Biohell (57 page)

Voloshko moved in close to
Franco. “It’s alive,” he whispered in Franco’s ear. “AI. Sentient. You can
forget The Tangled, forget biowire, forget sharp-wire and veinthreads and
ticklestrands. Above you lies the evolution of a technologically advanced
synthetically living killer; it has intelligence far outweighing humanity, has
no empathy or emotion, is loyal only to its master, and has a single one-core
function. To kill. We call it a
skein,
but some of our tech comedians
refer to each strand as a Spear of Destiny. Haha. They will have their little
jokes. I, however, have absolutely no sense of humour.”

“What do you want?”

“Want? Well, I know you are
Combat K, Franco. I knew it when you worked the streets for me, all those long
detached weeks ago. I knew it when you took out my men, the retards Keg and
Tag. I’ve been watching you for a long time, Franco. Yes. Waiting.” He circled
Franco, still dabbing at his lips. “And I admit to being aggrieved when you
helped that bastard Slick escape; and I was aggrieved when you evaded capture
for so long. But, ultimately, it was a plan that worked out for the best. Didn’t
it?” He smiled. His dark eyes shone.

“Waiting for what?” said Franco.

“You were the bait, little man.”
Voloshko lifted his head. His gleaming eyes fixed on Keenan. “I needed you, and
Mel, the whole thing, in order to reel in Mr Z. Keenan here. I feel that me and
Keenan have some unfinished business.”

“We do?” Keenan stepped forward,
leaving Xakus in the corridor. Xakus, ashen, backed away; vanished like a
ghost.

Keenan glanced up, watching the
skeins of toxic wire waver and solidify, waver and solidify, as if in
never-ending cycle, like metal hairs in a breeze. Taking a deep breath, he
strode to stand before Voloshko, hands resting light on his weapon. “I do not
know you.”

“But I know
you,”
hissed
the Minister of The Hammer Syndicate. He reached up to his face, took a hold of
the skin, and peeled it up and back with a sudden violent wrench. What stared
at the two men now was quite clearly not human. The head was small, circular, a
tiny sphere of some black metallic substance... almost robotic, but not quite.
It was organic. A synthetic machine built from odd old flesh. Eyes wavered on
stalks, clusters containing millions of tiny black globes above a slit for a
mouth. The slit smiled, and Keenan saw perfect little cubic teeth.

Keenan allowed a breath to leave
his body. His eyes flickered to Franco... and he knew Franco was ready. For the
battle that must surely follow...

“Yes,” said Voloshko, voice husky
without his ersatz human voicebox, clusters of eyes glistening and altering in
size—some shrinking, some enlarging—in a rhythmical pulsation. “I am Seed
Hunter. Like my brother, the man you murdered on Teller’s World. The man you
knew as Mr Max.”

“I did not murder him.” Keenan’s
voice was quiet. His head lowered. His eyes subdued.

“You—” Voloshko’s head snapped
right, to Franco,
“both
of you, you killed Mr Max as surely as putting a
gun to his nerve-cluster. And now you will die. A horrible, long, painful
death. It will take weeks. The skeins have been
programmed,
and we’ve
been waiting for you.”

He stepped back, a sudden
movement. From the ceiling flashed a hundred
skeins,
needle thin wires
which pierced Keenan and Franco, entering their flesh in a hundred separate
places and worming under skin, into muscle, into faces and arms and legs and
torsos...

Both men dropped to their knees,
screaming, clawing at their faces, the air around them hazy with fluttering
organic wire like strands of silk, synthetic killing
skeins.
Franco
howled as wires wormed into and under his cheeks and stood out against skin
like thick black veins, a web-mask on his flesh as the skeins burrowed inwards,
sank deep towards his brain...

Franco toppled over, rolled to
his side, vibrating in a spastic fit, caught in the throes of a slow and
agonising death.

Keenan gritted his teeth, forced
his head up, black wire writhing under his skin, in his cheeks, his nose,
inside his eyes, wriggling stark against his cornea like microscopic worms. He
glared at Voloshko, teeth entwined with black skeins, his tongue riddled with
the poisonous killing wire and he spat at the Seed Hunter—

“Go—to—
hell,”
he snarled,
growling, hands clasping at the agony in his skull.

Voloshko smiled with his tiny
mouth. “On the contrary. That’s your religious belief, not mine. Enjoy the
experience, Mr Keenan. And Mr Haggis? I have to say, it’s been a pleasure.”

Voloshko turned, and strode from
the room.

~ * ~

CHAPTER 13

WIRED & WEIRD

The
City had once been a normal planet. It had equator, oceans, desert, arctic
regions; and a gravity near-similar to Old Earth. 1.1 OEG. However, over
millennia a thousand different species had built a billion different buildings,
towers and skyscrapers and cubeblocks, all vying for life and light and
towering over every and any expanse of the world which would take foundation.
Then, a planetary engineer had the bright idea of
utilising
those areas
not traditionally utilised; first to be decimated by the hand of the architect
were the deserts—kilometre-deep foundations forced beneath the sand, huge areas
fused into glass by controlled thermonuclear direction, sand dunes skimmed and
buildings speedily erected. The seas fell next, pontoon support struts housing
floating fifty lane freeways above roaring surf, with floating rig-decks acting
as huge cubic boots for towering concrete and alloy and emerald structures.
Finally, it had been the arctic which succumbed to planetary usurpation. Ice
and snow were tamed. Icebergs used as flotation chambers. Skyscraper domes
erected against freezing hailstorms.

Predictably, this planetary molestation
caused havoc with the natural ecology. Species were rendered extinct in months.
Natural resources could not fulfil the building quota, the geological shopping
list, and so trillions of tonnes of raw materials were dragged low-grav
down-side on MeshCables by orbiting freighters, and pummel-dropped into
anti-grav clusters surface-side. This, combined with a realigning of the planet’s
natural ecology, in short, screwed up The City’s weather.

Floods, heat waves, snowstorms,
hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes... all accelerated in
event and violence, which caused untold damage and, more importantly,
loss
of revenue.
A reduction in the credit column. And so, over the next twelve
years a system of climate control was gradually and experimentally dragged into
place. Two hundred and fifty huge, orbiting WCS blocks monitored the planet’s
ecosystems, and were capable via skystreams of injected aeromatter of altering
any advancing weather patterns that cost-programmed hardwired AI controllers
could predict. Which meant, overnight, threats to The City’s stable economy and
accelerating growth were killed dead. Like a miracle, like a god, The City
controlled its own climate.

Which is a great state of affairs
when sensible machines rule the roost. However, currently, twenty-five AI
controllers lay crumpled, broken and dead, on the WCS Control Centre’s nicely
panelled marble floor.

And sitting at the controls, pus
and drool spooling from green necrotic lips, eyes shining with a strange and
curious intelligence, the zombies had taken their place. They had rotting,
flapping boots on the desk. And were eating brains on toast.

~ * ~

Thick
black snow fell on the city. It was getting thicker as the climate grew colder,
and colder, and colder. Ice settled on mammoth buildings, icicles lining high
summits like evil, glistening teeth. Globally, liquids froze, and the colder it
got, the more functional the zombies became. As if whatever controlled them
needed
the cold.

High up in the atmosphere, there
came a
hiss
as something slammed north.

There came another... another...
then thousands more as tiny black PopBots smashed through the snow in a neat,
flowing formation which undulated around buildings and aircraft, weaved through
the atmosphere, and targeted a very specific single location:

#proximity series15OOO

#speed 275 altitude 2370
beginning descent

#updated instructions received

#integrated/ received/ understood
co-ordinates loading............

#uploaded all data structures OK

#attack sequence initiated

With a silent, flowing
hiss,
six
thousand detonation PopBots dropped like ice from the sky, and locked
unerringly to their target.

~ * ~

With
shaking, wire-squirming hands Keenan lifted his Techrim, sighted, and as
Voloshko exited the chamber, turning right, so Keenan started firing, the gun
booming in his hands as he tracked across the organic vegetable wall. On bursts
of fire, bullets howled across the chamber, punching fist-sized holes through
the interior. With wire squirming in his face, Keenan kept on firing, shot
after shot after shot, and he staggered to his feet as Voloshko reappeared, his
fake human flesh ragged and scorched and holed and his tiny Seed Hunter’s head
lowered, globe-eyes fixed on Keenan with... annoyance.

“Why can’t you just die in peace?”
Voloshko growled... and charged—as a
detonation
rocked the tower. The
walls shook, flapping like quivering, impacted slabs of flesh. From somewhere,
cold air flooded the chamber in a downdraught dump. It smelt of ice.

Voloshko skidded to a halt as
Keenan toppled over, foetal, his Techrim thumping across the floor. His eyes
were closed, breathing laboured as the wires closed on his
heart
and
started to squeeze tight in a fist of AI metal...

Voloshko’s head lifted, turned,
eye-clusters fluctuating as his senses screamed warnings... and
understanding
flooded him as the detonation PopBots began to slam the tower. Explosions
howled like machine gun fire. Huge ragged tears appeared in the walls. The
quivering organotower seemed to pause... in suspended shock... then
scream
in
a silent wail of tortured despair.

“No!” snarled Voloshko. He
sprinted to the gaping, ragged maw, stopping at the edge and gazing out and
down over six hundred and ninety-eight floors. Thick snow fell. He blinked away
ice from his cluster-globes. And saw them, more detonation drones, undulating
towards him in a vast, awe-inspiring wave—

Only one man had the resources
and the technology.

“Oz,” hissed Voloshko, spittle at
the edges of his thin-slit mouth. “You have betrayed me!” Oh the irony, he
thought. Before I could betray you!

Voloshko whirled, in time to
catch a
flash
at the edge of his vision—as Cam hurtled into the chamber,
did a single fast circuit reconnoitre, then slammed at Voloshko with all the
speed his upgrades and military combat training would allow. Cam hit Voloshko
centrally between the eye clusters at about 70,000 pounds per square inch.
Voloshko staggered back, stunned, head caved in with a crunch, and stepped
backwards from the fluttering lips of his bombarded organotower with a stutter
and a fall...

There came a
whoosh
of
air.

Voloshko was gone.

More explosions rocked the tower,
and Cam spun, sped to Keenan and Franco, and slammed an EMP through their
metal-invaded flesh. Inside, the wriggling skeins halted instantly as
electronic life was blasted into an electronic coma.

Franco groaned.

“Quick!” snapped Cam, “we haven’t
got much time!”

Franco opened his eyes. The tower
rocked, and deafening squelches could be heard, deep and muffled. Past the
quivering hole in the wall, through which a cold wind gusted, huge chunks of
charred flesh fell.

“What hit me?” groaned Franco.

“You’ve got to get up! Come on!
You’ve got to carry Keenan! The skeins have crushed his heart!”