map of the sewer system down here. Pretty, bring up the rear. You see anything that isn’t human or ghoul, you just start firing until you run out of ammo. One of us will come back help.”
“What about the FRT squads?”
“Let’s try to work with them if we can. No need to fight on two fronts if we can aim all our guns at the enemy.”
“So, just pretend we’re one of the squads?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
We started moving, keeping our pace as rapid as possible while maintaining stealth. Slim pulled up the old maps from before the Bug City incident, and transmitted them to all of our ’links. The labyrinthine layout was only so helpful, as some tunnels had collapsed. I checked the sensors on my new commlink, noting the slow rise in radiation. Strange. After all these years, the rads should have dispersed, even here at ground zero. Bio-sensors indicated no Strain III concentrations. That made sense. The bugs would never make a hive where they’d get eaten up by Ares’ pet bio-weapon. I noticed the breeze blowing from down the tunnel, and suddenly I didn’t need to assense, or even a map to know which way to go. I started walking faster.
“Red, where you going?”
“Isn’t it kind of funny how there’s no Strain III clouds down here?”
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