‘Fuck you!’ Angela screamed at the monster as it slashed its five-bladed hand through another set of bladders. She kicked her legs as hard as she could, desperate to cover the distance between them. The monster regarded her for a second, pausing with a disdain that was positively human before turning and walking away, leaving the bioil gushing freely onto the ground behind it.
Another ball lightning descended into the canyon, landing on the far side of the circled vehicles. It rebounded, oscillating wildly into a hemisphere before disintegrating into a globular cascade of glaring lightning strands. The entire convoy was illuminated with pure white solar splendour, as if Sirius had returned to its pre-redshift grandeur.
Angela’s net link vanished. She saw two figures lying on the snow beside biolab-2, the fuel hose snaking between them. Big patches of crimson blood were growing sluggishly out around each of them. The Legionnaires – Lieutenant Botin and Omar Mihambo were close by – moving as fast as they could in the hurricane wind, their weapons already drawn, thin ruby laser beams tracking round in search of a target. They must have seen the monster at the same time. Their carbines started to level in unison as the monster strode off beyond the sledge, creating its own micro-swirls within the rampaging snow.
‘No!’ Angela yelled at the top of her lungs. She waved frantically, trying to stop them. But she was too far away, they never saw her.
The carbines opened fire. Thin plumes of ice spiked up out of the ground just short of the sledge, stitching a fast line in pursuit of the monster. Explosive-tipped armour-piercing rounds that shattered the rock-hard snow and ice in small gouts of flame. Three of them struck the spreading pool of bioil as the corona of lightning flares began to fade.
Flames whooshed up from the spilled fuel, blue fire burning bright, sliding inexorably towards the residual torrent still leaking from the bladders. The Legionnaires realized what they’d done and stopped firing. One of them stood perfectly still, watching the flames in horror. The other lunged forwards. Angela watched in dismay as the figure reached the elongated puddle of flame. It skidded to a halt and bent over, dropping the carbine so gauntlets could shove at the snow, trying to create a break in the bioil like a child playing dams and streams on the beach. For a moment it looked like he’d succeed. The flames started to splutter, then suddenly he was lifting his hands, which had become two balls of striking turquoise flame.
A frightened Angela slowed to a halt, and began to run in the other direction. She crashed into Paresh who was heading in to help, sending both of them tumbling onto the unforgiving ground. The lightning died. Leaping blue flames illuminated the scene. They’d burned their way around the Legionnaire, and were racing for the sledge. But the flaming figure rolled over, deliberately crashing down on top of the smooth bright wavefront, extinguishing the blaze. It writhed about, kicking up ridges of saturated snow. The flames began to track wide.
Then the other Legionnaire was racing up to the sledge, snatching a fire extinguisher off the framework. Foam jetted out, smothering the leading edge of the flame. Then he was directing the foam onto the blazing puddles and their splash-pattern rivulets.
Angela’s link to the convoy net resurrected. It was instantly full of incoherent shouting. The grid showed her it was Lieutenant Botin in the flames, with his arms still alight, and flaming bioil seeping down his legs. Bioil somehow transferred to his hood, and he was engulfed in a halo of blue flame, the burn accelerated by the howling blizzard.
Paresh was rolling fast, onto his feet to struggle over to Botin. He grabbed a second extinguisher with his functioning arm, and played the foam over the lieutenant while Omar Mihambo battled the slurry of flaming bioil seething over the ground. Flame began to rise up Paresh’s own boots, and he fired the extinguisher down.
Angela shamefully shuffled backwards, fearful of the sledge and tanker exploding. The guilt at not helping Paresh was overwhelming, but not enough to push her to her feet. All she could do was squat there in the middle of the inimical blizzard watching the three Legionnaires risk their lives to protect the bioil that everyone else needed to survive another few days.
Eventually it was over, and the flames snuffed out beneath the bubbling foam, itself already starting to freeze. Elston’s voice was strong in the net, overridden by Botin’s agonized screams. That finally galvanized Angela into action. She put her head down, and pushed through the horizontal snow to reach Paresh. Together with Omar they tugged the lieutenant over to biolab-2.
Coniff and Sakur helped Angela, Paresh, and Omar heave Botin onto the vacant gurney. Ravi was moved aside, while Leora, Winn, Chris, and Juan-Fernando with their serious but non-life-threatening injuries were unceremoniously dispatched into the laboratory section itself to clear some space.
With the snow and ice melting in the cabin’s warmth, the damage the flames had done to the lieutenant’s hands and arms was becoming apparent. Angela stood as far back as she could, with water dripping off her parka as Sakur cut the crusted, blackened balaclava away from Botin’s head. Two sacs of sedative were quickly bumped against the charred skin of his neck, silencing his whimpers.
‘We need to strip all his clothes off and apply the flesh membrane seal,’ Coniff said. ‘Omar, can you help us, please? Take the armour jacket and torso layers, the flames seem to have missed them. Use cutters, don’t worry about buttons and zips.’
‘Yes ma’am,’ Omar said in a hushed, reluctant tone. He pulled his own gloves and parka off, and went to stand at the gurney.
‘I’ll take the arms and hands,’ she said. ‘Sakur, legs and feet, please.’
Water and splats of yellow, blood-curdled foam continued to drip off the gurney. Strips of stained cloth followed them, crumpling into a soggy mush on the floor. Angela looked away. There was a smell starting to build up in the biolab’s main cabin which the air-con couldn’t entirely deal with even though the vent fans were running on high.
The door chamber slid back, and Elston bustled in, unzipping his parka. ‘Is he okay?’ He craned forward for a look at the lieutenant on the gurney, and blanched when he saw the ruined flesh of both limbs and face.
The doctor was spraying the raw burns with antiseptic oil. She turned to face the colonel, and shook her head, tight-lipped.
It was a wonder Elston didn’t slam his fist into the cabin wall. Angela hadn’t seen him quite so angry before. Cross, yes, but this was a rage that was consuming him. ‘That thing,’ he choked out.
‘Who did it get?’ Angela asked quietly. Her grid was showing her identity icons and their status, so she already knew. But there was some kind of primitive belief going on deep in her brain that wanted the deaths confirmed by something other than a machine.
Elston glared at her, then relented. ‘Atyeo and Garrick are confirmed dead. You saw them out there. Bastian is missing. It must have carried him off.’
‘What does it do with them?’ Omar demanded, his ruined face wrinkling up heavily in an expression of frightened dismay. ‘Is it eating us? Is that it?’
‘It won’t be biocompatible at that level,’ Coniff said without looking up from her patient. ‘Even if it is carnivorous, our protein structures will be all wrong for it.’
‘Then what—’ Omar began wretchedly.
‘I don’t fucking know!’ Elston shouted back.
Angela realized a mild shock was starting to set in. Her skin was beginning to flush. Somewhere underneath all her layers, her arms were shaking. She wanted to ask Elston what he was going to do about refuelling now. About safeguarding the tanker and the remaining bioil in the sledge. But they were past that now. All they could do was wait in their vehicles for the fury of the blizzard to pass, like peasant primitives, and hope the monster didn’t come for them in the meantime. It riled her that she had no other option.
When she looked round the muggy cabin she saw Ravi looking at her with an unnervingly calm expression. She shuffled her way round to him.
‘Thank you again,’ the craggy old pilot said.
‘It’s going to finish what it just started. I would. Without fuel we’re totally screwed. That and the comm rockets. It’ll keep going after them until it succeeds, and when it does, we’re all dead. Our biggest disadvantage is that none of our weapons work against it. How do you stop something you can’t kill or even injure.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Elston said without turning round. ‘We do have a weapon that will be utterly lethal to that son of a bitch.’ With that he began to pull his outer gauntlets back on in fast angry motions. ‘And I’m going to get it, and I will have no hesitation using it on that bastard. If HDA want a living specimen they can come here and collect one for themselves. Because that is now one dead monster walking.’ He stomped into the door chamber.
Angela exhaled lightly. She looked down at Ravi, and flexed her fingers, feeling the mild tingle of her dark weapons. ‘So if I had a weapon that would kill it, what would I do?’
‘There’s only one option left,’ the pilot said knowingly. ‘You have to go on the offensive. Like you did before . . .’
Angela gave him a tight smile. ‘Yeah.’ The trouble was, she hadn’t exactly been on the offensive.
*
After the shock of finding the bodies of the three Norths and Suski in the mansion’s lounge, Angela hung on to the door frame for grim life while her nerves steadied fractionally. There was a psycho loose in the mansion, and, like the light, none of the alarms was working. She peered out into the long central corridor. Without ringlight, the only illumination was that provided by the overspill from the lounge lights. She looked up and down the corridor. Five metres away, the door to Bartram’s bedroom was opening silently.
The sight of it was all Angela needed to clear her mind and focus. All that mattered now was survival. Cost irrelevant. She activated the dark weapons in her hands, and felt eight sharp pricks of pain when the sharp little talons punctured her skin as they rose up from the cy-tech fronds which had twined along her finger bones. Blood began to drip down, adding to the lake of gore around her feet.
There was so much she’d never be able to keep her balance, she realized. She hurried out into the corridor, her feet slapping against the clean marble, gaining traction.
Bartram’s door swung right back. A humanoid monster was standing there. Time halted as she stared at the impossibility. It was her own height, though considerably more bulky, with a skin she would always recall as resembling leather turned to stone. Behind it, revealed in the faint wash of light from the lounge, she saw the bodies of Mariangela, Coi, and Bartram. Butchered by the same blades that were now rising up in front of her, the hands of the monster. That motion broke the spell.
She assumed a combat crouch, just as some long-forgotten instructor had taught her and Shasta decades ago, during one of their foolish fads. Studying the monster’s movements, waiting for the tell-tale shift that would illustrate its attack.
For some reason it didn’t attempt a lunge or swipe with those horrific blades that were poised ready to administer her death. Instead, its head tilted to one side, and it issued the wistful sigh of a thwarted lover, as if it was surprised and gladdened to see her.
Angela jumped, turning sideways as she went, assuming a Soaring Leopard posture. Ducking under the raised arm to unexpectedly jab both sets of fingers into its torso. And trigger—
The cy-tech that had been implanted in New Tokyo, and stimulated by the activants behind Maslen’s café, had spent the intervening weeks growing inside her, its quasi-life cells enveloping her ulnas in a sheath of synthetic cells that had been faithfully copied from electric eels. Semi-organic conductor threads had sprouted from them into her hands up to the talon buds in each fingertip.
Five thousand volts slammed into the monster with a blinding violet-white flash. It went flying backwards along the seventh floor’s wide central corridor, landing in the long grisly slick of blood and skidding further until it smacked into the wall.
Angela didn’t even see the final impact, she was already sprinting for the stairs. The world had gone mad, imploded on her. But that didn’t matter, the transfer had gone through. Rebka would get the genetic treatment. Nothing else mattered. A hysterical laugh bubbled out of her rigid throat. Not even alien killer monsters.
All she had to do was keep alive, stay ahead of the authorities. Nobody was going to believe her when it came to tonight’s events. She couldn’t explain them fully unless she told them why she was really here, and that could never happen. Nothing could risk Rebka’s treatment. Nothing at all. Her own life was expendable at this point.
She took the stairs three at a time. Couldn’t hear anything moving behind her. Not yet. Maybe the charge had killed it? Somehow she knew it hadn’t.
There was a bag in her room, one she casually kept packed, one which had items to help any emergency dash to safety. She reached the sixth floor and had a millisecond debate with herself – if she could afford the time to retrieve it. The monster would be after her, she never doubted that for an instant. But she needed the things in that bag if she was to stand any chance of getting away clean.
Angela went for the bag.
*
Inside the biolab’s door chamber, Angela ordered her e-i to switch on the identity code in her solid memory cache. She put the little block on a shelf, and deactivated her bodymesh’s link to the convoy’s net. Not that the net was much use in the bedlam of the lightning storm.
She stepped out into the turmoil of the blizzard. Sirius in its weakened state still hadn’t penetrated the cloud, leaving the canyon immersed in a thick gloaming. Gravel-sized snowflakes assailed her parka and quilted trousers, crackling against her helmet. As she looked round she could see the white headlight beams pointing ineffectually into the storm, blurring into a haze just a few metres outside the pathetic protective ring the vehicles had once again contracted into.
Atyeo and Garrick still lay on the ground beside biolab-1, with the snow already starting to accumulate along one side of their corpses where the wind blew unceasingly. Most of the hose was already submerged under small ripple-like drifts, while the frozen extinguisher foam looked like another serrated ice ridge, just one more piece of the tormented landscape. None of the remote guns was moving now, leaving the convoy effectively defenceless against the monster. Though in truth, they always had been, she thought.
Angela set off between Tropics-3 and 2. The side windows on both vehicles were covered with pale sheets of ice, fluorescing slightly from the inside lights. Their windscreen wipers were still churning away in pained judders, but all they cleared now was ever-smaller triangles. At this rate the windscreens would be covered in another half-hour.
Nobody saw her, not even when another crazy lightning ball streaked through the turgid clouds far above, throwing down a brighter illumination. She walked unchallenged into the canyon’s arctic emptiness where the monster awaited. The solitude was almost refreshing, as was the lack of worry. Her decision had been made, the demon would be faced.
She trudged around the convoy slowly, turning a complete circle every couple of paces so she could see it when it came for her. Ball lightning swooped above her sporadically, revealing the stark ground of broken folds, meandering fissures, and entombed rock. She had to walk, anyone stationary out here would freeze soon enough. The glow of the headlights revealed the vehicles easily enough. An icon in her smartcell grid showed her the net fading in and out as if it was nothing more sophisticated than a shortwave radio signal.
Angela had completed a half-circuit of the vehicles when she saw something moving through the churning snow. A bulky humanoid figure leaning into the wind and abrasive snow. It was heading straight for her. Angela hurriedly pulled off her outer gauntlets.
When it was five metres away, another lightning ball darted above the canyon wall. The figure was coated in a slick black skin, obscuring i
ts features. Snow slithered down it, unable to gain any kind of hold. Several slippery bulges flared out from around the waist, two of them with pistol grips protruding.
‘Rebka?’
A secure link quested out from the blank figure. ‘Mother, what the hell are you doing out here?’
Angela started stuffing her hands back into the gauntlets. Just a few seconds’ exposure had sent the acute cold slithering through the fabric of her inner layers to nip at her fingers. ‘Protecting you. It’ll come for me. I can deal with it.’
Rebka came right up to her until their faces were centimetres apart; Angela covered by a balaclava wrapped in a scarf, Rebka clad in smooth metamolecule armour.
‘I really don’t think you can,’ Rebka said. ‘Come on, come back in.’
‘To sit in a biolab until it rips a door off and stabs us while we sleep? Not my style.’
‘The biolabs are tough. We can sit out the blizzard in them.’
‘It will go for the comm rockets. We need them just as much as the bioil.’
‘Mother! Please, I can deal with it.’
‘I am not letting you face that thing. I can’t. Not after everything we’ve done to make sure you live.’
‘Why won’t you trust me? These systems are quite capab— Aye hell.’
‘What?’ Angela turned to scour the blizzard, fearful what her daughter’s sensors had detected.
‘You must have two micro-tracers on you. The second one just got triggered.’
‘That son of a bitch Elston never did really trust me.’
Rebka slapped her shoulder. ‘Can’t think why. He’ll be out here soon. That’s all we need, a Gospel Warrior screwing things up.’
*
As soon as Vance gave the order for everyone to take shelter in the biolabs he found Angela was missing. Her identity icon showed she was in biolab-2 where he’d left her, but Paresh had tried to link to her, to check she’d made it back to the Tropic okay.
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