Hardcore - 03 (30 page)

"Good boy. Keep an eye on them, Cam. I can do without ten thousand enemy squaddies up my arse when I'm not expecting it."

"What about establishing contact with QGM?"

"All in good time," said Keenan. "Come. Let's get back to the Buggy. Snake and Ed are looking bored, and a little bit red. You got some sun cream? Thought not, a shame; we'll just have to let the fuckers
burn
."

They drove for eight hours, with occasional breaks where Cam would extract water - or a thick, bitter, honeyed approximation of water - from narrow-leaved spiky plants with an interesting organic disposition: the ability to fire poisoned barbs. They filled water bottles in dribbles, and bemoaned the harsh pounding of the sun.

Keenan, head shaded by his EBH in desert camouflage colours, watched as Snake and Ed slowly broiled in the back of the Buggy, moaning and whining, their pale white skin, too long idle in brothels and disreputable bars, graduating through scarlet shades to a bright and painful lobster red. Ed's facial tattoos did funny things when combined with the scorched torture of reddened skin, making him look considerably demonic. Ed complained long and hard about this perceived abuse.

As the MonkeyMan SatNav guided them with the unerring accuracy of a digital primate, they crested a rise in rolling, undulating dunes which seemed to fill the world with apparently endless fluctuations, an ocean of sand, a desolation of desert.

Keenan caressed the brakes, and the Buggy slowed, squeaked, and stopped. He killed the engine.

Below spread the ocean.

"Wow," said Ed, eyeing the sparkling expanse of rolling blue. "Where the desert meets the sea. Romantic."

Keenan glanced up at the sun, noting its position. "I'd say we have another hour of daylight."

"So what?" said Snake, weary now, his body slumped against the pressure of his SnapWires.

"I'm thinking of that rock rainfall; and wondering if it's attached, somehow, to the night."

"You think we need shelter?"

"I think so," said Keenan. He eyed the MonkeyMan. Fifty miles, to this so-called Silglace. But would it provide any form of shelter? Improbable. They had no way of knowing. "Cam, you want to scoot ahead, see if you can find a place to hide if God begins dropping boulders on our heads?"

"Sure thing, Kee. Will you be all right with these two idiots?"

Keenan smiled. "Oh yes. They are my... friends."

Cam zipped off, and Keenan cruised down to the edges of the ocean, where blue-silver waters had smoothed the beach in a massive crescent of flat, damp, solid sand. After the bumps and bashes of the rocky desert region, this hard-packed platter was like a fine racetrack and Keenan put his foot to the floor. The Buggy growled, surging ahead, picking up speed. They slammed along the flat beach, a salt-smell of ocean in their nostrils, the sun gradually lowering over the horizon and allowing green tinges from the still-invisible moon to filter into the scene. The ocean's rolling waves turned from blue-silver to blue-green, and the desert took on an alien hue, giving the Combat-K men no doubt they were on an esoteric world. A junk world. A sick world.

"Great," snapped Ed, as they powered along.

"What's that?" Keenan did not turn.

"There's a storm coming."

Keenan turned, could see towering dark clouds in the distance. He grimaced. "Is it coming this way?"

They powered along, and Keenan glanced back after a few minutes. The blackness filling the sky was closer. They heard the deep bass rumble of thunder. Green lightning flickered. Static seemed to fill the air.

"It is getting closer," said Ed.

"Shit," muttered Keenan, boot edging lower on the accelerator. The Buggy surged ahead, engine howling, and reached its maximum speed. Keenan watched the temp gauge. It touched the red.

"It's coming in fast," said Ed, a note of panic caressing his voice, and Keenan turned. The whole sky was black now, as on the opposite horizon the sun dipped out of sight, leaving a surreal, orange glow painting the rim of the world.

"How far?" came Snake's easy drawl.

"Twenty miles."

"We'll never make it."

"You don't say?"

"You must untie us," said Snake, face locked to Keenan. "When the storm hits, the rocks will bury this car. By leaving us Snapped up, well, it's nothing short of murder. It's a War Crime, Keenan."

"No."

"That's plain evil!" snapped Ed. "We'll die out here if you don't take off the wires!"

"Then you'll die," said Keenan, settling back into his seat and watching the needle creep ever more into the red. Yeah, he thought sourly. We'll all die. We'll all die when this heap of shit decides to weld its engine into one huge lump of useless alloy.

They powered along. Thunder rumbled, deafening now. And with it came a distant
pitter patter,
a tribal drumbeat of falling rocks. Both Ed and Snake were staring out the back of the Buggy as Keenan screamed along the flat beach, the ocean crashing to his left -

And realisation dawned.

There were no craters on the beach. It was flat, unmarked, devoid of rocks. Which meant one of two things; either the Rockfall storm had never ventured this far to the coast before - unlikely, after judging its widespread ferocity the previous night; or that, just possibly, it was following them.

"Shit!"

Cam slammed out of the fading twilight like a cannon shell, and forced an equilibrium beside Keenan's head. "The Silglace is up ahead, Keenan. We're on the correct trajectory. And you were right, there's a river that runs deep into the heart of the glacier - it's silver, a river of mercury!"

"But?"

"How'd you guess? It's guarded."

"By our friends in the SlamShips?"

"No. By Cryo Medics with IceTanks."

"By..." Keenan stared hard at Cam. "You're pulling my bell, right?"

"I swear to you, Keenan. IceTanks. They distil shells from the air, from the sea spray, freeze them, and fire them. There's twenty of the behemoths, they're real old, real... odd. And fifty of the... well, I'll call them soldiers for want of a better description. They have weapons."

"Machine guns?"

"Um. Sort of."

"What's a 'sort-of-machine-gun'?"

"They fire mercury shells. They seem to be based around... thermometers."

"What?" But all conversation was lost as Ed gave an animal howl and the storm - raging behind the speeding Buggy like a solid wall of tsunami, rocks pounding the beach from a raging torrent of skies and smashing it from a flat smooth racetrack into a garbled pebble-dash of geological mush - howled with a cacophony of thunder and an incredible dazzling light-show of crackling, discharging lightning...

"Ten miles," snarled Keenan.

The Buggy's needle touched the top of the red. Steam curled from the edges of the bonnet. The Buggy's speed very gradually, began to fall...

"What are you doing?" screamed Snake over the noise of the storm. Tribal drums filled the air, deafening and terrible, like God playing with a set of world-sized tom-toms to the accompaniment of devil-run acid-house factory-hell.

Keenan pumped the accelerator, his boot stamping in rising panic. But the Buggy continued to slow.

And the Rockfall storm swept over them...

CHAPTER EIGHT

PARA-MEDICS

Pippa, Betezh, Mel and Miller backtracked fast under the screeching advancing buffer blades of the wild-eyed cleaner, who in herself looked suddenly wild, elemental, a million miles removed from any semblance of normal organic life...

"I must apologise," screamed the cleaner over the roaring of the buffer-turned-killing machine, "but you're dirtying up my corridor! You must be swept clean! Buffed to a shine! Sucked away! Scourged!" Cackling, the cleaner swung the slicer left and right, humming through the air like a bad trip, an out-of-control helicopter, and the group scattered backwards in panic.

Pippa caught Betezh's attention, and gestured; Betezh gave a tight-lipped nod.

He ran right, slamming into the wall and diving into a fast roll past humming blades as Pippa lifted, then hefted, her yukana sword, and launched it like a spear. The blade flashed through the air, and the cleaner moved fast, but not fast enough. The blade slammed through her external pumping heart, showering the floor with a splatter of blood. There came an "oof" of shock, and the deadly buffing machine slowed with a whine, left her fingers, clattered against the wall, shearing bricks and mortar in a shower of powdered debris, then gradually fell still with strangled
shrings
. The deadly blades lay motionless, battered and twisted.

The cleaner hit the floor, bleeding, grunting, and Pippa walked forward with the D4 aimed at her head. As Pippa gazed down, the cleaner fished in a leather bag at her hip, pulling free a fresh oiled and slippery heart. She fumbled for a minute, nearly dropping the organ, then unclipped the severed heart from her neck chain and went suddenly blue. With clumsy fingers, breathing suspended, she fitted the new heart in place and it stuttered, fluttering like an encased butterfly, shuddered and started to beat. The cleaner took a deep, exaggerated breath, easing herself from blue-tinged panic into calm, then turned and glared at Pippa.

"That damn well hurt!" she snapped.

Pippa lowered the D4, and poked the cleaner in the teeth. "Not as much as this will. Now listen, you freak, you're going to give me some answers because I'm fast getting sick of this place. Understand?"

"I will tell you nothing!"

"Then I'll blow off your stupid head."

"Do it!" snarled the cleaner. "You think I care? You think you can torture me more than my current existence? Well fuck you, city girl, there's nothing you can do that hasn't already been done. Torture me, rape me, cut out my organs..." her eyes gleamed. "Kill me. It matters nothing." She snarled again, like a caged animal, and spat at Pippa.

Pippa glanced up to Betezh, who gave a shrug.

"What we gonna do with her? She's mad as a brush."

Betezh winked. "Hey. Leave this one to me." He moved closer, scratching his head, then crouched beside the fury-filled cleaner who was frothing at the lips. "So then, love," he said, "we can torture and kill you? Yeah?"

"Go to hell!"

Betezh nodded, stood, stretched, turned his back on the group, and there came the sound of an unzipping fly. "Nice floor this," he said, conversationally, and started to urinate against the wall. "Must have taken you hours of work to get such a lovely shine."

"No! Wait! What are you doing?"

"It's so gleaming," said Betezh, amidst the sounds of tinkling, "so perfect, that you could almost see your own face in it. Oops! Oh damn, look here, I seem to have inadvertently pissed all over your nice clean floor." He zipped up his flies and turned, grinning.

The cleaner was incandescent with rage. "You, you, you -" she snarled.

"Me? Little old me?" Betezh rubbed at his belly, then grinned over at Pippa. "You know what Pippa, all that spam I had for supper last night has finally worked its way through my complicated bowel system. And you know what? I think I need to take a long hard dump, right here, right now."

"Nooooo
ooo!"
howled the cleaner. "Not on my floor! Not on my polished masterpiece! It took me a
thousand years
to get it looking like that! Don't defecate on my artwork, you bastard's bastard."

Betezh undid his belt, and disarmed his WarSuit rear-end flap. "So you'll talk? You'll give us answers to questions?"

"Yes!" sobbed the cleaner suddenly, "yes, yes, please don't shit on my floor. I'll tell you anything.
Anything!
"

"OK then," nodded Betezh sagely, and fastened his belt again. "Just remember, nutso. You can die, you can be dismembered, you can disintegrate... but I can always pluck up the energy to defecate."

Sobbing, the cleaner nodded and covered her eyes with her hands. Pippa sidled over to Betezh.

"Nice," she said. "Slick."

"Why, thank you."

"Only you could have dreamed up that particular angle."

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Like the best toilet flush in the world," said Pippa with a smile. "Now, Little Miss Sparkle. We want to know what's going on here, in this place, in this Sick World. You've been polishing the floor for a thousand years. You must have seen some changes."

"Oh yes," said the cleaner, climbing slowly, dejectedly, to her feet and rubbing away tears. She looked down, poking at her external heart for a moment, then focused on Pippa. "We were happy here, you know. In the beginning."

"You mean when this place was Sick World?"

"Yes. It was grand, the opening, when the Mammoth DropShips came speeding down from space. They'd built the hospitals and research centres, thousands of them, dotted all over the planet. This was going to be the premier place to recover from your illness. This was going to be another Eden, a Paradise World for the sick, the lame, the injured, the diseased. Humans and aliens came together in perfect harmony with only one objective: to get well again."