Ellie Quin - 04 - Ellie Quin in WonderLand (19 page)

'They kind of look quite scary now,' she said.

Shelby nodded. Satisfied. 'Well, good!'

'Are they safe though?'

'Safe?'

'I mean…what if…what if one of them, or all of them attacked us?'

'Quite impossible. You might as well ask the question, what if an office chair attacked us.'

'Oh, come on, Shelby, I'm not joking. It looks
dangerous
now.'

'I know you're not joking. I am merely mocking your technical ignorance. It can't attack us, Ellie, because it is designed with a very robust chemical behavioural inhibitor.'

'What's that?'

'Humans emit pheromones. In affect a language spoken as combinations of
multicellular eukaryotes
.' Shelby rolled his eyes at her as she frowned, confused already. 'Chemicals, Ellie. A language of smells. These smells act as a chemical identifier to all of the products we make. So, for example, any product would know instantly if its interacting with a human being.'

'Now…,' he continued, 'the atmosphere in these worlds is also laced with additional chemical messages that allow us to instantly modify the behaviour of all the products.'

Shelby wafted his hand over the floor projector. 'Mother, can you display the Product Behaviour Interface.'

'Of course, Shelby.'

The projection of the creature was replaced with a floating control screen displaying dozens of attribute descriptors and sliders. 'With this interface I can select any active product in a world, individually, or by category. I can modify its behaviour in any way I want.' He smiled. 'Which is the fun part. For example, I could make a butterfly fall in love with you and follow you everywhere. I can make two products instantly hate each other and fight to the death. I can put all products to sleep, wake them up. I can make them hungry, happy, sad, amorous or playful.'

He turned to look at her, and for a moment his narrow shoulders slumped like a child denied a visit from Santa. 'It's the part of the job that would have been
most
fun if this installation had ever actually had visitors; to observe what was going on in each world and orchestrate the behaviour of our products to give the guests the best possible vacation experience.'

He casually pushed a few of the sliders, up and down. 'Hmmm. Just like a conductor conducting his orchestra. All of these operations consoles in the tower would have been staffed by 'Entertainment Experience Technicians'. Each one carefully observing our guests and making their rather expensive visit a perfect bespoke experience.'

He sighed. 'Anyway…the short answer to your question is, no. Your creatures are not dangerous to you. But, hopefully, they will be to whatever ridiculous creations your friend has come up with.'

'Is that what you would have been?' asked Ellie. 'An Entertainment Experience Technician?'

He snorted at that. 'Pfft, no! I'm a systems architech, not a mere mood jockey! In fact I was head-hunted when they decided to put this place into hibernation.'

'The others? Were they head-hunted too?'

'Some were brought in, yes. Some were already part of the original construction team. A mixture of originals and noobs.'

'Those were the poor people who died?'

Shelby nodded. 'A shield not properly installed. Not a particularly quick or pleasant way to die.' He waved his hand over the screen and brought up the creature projection again. 'Anyway. Enough of that.' He cocked his head and studied the appalling nightmare teddy in front of them. 'Imagine giving one of those to a little child to sleep with?' He made a
hyuk-hyuk
sound as he giggled. 'It would shred them to tiny pieces!'

Ellie smiled along with him. But there was something troubling her. Something lodged in the back of her mind that wasn't adding up. Later that evening, as she lay in her bed in one of the villas, staring out through her open bedroom window at the full moon and the bright stars above, and listening to the
cheep
-
cheep
of cicadas…it came to her.

Didn't he say they'd been 'sucked out'. That would be a quick way to die…wouldn't it?

CHAPTER 26

Deacon had the entire block cordoned off. Colonial marines, three companies of them, had been deployed to clear the riffraff from the surrounding streets and elevated pedestrian plazas. Hover units were blocking any sky traffic from entering the airspace around
Amblin Towers
. New Haven's local media had all been informed that a cell of Awoken terrorists had been tracked down to this abandoned apartment block and that this particular cell were believed to have been responsible for the viral outbreak that had led to the system-wide quarantine.

The marines had already started their assault, led by that capable young officer, Captain Hollander and the elite first company, moving up the deserted tower floor by floor. In the hovering command craft, a team of support officers were watching holoscreen displays relayed from head cameras inside. The cramped interior of the vehicle buzzed with coms traffic as the troops inside the building relayed information and the officers returned commands with clipped and cool economy.

Leonard sat beside him, eyes wide with excitement. 'It's just like a real war- dram!' he whispered. 'Like a shooter-sim!'

Deacon turned to him. 'It's not a game, Lenny. Those are real people in there. No one
respawns
when they get shot. They bleed out and die. Try and keep that in mind.'

Leonard nodded, a little shamefully. 'Yes, Deacon.'

*

Captain Hollander emerged from the emergency stairwell. The tower's eighteen elevators were powered down. By the look of them they had been for months. The squatters inside this structure had been forced to use the stairs and the evidence of that, food wrappers and crushed plastic cups, littered the sides. In the corner of one of the exit bays, was a pile of what looked like human faeces and tissue paper; a communal toilet. The entire stairwell wreaked of stale urine.

There'd already been several short skirmishes on the floors below. Any possible element of surprise was now well and truly spent. The Awoken terrorists, holed up in their cell house on this floor now knew just what they were up against.

He stepped over the ragged remains of one of them onto the landing of floor 19. Ahead of him was a long passageway. This floor's main lateral passage; twelve feet wide and a hundred yards long, cube doors on either side of it all the way down.

His men were already in position, crouched in open rounded doorways on both sides. The floor was spattered with blood and bodies lay crumpled in several places. Hollander noted with relief that none of them were his own men. He hugged the left side wall and made his way down the passage, darting from doorway to doorway, glimpsing, as he did, the cube interiors; depressing, dark, squalid spaces containing the broken remains of left-behind furniture and gutted wiring of appliances. In one cube, a toob with a faulty colour balance silently flickered a frozen purple cartoon image in mid air. In another an overturned soft red lamp highlighted dark liquid spattered across a grimy floor. The muted glow from floating neon billboards outside spilled through the small, porthole windows of the cubes lining the passageway; shadow and light playing across the trash covered floor in a varying, flickering rainbow of colour.

Finally, halfway down the main passageway he found the company's 1st Sergeant-of-Arms. He knelt down beside him in the doorway. 'Update me, sergeant.'

'Heat signatures indicate they're holding up in a bunch of rooms right down there at the end, sir. That's their cell house.'

Hollander looked around. The walls were covered with faded gang-tag graffiti. Obscene language, cartoonish and childlike scrawls of human-alien sex acts. Over the top of some of them, like a fresher layer of geology, were pasted sheets of Rebornist scripture. Slogans, prayers, phrases in bold yellow lettering…

The last prophet wipes away ALL that is WRONG
.

Gods JUDGEMENT is Near
.

Be vigilant, Be patient. Be PURE
.

'Looks like these floors were occupied by gangers and dopeheads first,' added the sergeant.

Hollander nodded.
Then the terrorists moved in and cleared them out
. If there was one, solitary, worthwhile thing that could be said about the Awoken it was that they had a zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol. Intel reports emphasised the fact that they recruited their foot soldiers from places like this, the weak, the damaged and broken; addicts looking for one last chance of salvation. Hollander glanced at a poster stuck to the wall above the sergeant's head. An image displaying their faith's long overdue final prophet; a human silhouette that could easily have been male or female; arms and legs spread-eagled like that Old Earth painting by the famous medieval artist…
Davinzy
or something? Beneath the image -
The Arrival is Here And Now. Are you READY?

The last members of the cell were up ahead. Hollander could hear the faint sound of one of their martyrdom hymns playing softly; a solo mournful male voice warbling lines from their scripture. It echoed down the dim flickering passageway towards them.

'Those mad bastards aren't going to surrender, sir.'

'Of course they're not,' replied Hollander. 'We're giving them exactly what they want…martyrdom.'

'We should just hit them with a
decomp charge
.'

A decompression charge; a canister of highly flammable liquid that discharged as a fine aerosol, then ignited. The explosion of flame had the affect of instantly consuming all the available oxygen within the blast perimeter. It created an instant and very powerful localised vacuum that pulled the linings of the lung right up the throat and out the mouths of those in the immediate area. Further away, it caused other extreme decompression deaths such as eye proptosis, collapsed lungs and ruptured throat linings. But most often it killed by asphyxiation. The perfect clean out weapon for room-by-room combat. The flash flame would also incinerate any flammable evidence materials. That weirdly dressed 'supervisor' sent by The Administration,
Deacon
, insisted he wanted this cell house completely intact.
Evidence materials
, that was the phrase he kept stressing.
Evidence Materials
. That's what he wanted to get his hands on.

'This isn't a cleanse-n-burn, sergeant. We need to take the cell house in one piece. Survivors where possible. It's a room-by-room.'

The man nodded. 'Understood, sir.'

Hollander touched his throat mic to address the rest of the platoon squatting in the open door ways all the way down the length of the passageway. 'We need to take this cell house. The Powers That Be also want at least a couple of breathers by the time we've finished here. So body shots where possible, gentleman. Understood?'

Heads nodded silently.

'Right,' he said to the sergeant. 'Let's do the best we can.'

The far end of the passageway was dark. The ceiling lights shot out, the cube doors on either side were closed, blocking the faint multicoloured light from the city outside. It was pitch black. Hollander noted the faint melodic sound of the martyr's hymn had ceased.

They're ready for the end
.

He was about to give the sergeant the go-ahead, when one of his men called out. 'Movement!'

He flipped down the heat-vision hud over his right eye. The grainy purple image was low resolution and unclear. He could just about make out something large and bulky shuffling up the passage towards them, it's colour was slightly
warmed from heat signatures beyond it. It took him a couple of seconds to work out what he was looking at; a piece of furniture, a gel couch or a mattress. They were using it as a heat shield to disguise their approach in the dark.

Now they knew their cover was blown, he heard their voices behind it, raised and crying out a last plea to their God.

Fregg
. Hollander shook his head.
What is it with these people?

His sergeant bellowed the order to open fire and the dark passageway suddenly came alive, ignited by the strobed light of muzzle flashes; a zoetrope sequence of grisly frozen images as the gel couch disintegrated under the impact of several dozen high calibre rounds. It wobbled like some giant Bhudda's belly, gouts of green plastic gel erupting from large ragged star shaped exit holes. The gel couch quickly torn to pieces, fell in wobbling plastic chunks to the floor.

Then, it was the turn of the young men beyond to be eviscerated in much the same way.

CHAPTER 27

Deacon picked his way carefully past the bodies that had been dragged to one side of the passageway. If he bothered to count up the dismembered parts, he reckoned he'd find about seven or eight bodies lying there. The ridiculously high calibre rounds these marines insisted on carrying with them always left such a damned bloody mess behind.

However, all credit to them, they had taken the cell house without completely obliterating it or the entire tower block for that matter. More to the point, they'd managed to capture one of the Awoken terrorists alive. Deacon was assured his wounds weren't fatal and he was currently being treated.

The passageway was still smokey with the acrid smelling propellant gas from their pulse rifles. The hastily erected floodlight set on a tripod shone a thick bluish beam through it, down the length of the dark passage.

He found the First Company captain waiting for him at the entrance. He snapped to attention and offered Deacon a crisp salute.

Deacon casually waved the gesture away as unnecessary. 'Hollander, I want to walk through this cell house alone. I don't want it contaminated by clumsy army boots. All right? Nobody else comes in until I say so.'

'Understood, sir.'

He stepped through the round doorway, ducking as he entered the floor-end 'penthouse' cube that the terrorists had been so fiercely defending. It was larger than the other cubes, of course. Two bedpods off the main room, a washroom cubicle big enough for a small tub and a kitchen big enough to have a pull-out table in it. The main room's window was a large panoramic oval that looked out directly upon another mirror image apartment tower block. Deacon approached the window, pulled the slatted blind up and gazed out at the multicoloured neon glare of the city; at the hundreds of glowing round windows opposite, at the garish flickering billboards that encrusted the tower. He leant forward until his forehead touched the perspex and looked down at the street levels below. He could see the winking of blue law marshal lights, the surrounding pedestrian ways blockaded to keep the nosey riff-riff back and out of harm's way.