Biohell (58 page)

Franco rolled onto his belly,
pushed himself to his knees, stared in horror at the black veins standing out
across the backs of his hands. “I remember.” He spoke slowly, slurring a
little. The wires were in his brain, interfering with motor function. “What
happened... to Voloshko?”

“Took a long walk off a short
plank.
Hurry up!”

Franco staggered up, grabbed
Keenan’s arms, but did not have the strength to lift his comrade. Instead, he
grunted and dragged Keenan, bumping his friend’s body across the organic floor
as he limped after a fast retreating Cam.

Xakus rushed in, grabbing at
Keenan and helping Franco lift the stocky soldier. Between them, they staggered
on.

“What the fuck happened to you,
Mr Judas?” snapped Franco, glaring sideways at the old professor.

“I am a man of peace, not violence.
I was stealing the machinery we need to decode the junk’s Sin-Script.” He
lifted a small, colourless, glossy box, which gleamed and seemed to squirm in
the black man’s fist. “A CryptorBox. We all had our specific jobs to do. I did
mine. Now let’s move, and stop your moaning!”

“Hah!”

“We’re near the roof,” said Cam. “Voloshko
has a squad of Apache choppers—if the damn DetBots haven’t wasted them! We can
get ourselves an airlift.”

Panting, sweat gleaming on his
face, Franco stopped, knelt, and was sick.

Cam swerved back. Dropped to
Franco. “If you don’t move your arse, soldier, we’ll be dead in two minutes.
There’s thousands more detonation Pop-Bots descending on this tower right now!
Do... you... damn well understand?”

Franco wiped his mouth with the
back of his skein-infested hand. Subcutaneously, they gleamed. He nodded.
Stood. Took his hold on Keenan.

“How long has he got?”

“Three minutes. Which is
academic. Soon, Franco, we’ll all be
sushi.”

Franco limped after Cam, up
several sloped floors, and between him and Xakus they managed to get Keenan
onto The Hammer Syndicate’s roof. Cold air blasted them. The wind howled a
mournful song. Snow danced diagonal jigs.

Deep down, beneath boots and
sandals, more explosions detonated like muffled ordinance. The organotower
shuddered. It swayed beneath them, and the whole chassis quivered constantly,
as if in terminal seizure.

As Cam predicted, many Apache
choppers were nothing more than glowing shrapnel, parts scattered like comedy
dice across the hole-infested roof. The two men staggered with Keenan towards
an unmolested vehicle, skirting wide, quivering gaps in the floor showing
twitching bone and gleaming gristle.

“Quick!” howled Cam. “The main
wave is here!”

Deep below, near the organotower’s
foundation, hundreds and hundreds of detonations ignited simultaneously. The
Hammer HQ swayed dangerously, a dying erection, and started to slide, slowly,
flapping over in a slow-motion stop-motion topple—

Franco dragged Keenan onto the
Apache, clambered into the cockpit, and slammed the starter. Rotors began a
slow turn. In the back, Xakus unzipped Keenan’s WarSuit and stared with horror
at the mesh of wires beneath the soldier’s bruised and inflamed skin.

“You perform heart massage, I’ll
extract the wires,” said Cam.

The organotower, in its lazy
slide, began to actually scream, a deafening, squealing, gnashing sound
interspersed with millions of crackling, snapping bone cracks. Still the
DetBots exploded, ignited, detonated, blasting flesh and gristle and sinew and
bone. Fires burned. Raged. The stench of scorched vegetable flesh flowed up
through the snow like a mushroom cloud.

“Come on, come on!” snapped
Franco. The rotors were buzzing, dicing black snow.

Franco felt himself start to
shift. Before him, the tower swayed and tilted in a nauseating parody. The
Apache began a slow slide towards the edge of the bomb-blasted roof. Franco
frantically tried to take-off, but the Apache gave a simple warning
buzz.
No,
it seemed to be saying. Go and find another chopper.

Cam, rotating beside Keenan’s
chest, inserted a needle. Something glowed. Cam flowed inside, flowed with the
dormant skein wires using their own micro-molecular pathways. He observed a
spiral of thousands of strands encasing Keenan’s heart, a black coil
suffocating an electric motor. Tutting, Cam began to burn away the wires from
inside Keenan’s chest cavity; with digital winces, he tried to ignore the
scorching of Keenan’s actual heart fibres.

Outside in the snow, once again
Franco tried to panic-leap the Apache into the air. Again, it buzzed at him and
he scowled his legendary Franco scowl, all eyebrows and squinty hatred.

“Bastard machine! Fly you bastard
of a bastard’s bastard!” He thumped the console. “Come on, I say,
fly you
bastard!”

The Apache reached the edge of
the roof, runners grinding. Below, in darkness and gloom and falling snow, the
whole of The City seemed to rear up like a million-headed snake to mock Franco
with each and every lisping head. Franco stared at his own ghost-reflection
superimposed against the Apache’s cockpit, a HUD mannequin. His face was nearly
entirely black, hundreds of minute swirls beneath his face giving him the
appearance of suffering a bizarre tattoo epilogue.

More detonations rocked, deep
down below... and this time, they did not stop. On and on they boomed,
thousands of final concussions slamming the remaining fabric holding the
monolithic structure in place. And with a shudder like widow’s grief the
organotower, finally, died...

Agonisingly, it tilted.

The Apache slid free of the
summit.

And with a scream Franco fell...

~ * ~

Voloshko
hit the ground
bard.
Six-hundred and ninety-eight floors was a long way
to fall. His body slammed the earth, compressed, and within his organic sack he
felt the sickening crunches as his bones and chassis collapsed, crushed,
disintegrated, many components ground into powder, floating like dust in blood
both human and alien: mingled and combined. Voloshko felt his spine compress to
become an organic corrugation. He felt his skull flatten, bouncing from
concrete to give him instant brain damage; a total pulping.

He lay, contorted at impossible
angles, fuming.

He watched the organotower fall,
as if in slow-motion, through swirling black snow. It keeled over, crunching
through various other buildings and taking them down with it. The last of the
straggling, final detonations boomed through darkness until only a gentle
sound, as of running water, remained; that, and the blanketing, muffled
silence, of the snow.

Voloshko tried to move. But his
spine and limbs no longer worked.

He settled his burning anger on
NanoTek. On Dr Oz.

Had Dr Oz discovered Voloshko’s
plans to overthrow him?

Had Dr Oz realised Voloshko was
behind the bio-mod hacking and piracy?

Or was the total annihilation of
The Hammer Syndicate simply a cheap shot attempt at removing Keenan from the
face of the planet?

It mattered not. The Hammer
Syndicate had served its purpose. And NanoTek had used a premiere war machine
to put the syndicate out of business.

Voloshko frowned, the look
strange on his metallic face. He tried again to move, but could not.
Frustration gnawed him like a maggot, eating his heart from the inside out.

Come on, he thought. Where are
you. Where are you? What’s taking so long?

A terrible thought flowered in
his brain. If it was NanoTek who had betrayed the Syndicate... then maybe the
gift
was also a betrayal? A final mockery? A two-fingered salute to the most
powerful ruling Syndicate on the planet?

Time. It was supposed to take
time.

Voloshko relaxed. Sighed. He
allowed his pulped and liquid mind to swim, drifting lazily back through long
hot centuries, always hot, to the days with his brother Mr Max... and the
others of their clan, their breed, their tribe.

He floated along distant timelines,
half-forgotten. To their youth, on the planet which one day became known as
Sick World... The world for the ill, the deformed, the dying and the dead. The
place where he had
developed
his Seed Hunter abilities. The place where
he had ceased to
be
human, instead having to wear a human skin which in
itself mocked him with ersatz physiology. To masquerade as that which you had
been born! The shame. The shame burned him...

He awoke, to find the burning was
real. Inside his bones. Inside his metal bones. Inside his crushed spine.
Inside his eyes. Inside his pulped and gooey-liquid brain.

Carefully, the nanobots began to
rebuild Voloshko.

Carefully, they began his
restructuring.

~ * ~

“Aiiieee!”
screamed Franco, waggling the joystick and slapping at buttons randomly. They
slammed through the snow, the organotower falling after them, behind them, and
then above them. Franco checked his rear-view mirrors. Shit. Yep. There it was.
Several billions of tonnes of dead organic slab chasing him vertically through
the atmosphere. Stubbornly, the Apache still refused to operate, despite rotors
whamming
round in a blur of slivered snowflakes...

“It’s the red button, retard,”
came Cam’s drawl.

Franco slammed the big red
button, marked helpfully in white letters that read: FLY.

The Apache lit afterburners,
banked, and screamed low through the city streets. Franco was pushed back in
his seat, veined cheeks wobbling as far behind the organotower slammed the
ground like a billion tonnes of raw meat on the biggest butcher’s slab ever
carved. Franco, fully awake now in fresh air and fresher fear, tugged and
jerked on the joystick like an automaton as they smashed a random, insane dance
ten feet from the ground following roads filled with zombies and burning,
overturned cars.

“Arrr
hhh!”
he managed after a while, as he
rounded a corner, rotors taking alloy shavings from the edge of a building, and
yanked back on the controls to send them searing like a rocket up up into cold
high brittle heavens.

A minute later, Franco finally
had the chopper under his control, and hovering steadily, humming. He released
a pent-up breath. Then he beamed, grinning back at Cam and Xakus. “I did it! I
got us out of there! I’m a hero, I am! The man of the moment! I saved the day!”
Then his eyes fell on Keenan, and he paled, despite the dead skeins beneath his
own, quivering, rancid skin. “Will he be OK?”

“He’s breathing,” confirmed Cam,
and even as the PopBot spoke Keenan’s eyes flickered open. They were laced with
black swirls. He focused on Cam, then Xakus, then a grinning Franco who bounded
forward, dropped to his knees, and hugged Keenan.

“Whoa, mate,” croaked Keenan. “I’m
still a bit... tender.”

“It’ll take another hour to
remove all the skein strands,” said Cam mellifluously.

“What happened to Voloshko?”

“I helped him learn to fly.” Cam
sounded smug.

“And the organotower? Why the
detonations?”

“They were DetBots. NanoTek’s
finest. We can only assume NanoTek had some grievance with The Hammer Syndicate
and decided to go to war.”

“Yes, I can confirm NanoTek
certainly has the technology. It’s a common misconception the computing giant
is simply an over-exaggerated software house.” Xakus sat, one hand run halfway
through his bushed white hair, his face weary with exhaustion and fear. “NanoTek
uses and abuses. Believe me, it has teeth. Whatever the reasons, it matters
little to us know. We have the CryptorBox. I can use it to analyse the junk’s
SinScript... although it may take a little time, and I will need a massive
power source.”