Biohell (64 page)

Franco blinked. “Shit.”

“What is it?”

They stopped; were treading
water. The darkness seemed infinite. Out there, they were terribly alone.

“I was having a good ol’
daydream; then I remembered Shelly.”

“The first wife? The one who
cleaned you out?”

Franco nodded, face bitter. Then
he brightened. “Still. I look at the positives, right? At
least
she set
me on the road to sexual exploration with all manner of deviants.” He beamed.

“Franco, you’d find happiness in
cancer, joy in a brain haemorrhage, ecstasy in instant death.”

“Aye.” He thought. “I’m the man
who put the tit into hepatitis.” He beamed. “Still! All those STDs are gone now
and solved! No more itchy scratchy for this sexual athlete!”

“Come on,” growled Keenan. “We’ve
got a long way to go.”

“Aye.”

“And Franco?”

“Aye?”

“Keep your thoughts to yourself
in the future, there’s a good lad.”

~ * ~

“I
can see it!”

Keenan and Franco stopped,
treading water and nudging at bobbing filth in the darkness. Silence reigned,
except for the roll of the ocean, and the occasional slap of water. Sometimes,
in the depths beneath them, a huge and bass grumbling could be heard, almost
felt,
like some titanic machine roaring in subdued and muffled operation. Now,
however, this mechanical leviathan had receded. Even Xakus with his knowledge
of The City could not explain the aural phenomenon.

Keenan squinted. “Yes,” he
breathed, feeling at once a terrible fear and apprehension, but at the same
time an excitement at stretching for the climax of the mission. Would Xakus
decode the SinScript and decipher why the scourge of invading junks desired
Galhari? Would Mel change back to human and be fit and healthy, and ready to marry
her beloved Franco? And would NanoTek own up to having a hand in the terrible
deformations caused by their deviated unsafe biomod technology?

From their ocean platter, NanoTek
HQ, the Black Rose Citadel, was ominous indeed. Xakus had said it was an island,
but had not emphasised its sheer
scale.

The Citadel was a fortress
island, a vast, sheer, black-walled monstrosity that reared high and
impenetrable and covered the twenty-square-kilometre island in its rocky
entirety. In the gloom, the massive slick walls gleamed, gloss, solid, smooth,
without window or hand-hold or any possible means of ascent.

“How can we climb that?” said
Franco, in awe.

“They have gates, right? A means
of entry? Up on the freeway bridge?”

Xakus smiled weakly. “Yes, there
are bridge connections to the mainland, but these retract into the body of The
Citadel leaving nothing but a smooth and impassable wall. However, this rarely
happens. I assumed these bridges would be open, but looking now,” Xakus glanced
back over his shoulder, then tracked across the dark ocean, “it would appear
everything has been shut down. They’ve closed everything. NanoTek has retreated
into its bombproof shell.”

“We need an air infiltration,
then,” said Franco.

Xakus shook his head. He was
shivering, and his teeth chattered despite electronic thermal aid. “No. The
shell analogy was a good one; the whole place is built to withstand aircraft,
bombs, nukes, the lot. It would take serious industrial weaponry to carve a
hole in NanoTek.”

“Like an IMS?” Franco beamed,
waving the Industrial Molecule Stripper around dangerously; the two men ducked.

“No,” snapped Xakus. “They
thought of that, also. The walls are covered in a type of sub-atomic electronic
mesh; it can absorb an IMS beam and redistribute to source.”

“You mean it bounces it back on
the user?”

Xakus nodded. “Yes. Very
effective.”

“Are you sure?” Franco was
scowling.

Xakus gestured at the distant
citadel. “Try it. Even from this distance, it
will
work.”

Franco stared at the Black Rose
HQ. Finally, he said, “No.”

“Good choice. The only way I can
think of gaining entry is beneath the ocean. The HQ descends for two or three
kilometres, although my clearance never allowed such immersion. Down there,
beneath the black, there are long flowing sea-corridors, hubs, OctoStrands and
VertClicks. There’s a city down there, gentlemen; a city dedicated to
technology. A world dedicated to the human upgrade.” He smiled, his face the
mask of the sardonic, and tinged by the twitch of the insane.

“The GreenSource Mainframe is
down there?” said Franco.

“Right at the bottom.” Xakus
nodded.

“And Mel! Let’s not forget Mel!”

“Who could forget Mel?” said
Keenan.

“Hey, what’s that?” Franco was
peering up. Keenan squinted, following the ginger squaddie’s gaze. From the
core of NanoTek HQ a tiny filament, a silver strand, wavered off up through
bunch-fist clouds of iron and carbon; it undulated gently, describing a sine
wave, then disappeared into a seeming infinity where, if one concentrated hard
enough, at strand’s end a tiny sparkle glittered like a star.

“It’s a SPIRAL port,” said Xakus.

“That’s impossible!” snorted
Franco.

“Is it?”

“What? Here?
In
NanoTek?”

“They’re the richest conglomerate
in the Quad-Gal,” said Xakus. “The glittering thing at the summit, what you
probably think looks like a star, that’s the SPIRAL EYE, the bit that fires
ships up near LS. Further down, but dark so you can’t see it, is the dock
itself; only NanoTek have gone one step further, and another umbilical connects
the dock directly to the HQ.”

“How big is this dock?” asked
Franco, squinting.

“Big, Franco. Very big. Plush.
Like an opulent city, in fact, and reserved purely for the admiralty of
NanoTek. Probably weighs in at a million tonnes. It’s suspended using AGE
anti-gravity engines, the most powerful engines ever built. By NanoTek, of
course.”

“So, that there little silvery
wormy thing, people slide up and down it?”

“Sort of. Just think of it like
an express elevator. From the space station to the HQ passing a thousand
different levels. Only, it’s a
very
fast lift, capable of taking not
just people, but cargo, freight—weight and mass matter not. Using a by-link to
the AGE engines, they can drop a million tonne Shuttle down one of those lines.”

Franco nodded, watching the
wavering filament strand which described a faint sine wave through the
thunderous, storm-filled heavens. “The wonders of modern technology,” he
snorted, and sulked, thinking of what modern technology had done to his
Melanie.

Keenan extracted his PAD. “Cam,
do you copy?”

“I’ve got you, Keenan. Gods, did
you guys see that horrible display of urban terrorism a few hours ago?”

“Urban terrorism?”

“Some fanatical bastards blew the
connecting freeway to NanoTek’s HQ! NanoTek are in real panic! A real big
zombie army has gathered, a warhost on the march towards NanoTek’s HQ— and now
NanoTek think the zombies have got hold of nukes, or something, and destroyed
the main connective. They’ve closed the Citadel tighter than a bank vault of
politician’s porno photos. Your path in
would
have been straightforward;
now, it’s been compromised by whoever blew that freeway. We’ll have to
improvise, gentlemen. I’ll be with you in ten. Don’t move. Out.”

The PAD went dead. Keenan glanced
sideways at Franco.

Franco whistled softly.

“You hear that?” Keenan said.

“Hey! See! It was those pesky
urban terrorists that blew the freeway! Nothing to do with me, lad!”

“Nothing to do with...” Keenan’s
eyes were wide.

“It must have been one of those,
y’know, coincidence thingums. The urban terrorists
just so happened to
strike at the freeway at the same time I had my unfortunate accident with the
Industrial Molecule Stripper.”
Franco smiled. It was a wide smile in a flat
face devoid of true understanding.

“What’s it like? Being you?”

“It’s great, mate. Thanks for
asking.”

Cam arrived, as promised, ten
minutes later, skimming low over the choppy ocean. He circled them, sensors
scanning jagged horizons, then dropped low to hover beside Keenan’s head.
Something trailed from Cam’s shell, held in tiny metal grippers. It looked like
oily metal rope.

“It’s been a long, hard slog,”
said Cam heroically.

“You find a way in?”

“Ye-eessss, sort of.”

“Meaning?”

‘“Tis a route fringed with peril
and danger.”

“Have you been sniffing hot oil
again?”

“Listen, when a GradeA+1 Security
Mechanism with advanced SynthAI and a Machine Intelligence Rating (MIR) of
3450, with integral weapon inserts, a quad-core military database, and Put
Down™ War Technology gets on a job integral to the success of a Combat K mission,
he
does not
sniff hot oil. OK? Now, this is the plan.”

Cam explained the plan.

Keenan and Franco stared hard at
the little Pop-Bot.

Finally, a few moments after Cam
had finished, Franco snorted. “That’s insane,” he said.

“Fine words coming from a frizzy
ginger midget with an addiction to rainbow pills!”

“Hey, less of the frizzy. I shave
it off now.”

“What do you think, Keenan?”

Keenan, treading water, and
shivering violently despite his WarSuit and thermal-tek, was rubbing at his
chin. His eyes gleamed. “Seems we have little choice if we want to get inside.
Are you sure it will work?”

“Aye, Keenan. I’ve been analysing
and hypothesising since the terrible hooligan destruction of the freeway put a
new challenge before me. I admit, a submarine would be preferable, especially
one of those new HunterShark K12 models with aero-flux turbo-fans and Mercedes
quad-impellers; but we ain’t got one.”

Keenan looked at Xakus. “You can
do this? Including the bit with Cam?”

Xakus nodded, eyes weary. “I have
the technical ability, once the
merge
takes place, but it’s... highly
dangerous. For both me and Cam. Joining with an AI always is.”

Keenan nodded, accepting the
danger.

“How will we breathe?” said
Franco.

“These.” Cam ejected three tiny
silver globes. “Oxyjets, with a concentrate of titrapsyche-oxygen. “Just keep
one in your mouth whilst submerged. I stole them.
Before
the Black Rose
Citadel closed down and I had to cut a PopBot sized hole to escape.”

Franco nodded, and popped the
long silver pill into his mouth. The three men took hold of the thick rope
attached to Cam’s shell.

“So, we going down?” Franco’s
eyes gleamed.

Keenan pointed at him. “Don’t
fucking start!”

“I was just...”

“No, Franco!” Keenan inserted his
Oxyjet. It gleamed, entwined with his teeth. Against the lapping dark ocean
Keenan’s eyes were pools of poisoned mercury. Focus hijacked his face. His
concentration was total. “Cam. Let’s do it.”