Biohell (75 page)

Below, Nyx growled, and surged on
up...

~ * ~

Cam
ejected on a spurt of hot gunk, and fell, spinning, motors whirring, until he
halted, suspended above a mammoth cylinder. Below, the gunk began to bubble.
Geysers of steam erupted. Cam’s scanners scanned. All around him, irrational
lights flickered and flowed up tarnished walls. And inside the PopBot’s tiny
brain, it clicked.

The GreenSource. The gunk cooled
the Green-Source.

And the hotter she got, the more
confused she would become!

Cam shot off, scanners searching
for Keenan...

~ * ~

Franco
heard a sound. Like blood rainfall.

Before him, practically
around
him, the GreenSource Mainframe shuddered. Huge waves pounded and pulsed
through the behemoth. And Franco realised he could suddenly move his fingers,
his hands, his wrists, his arms, and he pulled back with
squelching
sounds
of extraction as the GreenSource malfunctioned, saw Keenan erupt backwards
above him gagging and reeling, retching a long stream of green jelly vomit
which poured past Franco and bounced from Nyx’s hull below.

“Franco?”

“Yeah mate?”

“Pass me a bomb.”

“Sure mate.”

Franco held up a BABE, and Keenan
pulled the pin, squinted, paused—a hiatus of intricate timing—then dropped the
grenade. They both watched, twisting to look down, as the small globe fell,
spinning, and
detonated
with a savage harsh scream. Nyx was flung from
the tower, sailing out and down, legs kicking madly, to hit the ground far
below in a crumpled heap. Again, the tower before them shuddered. The
GreenSource Mainframe seemed to be suffering.

“Let’s climb.”

“Sure thing, Boss.”

“And Franco?”

“Yeah Boss?”

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Boss.”

They climbed. GreenSource
shuddered several times as the two Combat K soldiers continued their ascent.
The walls were no longer soft and malleable; they’d hardened, as if the
Mainframe was trying to establish an outer shell of protection.

“It’s coming again,” said Franco.

“What?”
Keenan stared down. Nyx had
uncurled, and was once more climbing the tower far below. This time, however,
the GK was moving with inhuman speed, claws finding exceptional grip on the
tower-wall now that it had solidified.

“It looks a bit pissed, mate.”

“Good. Come on.”

They climbed, sweat streaming,
muscles cramping, the glow of the Line leading to the SPIRAL dock growing
closer. Finally, the two weary men hauled themselves onto a narrow circular
platform near the summit of the central tower. It squelched, compressing
organically beneath their feet.

Franco scratched his beard.

“I don’t understand.”

“What?” Keenan was peering up.

“It’d be better to blow the tower
from the base, right? Unless you’re thinking of separating it from the Line.”
Franco was casting his experienced eye over proceedings. He scratched his arse.
“I mean, detonation’ll only commit limited blast damage up here...”

“No,” said Keenan, eyes gleaming.

“Eh?”

“I’m thinking of something
more... drastic.”

“Explain please?”

Keenan grabbed the Makarov from
Franco’s belt, and started to fire; bullets slammed down, bouncing from Nyx’s
sculpted—and slightly twisted—skull. The machine snarled at the two men, blank
eyes focused on them, head tilted to deflect the bullets... Yet still she
climbed. At that moment, she seemed totally unstoppable.

“We have to ride the Line,”
snapped Keenan. “There! Run!”

They sprinted for Line Base,
Franco’s sandals slapping, Keenan glancing behind. Nyx leapt, and landed on the
platform with perfect balance. Her incisors grew in length, and ripples of
needles pulsed down her back and arm. Claws flexed.

Keenan stepped into Line Base,
and shot up, accelerating with a gasp.

Franco glared at Nyx, and pointed
at the machine. “When this is over, lass, I’m gonna fuck you up for what you
did to Mel. You hear me, calculator brain?”

Nyx roared, a metallic, shrieking
scream, and pounced...

Franco stumbled back in panic,
into the Line Base. He shot up, following Keenan high through the smooth
vertical tunnel of rock, accelerating at a phenomenal rate and gasping, breath
knocked from him for a moment as his beard streamed in the wind-flow and he
giggled, suddenly, at the insanity of the
rush.

Nyx looked around. She seemed to
be listening to an internal voice.

Kill them,
said GreenSource.

Nyx stepped into the Line.

With a
hiss,
the advanced
prototype AI machine flashed upwards, head raised, lights glittering from matt
eyes... and with CPU set in closed and locked pursuit.

~ * ~

Steinhauer
groaned, coughed, and blood ran down his chin in a thick pulse. His eyes
flickered open. He breathed. Pain pumped through him like some evil narcotic.
Everything was fuzzy, and tinged with green. He levered himself up on elbows,
aware of a choking sound to one side. He squinted, blinking, trying to focus. He
could see Pippa. She was being strangled by Dr Oz.

With a great force of will,
dragging severed stumps behind him, Steinhauer began to crawl. Clawed hands
scraped rock, snapping two fingernails. His teeth ground, filling his mouth
with enamel pepper. He glanced down, and almost wailed as he saw the bloody
streamers of skin which followed his slug-like, wavering trail.

Steinhauer pushed on. His mind
calmed, and started to scroll with clarity. He should be dead. But he wasn’t.
And he knew why, although he had never experienced the sensation through long
years in the military. As a General, he’d been infused with basic Military
Grade biomods, 1
^st
generation, non-AI, programmed to keep him alive,
channel energies, heal tissue, cauterise wounds. And that had happened. Despite
the pain, and fear, and horror, the military biomods had sealed the stumps of
his legs... or at least, slowed down the rate at which he would expire.

He was close now. Could see Pippa’s
face, a pale and drawn puppet, jerked and shaken by the powerful grip of
Oz—like a dog with a bone. Steinhauer pulled free a semi-automatic CNP 1mm—a
Compact Nail Pistol—from inside his uniform. With a shaking hand web-tattooed
with his own gore, he aimed.

“Hey, Oz.”

Dr Oz turned, a swift movement,
lips drawing back into a snarl over ruby teeth.

Steinhauer squeezed the trigger,
and held it hard. Needle bullets, tiny, whipping, flashing needles, gleaming
bright with silver light, slammed from the pistol and riddled Oz’s face. Oz
screamed, scrambling back, but Steinhauer, up on his stumps now, teeth grinding
in agony, staggered forward in jerking stump-steps, gun wavering but held true
despite his fatigue and blood-loss and pain. Hundreds of needles distorted Oz’s
face, ripping his visage apart, tearing at his brain, puncturing his eyes,
splattering his face into twisted rubber platters of stretched spaghetti. The
gun clicked, an empty click, and Steinhauer reloaded the CNP, then turned to
Pippa. He fell forward, onto his hands, and began to crawl to her white,
deathly-still body.

Oz, face distorted, head exploded
into thick octopus-leg tendrils, lurched forward and grabbed Steinhauer by the
stumps. He threw the legless man
hard.
The CNP 1mm clattered. Steinhauer
flew, slapped the ground, and rolled fast to an unconscious halt beside the
SLAM Cruiser’s ramp.

Slowly, Oz’s face, misted and
hazy with a cloud of a million nanobots, eased like moulding putty back into
shape, torn strands of flesh pulled in and healed, popped eyeballs sucked
together and organically reformed. Oz coughed, and his hands came up, pressing
at his features as if surprised to find them whole.

With a grunt, he pulled Pippa’s
yukana from his stomach with three painful jerks, and looked down as the flesh
melted together and his own blood coated his hands like gloves.

And, holding the blade, tip to
the floor, he moved in to finish the job.

~ * ~

Keenan
and Franco accelerated into the sky. The Line left the cover of the NanoTek HQ,
and suddenly, through transparent walls darkness flooded their vision
interspersed by a million fires. They were flying. They were
soaring.
Distantly,
out over The City’s ravaged battle-scarred streets, ranks of zombies merged,
coalesced, gathered with roars, all drawn towards the NanoTek HQ as if summoned
by some unspeakable force, drawn to this, their Creator, a Monster returning
for a final Feed.

Keenan glanced down at Franco.

“You see it?”

“What?”

“The zombies! They’ve formed an
army! They’re marching through the streets to NanoTek!”

“What do they want?”

“They’re coming home to sleep!
They’re the new junks, Franco. NanoTek have created an army for Leviathan!”

As the two men flashed into the
heavens above The City, both Keenan and Franco could see the tens of thousands
of zombies filling and packing the streets, flooding like a necrotic tide over
ravaged highways towards the Black Rose Citadel.

“How many?” shouted Franco.

“Half a million, I reckon,”
yelled Keenan. “But there’ll be more to come. Many, many more.”

They ascended. And gazed down,
dumb-struck with horror.

They had to stop the zombies.

They had to destroy the
GreenSource Mainframe.

Franco, eyes narrowed, mouth a
slit, bile in his brain, was suddenly nudged by instinct, and he glanced down.

Nyx was there!

He yelled, a sound of pure panic,
and stamped down with his sandal, slapping against the AI’s head with a
metallic thump. Again he kicked, and again, and Nyx stretched up with gleaming
claws and grabbed his ankle.

“Help! It’s got me! Keenan, it’s
got me!”

Keenan turned, hair streaming,
rolled so that he was facing down towards Franco. The Makarov sang in steady
hands still scarred by a webbing of subcutaneous pathways from his brush with
toxic biowire... bullets thumped on trajectories of howling fire, slamming into
Nyx’s face which stared up at him, eyes emotionless, jaws working soundlessly
on black enamel hydraulics. Five bullets, ten, fifteen. One of Nyx’s eyes
cracked, then fluttered away leaving a tiny wriggling stalk of alloy. Franco
kicked out with his free sandal, slapping at Nyx’s head again. More bullets
crashed down on the AI’s TitaniumVI skull, and suddenly it released Franco, falling
back down the Line until it steadied itself and glanced up—ready to attack...

“Shoot it again!” shouted Franco.
“Shit man! Go on! What are you waiting for?”

He met Keenan’s gaze.

Keenan smiled. It could have
frozen nuclear fire. “Out of bullets,” he mouthed.

They both watched, powerless, as
Nyx growled, seemed to shiver, then stretched herself out, elongating slim
alloy limbs and
surging
to dive up the Line after them...