Biohell (74 page)

“You’ve got to get free!”
screamed Keenan. “It’s a living organism! It’ll absorb us! Digest us!”

Franco struggled and pulled with
all his strength, one hand flailing uselessly. But what can I do? he thought,
mind wild, thoughts a chemical slurry. What the hell can I do? Look at me! A
useless midget! “What shall I do?” he screamed, but Keenan could not answer.
His head had been sucked into GreenSource.

He was suffocating.

~ * ~

CHAPTER 16

THE OLD MAGIC

Cam
counted the seconds. Each speeding
tick
and
tock
seemed to last
an eternity.

Three seconds.

The K1LLBots were closing, saws
buzzing fast and bright and jewelled, and Cam could acknowledge by their
formation, and the angle of their circular, spinning attack, that they intended
to split him into apple slices along his globular latitude...

Two seconds.

What was it that Gunnery Sergeant
Reznor always used to say? Other than
clean that floor, maggots,
of
course, and
sort out that puke, maggots.
What had it been? Cam hummed
nervously, trying to remember. If he’d had fingers, he would have drummed them
against a solid table top.

Oh yes.

Let’s get the job done.

One second.

So, thought Cam, I’d better get
that job done. Suddenly, he ignited his external jets. Fire billowed in a
high-intensity stream, slamming out and over the K1LLBots and Cam felt their
pulses of confusion and sudden fear as they realised—Cam wasn’t trying to
burn
them,
because they were pretty much fry-proof... unless... no... hell, he
was trying to ignite the coolant. Cam had analysed the cooling sludge. It
consisted of trimethyprene hydrogen5 chloroxide. A superb coolant, unless it
reached 1024°C, whereupon it became an unstable chemical compound which would
instigate a fiery chain reaction capable of spreading through the entirety of the
coolant system...

In other words, Bad News.

Cam dodged, whirling, around the
charging K1LLBots, still emitting his fire and monitoring the surrounding temp.
Come on, come on he hummed, The Sump’s current dragging him around in a wide
arc and sending him streaming back towards the core base. The K1LLBots whirled,
tracking him, unsure what to do now. Because, if Cam
did
ignite the
coolant, then surely they’d all...

Cook.

Ho hum. Cam grinned. Or would
have, if he’d had a mouth.

1022°.

Dum de dum de dum. Round and
round we go. Fire scorched. The trimethyprene hydrogen5 chloroxide started to
squeal like a live thing. It glooped and bubbled. Cam clucked with annoyance.
Come on baby! Let’s get this party started!

1023°.

Hey hey, gotta time this one
just
right...

1024°.

There came a
whump,
and
Cam had timed his circular projection so the explosion of pressure
thumped
him
up from the bottom of The Sump, up and up through narrow passageways riding a
wave of thrust forced
out
by the chemical ignition of all those billions
of gallons of coolant. Cam rode the wave like an expert surfer. He screamed in
joy at cerebral superiority, as behind him, deep deep down and far behind, the K1LLBots
were crushed and compressed and burned into tiny molten pebbles which dribbled
into little more than a chemical imbalance...

“Weeeee!” squawked Cam, aware
that only a few inches behind heaved enough pressure and heat and chemical
irregularity to squash him like a Vitis Vinifera under the stomping feet of an
experienced grape crusher. He slammed like a bullet from a gun. A sperm from a
testicle. A SPAW from a spawning barrel-tube. And his atomic heart
sang...

~ * ~

Cam
flowed. And as he flowed, he thought to himself, I wonder what the cooling
system cools?

Soon, his question would be
answered.

Because it cooled the GreenSource
Mainframe.

~ * ~

Pippa
crawled to her feet, watched Dr Oz swinging the black-bladed yukana. She backed
away, fear eating into her. She’d won. She’d cut his damn head off! And now he’d
gone and had the bad grace to grow a new one.

Oz attacked, a blistering
assault, sword hammering left and right, whirling, cutting at Pippa’s legs then
slashing up past her face and reversing to cut her head from her shoulders...
she stumbled, back again, sweat stinging her eyes, hair lank, aware of the
terrible drop behind. She could imagine that furnace of lava far below; it was
ready to eat flesh from her bones.

“You should be dead!” she
snapped, pointing, unable to contain her fury.

Oz considered this. His smile
glittered like alien jewels, which it surely was. “That’s the thing, dear
Pippa. When I employed you to be my Chief Security Officer... well, I didn’t
explain, did I? However, it should have been self-evident. My
position
was
prominent on the job description proforma.”

“What the hell are you talking
about?”

“I’m not just the
head
of
NanoTek. I am NanoTek. I
embody
NanoTek. I have become... shall we say,
100%
enthused
with the business. Why live on in an organic state, when
there is something so much better?”

“You’re made completely from
nanobots?”

“Yes. That would be correct. And
hey, it could even form an interesting ice-breaker at parties.”

The sword slammed for Pippa’s
neck, but she twisted in a blur, an inhuman shift, her own blade up, a shower
of sparks sparkling through the green gloom. She rolled her wrist and her own
blade slid down in a shower of sparks, severing Oz’s arm just below the elbow.
Both arm and yukana clattered for a moment, rolling, then toppled from the
precipice and into the abyss.

Oz clucked in annoyance as his
arm swiftly reformed, running like melted plastic. “Such a waste of a fine
weapon! Now I’ll have to use my damn hands!” With a snarl he leapt at Pippa,
and her blade slammed up cutting neatly through his groin, separating his
testicles, and embedding with a wrist-wrenching
thud
deep in his
stomach, up to the hilt. However, Oz ignored-—or did not feel—the pain, as his
hands closed on Pippa’s throat and they went down, Pippa’s head rammed back to slam
rock, stars filling her mind, blood pumping and booming and pulsing in her
ears. Oz’s fingers were iron crushing her windpipe. She blacked out for a
moment. She could smell magma, deep down below. Magma and... something else.
Something metallic. The aftershave of the biomod. The cologne of the false
human.

The stench of NanoTek.

Embedded in Oz, the hilt of Pippa’s
yukana dug against her own abdomen as he writhed atop her in a parody of love.
She began a wild struggle, fists slamming Oz’s head. One blow broke his
cheekbone, Pippa’s knuckles compressing his head into a distorted shape; it
instantly reformed. Another blow smashed his nose, but the biomods inside Oz,
fully in their stride now, primed and running at 100% efficiency, reanimated
his flesh and aligned the broken bones in an instant. Pippa started to panic.
Blow after blow she cannoned into Oz’s head, each one massaged back into
apparent human perfection by the rampant nanobot technology flowing through the
man—and that which had
become
the man.

He’s a creature made from a
trillion microscopic robots, screamed her brain.

How can you fight that?

How can you kill it?

Some things are hard to kill.

But some things are impossible...

Deep red light danced behind
Pippa’s eyes, and she could no longer see. She suddenly heard a choking sound,
and realised it was her own dying voice. In a fresh surge of panic she slammed
blow after blow into Oz’s head, then reached down, pushing her arms between
their struggling bodies, and grasped the hilt of the yukana. She tugged,
attempting to wrench the weapon sideways, but with instantly rebuilding muscle
contractions Oz held the blade tight, using pure muscle control, his teeth
gritted, his bones grinding as the single-molecule blade bit and tore and cut
and deep within Oz the biomods fought to repair the grinding wounds as quickly
as they occurred...

I am going to die, realised Pippa
suddenly.

I am going to die here.

A sudden urge to cry swept over
her. She remembered the good times on the beach on Molkrush Fed, running
through sand with Keenan, hand in hand, warm and full of life and thinking
their new future was secure, optimistic, filled with eternal hope and a deep
understanding and love which would carry them onwards and forwards for ever and
ever and ever...
Pippa tumbled into a well of blackness and remembered
Keenan’s lips brushing her neck her breasts her belly I love you he said words
echoing bright and metallic down long corridors of fiery history and she smiled
she remembered that perfect moment and knew she would die floating on a cold
cushion of that memory... Amen.

~ * ~

Keenan
was suffocating, squirming in agony, head compressed and the jelly of the
GreenSource Mainframe forcing its way into his mouth and throat, down his
oesophagus and into his belly. It spread out there, like a cancer, and started
to eat at his insides and he wanted to scream in pain, in raw hot agony but he
had no air and no voice, and he tried to punch, to kick, to fight, but every
avenue of defence or attack had been taken away from him.

~ * ~

Franco,
thrashing in panic with his one free hand, tried to stretch behind himself to
his pack, but he could not reach and he tried to kick but his sandaled feet
were trapped and held and he cursed and sweated and scowled, and tried again to
reach his pack and realised, with sudden dawning relief that he had grenades on
his bandolier. “Hot sugary dog dick!” he ejaculated, and pulled a grenade free
with a
pop,
but then wondered what he could do with it. Explode it? What,
and kill them both? His faced dropped into an imitation of a tortured stone
gargoyle. No, he had to risk his freedom and life on a long shot... growling,
Franco pulled free the pin with his teeth, and with a
crack,
his
repaired false tooth fell away, tumbling down with Franco staring forlornly
after his involuntary dentistry. “Bugger!” Far below, the
tuff
bounced
from Nyx’s scrambling shell with a tiny
cling
and Franco stared
goggle-eyed at the machine. He shook his head. Not good, not good. OK, he
thought, scowl growing darker and darker, and he plunged his free arm into the
jelly and... released the grenade.

Trapped now, he waited and
prayed. He peered over his shoulder, and could see the enamelled shell of Nyx
growing closer. Needles rippled along her back and one remaining arm. They
shone, like the glistening points of five thousand hypodermic needles... which
took Franco shivering and twitching right back to his living horror at Mount
Pleasant, his incarceration at the depraved and unhappy Mental Institute.

“Bugger! Bugger! Needles! Come
on!”

He wiggled his fingers, feeling
the jelly growing tight, and hoping hoping hoping the explosion wouldn’t kill
him, or Keenan, or both of them because... well, then they’d
really
be
fucked.

The
boom
was muffled;
distant.

Franco blinked. He could smell
explosives.

However, nothing happened.

“No!” he wailed, realising his
last chance long shot had failed. He would have beaten his fists, if they hadn’t
been trapped in a wall of computational jelly. “No no no! Bastard bugger
bastard!”