Version 43

by Philip Palmer

  As the ambulance flew off, I ran after it and leaped up, and clung on to the undercarriage. I used magnets to hold myself in place.

  The ambulance sped away, high above the streets, with me clinging on, while the Sheriff trailed us at a careful distance on the flybike.

  “How are you?” I asked over my secure MI channel.

  “The bitch cut my fucking face,” whined Macawley.

  “It’ll heal.”

  “It better. I like this face.”

  “I like it too,” I said, and wondered at myself.

  “We’re heading for the Industrial Zone,” said Sheriff Heath. “Away from the City Hospital.”

  “They’re about to sedate me.”

  “Don’t let them,” I counselled.

  “Don’t fucking let them girl,” the Sheriff added.

  “They’re dead.”

  “How?”

  “I used my claws. Cut their throats. The back of this ambulance is like an abattoir now.”

  “Good girl.”

  “You’re still on the same course,” said the Sheriff. “I’m hoping the driver heard nothing.”

  “I cut the bastards’ throats before they could subvocalise.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “Where are we now?”

  “South of Brancton Park.”

  “Heading for a deserted fabricator building, maybe? They have a lot of those in the Industrial Zone.”

  “No. I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s a House of Pain in the Industrial Zone. Owned by Hari Gilles, but no whips and scourges and chains are ever delivered there. But there is,” I said, scrolling through the receipts generated by my database, “a canteen, and a large staff of workers, and many flybikes and flying vans apply for flight paths which lead there. It’s a perfect match. It’s Hari. Hari Gilles is behind all this.”

  “Ah.”

  There was silence for a while. I held on tight, watching the Industrial Lands unfold below me. Nowadays, most of the industry was in space, but in the early days of Belladonna, this was where the consumer items that made this society possible were robotically created.

  Now, it was where the unsavoury, poor and desperate citizens of Belladonna were slaughtered, and then disassembled for their parts.

  “I can see it below now, the ambulance is swooping down,” the Sheriff announced.

  “Okay. I need to – ah – move,” I said. “Before this thing lands on me.”

  “Once we land, they’ll know what I did to their paramedics,” said Macawley.

  “We’ll be there for you girl. Trust us.”

  The flying ambulance swooped down into the courtyard of the House of Pain, as I scrambled my way up the hull of the craft. The grass below us moved and an underground landing pad appeared. The flying ambulance swooped in and docked.

  Sheriff Heath followed behind on his flybike. A handful of engineers were standing by as the ambulance came to a halt, followed, moments later, by the Sheriff on his bike. The back door of the ambulance flew open and Macawley leaped out, her face enraged and dripping blood, her claws extended.

  “Hey,” said an orange-uniformed security guard and fired a plasma blast at her.

  He was fast; the plasma beam caught Macawley head on; her forcefield engaged and the energy swirled around her, burning the walls and floor. I leaped off the top of the ambulance and landed with both feet on the ground, and stopped the guard with a single plasma blast, boring a hole in his skull.

  Sheriff Heath got off his flybike. His blue eyes and walrus moustache were vividly framed by the red flaring frame-bars of his clear hardglass helmet.

  “So, it’s Hari Gilles,” said the Sheriff, and the words were a death sentence.

  A siren began to blare and I used an electromagnetic pulse to silence it. I paralysed the engineers with a sonic shout at point-blank range, and when they sank into catatonia, I bound their arms and legs.

  Then I blew open the double doors and we found ourselves in a long corridor. I did an infra-red scan, and saw the laser beams criss-crossing the corridor and I threw a flare bomb. The Sheriff and Macawley shielded their eyes, while I stared impassively as a flash of blinding light ripped apart the walls and ceilings and hidden death-lasers.

  We ran through the smoking black corridor and crashed through into a hospital reception area. It was a perfect replica of the actual City Hospital, staffed with uniformed nurses and with a robot receptionist peering curiously at us.

  I walked up to the desk. “Sergeant Aretha Jones, where can I find her?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I’m not auth—” said the robot receptionist, and I thrust a finger-spike into the robot’s brain and leached the information out that way.

  “Where?” said Sheriff Heath calmly.

  “Fourth – floor –” I said, feeling shaken. In absorbing the information from the robot I had also absorbed all the data it held on the hospital – the layout, the names of the staff, the numbers and names of the “patients.”

  One million people were being kept in the hospital, some of them still whole and intact, but most of them dismembered and eviscerated and stored in vats.

  “Here comes security,” grinned Macawley, as a dozen silver-bodied Doppelganger Robot security guards appeared in the reception area.

  I felt a visceral fury, as if confronted with an age-old enemy.

  Macawley leaped high, catapulting with her hands off my metal shoulders, as the bullets and plasma blasts started to fly. She landed nimbly behind the reception desk, which was armour-plated and impervious to plasma fire, and she huddled there grinning as the battle was waged.

  The Sheriff fired his supersized plasma rifle fast and furiously at the twelve robot warriors. He aimed carefully, avoiding civilians, but the Doppelganger Robots had no such qualms – they rained plasma fire and explosive bullets indiscriminately in the direction of their opponents, and yellow-uniformed nurses and white-robed doctors were ripped limb from limb.

  But through the haze of blood and colloidal flesh the Sheriff kept firing his precise blasts, targeting the heads and necks of the DRs, using multiple plasma blasts to literally saw their heads off. His body armour was rocked with plasma blasts and bullets, but he was a veteran of such wars, and absorbed the kinetic shocks, and kept his feet.

  Meanwhile, I retracted my eyes and brought my disruptor blasters up through the sockets and fired, again and again. Each pulse fed compressed energy into the atoms of my enemies, creating a blast that explosively ripped the DRs into small pieces.

  Then I scuttled towards two of the remaining DRs, absorbing plasma blasts and dodging bullets, and I shot and punched them into smithereens.

  The Sheriff continued to plasma-saw the heads off his chosen targets. And when the last of the DRs, was destroyed, the reception area was incandescent with blazing smoke.

  Macawley bounced back over the reception desk. “Upstairs?” she said.

  “Yes. I have the schematic,” I explained to her. “We take the elevator to the third floor and—”

  “Which is up,” Macawley explained, “there.” And she pointed, and I got it.

  And Macawley leaped off the desk and into my arms, then wriggled round to piggyback on me, and I flew up into the air on my boot rockets and smashed through the ceiling, as the Sheriff flew behind on his body-armour jets.

  My x-ray vision and ultrasound allowed me to pilot a route upwards that avoided the beds and bodies of patients and we finally erupted into a ward where we found Aretha unconscious in a vat of liquid, tubes leading from her nose, a breathing mask over her mouth.

  I looked at her for a few moments. She was vulnerable, as if asleep, lost to the world.

  Then I ripped the tubes off her and pulled her out of the vat. I laid her gently on the ground, and checked her body for holes and organ absences. Then, reassured, I placed my fist between her breasts and electrocuted her.

  Aretha jolted awake with a scream.

  “Fuck, it’s you,” she subvoced we
arily.

  “We’re getting you out of here,” I explained.

  Aretha struggled to her feet, naked and vulnerable and afraid. Macawley, anticipating her plight, had brought a rucksack of clothes, and Aretha fumbled with them, and managed to put on a top and leggings. But then she tottered. Her body was weak. Her face was pale. She tried to speak, but still couldn’t, because of the broken jaw. Instead, she gestured.

  I followed her gesture. I saw all the other men and women and boys and girls and toddlers and babies lined up in rows in their hospital vats.

  It was a very long room and the vats were packed tight, like fish shoaling.

  “Go,” said the Sheriff.

  And so I walked along the row, checking for vital signs. Most of the patients were technically alive, even those who had been dismembered and stripped of every organ, including their brains. I counted the barely living, and I counted the true-dead, and I counted the crippled organless wrecks, and when I was sure I had proof of mass serial murder and use of banned medical technology, I paused in my count, and turned back to face the others.

  And there I stood at the end of the long corridor of pillaged bodies, looking down at Macawley and the Sheriff. And they looked back at me, and had no words.

  And I raised my arms to the heavens.

  “Urgent assistance, now,” I said, and waited for the response from the SN headquarters.

  No reply came.

  “Urgent assistance!” I screamed.

  Nothing.

  I sent a coded signal to my heavily armed computer-controlled spaceship, still in automatic orbit around Belladonna: no reply.

  I walked slowly back to the others.

  “What’s up?” said the Sheriff.

  “The beacon link is down,” I explained. “My spaceship is not responding. Something’s happening. Something big.”

  “Then let’s get the hell out of here,” said the Sheriff.

  I took hold of Aretha, and held her in my arms, and Macawley grabbed me tight around my neck.

  And I blasted my rocket jets a second time and I used my plasma guns to blow a hole through the ceiling and I flew up and up and up until I saw sky.

  I flew away from the hospital, pursued by missiles fired by Hari’s security people that weaved around the sky, and looking down to see the vast size of the hospital wing of this House of Pain.

  Eventually, I found the rooftop of an old fabricator building and dropped Macawley and Aretha off there.

  Aretha was shivering. Her shattered jaw had been clumsily pinned in place. There were pen marks on her bare shoulders, little dotted lines, which marked where her arms would have been severed, prior to the removal of her organs.

  “Are you okay?” I said, gently. She shook her head, too tired to even subvocalise.

  “I’m sorry,” I subvocalised. And there was a flicker of expression that showed that she had heard me.

  “I honestly believed that you were corrupt,” I said, pleading to be understood and forgiven by her.

  She stared at me blankly. Her broken jaw made her seem unreal, more doll than person. Her body was in shock after all the drugs that had been pumped into her. So she didn’t speak, she just stared.

  “But I was wrong; you backed me up, didn’t you?” I said. “You lied for me. You had faith in me, and that’s how you were able to lie. How, with such total and absolute conviction, you fooled Barumi and his third eye. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Her eyes flickered; I knew that meant Yes.

  “Why?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Her eyes closed, and she drifted off to sleep. I laid her down, and inserted an IV, and hooked her up to a vital-signs monitor.

  “She’ll live, I think,” I said.

  “Who is she?” Macawley asked.

  “Just a cop,” I said.

  “Why rescue her, and not all the others?” Macawley marvelled.

  I thought about it, and had no answer.

  “Skip it. Look, robot head, I’ll stay with the girl. You have to go back,” said Macawley. “Rescue the others. That’s what we came for. Go rescue all those people.”

  “Just me and the Sheriff, against an entire army?” I said.

  “Yeah? Is that a problem?”

  I thought about the odds, and grinned.

  “No problem.”

  From high above, I could see soldiers assembling outside the entrance to the phantom hospital. They drove military trucks and jeeps, and they wore old-fashioned body armour of a design I did not recognise.

  “Sheriff Heath, this is Galactic Cop 44, do you hear me?”

  “I could do with some help here.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “I’ve called for backup from police headquarters; nothing’s coming. No one’s responding.”

  “I can see fires in the city,” I informed him. “New stars in the sky.”

  “Stars?”

  “Satellites. Exploded. Their reactors burning in space, radiating heat and light. I think my spaceship has been blown up too. It seems highly likely the Quantum Beacon ship has been exploded also.”

  “What’s going on out there, a war?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I started to descend, and as I did so, I accessed the Belladonna MI channel and listened to the news report.

  “According to official sources,” said a warmly reassuring news presenter’s voice, “Mayor Abraham Naurion is now heading a new civil administration, following his daring escape from prison where he was being held by representatives of the old regime.”

  I wanted to curse inwardly, but that wasn’t in my programming. Instead, I resolved to find out who had been bribed to let the Mayor go.

  “The Mayor has declared a state of national emergency,” continued the news presenter. “All links with Earth and the Solar Neighbourhood Government have been severed. Belladonna has declared its independence. Citizens are advised to get out on the street, and commence celebrating. This planet is now officially free.”

  A few moments later I heard the Mayor’s nasal tones:

  “This is Mayor Naurion speaking. All the rumours are true; we have declared our independence from Earth. Elections will be held next week. God bless you all.”

  I switched off the MI link, and crashed back down into the hospital, via the hole in the roof I had created earlier. I found the Sheriff barricaded into position behind the double doors.

  “There’s a revolution going on out there,” I told him.

  “It’s none too fucking quiet in here either,” he responded.

  “They’re deploying a regiment of soldiers. We need to get these patients out. How can we do that?”

  The Sheriff thought about it.

  “How about,” he suggested, “over the bodies of our enemies?”

  I considered that option.

  “Good strategy,” I said.

  And so I plasma-blasted the door open: and the two of us ran through, roaring.

  The soldiers were bounding up the stairs in scores, carrying KM rifles. I drew my pistols and rained bullets and plasma at them.

  Their body armour absorbed the blasts and they fired back. I hurled a flash grenade, but their helmets darkened to protect their eyes.

  I holstered my pistols, and extended my fingerspikes, and my eyeballs retracted, and I exposed my twin disruptor blasters. And I prepared to leap at the soldiers in a killing frenzy, when—

  “Hey, I got it,” said the Sheriff laconically, and raised his plasma rifle, and fired it, once.

  A thin missile shot out into the midst of the oncoming soldiers, and exploded in mid-air, and lit up the entire hallway. Sheets of flame erupted but the armoured soldiers walked arrogantly through the fire, not realising that the air was now rich with microscopic airborne combustibles, which had been released by the Sheriff’s missile as it flew. So instead of dimming, the flames flared hotter and hotter, in an exothermic chain reaction that was turning the air itself into an inferno.

&nbs
p; The first rank of soldiers were in sight of the double doors when the heat became so intense it disabled their body armours’ cooling mechanism.

  This caused their armour to glow red, then blue.

  And, of course, once the armour was close to melting point, the bodies within ignited.

  Bodies burned, and screams filled the air.

  Sheets of flame rippled through the air and down the stairs. The agonised howls of the soldiers vied with the relentless crackle crackle of flesh burning inside melting hardmetal.

  The fireball became a screaming dancing conga chain of flaming bodies, and the fire in the air continued to blaze like a magnesium flare.

  Then the fireball flared and became a larger fireball, and flared again, and again, and again.

  The Sheriff and I huddled in the doorway, beyond the reach of the flames, but still bathed in blistering heat. I turned my refrigeration units up to maximum, and used my body to shield the old man from the inferno. I noticed that the Sheriff didn’t blink even when flames flickered close to us, and I realised that those peering blue eyes were mechanical, not organic. That’s how old the Sheriff was: too old for new eyes.

  “Nice one,” I said.

  The sprinklers now kicked in, slowly dousing the blaze. Before long, all that was left were the black ashes of the dead, amidst the melted slag of the body armours.

  “It’s an adapted military missile,” the Sheriff acknowledged. “Like a One Sun, but just a tad less powerful. I carry it for emergencies.”

  The staircase was charred and blackened, and it crumbled and collapsed before our very eyes, but the forcefield infrastructure remained intact. The Sheriff and I began to make our way through, effectively walking on air, using the charred bodies like a forest pathway.

  Finally we were outside.

  An army of deputies had gathered outside the House of Pain – the Sheriff’s flybiker gang, and a horde of other street tearaways.

  “You have impressive resources,” I observed.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Then he turned to his deputies, and spoke in calm, reassuring tones: “Go,” said the Sheriff. “Guard those people who are inside. This is now officially a City Hospital. You,” he pointed at a tattooed flybiker. “Get to the main hospital, round up as many doctors and nurses as you can. Anyone who won’t cooperate, true-kill them. You are my deputies, you have that authority.”