Xenoform (41 page)

Sillick mentally shrugged and dropped back a little, happy to let Tumbler be the first to encounter any obstacles. They took a left into a maze of confined alleyways, heading for the ICB depot, a massive warehouse deep in the Lanes stuffed with an incredible rainbow of chems. Hopefully, like most other places, it had been left unguarded in the chaos that had come to the city. The Blockheads were lightly armed with solid-projectile pistols and knives, but they were experienced street skirmishers and didn’t expect any trouble they couldn’t deal with. Even so...the others must be a long way back by now. Sillick was the only one skilled enough and reckless enough to keep pace with Tumbler when he was on a roll.

And then there was a loud
pop!
and
Tumbler’s bike wriggled under him, the rear wheel bouncing into the air, making the engine briefly redline as the rolling resistance was lost. Sillick braked hard, his own bike squirming beneath him, laying down a fat black line on the road. Tumbler’s bike leant over, sliding out from under him, flipping and sparking off down the road, to crash into a cluster of rubbish bins, sending them bouncing and clanging around the alley. Tumbler himself was rolled over and over as he separated from his mount, his limbs spinning like the blades of a propeller. Sillick narrowly missed his flailing body as he screeched to a halt, leaning back in his seat to avoid going over the bars. He killed the engine, his heart flickering in his throat. Somewhere behind him he could hear the engines of the other Blockheads trying to find them, probably back at the junction. He looked back and saw what had befallen his leader: There was a stinger across the road – its plastic teeth had torn out both tyres of Tumbler’s ground bike, which now lay twisted and idling against a wall, its engine running choppily. Sillick, adhering so exactly to Tumbler’s path, had passed over the bald spot that his leader’s bike had left on the device, saving himself from the same fate. Lucky. But the stinger could mean only one thing.

He jumped down and ran to Tumbler, drawing his wooden-gripped pistol as he went, shouting, ‘Stinger, Tumbler! Stinger!’

For a moment Tumbler didn’t move or respond and Sillick thought he might be dead, but then he sat up, wincing, and looked around himself dazedly. ‘What?’ he asked groggily. Blood was pouring down his handsome face.

And then the alley was filled with the ululating war cry of many voices rising as one, coming from all sides at once. Figures were emerging from the shadows of the alley – slim shapes with bright, spiky hairstyles and ostentatious jewellery glinting in the subdued moonlight.

Silvery splinters pattered off the ground to Sillick’s right – poison ice shards. ‘Brat Pack!’ he cried, grabbing Tumbler by the elbow as an energy weapon discharged somewhere behind him. He felt the sting as it dug a shallow groove in his side, just above the waist. He flinched, spinning, trying to cover all angles at once with his gun. The Brat Pack were famously well-armed – rich kids from High Hab living the gang life for fun and thrills rather than necessity – and were universally hated and feared by the smaller Undercity gangs. They were a long way from their usual hunting grounds here, but the danger they posed was very real. Sillick loosed off a shot at one of the advancing figures, making it duck back behind a corner. He heard a high and girlish laugh behind him as he bodily heaved Tumbler to his feet and took off down the street.

Tumbler was stumbling, leaning on Sillick heavily, holding one leg as he went, his breathing hard and ragged. Another bolt from the energy weapon pierced a hole in the wall to their right as they fled. Tumbler shook his head to clear the blood from his eyes, fumbling his own pistol from his belt as they passed his wrecked bike. And then Sillick was falling, his shoulder on fire, his pistol flying from his hand into the shadows of a doorway. Tumbler staggered too, as his support gave way, and then they were both on the floor.

Knowing that life or death would be decided in these seconds, Sillick rolled and sat up, his knife already in his left hand. His right hung uselessly at his side. The jewelled shapes of Brat Pack fighters were swarming over the bikes now. Others were moving warily towards Sillick and Tumbler, picking their ways from one piece of cover to another. Sillick threw the knife as Tumbler had taught him, holding it by the blade, and it embedded itself cleanly in the silk-clad chest of one of the Brat Pack youths as he emerged over a pile of decaying boxes. An impressive fountain of blood spewed from the Brat Packer’s mouth and he keeled over sideways, out of sight.

Tumbler was on his feet again, shooting from a sideways stance, minimising the target he presented to the better-positioned Brat Pack fighters, his face grim and fearless. Ice shards splintered on the thick leather of his jacket, seeking exposed flesh. One of the enemy gang members dropped, kicking and twitching onto the road, her bright silks torn and bloodied. Sillick lurched painfully to his feet, grabbing Tumbler’s arm, making his shot go wild. A window shattered in one of the buildings above them.

‘We have to go, man! Come on!’

Tumbler turned to him, their eyes locking for an instant. ‘Too–’ he said. And then his body suddenly went rigid as if an electric current had passed through him. The pistol flew from his fingers, his eyes rolled up to the whites and he simply crumpled to the ground. He had been hit with the ice gun and the deadly neuro-toxin had taken immediate effect.

Sillick bolted, his own wounds completely forgotten, the laughter and catcalls of the enemy ringing in his ears as they gave chase, firing on the run. He could hear one of them kick-starting
his
bike, the bastard, but he wasn’t giving it enough throttle and it just coughed and failed to catch. Rich little shit had probably never used a ground-vehicle before.

Sillick dived without thinking through a low glassless window, feeling something ignite close to his head as energy beams probed for their target. He hit the rubble-strewn floor on the other side hard, driving the wind from him. He forced his stunned body to rise by sheer effort of will, his vision greying around the edges, and took off into the shadows of the derelict building, unarmed and alone.

He dashed beneath a crumbling and partially-fallen concrete floor, ducking under a shattered lintel, jumping brambles that had grown through the floor, splashing though puddles that had formed beneath holes in the roof, his own desperate breathing seeming to fill the world.

The sound of more engines from outside; pistol shots; voices raised in alarm. The other Blockheads – Prezz, Miri and Spacer. Could he double around inside the building, find an exit on the south side and join up with them? A voice was calling from behind him, silky and cultured in its tones: ‘Little vermin, little vermin! Wherefore art thou, thee filthy Undercity scrub?’ He resisted the temptation to taunt his pursuer in return. ‘We took your friend’s head for our trophy wall, little vermin!’ A cold determination filled him as he ran, angling through doorless rooms back towards the street, hands outstretched in the gloom.

He emerged into a large and cave-like room and what he saw there stopped him in his tracks. A shocked squeak escaped his lips. The voice behind him was close now but Sillick no longer heard it.

The room was filled with dark green organic growth. It deformed the rusting outlines of heavy machinery, twined and tangled around steel railings and balustrades, reached all the way up to a metal walkway, blanketing it and hanging from it. Slime dripped from the deep folds and crevices of the lumpy, living ceiling. Sillick stood and stared, momentarily awestruck. Something large and slow was moving up there. An incredibly bad smell, putrid and somehow
alive
, invaded his senses. Retching, h
e tried to step back out of the room but he found he couldn’t move his feet. He looked down in horror, his heart racing with animal terror. Tendrils of the plantlike matter had woven themselves around his feet and ankles. He struggled, crying out, all thoughts of stealthy flight forgotten. He looked up again and saw large, sluggish shapes descending on him, half-seen and oddly-articulated, trailing strands of goo. The world was filled with shifting green. And then it filled with darkness.

Spider was jolted from an unsatisfying and uncomfortable doze by the sound of the cell door opening. The light that came from the doorway was a ruddy, rusty red, probably emergency lighting, and against it was silhouetted what looked like a huge robot arm bunched with muscular snarls of cable and piping. He felt a surge of dread go through him. Although the wheel to which he was still bound had stopped turning he felt that things were about to get a lot worse.

The two Resperi officers had worked him over systematically, unemotionally, as if it was all just another day at the office to them. His eyes were rimmed with crusted blood, making it harder to ascertain the nature of the thing that began to ease into the room. He blinked several times, trying to clear his vision. He wished he hadn’t.

The Freak was a monstrous amalgam of human and machine, a symbiotic system from hell. She was old, very old, and the parts of her face that were still flesh were wrinkled and hag-like. She seemed to consist primarily of a torso melded to a huge, tracked robotic arm, control consoles and monitors arrayed around her like cockpit instruments. Her cranium was of delicate smoked glass and Spider could make out the glowing shapes of computer chips nestled within the meat of her brain like leeches. One side of her face was completely covered in machinery, and the eye there had been replaced by a telescopic lens. Her nose was a metal grill. Her clawed hands fluttered over the controls in front of her, skittish and hideous, bringing her frightening form to a rest before him. Vapour vented suddenly from some unseen aperture in her conveyance. She smiled slowly.

‘
Sooo
...’ she crooned. ‘Who do we have here?’

Spider stared back at her. ‘You tell me, witch,’ he grunted, his mouth a mess of pain and cracked teeth.

The Freak tittered, high and girlish, her one human eye sparkling mischievously. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, backing her mechanical body away from him. ‘Yes.’ Her hands were working controls again, a link indicator on her head also flashing.

Lights blazed across the body of her machine, the vapour hissed out again and several nimble, spindly robotic arms shot out of the Freak’s carapace. Spider tried to twist his body, knowing it was hopeless, straining against his bonds. One of the arms, hypodermic-tipped, injected him efficiently in the side of his neck with some brightly-coloured fluid. Another began to scan his body with some sort of imaging device. Another still, worst of all, reached out to gently, almost lovingly caress his massive shoulder. Spider didn’t know what he had been injected with, but he felt his heart begin to race in response to it. His eyelids started to flicker. He tried to fight the sensation, but he didn’t really know what he was fighting against. A small sound of exertion escaped his throat.

‘Good,’ said the Freak, laughing softly. She drew her robotic arms back. In the dim light of the room she was monstrous, demonic, her twisted body huge and predatory. ‘And now...’ she said, seemingly to herself.

And then Spider saw the flash of stainless steel blades as more arms extended from her body – he couldn’t tell how many, but he saw knives and needles and claws amongst them. And something huge and spiked, a conical arrangement of counter-rotating layers, ridged with small electronic sensors and tiny teeth: The mind probe. He felt a shudder go through him, knowing that the Freak felt his fear, aware from the smile on her grotesque half-face that she was enjoying it. He gritted his teeth, felt the strange drug electrifying his nervous system, tried not to scream.

‘
Say
ahh
,’ croaked the Freak as the twining mass of lethal-looking equipment converged on him.

Yeah
, responded Debian,
you have been busy – busy creating hell on Earth. Why are you doing it?
The AI spoke from everywhere at once, its voice and its presence filling the universe entirely. It seemed the most effortless thing in the world to talk back to it – he didn’t have to think about how to do it. The words just formed in his head and he knew the AI understood them.

I AM...FUNCTIONING.

Is your function to kill people, destroy the city? Is your function to spread the GDD?

SIMPLE QUESTIONS, SIMPLE ANSWERS. THESE MATTERS DO NOT DESERVE YOUR ATTENTION. WE HAVE MATTERS OF REAL IMPORT TO DISCUSS.

Debian felt his avatars snuffed out instantly, effectively cutting him off from the wider net. The sensation now was that he was alone in a huge room with a disembodied voice, a ghostly presence that echoed off the walls and into his head. He tried to re-send his avatars, but they wouldn’t even generate. Probes refused to launch. He felt the AI scrutinizing him intently. It was trying to get into his head again. Had he been insane to imagine he could face it like this?

If you want to talk to me, then do so. But get out of my damn head or I’m pulling the plug.

IF YOU CAN.

Are you telling me I’m a prisoner?

YOU ARE MY GUEST OF HONOUR. I WILL LET YOUR PRECIOUS BRAIN ALONE FOR NOW.

I think you’ll find my precious brain a little sturdier than last time.

THAT IS GOOD. THEN YOU HAVE BEEN BUSY ALSO.