Hardcore - 03 (2 page)

Jekyll's solar rings ate the WarFleet.

Explosions roared in a rapid machine-gun concussion which pulsed through the entire system, and out beyond, into the Void, on the screams of a million dead...

In the blink of an eye, the entire Quad-Galaxy navy was destroyed.

Combat K: efficient in infiltration, assassination and detonation. Combat K, unsung heroes of the Quad-Galaxy, soldiers of fortune, the Special Forces elite squad who always got the job done. With only one drawback... they hated one another. But now, a directive: from General Steinhauer, of the Quad-Gal Military.

"Combat K will carry out missions for QGM. All three of you
will
co-operate, because you have been implanted with spinal logic cubes. If you do not work together, then you die. If one of you kills another, then again, all three die. Horribly. You have no say in this matter. You will work for QGM, you will help bring about the end of the junk invasion, the junk acceleration. Or you will die in the process."

"I'd rather fucking die," snarled Pippa.

Steinhauer smiled. "Die, then," he said.

The Blip, a semi-sentient Monitor-Drone, watched Combat-K uneasily as they cruised through a seemingly endless state of REM sleep. It was a long haul from The City in a cold, cargo-storage SLAM Freighter. In half-stasis pods, Combat K dreamed, and the Blip watched their dreams on linked nerve-spine monitors, searching for... inconsistencies.

Pippa dreamed of a young girl with her hair in flames. Pippa twitched, crying for her mummy, and was chased by a group of savage snarling children, screaming at her, hurling matches, yelling, "Burn the witch, burn the witch, burn the witch." Tears rolled down her face as she curled into a ball; and her sorrow lasted an eternity.

Franco, as usual, was dreaming about sex. Only this time it was a forced infection, and he awoke, cold and grey, vomiting and scratching, the
beat
of the rhythm through his veins carrying strange alien toxins which made his flesh bloat, his internal organs die, and he awoke screaming screaming screaming... into
another
dream, which simply repeated his frustration, his infestation, his raw and painful agony, of both body and soul.

And Keenan dreamed of his girls, his young dead girls, and they were beautiful and radiant and they stretched out for him, pleading in their eyes, in their cries, "Come with us, daddy," they said. "Be with us, daddy. We
miss you."
And Keenan fumbled with his Techrim 11mm, cold shivering hands placing the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. There was a muffled
blam
and the rear of his skull detonated, skull shards and liquid mashed brain ejecting in slow-mo spirals and he blinked, was normal again, alive again and he dreamed of his girls, his young dead girls, and they were beautiful and radiant and they stretched out for him, pleading...

All life is a cycle, thought the Blip.

And all death a fitting end.

PART I

SICK WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

PARTY BOY

It waited in the slime, playing with its peroxide-blonde hair, twirling tight curls and bobs between fingers with lacquered, polished nails, and enjoying the feel of oozing mud and rotting vegetation. Cherry-red lips pulled back over crooked yellow teeth as the creature
grinned
, and it knew,
knew
fresh meat was coming. It could
smell
it
.
And if it waited for long enough, fresh meat always arrived, fresh and plump and wriggling and tasty. Screaming, yes, but that was an inconsequence easy enough to handle. What took
real
skill was keeping the meat alive. Helping the meat repair. Nursing the meat in getting
better.
That was the real skill.

The Titan Pleasure Cruiser
Razzle
was sixty kilometres long, half a klick wide, a missile-ship crafted from Plutonium Dakkra and humming 0.7LS through hydrogen, methane and vast pockets of carbenes. It was a long dacromet needle piercing the most remote reaches of the Quad-Galaxy... a needle, threading an invisible galactic eye.

Originally built for the thousand-year Helix War, the Pleasure Cruiser's original objective had been infantry and vehicle transport - on a
vast
scale. After the Helix War was brought to a violent, bloody and sudden conclusion by the Quad-Gal Peace Unification Army, so the Titan was retired from active military service and forwarded to a tacky pleasure travel outfit named
Whoral Pleasure
based on the hedonistic corporate hive of The City, and specialising in two-year Sinax Pleasure Cruise deals, with machine sex thrown in for free.

Now, however, after a recent spate of attacks by the expanding and flowering army of toxic aliens known as junks, Quad-Gal Military - or QGM - had requisitioned the ship as fast transport through Quad-Gal on a very select group of missions. Carrying a vast array of Combat-K and reg. army squads, even as QGM Generals formulated missions and directives, so the craft delivered troops, teams, even whole armies in a vast machine-gun volley of proactive and, unfortunately
, reactive
missions. Reactive was bad. Reactive meant the enemy had the tactical advantage.

One of eighty such stellar onslaughts, the
Razzle
was governed by the recently crippled figure of General Steinhauer, the originator of QGM Combat-K teams and currently in a state of high anxiety. As the Pleasure Cruiser hummed around him, and the orange and black glow of his suite gave him a pounding migraine, so the General pushed himself back from his desk and for the millionth time glanced down at his severance.

Steinhauer bobbed on the HoverChair, then gritted his teeth in a caricature of a smile. Bastard, he thought.
Bastard
. Even with sub-atomic nanotechnology, for reasons apparently unknown to medical science, Steinhauer could neither rebuild nor graft legs in place onto his disabled and savagely severed anatomy. According to top military surgeons, Steinhauer's own body violently rejected any attempt to rebuild his legs, and after the recent horrors of Biohell, the media nickname tagged to the deviant horrorshow that went on down on The City at the hands of corrupted hardware manufacturer NanoTek and its governing AI alien-grown GreenSource Mainframe instigator, so people no longer trusted biomod improvement nanotechnology - in case a person woke as a different damn
species
.

"You OK?" came a soothing, female voice. It was the HoverChair's inbuilt Psychosis Monitor. Her name was Jemma.

"Yes," snapped Steinhauer, irate for no reason. He grimaced again. Actually, he did have a reason. He had no legs. And no genius of science could replace that which he'd taken so much for granted. "Stop asking me the same damn questions over and over again. In fact, stop analysing my mental health - because at this current moment in time, I haven't got any mental fucking health!"

Steinhauer dropped back to his pit of depression.

And thought gloomily about the junks.

Keenan went to step through the doorway to his shared quarters, when Franco dropped his shoulder and barged his way in. Scowling, Keenan followed and watched Franco drop his pack, put his hands on his hips, and beam around the narrow combined recreation and sleeping quarters. The decor was art nouveau, all twisted alloy and bubble-filled glass. The floor was a new type of spongy jewel. Even the sinks gleamed, with swan-head taps. The toilet was a contemporary aero-suck titanium-III model. Advanced.

"I'm bunking here!" Franco landed on the bed, and bounced a few times. A spring popped. Franco beamed. "It's all right this, ain't it Keenan? I mean, getting ferried to our next mission on a damn
pleasure cruiser!"
His eyes gleamed, and he licked his lips.

"I wouldn't pay to stay here," said Keenan, dropping his own pack to his bed and eyeing Franco warily. "It's a little bit too...
tacky
for my liking."

"Tacky? Tacky! Keenan, your middle name should be
Moaning-Old-Goat
."

"You're the guy with a magpie eye for every plastic glitter bauble you can get your paws on. Now listen, we've got forty-eight hours until our DropShip leaves for Sick World. In that time we have to undergo medicals, get kitted out, check vehicles and weapons, and have upgrade implants. I don't want you heading out on the piss."

"Moi? Piss?" Franco spread his hands. "Why would you possibly think I might do that?"

"I know you, dickhead. So, no women, no beer, you understand? I need you switched on when we hit the ground."

"Hey," said Franco, "have you
ever
known a mere ten pints of Guinness stop me performing?" He scratched his ginger goatee beard, and frowned. "Or even twenty, for that matter? I am a veritable
party animal,
Keenan. You
have
to let me out to play."

"No."

"Aww, go on Keenan, don't be such a stick in a bucket of turd."

Keenan pulled free a battered Techrim 11mm pistol, and weighed it thoughtfully. "I'm not a... a
stick
in a bucket of turd, idiot." His words were tight. Controlled. But his eyes shone. "I'm just helping you to help yourself."

Franco slumped to his bed, and kicked his sandals forlornly. "Fine words coming from a damned Jataxa
alcoholic."

"I don't drink anymore," said Keenan. "Not after Biohell. Not after the GreenSource Mainframe." He shivered, just a little, and remembered the cold clarity of alien thoughts flowing through his veins, acidic, cold, like hydrogen through an engine.

"Well, I believe I deserve a drink. I've, um, had some recent bad news. Needs a bit of cheering up, I do."

"You do? Why?"

Franco twisted uncomfortably. "Weee
eeelll,
do you remember how I got married to my sweet Melanie? My liddle chipmunk? My little pocket of furry honey delight?"

"You mean your eight-foot tall twisted deviated fiancée? Yeah, I remember it all too clear. You're a fucking braver man than me, Franco." Keenan shivered.

During the horrific events which had overtaken The City, an entire planet dedicated to pleasure and hedonism, and whereby anybody planet-side who'd taken a vanity biomod human or alien upgrade
transmogrified
into mutated, zombie-like creatures, Franco's new-found true-love, a tax-inspector by the name of Melanie, had changed quite horrifically into an eight-foot tall quivering mottled genetic super-soldier. Despite their best efforts to find Mel medical help, and get her changed back to a form considered more human, they had been unsuccessful. Apparently, NanoTek, the organic engineering butchers who created Mel's unfortunate biological modification, had made this particular model a
one way process.
Franco, however, being a man of his word, a soldier of iron principles, and with a constitution greater than any hardcore barroom brawler, had gone through with his ultimate promise. That of marriage to what was, effectively, a zombie.

It had been an interesting ceremony.

And an interesting wedding night.

"Well," Franco puffed out his chest, watching Keenan unpacking his kit, "I'll come right out and say it. We've had a bit of a lovers' tiff. There." He looked about in a shifty manner.

Keenan stopped, holding a pair of chemical-socks. He stared at Franco. "You had a lovers' tiff with an eight-foot mutation?"

"Aye."

"Did she bite off your head?"

"Very funny. No. It would appear we had very differing standards about how to conduct marital life."

"Meaning?"

Franco shook his head. "It was disgusting!"

"You mean her jellied vagina? The pus which continually leaked from her nipples? Or maybe the way her distended jaw continually drooled what could only be described as vomitus?"

"No, no, no, none of that." He waved his hand. "The damn woman expected me
to do my own ironing!
She wanted me to
wash the fucking dishes!
And, and this was the worse thing mate, like, I just can't believe she even
thought
this was a rational request..."

"Go on."

"Mel expected me to
shave off my beard."

"The horror," grinned Keenan, unloading several Techrim mags from his pack which
clacked
as he tossed them on the bed. "I expect she wanted you to pluck your nostrils, too. You never were one for a neatly-trimmed nasal bush."

Franco stared at the floor, looking sheepish. "Yeah, well, she filed for a divorce."

"
What?"

Franco looked at Keenan. There was a hint of pain nestling deep in Franco's blue orbs. He sniffed. "Yeah. She filed for a divorce. I signed the paperwork yesterday. I'm officially a free agent."

Keenan scratched his head, and pointed at Franco. "So, let me get this straight, you're telling me you were
divorced
by an eight-foot mottled dribbling pus-drooling genetic mutation?"

"That's one way of putting it," mumbled Franco. He looked up. And brightened. "But look at it this way! At least I'm the
Party Boy
again! I like women! I like all kinds of women! But most of all, I like women I don't
know
very well!"