Biohell (59 page)

“We have time,” said Keenan. “It’s
a long walk to NanoTek.”

“You still plan to invade?”

“We’re going to stop this shit.
We’re going to find out what’s gone wrong.”

Franco lifted his hand. “Is it OK
if I get these worms out of my eyes first? They’re really starting to irritate.
They’re all itchy scratchy.” He shivered, scratching his beard. “It freaks me
out. I’ve never felt so...
wired
and weird before.”

“Haha,” said Cam. “Very funny.
Anyway, we certainly need to remove the wires before they reactivate.”

“What?”
hissed Franco, eyes widening.

“I used an EMP. I disabled them.
They’ll... no, I just can’t say it.”

“Say what?”

Cam took a deep breath. “They’ll
be back.”

“Put us down on that rooftop,
over there,” said Keenan, nodding. “We’ll let Cam do his micro-butchery on us
and we can re-group, and plan. I know what you mean, Franco, about feeling this
shit inside my veins and my flesh—I feel like a doper permanently wired on a
bad cocktail.” He shivered. “I feel like every atom has been raped.”

Franco went back to the controls,
and eased the Apache through heavy falling snow. Warily, he touched down on the
rooftop, and with Kekras primed, climbed out to secure the area.

“I can use the power source here
to start decoding the SinScript,” said Xakus.

Keenan nodded, flinching as Cam
extracted wires from inside his eyeballs. Pain flared through him like molten
metal. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Go ahead. Lets find out what the
poisonous little junk fuckers are up to.”

Xakus met Keenan’s gaze. “You
might not like what I find,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper.

Keenan stared off through the
snow, eyes stinging. He breathed deep. It felt good to be alive. Bizarrely, he
thought of Pippa. Remembered what it what was like to hold her. To touch her
soft skin. Kiss her ripe lips.
“Hold me, Kee,”
she said in his mind,
words a distant haunting echo.

Keenan shivered. “Not like it?”
He laughed, his laughter the sound of an alien metal wind across a desecrated,
dead world. “I’m betting on it,” he said.

~ * ~

It
took an hour for Cam to remove every last strand of fried biological skein wire
from Keenan, and a further hour to replicate the procedure on Franco. As Cam
operated on Franco, Keenan gave himself painslashers, vitboosters and brain and
heart stims from the Apache’s medical box. Then he lit a burner, out beside the
Apache, and boiled some water for a brew. Xakus had moved away across the
skyscraper’s roof, connecting the tiny CryptorBox to a 90,000 volt mains power
cable, where tiny electric teeth burrowed through insulation like an electronic
parasite, and stole power. Keenan watched Xakus insert the stolen SinScript.
There came a massive bass whine from deep down below in the building. In its
heart. In its soul. Emergency lighting around the rim of the skyscraper dimmed.

“Powerful, for such a tiny thing,”
said Keenan, walking to Xakus and handing him a pot of steaming coffee. Xakus
took the drink with a nod of thanks.

“Size has never been an
indication of power.”

“Don’t mention that to Franco.
You’ll hurt his feelings.”

Holding his own coffee, Keenan
climbed into the Apache and stared down at Franco, lying on his back on an
unrolled sterile med-stretch. Cam was silent, humming, extracting wires from
within Franco’s flesh. As Keenan watched, a ten metre element was drawn slowly,
painfully, carefully, from one of Franco’s eyeballs. The little ginger-bearded
soldier squawked in a long-drawn low-level agony, then blinked rapidly, eyes
smarting.

“It’ll hurt for a while,” said
Cam.

“Story of my life,” snorted
Franco, then looked up and saw Keenan. “Ahh. At last! The basic staple of the
old-fashioned honest-to-goodness squaddie.”

“Tea, five sugars?”

“Just how I like it.” Franco
struggled into a sitting position, took the brew and slurped tea down his WarSuit.
“Ahh,” he said. “Ahh.
Ahhhh.
That’s good, that is.
Ahhhh!”

Xakus appeared at the door,
sipping his own coffee. “Look at us. We’re all exhausted. Fit to drop.”

“No rest for the wicked,” said
Keenan, voice low. “So many lives depend on it.”

“You really believe you can stop
this thing?”

“If there’s a way,” said Keenan. “I’ll
find it. I don’t believe these
zombies
are the living dead; I believe
whatever changed them can change them back. Something stinks here, Xakus, and I
want to help clean up the mess.”

“You’re quite a humanitarian, for
a soldier.”

“He was never always that way,”
grinned Franco conversationally.

“Just because I can kill, it
doesn’t mean I like to. There was an incident, once, many moons ago. I torched
a whole host of deviant bastards in Lakanek Prison. They were paedophiles, sex
offenders, the abusers of babies. I burned them and they squirmed, squealing
like pigs in napalm. At the time, I was filled with hatred. So much anger it
consumed me.” He sighed. “But as I get older, I realise violence and death are
not always the right way. There are alternatives.”

Franco snorted, tea coming out of
his nostrils. “What? What’s this? Keenan the do-gooder? Keenan the fucking
cardigan salesman? Those paedophiles deserved to die. They murdered children!
Why should they continue to exist? Hell pal, soon you’ll be wearing
hand-knitted jumpers and organising jumble sales! You’ll be protesting for the
release of scumbag murderers just because they’ve had a few human rights
constrained.
Ha! Get to fuck and suck hard on it.”

“Calm down.” Keenan was smiling.
He punched Franco on the arm, playfully, and the rotund soldier yelped. “All I’m
saying
is this entire situation sits bad with me. Once, I would have
torched the place. The entire planet! Now... we may have a different option.”

“I don’t think you understand
what you’re up against.” Xakus sat across from Franco, holding his coffee, and
Keenan settled down cross-legged.

“Have we got time for this? What
about the Sin-Script?”

“I’ve set cores running to decode
algorithms. It may take some time.” He eyed Keenan coolly, and not for the
first time did Keenan sense the
iron
in this old professor. Despite age,
this man was not a weak-willed individual. He was a man to walk the mountains
with. Keenan believed in his judgement: he was rarely wrong.

“Tell me about NanoTek, and Dr
Oz.”

“Dr Oz is slim, delicate, small.
Nothing to look at. Nothing at all. He’s bald, face a bit bland, you know,
nondescript. In a crowd he would never stand out. He always wears a simple
glass suit. It’s only when he smiles that his face changes; he has little
pointed teeth made of some kind of alien jewels. They say he has never taken
his own biomods, but I think that’s an urban myth. How could somebody so
powerful keep away from self improvement? Why invent them in the first place?”

“Ouch!” Franco glared at Cam. “That
bloody hurt that bloody did. Watch what you’re poking! I don’t like being poked
like that! A gentleman,” he smiled haughtily, “should not be poked.”

“If sir would like to remove his
own dormant biowire?”

“OK, OK, you gotta point. Just...
stop hurting me! I hurt enough already, what with Mel being kidnapped an’ all.
And it hurts!”

“What about this Black Rose
Citadel? NanoTek’s HQ? Sounds hard to infiltrate. Sounds like maybe we should
call in Steinhauer, get him to bring his entire QG army down here and forge us
a passage. Then we’d have some fun.”

“The HQ is an island. About three
hundred klicks north of here. Anti-aircraft, anti-nuke, anti-everything. It
looks like what it is, a military citadel; huge and black and foreboding. The
roof is steeply pointed, the whole thing coated with biowire and veinthreads.
Nothing living’s going to infiltrate that way. But that’s just the tip of the
iceberg; the citadel extends
down,
down beneath the ocean for perhaps
three or four kilometres. There are sea-corridors created from plasma, hubs
with Octo-strands and VertClicks, like cylinders, dropping deep beneath the
ocean. In the depths they have the GreenSource Mainframe, the hub of NanoTek’s
knowledge, technology... and wealth.”

“I’ve got a really bad feeling
about this Green-Source Mainframe,” said Keenan, voice slow, caged, intuitive.

“And you’d be right to. Rumour
suggests it’s alive—not just a collection of processors, or even AI; but a
real, organic, sentient machine. Rumour has it the GreenSource came from
somewhere
else.
Made NanoTek what it is today.”

“But you’ve never seen it?”

“Nobody has seen it,” said Xakus,
shaking his head.

“So it may not exist?”

“A possibility. You thinking of a
distributed network core?”

“I’m thinking a single target is
too neat. Also too risky for a company like NanoTek. Still, we’ll find out soon
enough. Have you got co-ordinates for the island?”

“Yes. It’s no great secret.
Gaining access is what’s going to cause the problem.”

“I think we’ll go for the
straightforward approach.”

Franco grinned. “You mean knock
on the front door?”

“Seems like the best way to
conquer a citadel to me.”

“Ouch!”

“Sorry!”

“Damn tennis ball!”

“I said
sorry,
Franco.”

Xakus smiled, and jumped down
from the Apache. “I’d better go and check on the decryption.” Keenan nodded,
and watched Xakus crunch off through black snow.

“What do you think?” said Franco.

“I like him. But I don’t trust
him.”

“Me neither. There’s something
too neat. And we was sent to him by Steinhauer. That’s not a great
recommendation, my friend. Steinhauer has played us like prawns before.”

“Pawns.”

“Whatever.”

“And you said “we was”.
Grammatically incorrect.”

“Bugger off!”

“One last thing, Franco.”

“Yeah mate?”

“Thanks for saving my life back
there.”

“‘Twas nothing. I know you’d do
the same thing for me.”

“Always, brother.”

~ * ~

Franco
jumped from the Apache and rolled his shoulders. “Ahh!” he said. “Ahh! My flesh
feels as good as new!” He turned and stared at Cam. “Good job scrotum ball!”

“A thank you would be nice.”

“Hey, don’t push your luck.”

“I just spent an
hour
picking
dangerous weevils from your flesh.”

“Yeah but, like, that’s your job.
Ain’t it?”

“Still, manners cost nothing.”

“I agree,” beamed Franco. “It’s
about time you recognised your own deficit.”

Leaving Cam hissing to himself,
Franco strode through the snow to where Keenan leant over the edge of the
skyscraper, enjoying a cigarette and gazing into the vastness below. “What you
doing, bro’?”