Code Breakers: Beta (9 page)

Chapter 8

Tears streaked down Sasha’s cheeks. She couldn’t get the sight of Malik’s face, screwed up with pain, out of her mind as his leg came away from the trap. She was paralysed, watching him crawl away towards the darkness of the tunnel ahead.

It took the sound of shouting voices to wake her from her stupor. The rabble of voices sounded far away, muted is if underwater. And then they grew louder, rushing to her like a torrent.

She snapped her head round. Saw the beginnings of flashlights penetrate the darkness. They were coming. She still had her flashlight tucked into her belt and a single pistol, plus the rifle. She slung its strap over her neck, letting the rifle slide over her back.

“Come on, then, let’s get to it,” she whispered to herself.

Malik breathed heavily; sweat dripped down his face. The fabric she’d wrapped around his leg trailed behind him.

“We’ve got to get out,” he said weakly.

“Yeah, I know that,” Sasha said. The guards or whoever they were would be on them in a minute. Then she had an idea. Bending down to grip around Malik’s waist, she hoisted him to his one leg. “You’re gonna have to hop. I know it hurts like hell, but we’ve got to go.”

He gritted his teeth, nodding his head.

Sasha grimaced when she saw the blood dripping from his leg. She didn’t know how much he’d lost, or how long he could continue, but so far, he’d remained resolute and focussed. She couldn’t afford to delay any more. Together they made their way down the tunnel, heading for the chimney room.

She heard the people behind her stop and discuss what might have happened.

“Where are we going?” Malik said, leaning against Sasha for balance as he continued to hop.

“A way out.”

“I don’t think I’ve got long,” he said.

“You’ve got plenty of time, just focus, and keep going. We’ll make it.”

She said it more for her benefit than his, not confident of their chances. If they weren’t hunted and caught, they’d likely perish in the flames of the chimney. Still, if she were to die, she would do it trying.

A scream pealed out down the tunnel, followed by panicked shouts and cursing.

Sasha smiled with grim satisfaction. One of the fuckers had got caught.

Spurring her on, she lifted Malik, taking the weight from him, and sprinted the last twenty metres to the chimney door.

“In there?” Malik said just as a ball of flame erupted. He saw it through the small glass window.

“It’s the only way,” Sasha said. Before he could protest, she had already opened the door and pushed him inside. A narrow walkway followed the circumference of the room.

Sasha held Malik against the wall as she closed the door. She could see the flashlights moving slower now; no doubt they were looking for more traps. It seemed they had left their compatriot behind.

Sasha studied the lock mechanism. A rounded wheel turned a mechanical steel block. It wouldn’t budge, but the brace on the frame remained clear. She wedged the rifle between the wheel and the brace, using it as a makeshift lock. She tested it; it felt solid.

By the time Sasha had secured the lock, three ronin guards approached. They pointed and ran towards her. The impact made a clanging noise that reverberated around the chimney, but the door and rifle held as they tried the handle. A man at the front of the pack pushed his face against the glass. He was shouting something at her, but all she could hear was a muffled sound.

“We can’t wait,” Sasha said. “I don’t know how long it is before the flames come.”

“How?”

“There’s a ladder over on the other side.” She sidled up to Malik and gripped him around the waist while he threw an arm over her shoulders. She lifted the weight off his leg and sidestepped around the walkway until they reached the ladder. It was only wide enough for a single person. It had scorch marks going up almost the entire way. The rumble of machinery continued below them. She looked over into the grating. Smoke rose up, bringing the stench of burning oil.

“You go first,” Sasha said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Malik looked at her. His face was grey, slick with sweat. “I’m not sure I can—”

“I don’t care what you think you can or can’t do, Mal. You ain’t got a choice. Now get up that ladder.” Sasha helped him secure his foot onto the ladder as he gripped onto the rungs above him. Hand over hand, he pulled himself up as Sasha held on to his leg and helped push him up with each step.

It was slow progress, but at least he was moving, climbing.

The crashing against the door increased, as did the vibrations beneath the grating. She couldn’t tell if it was just her imagination or whether the smoke smell was getting stronger. Her head felt lighter for sure, but whether that was due to the smoke inhalation or just the panic she didn’t know.

When Malik and Sasha reached a quarter of the way up, the ronin smashed the window and were shouting at them. Stealing a look behind her as she waited for Malik to climb higher, Sasha watched the ronins reach through the window and try to remove the rifle from the lock and brace. One of them, a sharp-eyed woman, aimed a pistol through the hole, but she couldn’t quite get an angle. She would once they opened the door, of course.

Twenty metres from the top, the sun was shining down, blinding her as it reflected off the metal chimney. The scorch marks were thinning out this high up, but they were still there in patches. To remind her of their predicament, a belch of black exhaust shot up the cylinder, engulfing them in thick, choking ash.

Malik missed his footing as he coughed; his foot slipped, and he fell down, hanging from his arms. Sasha just dodged his dangling leg. She too coughed, but held on tight, waiting for it to pass. A few seconds later, the entire chimney vibrated. A great roar like thunder erupted, and she felt the heat beneath her.

She gripped Malik’s foot, placed it back on the rung, and screamed, “Go, go.”

His arms shook with the effort of lifting himself until Sasha moved up a rung and helped to lift him up and onwards.

The flames beneath only approached halfway, but with each thunderous roar, they licked a bit higher. On the upside, the heat and the flames had stopped the guards from trying to remove the rifle. They had backed off, unable to stand so close to the flames without the window to block the heat.

Malik stopped about ten metres from the tip of the chimney.

“What are you doing?” Sasha screamed, feeling the searing heat getting closer.

“I can get a signal from here. I’ll be able to call for help.”

“Do that when we’re out of the burning cylinder of doom, yeah?” She slapped at his leg. “Keep going.”

With a grunt and a groan, Malik hitched himself up again.

Each agonising step brought them closer, but she wanted to scream for him to hurry up. The flames were now licking at the chimney walls just inches from her. The steel of the ladder was hot beneath her hands. It took all her strength and patience to remain calm and keep going.

“I’m there,” Malik said as he reached over the lip of the chimney and hauled himself out.

Sasha hurried after him. The chimney shook, swayed, and a deafening roar echoed up. She felt the flames scorch her feet, then her bare legs. She screamed out, closing her eyes. Her back felt alight, and then she smelled burning hair and skin. Paralysed, she held onto the ladder, clenching her eyes shut. A hand gripped hers.

“Move. Now,” Malik said, heaving her up. She scrambled the rest of the way as the fire below roared once more.

As the flames reached her, Malik pulled, lifting her clear of the ladder and out onto a metal platform on the outside of the chimney. She fell on her front. Malik had taken off his jacket and whipped at her back, putting out the flames, each strike making her yelp.

Behind her, a great flame erupted up into the sky, missing her by inches. Malik, now sitting down, leant forward to pull her further along the platform and away from the fire.

Together they lay crumpled.

Pain burned into every part of her, and she could do nothing but weep with the agony.

When she finally opened her eyes, she realised they were about fifty metres in the air. She could see the entire warehouse district and people coming and going into the buildings. It wouldn’t be long before someone would spot them.

“We’ve got to get down,” Sasha said through gritted teeth.

“Let’s take a minute,” Malik said between pained breaths. “That was... horrendous... I need help. There’s a signal out here.”

Sasha took a deep breath of the cool noon air. The breeze started to cool the burns on her legs and feet. Her shoes were melted to her skin. How the hell had she let this get so out of control? Malik had leant against the metal-wired fence of the platform. It extended out a few metres. A motorised cage hung beneath. A set of controls was on a standing lectern, and a ladder ran from the platform down through a small gap into the elevator cage below.

While Malik was talking with the security department, explaining their position, Sasha tentatively stood on her toes, where the pain wasn’t as bad as the heels. Still, each step flared with the agony of the burns. She tried the controls and figured out how to make the elevator rise and fall. At least it worked.

“They’ll be here in ten minutes,” Malik said. “We should probably stay here. I’m not exactly up for running about.” Malik closed his eyes.

Sasha could see the fatigue and pain was too much. She gripped his shoulders and shook him gently. She checked his jacket pockets and found a small emergency med-kit containing a single shot of ’Stem. Now that they were out of the tunnel and didn’t need him fully alert, she could afford to inject him and let the ’Stems deal with the pain and clot the bleeding from his leg.

Before he even realised what was happening, she injected the ’Stem into his thigh.

He mumbled something and drooped his head as the ’Stem solution aggressively took hold.

“Stay with me, Mal, just for a bit longer. We can’t stay here. We have to go down, find cover.”

“I’m so tired. And cold.”

“I know. Just stay with me.” She lifted him up on to his good leg and shuffled over to the door to the elevator car. Malik slumped against her, but she bore his weight. They entered, and they both slumped to the base of the car, resting their backs against the cage. She watched through the metal grate that made up the base. Still no one had gathered beneath them. She hit the controls, and the car descended. Perhaps they would have a head start over their pursuers.

A bullet struck the metal frame of the carriage, making her dart back, pulling Malik away with her. A second shot rang out, this time whizzing just past the elevator.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Malik said. “Why can’t we catch a break, just for once?”

Sasha saw a dancing laser beam jitter across the grated floor. She traced its movements until it climbed up Malik’s leg to rest on his chest.

“Oh fuck.”

Chapter 9

Gabe blinked and felt something pressing against his chin. Something cold and hard like steel. All he could see was a dark shadow covering him. He was lying down. He tried to stand but received a blow against the side of his face by the cold steel.

“You two are either fucking stupid or insane to come back here.”

A mad rush of images, sounds, and smells assailed Gabe’s mind. He remembered everything with a blast of colour and panic: the falling, the ejection, and Shelley holding a shotgun, approaching him as he tried to unclip the straps on the seat.

He pushed himself back and rested up on his elbows. The sight before him confirmed it, as did the throbbing bump on his head. He didn’t know whether that was the result of the crash or Shelley taking out some early revenge.

Where was Petal? Frantic, he twisted his head to the right, then the left, the dark mustiness of the place telling him he was back in the converted fuselage that Shelley had made her home. He had been here once before, with Petal. The place was exactly the same, decked out with shelving units and filled to the brim with old parts, both mechanical and electrical.

Beyond a curtain divider to his left would be her workshop. A place dominated by a workbench covered in tools, soldering equipment, and electrical analysis devices. Further down the fuselage from the workshop was a sleeping area. That’s where Shelley had once revived Petal after she took a shock from the electrified perimeter fence.

“Where’s Petal?” he asked, suddenly afraid of what Shelley might have done with her.

“I’m here, Gabe,” Petal said. Her voice came not from the sleeping area, but rather to the right, where the cockpit and the first-class area would have been before Shelley gutted and converted the place.

“I’m okay,” Petal added.

He still couldn’t see her. Her voice wasn’t far off. She must be just beyond the doorway, inside the first-class compartment. He noticed that he was lying on some kind of table. He had a sudden image of being a corpse, and Shelley with her knives and other devices standing over him, deciding how best to skin him.

“Now we’re all fucking reacquainted, let’s get down to business, shall we?” Shelley lifted the gun, standing back and to the side. The bright afternoon light filtered through the dust-covered windows, lending the place a reddish glow. Gabe tried to stand; his legs felt weak. Had he been drugged? To his right and through the open door was the shocking pink of Petal’s hair.

She was strapped to a chair. She didn’t appear to be too badly injured—at least not on the outside.

“What do you want?” Shelley said then, leaning against the curved wall of the plane’s interior, the gun casually held across her arms.

She looked even more deranged than the last time he and Petal were there. Shelley’s hair was matted into thick clumps, entwined with wires and circuitry. It made her look like a technological gorgon.

“Well,” Gabe said, rubbing his head, trying to clear the throbbing, “we’ve got a deal for ya, something to make up for last time.”

“You think I’ve forgiven you for that? You stole my shit and fucked me over.”

“Not quite,” Petal said. “I think in terms of fucking-over, we were all quite equal in that. Besides, we can’t change the past now, can we? It wasn’t even us that shot you, remember?”

“No, but I can certainly make up for it. I always did like your skin. You’d make a fine coat, you two. A nice two-tone affair. A little coffee and cream to keep me warm in winter.”

Shelley smiled at them; her teeth were just black stumps now, and her gums were no more than purple and green festering sores. Along with her predilection for skinning people, she bolstered her food supply with long pig. Given her reputation, however, it was unlikely she’d get many stumbling upon her compound now.

“When’s the last time ya had a proper meal, eh?” Gabe noticed how her collarbones jutted out and how her cheeks were sunken and gaunt.

“I get by.”

“And I bet ya missing company these days too. Not many come this way anymore, do they?”

She shrugged. “What’s your point, Coffee?”

Ignoring the racial slur, Gabe presented his opening offer. “If ya do a job for us, we’ll give ya a year’s supply of food.”

Shelley looked him up and down. “With the two of you, I could make you last a good while. Food ain’t all that important to me.”

“What is, then? Must get real lonely out here in the desert on your own. No one to talk to, keep ya company. No one to share a tender, intimate moment. You must have... needs.”

“You offering to stay behind and be a fuck-buddy, are you?” Shelley raised an eyebrow.

Gabe could see that appealed to her. He smiled, shaking his head. “Nah, not me. I wouldn’t touch you with someone else’s pole.”

Shelley gripped her gun tighter, clenching her jaw at the insult.

“But I might have a solution.”

“What is it you two want? I ain’t got all day to stay around here jawing. You’re starting to piss me off.”

“A server,” Petal said, squirming beneath her restraints. “Old tech that needs fixing. We thought you might be able to do the job.”

Gabe hoped the promise of the task would appeal to her curiosity. She lived for this stuff. Although she wasn’t able to get one of the EMP-destroyed planes back in the air—partly due to Gabe and Petal not delivering on their previous arrangement—she was known for cobbling together all kinds of tech. She had one of the first working computers and created a limited network to a machine in Baicheng.

“What’s wrong with it?” Shelley said, her face relaxing.

“Burnt motherboard, overclocked processor. Memory’s intact, though. We need it fixed.”

“Just dump the memory into something else,” Shelley said.

“Not that simple,” Gabe said. “This thing’s unique, real old. We need it in its current state. Memory, motherboard, and processor.”

“And it’s with you?” Shelley asked. “In the wreckage?”

Gabe was going to spin a lie, but realised there was no real point. She would find out anyway. “Yeah.”

“Well then, there ain’t nothin’ stopping me from just taking it, the wreckage, and the food, and killing you pair of tits, is there?”

Gabe shrugged his shoulders. “I guess not. But you won’t.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because we know where ya live, which means other people know too, other people with bigger and better weapons, other people that if they don’t hear from us within the next hour will be on the way to shred ya into ribbons. So I suggest, if you wanna continue your miserable little life, ya’ll take the offer on the table and be grateful.”

Gabe stood now and stepped closer to her.

But he didn’t intimidate her. She wasn’t intimidated by anything. She laughed at him. “You’re right about one thing, Coffee.”

“What’s that?”

“I do miss having company. You’re an idiot, a clown. You make me laugh.”

“I’m glad ya’re entertained, but right now my head is throbbing, I’m tired, and fed up with your bullshit. If ya wanted to kill us, you’d have done by now. I know damn well ya want this deal. Hell, look at ya. Ya’re nothing but a bag of bones. Y’all be dead within weeks. Ya need this food. And besides, ya ain’t seen the company part of the deal.”

“Well, you big ugly, know-it-all bastard, I suppose you better show me, right? Lead the way.”

Gabe looked back to Petal. She just nodded back at him.

“Fine, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with what we’ve got to offer ya.”

Gabe pushed through the broken metal of the Jaguar’s wreckage until he got to the storage area behind the rear seats. Stuck within the webbing was the server, thankfully still nestled in its storage case, undamaged, along with the transcendent. The latter hung awkwardly from the straps, bent over at the waist.

“What’s this, then?” Shelley said, poking it with her shotgun. “A dead body? If I wanted one of them, I’d just kill you and that precious little bitch back there.”

“It ain’t dead,” Gabe said. “You know anything about transcendents?”

“What you talking about? What the hell is it? Some kind of robot?”

“Yeah, not far off. Think of it as a meat robot. One that has its own personality: an advanced type of AI downloaded into a computer-controlled body.”

“Quantum processing?” Shelley asked.

“Yeah.”

“Interesting.” She pointed a clawed hand at the server. “And this is what you want fixing? This old piece of junk? You know that shit hasn’t been made for, like, fifty-odd years?”

“I know. It’s what makes it special.”

“I tell you what,” Shelley said, fixated on the transcendent. “I’ll take you up on the offer, but I can’t promise I can fix the server.”

“No fix, no deal,” Gabe said. “Just because ya’ve a shotgun on ya, don’t make ya invincible. Ya ain’t dealing with some amateurs. Remember that. Remember last time.”

Shelley considered it for a moment and lifted up the transcendent’s head, staring at its face. “Quite handsome, really. What’s the personality on it? Will it do what I want?”

“Absolutely. It’ll do whatever ya want. It’ll be yours to control.”

“And it don’t need food or whatever or anything?”

“Nah, just regular maintenance for the joints and a fuel source, which we’re prepared to supply. It’ll be good for ten years at least. I dare say far longer than you.” Gabe couldn’t tell how old she was, such was her condition. She could be anywhere from forty to ninety.

“If I can fix this server for you, I want something else on top.”

“Really? A freakin’ manservant and a year’s supply of food ain’t enough? All we want is a bit of soldering and repair work. We ain’t asking you to build a space station or anything.”

“You need my services more than I need your fuck-bot.”

Gabe sighed. “What is it?”

She tapped her shotgun against the metal of the wreckage. “This. I want this.”

Enna would lose her shit. He could just see Enna’s face redden, her lips tighten, and the inevitable explosion of fury if he gave away her Jaguar. It was bad enough that it had crashed, but to just give it away with all the tech on-board would drive her mad. But still, it was important to get the server fixed. Everything hinged on it. Petal hinged on it.

He’d just have to take her anger on the chin.

“Fine.”

“How do I activate the fuck-bot?”

“Ya don’t,” Gabe said. “I’ll do that once ya’ve fixed the server. Until then it’s just a useless piece of genetic computing. You won’t even be able to use the parts as they’re DNA-linked.”

It was Shelley’s turn to sigh. She spat on the ground. “I hated you the moment I saw you.”

“Likewise, you freak.” He held out his hand. “Deal?”

She slapped his hand away and turned her back. “Deal,” she said over her shoulder as she hobbled back to her home.

Gabe smiled. It went better than he expected. But then he wasn’t fully expecting to get this far alive. Now all he needed to do was find a way of contacting Enna and arrange for transport. His internal communications weren’t picking up any radio signal above a constant hum of static, and without Omega running, there was no Meshwork to rely on.

He figured Shelley would have some means of communication. Unstrapping the server, he lifted it over his shoulder and headed after her.