Biohell (65 page)

“Yeah boss.”

Cam plunged beneath the ocean;
there was a surge of bubbles and frothing water, and the three men tensed,
preparing themselves as the rope uncoiled with a hiss.

Suddenly, they were dragged
violently under, and down down towards a cold and bottomless pit.

~ * ~

CHAPTER 14

BLACK ROSE CITADEL

Cam
sped, spiralling into the depths trailing bubbles. Towed, like fluttering
ragdolls, Keenan, Franco and Xakus hung on for life. They descended into ink
black. Above, any still-visible lights were immediately extinguished. And it
got very, very cold.

Keenan and Franco’s WarSuits
instigated extra thermal settings, and even Xakus’s thermal electronic jacket
clicked and buzzed. But as they went deeper, and the world got colder, so heat
circuits started to fail and the three men began a rapid descent towards the
beckoning door of death...

Cam halted, bubbles spurting from
his casing, and the three men floated down to stand on a huge globe. Squinting
through blackness, they saw spidery arms, like rubber tubes, disappearing off
into the gloom.

“We can use this as an
EntryShell,” said Cam, his electronic voice carrying weirdly to warble through
the ocean. Other than his squeak, the world was filled with an oppressive,
heavy silence. As if the three men slept under a very great weight.

“What—is—this?” bubbled Franco,
uncomfortably.

“A coolant system. Xakus, are you
ready? To do what we... discussed?”

Xakus nodded, boots planted on
the globe. Cam moved towards him, bubbles hissing in a burst stream. He bobbed
by Xakus’s head. Two tiny filaments drifted from his black case. Xakus took the
filaments, placed them against his skull... and
shuddered
as they flowed
through skin, bone, and into his brain to merge with his prefrontal cortex and
hypothalamus. Xakus’s eyes closed.

“Are you comfortable?”

“There is a lot of pain.”

“For me also. You must blank the
pain. It will interfere with our cortex bond.”

“Yes.”

“You must show me the NanoTek
organic codes. Then I will sneak us through the walls of the EntryShell.”

“Yes.”

Xakus concentrated. Cam watched
the spirals, memorising billions of patterns, swirls, colours, sounds,
experiences; they all mashed and merged, to form a Whole and the Whole was a
password. Cam formatted a section of his own brain, and optimised it to match
the brain of the human organism to which he was joined. Then, he took the data
and shuffled it into memory slots and riffled it at speed; he then
cross-matched more data with Xakus. It had to be perfect. He would only get one
shot at this illegal and highly treacherous entry attempt...

If he got it wrong, it would
erase his mind.

“You still OK?”

“Yes.”

“Describe how you feel?”

“Light-headed. Weak. Cold.”

“No pains in your spine?”

“No.”

“Good. I have the password. Wait.”

Cam spun, still connected
directly to Xakus’s brain. His voice wobbled through the ocean. “Keenan. Franco.
Focus. Hold Xakus. We’re going in. Be. Warned. It. Will. Be. Wild. Inside.”

The two members of Combat K took
hold of Xakus, and suddenly all three men and Cam sank through the black globe,
as if absorbed into quicksand, or through an incredibly sticky, black
rubber-gel. Keenan caught a last glimpse of the oppressive ocean and the
wavering, rubbery tentacles as he was
accessed
by NanoTek and allowed
through their esoteric organic password system. Organically entered. Merged.
Genetically accepted. Mechanically decrypted. Given. Access. Entry. Inside.

Everything went black.

Keenan felt movement, then a
sudden insanity of pressure, as if being smashed by the wall of a tidal wave...
and he was gone and lost and slammed, flowing through thick black gunk and Franco
and Xakus and Cam were all torn away and smashed away and gone as Keenan was
buffeted and forced into a long dive through a horizontally pressured cooling
system. A roaring filled his head. Pressure waves slapped him, sending pain
coruscating through every atom. His eyes squeezed shut, but his head was full
of pain with intense pressure, and Keenan sped along a winding, twisting route
of tubing until he was ejected, arms and legs kicking, eyes trying to blink
free gunk, through a waterfall of pressure-
release
and down a long
trailing fall towards a deep oily basin. He fell for a long time through cold
air, peppered by gunk spray, blinded, and hit the surface with a splash. He
went under. He sank, deep, then with a snarl of anger he kicked out, kicked up,
struggling and forcing his way past a deep centrifugal suction and up to the
edge of what felt like cold hard stone. Keenan hoisted himself up, and slapped
down onto the surface of the walkway, shivering. He spat out the Oxyjet and
lay, panting, wheezing, head full of stars, blood full of adrenalin, head full
of confusion.

Keenan rolled onto his side.
Glanced up into gloom, where high above it seemed to rain oil. Several pipes
emerged, feeding into this huge cylindrical chamber. Keenan lay on a narrow con-cretealloy
lip circling the interior of the cylinder. Metal walls reared off above him.
Before his eyes, the pool of gunk was thick, gelatinous, and a central
whirlpool spun denoting interior suction.

“Franco?” he hissed. He could see
nothing moving in the pool. “Cam?”

No response.

Keenan stood, checked his
weapons, glared around.

He was alone.

He fished out his PAD. “Franco?
Cam? Copy?”

Silence.

“Bastard.” Keenan—and Cam, who
had formulated the plan—hadn’t anticipated the force of the cooling system with
which they merged. It had quite literally ripped the group apart. And that
meant... Franco, Cam, Xakus, they could be anywhere within NanoTek. They could
be dead...

Keenan was on his own.

He breathed deep, calming
himself, and narrowed his eyes, moving cat-like around the cold metal cylinder.
Gunkfall pattered around him, splashing his boots. He scraped it from his eyes,
and found a metal ladder.

NanoTek. Dr Oz. GreenSource
Mainframe.

Keenan wanted answers. He wanted
them now.

He started to climb, up past the
oilfall of gunk and—he blinked,
hundreds
of pipes which fed into this
huge, towering cylinder. That’s a big cooling system, he thought. What the hell
does it cool?

He clambered up the ladder, hands
and boots gunk-slippery on slick rungs. Up and up he travelled, until the pool
into which he’d fallen was nothing but a distant dot. He shuddered. He was
lucky. He’d emerged low, and hadn’t taken a dive from this kind of height; the
impact, WarSuit or not, would surely have snapped his spine like a dry twig.

Far up on the greased ladder,
Keenan paused. He tilted his head, sure he’d heard a rattle of gunfire. He
fished out his PAD again, and tried to contact Franco. Nothing. He set it to
scan, but it simply blipped at him in the negative. It would not, or could not,
formulate a map.

“Bastard.”

Keenan carried on, slipping and
sliding up the rungs, gunk-spray tickling him. Finally, he spied an access
corridor high above, and gritting his teeth, muscles burning, hands raw despite
his gloves, he powered on, boots squealing on slick metal and threatening to
toss him back into the devastating pit.

He finally slammed down into the
low-ceilinged access corridor, and realised it was little more than a
rectangular pipe. Coolant gunk churned through a gully down the middle of the
corridor. Keenan realised this meant, despite its access pretensions, it was
still operational as part of the cooling system.

Rolling to his knees, he started
to crawl. Fast. He wasn’t sure how much time he had. The metal floor beneath
him was slippery, and it was probable it was used as a pipe, either an overflow
or runoff of some kind. If a jet of gunk caught him there, in that place... he’d
be forcibly ejected like a bullet, fall like a suicide jumper, and compact as
readily as any meat pie in a groundcar crusher.
Son of a bitch.

Keenan slid and slipped along the
bowed floor, and saw a horizon approaching. Tubes fed in at roof height, with
injectors pointing directly into Keenan’s emerging, snarling face. He squeezed
past the evil narrow nozzles to find himself balanced on a high gantry
overlooking a vast, vast warehouse. At Keenan’s level, a sea of matt black
steel rushed away, support beams, H-section, alloy, ironanium, spirals and
tubes and blocks and cable-carriers. Keenan moved carefully, warily, from the
access tube and dropped down onto a thick, H-section beam. He crouched,
grabbing hold of a tube over his head, and stared down into the heart of the
NanoTek HQ.

At one far end, huge juggernaut
SlamTruks were beeping and revving engines, reversing into a swathe of loading
bays as wide as any average city. Some were leaving with spouts of churning
acrid fumes. Keenan shielded his eyes, staring, trying to make out what they
were... unloading? There were long crates. Cranes worked, whining and banging,
unloading the SlamTruks and dumping crates onto skeeters and blobs.

Keenan’s gaze swept the vault,
from the loading bay to the...

“Holy mother of God.”

Keenan’s jaw, quite literally,
dropped.

Half of the vast, titanic chamber
was full of zombies.

They stood in ranks, row upon row
upon row, crammed and silent and stationary; thousands upon thousands of
deviant, broken, buckled, torn, pus-weeping figures. Keenan crept along the
beam, keeping low behind thick tubes, to get a closer look. Reaching a
junction, he stood, balanced high above the sea of motionless zombies, turned,
and leapt onto an adjacent beam. He caught his balance, steadied himself, then
moved out over the ranks.

They’re a battalion,
he thought.

They’re an army.

What the hell are they doing here?

Keenan frowned. Who’d want an
army of zombies? They’re slow, (well, slower than any trained soldiers), they’re
useless, they moan and dribble and fight amongst themselves. But then, he
thought, look at them now! Happy as puppies. Docile as dopers. Not an ounce of
aggression amongst their ragged... torn... exteriors.

Keenan frowned. Something was
wrong. Something, far down below him, didn’t fit. It wasn’t right. Like a
clever puzzle designed to fool the brain, Keenan fought against what he was
witnessing; then he relaxed into the game, allowed his eyes to play over the
scene, around the edges of the vault, and he realised and smiled a bitter, sour
smile. That was it. The discrepancy. The mind-fuck.

The zombies were organised by
deformity.

So, there stood a rectangular
battalion of zombies with sloping shoulders and distended jaws. Then, arranged
neatly next to them, another battalion with buckled ankles and twisted claws.
Another, seven feet high with eyes popped out on quivering stalks. And on and
on it went, the zombies, although clothed differently, were
arranged.
And,
Keenan was damn sure zombies didn’t arrange themselves like that. And they
certainly didn’t stand docile and...
waiting?

These zombies were not the wild,
random creatures he had seen out on City streets. These were well-behaved.
Conditioned. They seemed to be obeying...
orders.

“Ha!”