Toxicity (48 page)

She hit hard tiles with a slap
and lay there, stunned. Like a fish on a block.

Slowly, she rolled onto her back
and stared up at the hole through which she’d tumbled. Shivering, aching, fear
raw in her mind and stomach, she lifted her gun and aimed and focussed and
waited.

Randy appeared, slick with blood,
his twisted rebuilt face manic and inhuman. Jenny fired,
one-two-three-four-five
shots, and gunsmoke drifted, and Randy had gone.

Jenny climbed to her feet and
looked around. She was in some kind of kitchen. The floor was made of hard
white tiles, small squares which stretched off to walls of polished stainless
steel. Steel benches lined the walls, littered with pans. Everything gleamed as
if some maniac with a love of polish had been at work. The kitchen wasn’t in
use; no pans bubbled, no happy chefs tossed salads or pared meat from bone. It
was deathly still, quiet as the grave, cold as a corpse.

Jenny walked, feet slapping, and
found a door. It led to a corridor, and the corridor led to more rooms. She
peered through glass squares in each door, and the third one down was some kind
of locker room. She tried the handle, stepped inside, and started going through
the lockers. There was a wide range of different outfits, mainly of the chef or
kitchen orderly variety, and thankfully Jenny pulled on baggy white pants and a
cotton smock. She found white pumps, which she gratefully pulled onto her freezing
feet, and all of a sudden she felt less vulnerable. A little bit of her
confidence returned.

“You’ve been through a lot, girl,”
she murmured, eyes narrowing. “Now it’s time to finish this thing.” But she
could still hear Flizz’s screams echoing in her ears. Still see Sick Note’s
face as the chainsaw came down on him, and his blood splattered the ground. Her
face twisted into a nasty grimace and she looked up, looked around. “I’m going
to bring you all down, motherfuckers. Going to give you a taste of your own
sour medicine.”

~ * ~

IT
TOOK HER three hours to find the cell block. Most of the blocks were automated,
and Randy’s magical set of keys unlocked
everything.
He was
high-ranking, that was for sure. A regular ziggurat type of guy, no doubt with
a CV as long and fictional as it was fancy and stencilled. In the end, sick of
searching endless corridors and empty kitchens -
What was this place? It
felt like a complex waiting to be filled with an army!
- she found a
terminal in an empty office, which smelt of polish and wax and air freshener,
and she sat and booted up the computer and, using the codes on Randy’s keys,
managed to find herself a map of the complex. It was big. No. BIG. Her eyes
scanned the images, and noted the underground private train system which linked
most of the major cities on Amaranth with the Greenstar Factory Hub.

“Bingo,” she said, without any
form of smile or self-congratulation. But she
had
found it. The base of
operations.

The Factory Hub.

But first?

She needed backup.

Now, however, she’d come across a
problem. Three guards, seated around a steel table, reading. She really didn’t
want to kill them, but... hell. They’d put a bullet in her skull first chance
they got.

Luck was on her side. A comm
buzzed and one of the guards had a heated conversation. Cursing, he scraped
back his chair and disappeared into the depths of the prison block complex. A
few minutes later, one of the remaining guards stood and stretched, complaining
about his back. “I’m going for a piss. Hold the fort.”

Jenny followed him at a discreet
distance, sneaking into the restroom thirty seconds behind him and thanking her
lucky stars that he’d locked himself in a cubicle. She decided to work on the
shock principle.

The shot blasted a hole in the
steel door and punched a hole in the tiles six inches from the man’s head. When
Jenny kicked the door open, it smacked him in the face and he sat back down on
the toilet, pants still round his ankles, blood pouring from a broken nose.

“Don’t kill me,” he said,
clamping the bridge of his nose between thumb and fingers.

Jenny advanced. She smiled. “All
I need is information,” she said.

Five minutes later, the guard
with the broken nose, relieved of his weapon - which sat in Jenny’s belt -stopped
outside a blank steel door. It was heavy duty, reinforced with bars, and Jenny
smiled nicely at the guard. His comrade was unconscious back at the desk, a
copy of a pulp paperback covering his face, his hands and feet tied tight with
wire.

As the door opened, the man
within rose like a ponderous mountain. He had dark skin and wore simple prison
clothes. He’d been beaten badly, his nose was still bent, but his eyes were
bright and filled with fire.

“Jenny!”

“Zanzibar. Come on. I’m breaking
you out.”

“I knew you’d come.”

He grinned at her, and in that
face, in that smile, in that
connection,
Jenny realised she was back;
back with her family. Zanzibar stepped out of the cell, and stretched, and
glared at the guard. He grinned, and it was the grin of a shark. The guard
visibly flinched.

“You okay, girl?”

Jenny nodded, and burst into
tears.

~ * ~

JENNY
STOOD HOLDING her pistol, and stared at her squad. What
remained
of her
squad. Her
friends.
There was Meat Cleaver, stocky, his eyes narrow and
slanted, looking almost naked without his trademark knives and sharpened
meat
cleaver.
Nanny was there, face wrinkled, hair hacked into a crew cut,
haggard, shoulders square, almost a
cube
of muscle, but looking even
more fearsome in the harsh glare of the prison. Bull was there, a short stocky
man with angry eyes, an angry face and a horde of facial tattoos.

And then there was Zanzibar. Her
old comrade. Her old friend. They’d been in it together; from the start.
Through training, field ops, bombing raids; they’d saved each other’s arses a
hundred times. He was a dark-skinned man-mountain, hair short-cropped and
brown, eyes so deep they were pools of velvet.

“Flizz?” he said.

Jenny shook her head, looking at
the ground.

“What about Sick Note?” asked
Nanny, her voice a soft rumble. There’d always been rumours about her and Sick
Note, which they’d both vehemently denied. And not just because it was against
squad protocol; they both seemed embarrassed at the
notion
of love, as
if it would destroy their “hard man” image.

“I’m sorry,” said Jenny, looking
at the ground again.

Nanny made a strangled sound. “How
did he die?”

“It wasn’t... good.”

“How did he die?”
There was a furious light, like
the eternal fires of Hell, in Nanny’s eyes.

“With a chainsaw. At the hands of
a woman called Vasta. She’s the Head of Security.”

“I will kill her.”

Jenny nodded, and took a deep
breath, and looked up at Zanzibar. He was staring at her, head tilted to one
side.

“You have a plan?” he said.

“This place is linked to the
Greenstar Factory Hub by an underground train network. All the major Greenstar
places are slotted into this crazy spider’s web they’ve built. But what I also
saw, in the schematics, was a network of pipes running from the Hub to every
damn Greenstar base, carrying lirridium fuel to large tanks - I mean
large
tanks
- which resupply Shuttles and Dumpers. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Detonate the Hub, a chain
reaction should feed through the pipes and take out every Greenstar base on the
planet.” Zanzibar’s eyes were shining. “Sounds dangerous, though.”

“Certainly,” said Jenny.

“Suicidal, in fact.”

“Without a shadow of a doubt.”

“But we cleanse the planet of
Greenstar.”

“Guys?” Jenny Xi looked around at
what remained of her squad. “We’ve been through some shit together. Through
some pain. I am going to the Greenstar Factory Hub. And I’m going to blow it,
or die trying. I don’t expect any of you to follow; you have your own lives to
lead. In three minutes, I leave this room, and I won’t think anything less of
those who choose to walk away.”

“I’m with you,” growled Nanny. “I
want some fucking payback.”

“Me as well,” rumbled Meat
Cleaver.

Bull gave a grunt, which Jenny
knew from experience was an affirmative. Once again tears sprang to her eyes;
but these were tears of love, and a feeling that she was part of a union, a
joyous need to do the right thing and get the right thing done.

She looked to Zanzibar. He was
grinning, despite the torture on his face. “We’re all with you, little lady.
Just lead the way.”

Jenny gave a nod, approached the
guard and put a pistol to his head. “First, we need the armoury. If you’d be so
good as to give us directions.”

“We have no armoury here,” said
the guard.

Jenny lowered the pistol and put
a bullet in his shoulder. Blood exploded. Shards of shoulder blade hung from
the wound. The guard gasped, dropping to one knee, but Zanzibar grabbed him and
hoisted him up.

“I think you should take us to
it,” said Jenny, little more than a whisper.

“Okay,” said the guard, lips
trembling, blood leaking between his fingers.

“Let’s move,” said Jenny.

~ * ~

BOOTS
THUDDED DOWN the polished steel corridors. Jenny, Zanzibar, Meat Cleaver, Bull
and Nanny were now dressed in black combat fatigues, courtesy of Greenstar’s
secret armoury, and carried a range of D4 shoguns, SMKK machine guns and
Techrim 11mm pistols. They had packs full of HighJ explosives, and Nanny had
treated herself to Kekra Quad Barrel Machine Pistols. It had been a
particularly well-equipped armoury.

“How did you know they’d have
such a stash of hardware?” rumbled Bull, as they stopped at a corridor
intersection and crouched, weapons bristling and covering arcs of fire.

“Greenstar sort out their own
problems. Each and every factory has a stash that makes the Amaranth Regular
Army look like chicken farmers. It’s almost as if... they’re preparing for a
war.”

“Maybe it’s a precaution in case
the other planets of Manna decide they no longer want to allow Greenstar to
abuse the ecology of this world?”

Jenny nodded. “If politics fail,
then they will resort to violence. Yes. I can see the logic in that; after all,
it’s the way it’s always been with politicians, down the ages. Fucking
scumbags. All in it for the power, the glory... and the money. Especially the
money.”

“Let’s move.”

They sprinted down another
corridor and stopped, peering down a stationary escalator. Below them, they
could just see the edge of a platform - like any underground train station.
Only this was for the internal use of Greenstar staff only.

Jenny made several hand gestures,
and led the way down the escalator, treading softly, SMKK in her hands. The
schematics had shown that the trains were automated; but that didn’t mean they
weren’t guarded. But then, this place was hardly a hive of bustling activity.
Jenny felt suddenly uncertain about what would happen when they reached the
Greenstar Hub - after all, it was central. The core of all Greenstar’s Amaranth
activities. They’d have to leave the train early, do the last few hundred
metres on foot. See if there were access tunnels they could use to bypass what
was surely a “central” station.

Reaching the bottom of the
escalator, Jenny stopped, Zanzibar by her shoulder. Something felt wrong. It
was just too easy. Too quiet. Did they know the escaped ECO terrorists were on
a new warpath to destroy Greenstar in totality? Or were they tied up with some
other problem?