Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (31 page)

It took Petal another twenty minutes of climbing until she came to a vertical shaft with a metal ladder attached. Placing her slate and pistol in the folds of her prison suit she ascended the rungs. Up and up she climbed. Her legs like jelly, her arms numb and weak. She stopped a few times and waited for the pain to pass.

She reached the top of a ladder to find an electronic pad embedded on its surface. She reached up and touched the blank screen. A laser scanned her fingerprint. It beeped and the door slid away into the surrounding shaft. Good job, Gabe. He must have hacked the system to recognise her prints.

The streaming light of the morning sun shone down into her eyes, made her squint and hold her hand in front of her while her eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness. She clung to the ladder and bathed in the warmth for a few seconds while she breathed the fresh air into her sore lungs. The air was cool and moist, and despite the clear skies and bright sun, the cold temperature penetrated her flimsy clothes, making her shiver.

She had no idea how far away from Darkhan’s border she was. She looked behind her and saw the old, battered towers of the city centre, and between them a wide expanse of waste ground. A young girl, no older than nine or ten, dressed in filthy rags, propelled herself across the dusty ground with her hands. Her legs were withered thin, folded beneath her. She sat atop a makeshift wheeled board. The wheels clattered against the stones and fragments of Steelcrete.

The girl stopped a hundred or so metres away and turned to look at Petal.

Petal hauled herself out of the tunnel. Her heart pounded. Something about the way the girl looked at her like she was a criminal escaping from prison made Petal scramble to her feet and sprint away from the compound.

She didn’t stop to look back until she had travelled a couple of miles away from the city. Along her route nothing but waste ground and old empty trenches civilians had dug to protect themselves featured. It wasn’t uncommon to find an entire family of skeletons hugging each other in those trenches. Most were dug too shallow to stop the blast damage and subsequent radiation.

To the east she could make out the broken and dead city remnants of those places beyond the Sludge, the slow-moving river of mud and chemicals.

Between the Sludge and Darkhan, about a hundred metres away, stood a small, low building. At first she didn’t notice it. It was the building’s shadow that gave it away, despite its walls and roof camouflaged to look like one of the many rocky outcrops within the vast nothingness of this land.

Mustering up the energy she jogged closer.

It was a sturdy structure, twice her height, ten metres wide, and twenty metres long. A sand-camouflaged door stretched across half its width. She tried the handle but it didn’t budge. By the looks of the rails above and below she realised it was a sliding door, and yet it still wouldn’t move.

Coming from the centre of city, a dust devil plumed into the air. Within seconds she saw the small black mark on the horizon and knew it was a vehicle coming her way. It grew bigger every second, and she guessed she had less than a minute to find cover before getting caught.

Damn it. Her breakout must have been reported already. Despite herself she worried for Gabe. But no time to dwell. She yanked on the building’s handle which again got her nowhere. The control panel resided with a locked steel box next to the door. It featured a battered biometric panel. She tried her luck but it just buzzed back at her with the message: UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.

They’d likely know she attempted to get in now.

The low whine of an h-core-powered VTOL engine grew louder by the second. When she turned round, a hovering ATV approached from a few kilometres away. It reminded her of the old hovercrafts she once saw on a piece of old video footage from the twentieth century. These new versions were much more manoeuvrable owing to the more advanced VTOL engines, which were now ubiquitous on Jaguar-style helicopters, planes, and even the UAV drones that The Family used.

The driver wore the same kind of robes as those in the compound, along with goggles and a long-barrelled rifle attached to the front of the sleek pill-shaped vehicle. A monochrome camouflage paint job covered its exterior. Ideal for wintery conditions in Russia, she thought.

The red scarf around the driver’s face confirmed it: a Red Widow.

“Screw it!” Petal shot the lock with the pistol, exposing its innards. She realised without her implant she’d have no way of interfacing with it. So she shot it again until the entire control box hung from the door, exposing the mechanical part of the lock mechanism.

“Stop!” A voice boomed over a PA.

She had a few more seconds.

Petal turned to face the approaching ATV, held the pistol behind her back. She casually walked forward a few steps. She held her breath as the vehicle stopped and the Widow got out. The heavy-barrelled rifle remained attached to the vehicle’s hood, but the robed woman carried a similar looking shotgun to the one Gabe had wielded. Although a crude, short-range weapon, it had the mark of a western gun maker. The blued, carbon-graphene snub-nosed barrel and sturdy stock featured a hexagonal texture, making the gun incredibly light and rigid, transferring the power into the shells with incredible accuracy.

The Widow carried a large arcing blade on her back: a sickle like the one the guards back at the compound carried. Petal hoped the Widow hadn’t seen her pistol. She hoped it was small and quiet enough that the noise of the engine would have obscured the short blasts.

“Kneel to ground. Show me hands,” the Widow said. Her red scarf, covered in dust, came down to her chest and flapped in the wind along with her long, brown robes.

Petal knelt, dropped the pistol to rest on the back of her calves and brought her hands round to the front, palms up. If only I had access to my spikes, she thought.

The Widow approached, shotgun inches from Petal’s chest. She spoke aloud, but not to Petal.

“I’ve apprehended prisoner zero one, zero one, zero six. Kill or detain?” Her voice was thick with a strong, Russian accent, and her eyes were like the others: glassy, intense, fanatic. It was like she were controlled by someone, or something else. The Widow nodded to herself. Must have received an internal message. A smile like an open, rotten wound stretched across her face exposing black and yellow teeth.

She chambered a shell in the shotgun and placed her index finger on the trigger.

***

Petal blinked twice, and within that time, she’d wrenched the shotgun from the Widow by the barrel, swept her legs from beneath her, crashing her to the ground, and struck the butt against her skull. It cracked sickeningly against the bone, crushing and breaking it, killing the Widow instantly.

The gun juddered and transferred the impact to Petal’s hands.

A thrilling jolt shivered through her body. She finally started to feel like her old self again. Except she was now, for the first time in years, free of rogue AIs and bad code crawling around inside her. She was free of the dependence on NanoStem. Was this what she really was? A killer? Was she made, or altered, to be a super-soldier? It made sense in that moment. But she knew that wasn’t the truth, that she was something else, not just a robotic kill-drone. She felt, she dreamed, she craved.

Thinking about her creation reminded her again why she was here. She forced herself out of the kill lust, thought logically. A strategy formed in her mind: Blast the doors with the ATV’s huge gun. Hide the body. Steal the clothes. Get to Criborg.

There was one thing missing on that list: find Gerry. But right now she had no leads other than a vague indication from Gabe that he may or may not be alive and perhaps up there in The Family’s space station. She had no way of really knowing. No way of contacting him. That hurt more than losing her implant and access to her full suite of internal equipment. In the short time she had spent with Gerry, she knew she loved him, at least on some level.

“Dammit, Gez!”

She approached the ATV, which still hovered a meter or so above the ground, and jumped into the driver’s side. Petal considered the possibility of heading straight for the Dome. But Unmanned Aerial Vehicles—UAV drones circled the crystalline orb like eagles around a nest and would soon spot her.

There’s no way she’d get anywhere near the place, not in a Red Widow vehicle anyway, and especially after what had gone down in Cemprom. The president would have the place on lock-down, and The Family would have surely upgraded their security protocols.

Petal closed her eyes and thought of a solution. The options were slim. Not having their virtual private network—VPN running there was no chance of contacting him directly. Perhaps the Meshwork, she thought, but then remembered Gabe saying it was somehow offline, repressed.

Given the demon AI had used the Meshwork as a way into City Earth, she doubted The Family still allowed it to exist. And even if they did, she had no terminal or connection.

She looked at the wound on her wrist and realised how cut off she felt without it. She felt useless and weak. The body on the ground, however, told her otherwise. Gritting her teeth she looked at the control panel on the vehicle and tried to figure out how to fire that great weapon on the front.

The dashboard was a long, thin touch-screen. Foreign symbols were labelled with a language she couldn’t understand, an alphabet, which might as well have come from aliens.

Petal reached out a hand and gently touched a symbol resembling a spark. The engine whined-up and the vehicle jittered and vibrated like a boat. She pressed another symbol that looked like a pane of glass with a cross through it. A holographic targeting window popped up in front of her.

That’s more like it.

She touched a map-like icon, thinking it would be the navigation controls, but a pulse of laser shot from the hood-mounted cannon, missing the building’s door by a number of metres and flying off into the distance.

Her entire body convulsed with the shockwave, and her mohican stood on end.

Petal screamed and whooped, but soon realised that the laser bolt probably wouldn’t stop until it hit something or someone. Crap, crap, crap!

She frantically swept her hand across the symbols and the vehicle lurched and pitched. She eventually discovered the navigation and propulsion controls. Steering the vehicle so that the door lined up with the holographic targeting overlay, she hit the fire button and rocked back with another blast of laser. The door didn’t stand a chance. It exploded on impact and hung off its hinges, swinging wildly open.

“That’s what I’m talking about!”

Behind the settling dust and smoke, the hangar appeared dark inside. Within the gloom, however, she could make out the shape of a pristine h-core powered dune buggy. Much like the ones the Bachians at GeoCity-1 drove about in. “That’s more my style,” she said jumping out of the Widow’s vehicle. She dragged the body inside the building.

She shivered in the chilled air inside the hangar. Besides the seemingly brand-new buggy, it contained little else of value. It contained a workbench, a rack of tools, and a smaller room to the back of the building. She quickly got out of her prison clothes, and dressed in the dead Widow’s robes. They fitted surprisingly well, and were reasonably warm. She expected them to be tight, and rough. She felt like a ninja in the light cloth and the flat, comfortable shoes.

Taking her precious chip with CRIBORG stamped onto its surface and the slate given to her by Gabe, she placed them within the numerous internal pockets of the under-robe that fitted like a body suit. The whole thing was comfortably loose fitting on her, being much smaller and petite than her assailant, but it was a huge improvement over the chaffing and harsh fabric of her prison-issue outfit.

Something was inside one of the pockets. She fished out a small leather-bound book, no larger than her hand that featured a hundred pages of intelligible script: the same alphabet as the vehicle’s control panel. A curious symbol of a sickle-like blade surrounding a cross embossed the cover.

Must be a kind of religious prayer book or something. She pocketed it thinking it might be useful at some point. Even though she couldn’t understand it, books were so rare she quite liked having it around. She thought she might translate it one day.

She didn’t want to leave the body in such an open place, considering the doors had no chance of being repaired, so she dragged it across the Polymar™ floor to the smaller room at the back. Inside she found a desk, a computer terminal that had rust on its ancient metal frame, and a large humming cylinder. She dumped the body under the desk and checked the computer. Nothing. Dead like the Widow.

Petal considered taking the woman’s communicator: a small bud within her ear, but couldn’t trust that it wasn’t transmitting GPS data as well as receiving radio communications, so she removed it and crushed it underfoot. Her comrades would likely be on Petal’s trail soon enough, but that might slow them down for a few minutes.

She inspected the large metal cylinder attached to the rear wall. It was essentially a huge upside-down cone. Pipes snaked into it from the ceiling. Next to it a metal ladder protruded from the wall. She climbed up, poked her head out of a trap door, and noticed that a secret level half a metre high ran the length of the building, beneath its flat ceiling. Water gathered from gullies in the roof and filled the space. It flowed down the pipes into the cylinder below.

Climbing back down, she inspected the curious machinery closer. Towards the bottom of it, around knee-height, it had a wheel, a quarter metre in diameter, and beneath that a pair of tubes. She found thick, rubberised hoses wound up on the opposite wall.

When Petal inspected the buggy she realised what it was: A hydrogen splitter. The system was designed to separate the hydrogen gas from water. So that’s how the Bachians fuelled some of their vehicles. The building must have been a reserve, a getaway contingency.

She checked the buggy’s hydrogen tank: a thick metalled cylinder that ran the length of the vehicle. It was certainly big enough to hold a large capacity. A small dial on its side indicated a full tank. She didn’t know how far she’d get in it, but certainly with a full tank, it’d be far enough away to make any search for her difficult. And however far she’d get, it’d be a good way to start her journey to Criborg, as Gabe advised.