Biohell (12 page)

News clip: END.

~ * ~

“He’s
still out there,” said Slick. His voice was low and disguised the tremor. Sweat
painted a sheen on his beautiful, battered brow. Franco nodded, and crept
across the warehouse floor, boots crunching bullet-decimated, cubed glass.

Miniguns screamed and bullets
slammed through the windows and walls of the warehouse, pounding the building
into submission as Franco dived, sliding over glass and covering his head with
his hands. Slick cowered in the corner, clutching a length of chain, and
glanced right where ten holes had appeared in the powdered brickwork. He could
see a swathe of distant warehouses far below.

The firing stopped, and Franco
glanced up. His face was sour. He tilted his head and lifted his hand. In old Combat
K infantry sign, he said,
They are using sonic monitors.

Slick nodded.
You sure you can
line him up?

I’ll do my best.

Franco eased himself across the
floor, trying to avoid the broken glass until he was against the wall. Several
storeys below, he could see warehouses stretching off as far as the eye could
see. The rotors of the Apache thumped a sonic concussion as it banked and
whined. Franco grimaced. Shit. How had he ended up in this predicament? A
hunted man?
Again?

He locked his D5 shotgun to his
back, and checked his Makarov 9mm. A pistol against a thundering war machine?
Franco shook his head, then grinned. Hell, he’d had worse odds.

He edged towards the window,
careful not to make a sound. Voloshko’s men were monitoring for even the
tiniest of movements, hunting Franco and Slick like furry rodents in a burrow.

Franco reached the window.
Outside, the sky was brightening. Fireworks still crackled through the heavens
and The Quantum Carnival was now, officially, in full swing, despite it being
the middle of the night, or ‘night period’ as it had become known.

Again the Apache unleashed a
payload of bullets. Franco cowered as metal ate through bricks and spun on
trails of red dust through the air. Suddenly, Franco lunged into the space
where the window had been—and the Apache squatted, hovering, guns smoking and
rotors flickering in a blur. The machine nudged forward and Franco started to
fire, Makarov thumping his palm as bullets struck the cockpit and, behind the
bullet-proof glass, the pilot smiled. Bullets zipped and whined, ricocheting
off the machine. The pilot shrugged—as if to say, “Good try mate. Better luck
next time.”

“Now,” hissed Franco.

As the Apache’s pilot took up
tension on the mini-gun trigger, so Slick appeared at a second window, heavy
chain links in his hands, and watched the pilot’s head snap right to focus on
him. He hurled the coil of chain through smashed panels of glass. The chain
sailed, uncurling like a huge metal snake, and looped over the Apache’s short,
stubby wing and left-hand minigun. In reflex the pilot jerked on his control
stick, and the Apache’s engines whined as it lifted, banking. The chain slid
across the floor of the old warehouse chamber, Slick nimbly leaping over its
fast-slithering length... which went suddenly taut.

Franco and Slick looked at one
another.

There came a groan, deep and
reverberating, and both men glanced to where they’d fastened the chain to a
huge machine of old, rusting iron, bigger than a house, a squat ugly behemoth
whose function was lost in time and degradation. It would take more than ten
Apaches to lift the hulk. Slick’s face broke into a nasty grimace.

Franco leaned out of the window,
watched the Apache struggling, engines screaming now. Fire erupted from
exhausts. The chain ground a groove against brickwork, and as Slick appeared at
a second window both men watched the war machine sway like a kite on a line,
then drop, crashing into the wall, runners folding like buckled toffee,
spinning rotors connecting with stone and brick and collapsing in on themselves
with a grinding smashing howling cacophony of destructing metal. The Apache
compressed. Folded. There was a click of detonation and the machine was
consumed in a raging fireball as Franco and Slick skipped back, a wall of fire
slamming along the vertical flanks of the building.

Fire roared, and metal screeched.

“Merry Quantum Carnival Day,”
said Franco.

“You’re a devious bastard.”

“They don’t call me Franco ‘Devious
Bugger’ Haggis for nothing, y’know. Come on. Let’s get out of here—before
Voloshko sends some more of his goons.”

“Amen to that.”

~ * ~

People
were cheering in the streets. Dancing and singing and drinking. Franco and
Slick hurried along, glancing regularly behind. They entered an alleyway,
littered with burnt-out firework stubs. They moved cautiously, still checking
their back-trail, Slick nursing his wounded and battered shell. The two
ex-Combat K men stopped outside a Dreg bar named The Fist Fuck. Noise rattled
thin glass windows and light and smoke spilled from various bullet holes. Nice
place, thought Franco as he sidled warily towards a huge 2400cc Aprilia TSV—a
race bike which had been crashed and had its fairings stripped to reveal the
brutality of the acid_alloy-cooled engine beneath. A high set of handlebars had
been welded to the top yoke and fat bald tyres sat gleaming, oil-drenched,
beneath quad sports cans. Franco fingered the wiring, looking around with his
Makarov drawn and ready, then deftly made several cuts and twists. Being a bike
already abused by the caress of thieves, the triple immobilisers had been
bypassed—probably a professional job from one of the outfitters which
specialised in stealing rich Tek-side equipment, circumventing advanced
protection electronics and then selling it on in the Dregs. Bikes were the
favourite mode of transport down in the Dregs due to the physically narrow and
restrictive nature of Sub-C life. There were many localities and districts
which could not be reached by car. This made Franco’s current position healthier.

Franco fired the motor, revved
the bike hard with a scream of raw engine ferocity, threw his leg over the hard
sports seat and grinned as Slick jumped on the back. Dropping the clutch he
left a line of rubber against concrete and zipped away into the hazy smog-gloom
of Dregside early morning. Behind, a group of men spilled from the pub shouting
abuse; Franco banked left between two narrow walls of concrete and wheelied
over a long metal ramp, jumping with a roar of disengaged engine to land in a
long narrow courtyard beneath towering cube-scrapers.

Franco fed more fuel into the
Aprilia’s hungry engine, and the bike bellowed as it stretched its legs and
thundered down narrow alleyways, exhaust
booms
echoing from wall to wall
to wall in a curious song of metal synchronicity. Revellers and whores leapt
hurriedly out of his way and Franco watched with cool detached amusement as
stocky branded men and gangsters with swirling overcoats danced for him at the
right-hand blip of this howling weapon of mass corruption.

Left and right he cannoned, the
Aprilia’s needle dancing up to over 180 kph—an insane speed for the Dregs. He
sped past crash-barriers at head height, protecting roads blockaded from the
Dregs and carrying thick streams of city traffic beyond; under arched bridges
the Aprilia spun, Franco’s knee dusting the dirt as the Aprilia’s powerful
lights cut slices from the gloom pie.

“Franco, slow down!” shouted
Slick.

“What?”

“Slowdown!”

“I can’t hear you!”

After twenty minutes of roaring
insanity, Franco finally decided he’d put enough distance between the two men
and impending murder. He slowed the growling motor and rolled to a halt, tyres
crunching and sliding a little on gravel. People were dancing in the street,
drinking and gyrating. They ignored the two men.

Franco killed the engine and
kicked the bike onto its side-stand where it clicked as if in annoyance at
being switched off; and the two men moved down towards the boarded doors of an
old metro station, passing between poor ravers and winos getting jiggy into the
jig of The Quantum Carnival. Smoke and steam billowed from the murky depths of
the disused station, and three figures moved forward with battered scratched
Uzis when they saw the approach—but Slick smiled and the men returned grim smiles
through dirt-matted beards.

“You know them?” hissed Franco,
twitchy, hand straying to his D5.

“Yeah. They’re not bad men. Just
your usual Dregside poorlifes.”

“You OK?” asked one man, peering
hard at Slick’s battered face. “You look like you’ve been through the shit.”

“I’ll live.” Slick took a
proffered cigarette from the man. “Which is more than I can say for the other
bastards.”

Slick dropped the men some old
dollars, slid through the doors and led Franco into the ancient disused tunnel
network. Inside, even the roar of still exploding fireworks was muffled. He
picked his way with care through a maze of corridors, and after an hour of
walking emerged through more guarded barriers into TekCity Central. Fluttering
Search PopBots came whirling over to the two men, little alloy globes with high
trailing flexible antennas, and both Franco and Slick allowed them to give
retina scans to check their Credit Rating.

The poor weren’t allowed onto
NewLon streets.

With tiny
blips
and green
LEDs both men were allowed to move on. If they had failed the
test
— been
found to have negative Credit Status—then Justice SIMs would have been alerted
and intrusion from Sub-C logged. Whilst not breaking the law, it was...
frowned
upon.
And people who strayed were persuaded otherwise. Normally with a
laser tube.

Franco and Slick stood for a
while, watching the insanity of the early morning party. The City had come...
alive.
Humans and aliens, SIMs and Slabs, all danced and sang in the streets,
drank and fornicated in the gutters, huge walls of living flesh meandering and
joyful and the feeling of celebration crept into them, into their veins and
souls and Franco sagged, weariness slamming him.

“You OK?” Slick looked concerned.

“A long night,” grinned Franco. “How
you holding up?”

Slick, who had been analysing his
wounds, shook his head. “Three cracked ribs, a broken finger, and torn
ligaments in my groin and ankle. Plus the usual cuts and scrapes. But it could
have been worse.” He stared hard into Franco’s eyes. Took the little man by his
shoulders and smiled. “I owe you one, mate.”

“Ach, think nothing of it.”

“I still have contacts. Combat K
contacts. You ever need a favour, you look me up.”

Franco nodded. Sighed. “I’ll keep
it in mind, Slick. Now, you look after yourself.”

“Be careful, Franco.”

“Voloshko doesn’t even know where
I live. I faked my application. I’ve never trusted the Seven Syndicates.
Bastards, to a man.”

“Even so.”

Franco watched Slick disappear
into the throng. Music blatted around him, an irritant. And, despite Franco’s
usual party-animal nature, his love of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, all he
wanted now, amazingly, was a hot mug of cocoa, a kiss from Mel, and his comfy
bed.

Franco trudged through the
cheering, singing crowds, towards his rest, and only when he was on the
fifty-eighth step leading to his apartment did he curse.

“Hot damn and bloody buggers!” He’d
forgotten the fireworks.
And
the jasmine oil.

~ * ~

The
apartment squatted in gloom, black-out curtains killing early-morning light. A
strange silence seemed to have enveloped the room, and Franco, remembering his
action-packed night, shivered.

What if...

What if Voloshko
had
discovered
where he lived?

What if Voloshko had sent
killers, or kidnappers, for Mel?