Biohell (48 page)

“It’s derelict,” said Franco, who
had crept up beside Keenan.

“Better for us, no?”

Franco rubbed his ginger beard. “I
don’t like it.”

“You don’t like anything.”

“It smells fishy.”

“No, Franco, that’s just your
food pack.”

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with
anchovies.”

“I agree. On a pizza. But eating
them from a jar? With a spoon? Franco, you’re a culinary pervert. “

“Where do you want me to stop,
Keenan?”

Keenan peered outside. They’d
reached the haulage depot’s huge gates which hung from twisted, battered hinges
as large as his torso. Beyond, a tightly packed swathe of SlamTruk cabs linked
to TitanTrailers spun away as far as the eye could see, their long, corrugated
flanks emblazoned with a colourful logo:

PORKY PAUPER’S FAST-FOOD BURGERS!

GO ON, BE A PORKER!

“It’s too quiet,” said Franco.

“Walk her through,” instructed
Keenan.

MICHELLE eased between rows of
giant wagons, many with burst tyres, buckled axles and smashed flanks. Evidence
of recent battle. Franco pointed out an arc of bullet holes down one truck, and
as MICHELLE moved onwards, towards the depot itself, the signs and scars of war
increased. A whole row of SlamTruks had been torched and sat, blackened, melted
into the concretealloy. Others had been turned over, and yet more blasted into
a fusion of melted, twisted steel and alloy, charcoal and blue, melded by the
phenomenal heat of rampaging detonation.

“Someone’s been having fun,” said
Keenan.

“Boys and their toys,” observed
Franco.

“Head towards the back, around
the depot building. There should be an entrance to the old SPIRAL SP1_store. If
we’re lucky. And it’s not been raided.”

“They’d need entrance codes,”
said Franco. “Actually, how the hell are
we
gonna get in?”

Keenan smiled, and pointed at
Cam. “We’ve got a special permit,” he said.

~ * ~

They
stood on the flat expanse of concretealloy. A cold wind hushed over them. The
oil snow had stopped, but the ground was slick with slush, treacherous, and the
whole world seemed to have paused, a tableau of hellish desolation.

Knuckles shivered, and moved to
stand beside Keenan. “I want to come with you.”

“You want a weapon, lad?”

Knuckles glanced down at his
rusted machete. “This seems a little... primitive. For those we are to face.”

“You can’t come into battle,
Knuckles. You’re...” Keenan stopped. He stared into the concentration of pain
which made up the young orphan’s face.

“Only a kid?”

Keenan gave a nod.

“This world has aged me. I am a
man, now, I think.”

Keenan said nothing, but moved to
an almost invisible rectangle of alloy-concrete. Nearby, a huge,
twenty-feet-tall TitanTrailer lay, twisted and buckled, broken almost in two.
The bomb blast which destroyed the wagon must have been huge.

“Cam? Can you get us in?”

“I’m scanning now.” The small
PopBot rotated, blue lights flickering on his casing. “The codes are standard
military issue. Should take me a few minutes to hunt down entry signatures.”

“OK.” Keenan lit a cigarette, and
watched Olga sidling over to Franco. He pulled free his Techrim and checked the
mag, then cocked the weapon and stared off over the barrage of battered trucks
with their obesity-inducing logos. Franco was right. It was far too quiet.

“Franco?”

“Yeah boss?”

“You got those Kekras primed?”

Franco wrestled Olga’s hand from
his hip and gave her a stinging slap. She smiled coquettishly at him and
mouthed the words,
my hero.
He frowned. “Yeah Keenan. You expecting
trouble?”

“I can smell it,” he said, voice
a whisper.

His eyes roved across the massive
open expanses of alloy-concrete. His eyes narrowed. Distantly, engines rumbled.
Flashes lit the sky. Some kind of battle was being fought, and it was moving
toward them, like a remote storm. Tracer lit the heavens, flashing green and
purple like tiny, distant fireworks.

“We’ve got time,” said Franco.

Keenan nodded.

“We’re in,” said Cam. There came
a long, low buzz. Then a perfect rectangular outline of steel-concrete suddenly
dropped into a ramp and lights sprang to life illuminating a stark metal
interior. Keenan strode down the ramp, followed by Franco, Olga and Knuckles.
Xakus remained outside, talking in hushed tones to MICHELLE. The giant
bio-machine crooned, sitting down with a
crash
that put a twenty-foot
crack in the yard.

Keenan felt nervous as his boots
thudded the ramp. Then the room opened revealing a stock-pile of guns,
ammunitions, rockets, armour, bombs, and every other ancillary piece of
equipment a soldier could ever need.

Keenan smiled, relief etched acid
on his face as Franco pushed past him and raised hands to the stark metal
heavens a few feet overhead. He beamed a ginger beam, and said without a trace
of mockery, “Let’s offer up a prayer to our Host! Porky Pauper! May The Plump
One’s Burgers Make People Fat For Ever More! Amen!”

Keenan grabbed a gleaming, oiled
MPK and checked the mechanism. It clicked and clacked, neatly. He slotted home
a magazine, aimed at a distant target, and fired off a thirty round burst.
Smoke filled the chamber. The target, at the far end of the underground store,
sat battered and torn and ragged under metal onslaught.

Keenan nodded, smoke stinging his
eyes. He pulled free his cigarette. Gazed over the group.

“Let’s tool up,” he said. “And go
to war.”

~ * ~

They
emerged from the chamber carrying canvas sacks. Franco and Knuckles had donned
WarSuits, but Xakus had turned down the offer of armour. He was a scholar, an
inventor, not a soldier, he said. Olga had tried on various of the larger
WarSuits, but they buzzed and hissed in protest as she tried to struggle into
Permatex designed for squaddies, not sumo wrestlers. Eventually, she resigned
herself to several Titanium-kevlar panels, strapped to torso, arms and legs,
and giving her the look of a giant, somewhat obese, insect.

Keenan stocked up on ammunition,
and carried two MPKs, one slotted, on his back, one slung against his chest. He’d
found fresh stocks of 11mm ammunition for his Techrim. With this, he was happy.

Knuckles found himself two slim
Makarov pistols and a small stash of ammunition. Olga had two D5 shotguns
slotted against her back, and Xakus turned down the offer of weapons with a
weak smile. “I am a pacifist, at heart,” he said. “I abhor weapons of all
kinds. I could never kill another man. Or... zombie.” Franco couldn’t bring
himself to point out that MICHELLE was the most fearsome weapon he’d ever seen
in his life; the irony knocked him out.

However, it was Franco, as usual,
who behaved like a born-again hedonist. What he carried could only be described
as an
orgy
of weapons. He had five D5 shotguns on his back, nestling in
what he proudly nicknamed his canvas shotgun
quiver,
alongside a Bausch
& Harris Sniper Rifle with SSGK digital sights. Two MPKs crossed his chest.
Four Kekra machine pistols sat on his hips. Twin belts crisscrossed his chest
sporting all manner of bombs and grenades, including infamous BABEs and SPUKEs.
In his utility belt were myriad military-spec knife blades: flick knives,
retractable knives, throwing knives, homing knives, exploding knives, poison
knives, and even a couple with pre-programmable AI function. Finally, to round
off his now incredibly stocky appearance, he wore tri-goggles against his head
which could be pulled down over his eyes to provide infra-red, night-sight,
recording functions, green-key and TIP (target identification priority) systems
which linked to the AI knives on his belt.

Franco beamed.

“Like a kid in a sweet shop,”
drawled Keenan, lighting another cigarette. Snow swirled aimlessly in the air.

“Hey, I wouldn’t want to get
caught unprepared.”

“That’ll never happen,” said
Keenan, eyeing him up and down. “What are the goggles for?”

“They’re not goggles. They’re
TRI-SPIES. All the rage, apparently.”

“You mean they bring
on
rage,”
said Keenan, watching as they slipped down over Franco’s nose for the third
time. “Look, the strap’s too long. Let me shorten it for you.”

“No, it’s already on its shortest
setting.”

“And there’s me thinking you had
a big head.”

“Funny, Keenan. Amusing. Listen,
it’s the bloody army! Skimping on R&D. Either that, or all those SPIRAL
buggers had huge bulbous skulls.” He wrestled the goggles back onto his
forehead, and switched on a beam. A red laser swept the group.

“Don’t go pointing that where you
shouldn’t,” warned Keenan, eyes tracing the skyline. The battle was definitely
getting closer. Now they could hear a
crump
of explosions, and a muffled
rattle of automatic gunfire.

“Who’s fighting who?” said
Franco.

“Not our problem,” said Keenan.
He glanced around at the rag-tag band, and gave an internal sigh. Gone were the
simple days of solo infiltration. Keenan hated missions where he had to
baby-sit. It made life
much
more difficult. “We ready? We tooled up?”

The group nodded, and moved back
towards MICHELLE.

There, they halted.

Beyond her, perhaps thirty metres
away, squatted five evil, matt-black HTanks, engines on silent stealth mode,
huge, twin-barrel guns pointing directly towards the group.

They froze. Those guns were
menacing.

There came a click, and a hatch
slid open. A SIM appeared, poking his head from the oval and levering himself
up on elbows. His eyes clicked as he focused on the group. His chrome-masked
face and black armour shone, as if polished by somebody with a strong right
elbow, an eye for anal precision, and a terminal obsession for that very
special
Darth Vader
gleam.

Keenan heard Franco groan.

“You know him?”

“It was a while back,” said
Franco, voice hoarse, eyes roving for an escape route.

“I am Justice D,” said the SIM. “The
humans are to throw down their weapons and surrender immediately. The humans
are not to make a fuss.” He smiled, then. It looked wrong on his face. “Or
Justice D will be
forced
to blow all life from frail human shit-sacks.”

~ * ~

“Well,
well, well,” said Franco, moving forward with hands above his head. “If it isn’t
my old chum Justice D. I remember you, laddie. You need to get yourself a sense
of humour injection, and pronto!” Franco turned, and started making frantic
facial gestures at Keenan... who gave a single nod of understanding.

The Justice SIM’s face was a
blank chrome mask. When he spoke, his lips moved a touch out of synch with his
enunciated words, as if the SIM was a product of a badly dubbed Japachinese
B-movie.

“I remember you, Franco Haggis.
You helped slaughter a considerable number of my colleagues on the roof of the
Razor Syndicate a while back. I remember it as if it was yesterday, loading
slack broken punctured bodies into float-carts ready for reintegration in The
Great Wheel.” His mechanical eyes shifted, clicking. “And you, Keenan. You were
part of that extermination group.”