Biohell (41 page)

“Who sent you?”

“I will not answer your
questions.” The voice was beautiful; a lilting, female voice. Keenan stared
into emotionless matt black eyes, and shivered.

He poked the Techrim in its face.
“Do you have a name?”

“I am Nyx.”

“Well Nyx, I’m Keenan. You
already know I’m Combat K, so we’ll skip the fluffing and get right down to
hardcore pornography. Why do you want to kill me?”

Nyx said nothing. Keenan fired a
shot into the GK’s face; the shot screamed, bullet ricocheting. Keenan peered
close. One of the hydraulic valves which operated the mouth was damaged; it
bubbled a thin white oil.

“Next, it’s your eyes.”

“Go to hell, little man,” said
Nyx.

“I’m already there,” whispered
Keenan.

“Keenan, get up here!” snapped
Franco.

“It might take a while, but this
gun,” he waved the Techrim, “can eat away at your face. I’ve never tortured an
AI before, but an old ex-friend of mine once said it could be a lot of fun. I’ll
be back in a minute, love. Don’t go anywhere.”

With cigarette dangling, Keenan
strode up the gentle slope of the ramp and eyed the chamber. Franco had bound
Olga’s wound and stopped the bleeding with a D-PACK. She sat, pale and
obviously in some agony. Knuckles held her hand. Xakus and Franco stood by the
wall console.

“What is it?”

“Xakus has tapped into the
Library’s monitoring cameras. Come have a look.”

Keenan stood, smoking, staring at
the scene of devastation outside the library. More Mammoth MK13 tanks had
arrived, with thousands more zombies.

“Can you see them?” said Franco.

“I can see we’re in the shit,”
said Keenan.

“Look, from where the tanks
came.
When we were up on the balcony.
Look.”

Keenan stared, then dropped his
cigarette with a curse. The alleyway was full of dark-armoured SIMs. Battle
SIMs. Armed, armoured, silent, immobile. A waiting army.

“So the zombies have proper
military backup,” said Franco, with a grimace. “This gig just gets better and
better.”

“We need to get out of here right
now,” said Keenan, taking a deep breath. “Those bastards could advance at any
moment. And a fire extinguisher won’t halt SIMs. Olga, can you move, love?”
Olga nodded, and Knuckles helped her lumber to her feet, grunting. “Xakus, we
need to get to this back door. We’re pinned down here. Are you sure the only
exit was down the ramp? And we need transport. I’ll even risk a chopper.” He
eyed the monitor again, shaking his head. “This puzzle gets more and more
twisted the longer we play. We’re being fucked with. Again. And I don’t like
it.”

Professor Xakus rubbed his white
beard. “The only escape route is down that ramp. That much is for sure. There’s
no other way out of this building. But that’s OK, because MICHELLE is down
there. I’ll let her out of her cage.”

“But what about the AIs?” hissed
Franco.

“I’m sure MICHELLE will make
short work of them. It’s just, I couldn’t release her whilst you two were on
the ramp; without me, she gets a little too frisky.”

Keenan frowned. “Actually, just
what the hell
is
this
MICHELLE?”

“Perhaps I should explain. I used
to be an engineer at NanoTek. This much you know. Well, a leopard never changes
its spots. Just because I left NanoTek, didn’t mean I stopped building,
inventing, creating. MICHELLE is my... my
pet.
My little project, shall
we say. A way of whiling away the long winter evenings here on The City when
your wife is dead and your children have grown up and travelled six billion
miles to university.”

“You never answered my question,”
said Keenan.

“MICHELLE’S a Military Grade
bio-mechanical transport vehicle slash war machine. A Mechanically Integrated
Killer. A MIK
HELL.
MICHELLE. See? And she ain’t pretty, so don’t get
excited when you see her. She might just rip off your damned head.”

“So she’s... organic?
And
a
machine?” Franco frowned.

“Better just watch,” said
Professor Xakus, patting Franco on the shoulder like father to son. “And don’t
say anything.
Nothing
at all. MICHELLE’S pretty temperamental; she gets
upset easy. And when she’s upset, she starts to kill things.”

~ * ~

MICHELLE
slept. She slept more and more these days, and she was suspicious Xakus was
putting drugs in her food. But then, why would he do that? Why would he want
her to sleep ? After all, he loved her, he nurtured her; he had
created
her.
MICHELLE nodded to herself in slumber... and was gradually awoken by the
whistle. It was tuned specifically to her command nodes; it brought her a
subtle sexual pleasure.

MICHELLE awoke. She stretched,
huge metal claws clanging off the sides of her cage. The place she loved. The
place she liked to call
home.
MICHELLE stood, clanging her square head
from the roof of the cage, and waited patiently as the twin blast doors opened;
they could withstand a Grade 2 High-J blast. Huge knuckles of steel unmeshed
and lights flickered on in the underground gloom. MICHELLE strode out, square
metal boots clanging, but as she approached the ramp something was not quite
right and script flowed fast through her half-organic, half-machine brain.

MICHELLE stopped. She could
sense
danger. Something you only got from organics. This meshed with computer
instructions flowing at billions of instructions per nano-second.

The ramp was up. And
there.
Tiny
metal legs kicked.

MICHELLE’S sensors hummed at her,
and she saw the two tiny AIs dancing down below. One carried twin swords, the
other had blades as arms and legs. Flicking on dazzling HalogenV lights she
flooded the chamber with brilliance, then stomped forward in huge lurching
hydraulic motions.

“Xakus?” boomed MICHELLE’S metal
voice. The whole chamber reverberated. And then she...
clicked
with him,
flowed with him, could smell his thoughts. Huge metal nostrils quivered.

I hope you slept well, my
sweetness. Could you please do me a favour? The three robots, they have been
causing me some pain. Trying to kill me. Could you please dispose of them?

Certainly,
thought back MICHELLE, smiling at
Xakus’s use of the word
please. After all,
she thought,
it’s so
important to have manners in this day and age.

The six hundred and fifty-eight
tonne bio-organic machine took a couple more steps forward, huge iron boots
clanging, and bent, motors whirring, pincer claws reaching down towards the
GKs. The first danced at her, and tiny swords slashed, opening metal runs
across her pincers. A signal flashed pain in her brain and MICHELLE gave a
howl, taking an involuntary step back. This little robot had hurt her!

Script turned red. Her organic
half flared in anger, whilst her computational half calmed her irrationality.
She switched on electro-magnets with a
hum
that would have blacked out
five square kilometres of The City’s Global GRID, and the two GKs were sucked
from the ground and pinned to her pincers, swords and blades immobile, heads
twitching under a seemingly unstoppable force. Clanking and whirring, MICHELLE
turned and strode clomping back to her cell. She hurled the two GKs into the
chamber, and with a heave and a grunt, pushed shut the blast doors. She stomped
back to the closed ramp and surveyed the wiggling black metal legs.

What about this one?
she thought.

Put it with the others. Thank
you, my little flower.

MICHELLE preened, reached out,
plucked the GK from the clamp of the ramp with a
pop.
Thousands of
highly toxic poisonous spikes failed to penetrate MICHELLE’S metal skin; even
if they had, they would have had little effect. MICHELLE was alive with
billions of nanobots which would have negated the poison—any poison—within
seconds. MICHELLE was military grade. Designed for the army. MICHELLE was Hard
to Kill.

She strode back to her cage,
opened the blast doors, and tossed the tiny GK inside. Nyx rattled from the
back wall, limbs flailing, and lay still. With a grunt, MICHELLE heaved the
blast doors— each weighing several hundred tonnes—back into well-oiled grooves.

MICHELLE grinned. “I am MICHELLE.
Hear me roar!” she said, and roared. It was so loud, many of the light bulbs in
the underground vault popped and shattered, littering the floor with broken
glass.

Well done, my sweet,
said Professor Xakus.
Now I’m
coming down with some friends. We need transport to another location. Would you
please try and not hurt anybody?

Sure thing,
thought back MICHELLE in
smell-thought.

With a groan, the ramp juddered,
and started to descend.

~ * ~

Keenan
hunkered down, peering into the gloom. Lights fizzled, beams glittering from
shards on the concrete-alloy floor. The booms, crashes and clangs which had
filled the underground vault had Keenan and Franco exchanging worried glances,
whilst Knuckles, still shaken from his near-death encounter, backed away
brandishing his machete stained with congealing zombie blood.

“Follow me.”

Professor Xakus strode down the
ramp, boots crunching slivers of twisted alloy where Nyx had been trapped and
forcibly wrenched free, leaving long smears in the metal. He stood at the
bottom, hands on hips, a broad smile hijacking his features as he gazed up at—

Keenan looked up. And up.

Shit, he thought. It’s
big.

MICHELLE was a good fifty feet in
height. She was built around an endoskeleton of high-grade military armoured TitaniumIV-alloy.
Her hands and feet were huge cubic clumps of steel with braided piping coming
from ankles and wrists and feeding into limbs. The trunk, arms and legs were a
kind of blended, Kevlar-glass flesh, which looked a little like metal matting
but, Xakus assured the Combat K men, was 100% organic matter. A short, squat
powerful neck supported a head that was—

“By God, that’s bloody ugly!”
snapped Franco, staring up at the biomechanical behemoth.

MICHELLE clanked, took a step
back, and lowered her face to within inches of Franco. Her head was as large as
he was. He stared into glittering, silver eyes, many-faceted, like those of an
insect, each tiny plate fashioned from high polished alloy. The panels and
plates slithered and adjusted with the tiniest of metallic grating sounds. The
eyes were large, like dinner plates set in the face of a human-insect. MICHELLE’S
face was the same alloy matting skin as on the torso, arms and legs. She had no
nose, only a horizontal slot for a mouth—which she opened, showing row upon row
of razor-sharp teeth.

“They are, actually, industrial
standard razors,” said Xakus proudly. He stepped past Franco and patted
MICHELLE on the face where her nose should have been. Steam hissed from vents
behind her vertical metal ears. It seemed to be a sign of pleasure. “There,
there, who’s a good girl?”

MICHELLE beamed, the horizontal
slot somehow transferring the idea of a smile.

“So it’s... alive?” rumbled
Franco.

“Yes, biological and mechanical.
I built her. She is mine.”

“You’re crazier than me, crazy
fool!” snapped Franco. “You’s a lunatic, mate. Why, in the name of all that’s
holy, did you build that damned monstrosity? And
why
did you make it so
big? And
why
did you make it so bloody donkey-ugly?”