Biohell (24 page)

Mel fluttered her spider-hair
eyelids.

Franco gagged.

“Now then, when you two lovebirds
have quite finished?” said Keenan, and stooping, pulled Franco to his feet. Mel
growled, and Keenan shot her a dark look. “Not now, girl, we’ve got some
important business to attend.”

Franco slumped to his battered
couch. “I can’t get married to her like this,” moaned Franco.

“Listen, there are more important
matters afoot,” said Keenan. “Have you stopped to wonder
why
Mel has
been so afflicted?”

“I thought it might have had
something to do with the biomod upgrade thing she took,” said Franco miserably.

“You’re damn right mate,” said
Keenan. “Her and half the fucking population of The City.” Franco’s eyes went
wide. “That’s right. This thing is
planet-wide.
There are millions of
zombies out there, all waiting to tear off your head and shit down your neck.”

“I have to help her, Keenan.”
Franco’s face was filled with pain. “I have to get her back to normal. It’s my
girl. My bird. My
woman.
”

“Well, I have a mission down
here. You help me with mine, I’ll help you with yours.”

“What’s the gig?” Franco was
suddenly professional.

“My home planet of Galhari has
been overrun by
junks.”

“Them bastards? They’re a toxic
pollution. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Tell me about it. I have one of
their SinScripts, because these things are kind of semi-mechanical,
semi-sentient; they follow a set of instructions. I need to decode the disk,
find out what game they’re playing... and more importantly, how to fight them,
how to get rid of their toxic scourge.”

“How many invaded?” said Franco.

“Around ten million. I liaised
with Steinhauer. He’s lifted our Prohibition D. We’re back in business, Franco.
Combat K is back in business. Together again.”

“Rasta billy!” grinned Franco,
suddenly.

“The only problem we have is that
The City is now under QGM martial law. You—me—Mel, the lot of us, we’re
quarantined here, mate. We can’t leave. Not until we find out what’s going on.”
Keenan grinned, and slapped a woeful looking Franco on the back.

“You know,” said Franco, “a fella
goes to sleep with the whole world just fine, and he wakes up and the bloody
galaxy is out to feed him a big shit sandwich. What’s damn well happening? I
feel like I missed a bloody decade.”

“Don’t you keep your eye on the
news?”

Franco grunted. “I’m in love, ain’t
I?” He glanced at Mel. Shuddered. “I had
other
things on my mind.”

Keenan sat down next to Franco. “Listen
mate. We’ll sort her out, you see if we don’t. You said she took a biomod
upgrade. Which clinic did she attend? NanoTek have got a thousand this side of
the river.”

“No. She didn’t get it from a clinic.
She said...” Franco screwed up his face, “yeah, said it was cracked. An
illegal. Got it from a pirate out in the street. Friend of a friend, yeah?”

“A friend of a friend? Who?”

Again, Franco screwed up his
face, wrinkling his nose and ginger goatee. Then he nodded. “Down the market,
she said. A lad called Knuckles. Friend of Emily. Although I’ve never met
Emily.” Franco scratched at his beard. “You think that’s the way to go?” He
looked lost and lonely, forlorn in the middle of the couch. Like a little boy
in a big room, kicking his scuffed shoes.

Keenan patted his shoulder. “We’ll
get right on it, mate. I’ve a Shuttle parked down the street at Porky Paupers.
Come on, tool up.”

“You think we’ll meet resistance?”

Keenan eyed Mel warily. “I know
it, bruv.”

~ * ~

BLACK
AND WHITE NEWS CLIP

The City’s Premier News
Delivery Service

[available in:
print, TV, vid, mail, dig.bath, ident.implant, comm., kube, glass.wall, ggg,
galaxy.net
and eyelid transpose— all for a small monthly fee].

News clip GL/14/12/TBA:

NANOTEK

A CORPORATION AT WAR?

NanoTek is, as we know, the all-powerful
omniscient and
friendly
face of NanoTek Corporation based here, in The
City, in its alleys and gutters, skyblocks and cubeblocks, in the New York
Clusters, New Tek London, Old Athens, The Sydney Pipe and Cape Town Smash and
Shaghai and The Dregs, Sub-City, DOG Town and POSH Town right up to the Black
Rose Citadel itself— NanoTek’s heart and home and pumping core. NanoTek are
the
unrivalled and most affluent entity in Quad-Gal, single-handedly
responsible for the ability to cure death! NanoTek are indeed God—achieving a
technological apotheosis, for the biomods have brought the ability to cure any
disease known to man, to alter any aspect of a human organism from finger nail
and hair structure to factors such as weight gain and loss, facial
restructuring, skin tone and texture... the list goes on. NanoTek, the saviour
of modern medicine—able to rebuild organs on demand without recourse to opening
the body with a primitive
scalpel!
Able to increase sexual appetites,
decrease race hatred,
evolve
man to a God Platform from which he may
look down and survey with pride all he has achieved. What God created, NanoTek
perfected. 2-1 to NanoTek.

But...

There’s a worm at the rotten core of the
apple.

A chicken beak in the burger.

A severed finger, trailing tendons, in
the cheese pie.

Despite only being available for three
months on The City’s streets, the biomod (v1.0) human and alien upgrade has
been cracked, replicated and
pirated
by illegal and immoral code
monkeys. Where once NanoTek with global government support could control the
facilities of biomod upgrades and monitor activity via control pad dials and
GreenSource links to CoreCentral and GreenSource Mainframes, now the pirates
have stolen biomod chassis modules, re-programmed existing biomods,
deviated
and
twisted
the design from the original NanoTek blueprint and
ethic. In differing Dregsides across The City, these SubCs are
awash
with
pirated biomods... which allow humans and aliens to give themselves
immoral
and
perverse
upgrades never originally intended by NanoTek! Last week, one
suspicious suspect was arrested by the Justice SIMs—when he resisted arrest, it
took ten SIMs and twenty-four bullets to put him down, so fast, powerful and
agile had he become. And all by the abuse of illegitimate biomod technology!

A month ago, a Dreg porn syndicate was
raided—to find a man with three erections filming a movie with a series of
biomod deformed women, the most modest of which had turned her anus
and
mouth
into two extra vaginas, and the worst of which had grown her arm into a huge
flopping clitoris so that a gaggle of biomod deformed sexual deviants could
suckle their way to multiple biorgasm! And let’s not start on the pirates’
abuse of the biomods as a drug... the ultimate drug, able to give week-long
highs without risk of going cold turkey, and with the programmable ability to live
out twisted biomod drug-induced fantasies in differing periods of depraved
history.

My friends, this catalogue of abuse goes
on unchecked and, sadly, out of control. Where will it end? This sorry piracy
and abuse of the biomod human upgrade escalates and degrades with each passing
day. The GreenSource Mainframe reports more and more ‘snatch’ samples of
pirated biomods being used. They are on the increase, my friends, and have
infiltrated up through the Dregs and SubCs to mainframe life cycles. No longer
a pastime of the Non-Credits, now our wealthy executives, doctors, teachers,
bureaucrats, publishers, editors, inspectors, critics, thespians, all the
revered in our modern revolutionary and
evolutionary
society are
partaking in these pirated and dangerously
hacked
biomods with apparent
disregard for their own health and sanity!

We are slowly becoming a society of the
depraved: a circus act filled with freaks riding parasite-like on the back of
NanoTek’s abused and twisted technology. It must stop!
We
must stop this
farce. NanoTek must take responsibility for their abominable creation and
withdraw the biomod technology until it’s made foolproof! We, the people,
should not be subject to such a dangerous and out-of-control technological
deviancy. It must be stopped. And it must be stopped now!

News clip: END.

~ * ~

They
stood by the door, Franco in armoured jacket and pants, D5 shotgun strapped to
his back, Kekra machine pistols in his broad hands, a large variety of grenades
clipped to his belt, and a long
sha sha
knife strapped to one thigh. He
wore leather sandals on his feet showing toe-nails in serious need of a
clipping.

“At
last.
Are you
ready?”
growled Keenan.

Franco nodded. “Just need the
kitchen sink.”

“Very funny.”

“You think I’m joking? Great
weapon is a kitchen sink. Once clubbed a Slab to death with one. Especially if
you get a good hold on the taps. Gives you a bit of leverage, y’know?”

“Grwwlll.”

Mel stepped forward, her chain
jangling. Keenan glanced at her, then back at Franco, then back to the mutated
woman. “Wait a minute,” he said, as comprehension dawned.

“She’s got to come with us,” said
Franco.

“Oh no. We’ll go and find this
Knuckles guy, then bring help
back to Mel.
We’re not dragging an
eight-foot slab of muscled zombie torso on a damned mission. And that’s final.”

“But
Keenan,
she’s my
girl, my woman, my chick, my bird, my bit of fluff. I can’t leave her behind. Y’know.
With all the,” he shivered, “all them there zombie monsters wandering around.
She might get hurt.”

Keenan eyed the rippling muscles,
the jaw which could chew through hull steel, the razor talons. “What, in the
name of fuck, is going to hurt
that?”

“Hey, she’s a she, not a
that.
And you never know!”

“Franco, no.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“She’ll compromise the mission.”

“She
is
the mission.”

Keenan stamped his foot. “Dickhead,
listen, she’ll draw attention to us like groupies to an arse-ugly rock star.
She’ll be fine here, just leave her... the TV remote. Or something.”

Franco stared with puppy dog eyes
at Mel. “Sor-
reee
love. Keenan says no.”

Mel barked, a savage canine
ejection. She bared her teeth and growled again. “Grwwll.”

Keenan took a step back. He
clenched his teeth tight, his Techrim not-quite pointing at Franco’s fiancée.
He bit back a flood of jokes about Franco’s woman being
a dog.
“Come on
Cam, back me up on this one. We can’t drag an eight-foot mutant on a mission.”

“Actually,” said Cam, “I think
Mel could well be beneficial to our very survival in this place. And having her
aboard will actually
reduce
our mission time if we do happen find a cure
for her, ahem, condition. Speaking logically, of course.”

Keenan glared at Cam—just as a
shuffling sound came from the stairwell. Keenan whirled, but Mel was already
bounding past him, talons lashing out as the bulky zombie appeared, strips of
skin hanging from its mutated face, pointed teeth bared with yellow mucus,
hands like claws scrabbling at the pistol in its human-skin belt. Mel’s talons
hammered the creature, which toppled backwards down the stairs with a series of
sickening, bone-breaking crunches.

Everybody froze.

Franco beamed. “See! See what she
did! There’s a good girl Melanie! Atta girl!”

“OK,” said Keenan, grimly. He
deflated. “OK. I relinquish. Melanie can come on the mission.” She turned and
growled at him, long drools of saliva pooling from her crooked maw. He eyed the
black blood on her talons.
Dangerous,
screamed his mind. “Just make sure
you keep her on a damned tight leash.”