Code Noir Page 15

  A section of the building blanched into surreal shadows. I took me moments to make sense of it - the surfeit of fancy metals, hydraulics, moulds, tables of ’tronics all in catalogued order. Around the edge of them sat tanks of human body parts, tissue parts and other organic bits and blobs. Dotted among the tables were small aquariums - lots and lots, containing the weirdest, most inert fish I’d ever seen.

  They say reality bites! Well this reality bit, chewed, gobbled and hawked. I’d found Ike’s shop of post-human lunacy.

  It shouldn’t have been such a surprise. I mean I’d met the ma’soops. I’d got close and personal with the Twitcher army. I’d already witnessed plenty of his walking leftovers. But something about seeing the raw materials assembled underneath one roof was like opening the garbage on the butcher’s off-cuts.

  Vomit burnt the back of my throat. I ducked to the nearest window and pressed my nose against it to stop the spin.

  Outside a legion of unmarked cargo ’copts had settled on a brilliantly lit slab. Twitchers climbed about their gizzards unloading crates of all shapes: long flat boxes of weapons, chillers of foodstuffs. I now knew how Mo-Vay’s punters were getting their food, and probably everything else that kept this sick little ’burb fermenting along.

  I also knew that for once my timing was immaculate. It would be all hands on deck while the drop was on. Hopefully the Twitchers would be kept busy while I finished my snoop.

  I peered along to the other end of the slab. An UL sat there, composed and at home - the same one I’d seen at the water park.

  And next to it a Prier.

  Pieces of information played tag in my head. I wanted to sit right where I was and have a first rate cog, but behind me someone moaned.

  I hit the floor. A punter was in trouble, but that didn’t mean he was on my side.

  I crabbed along underneath the workbenches tracing the sound until the moans got louder. Peering through coils of wiring, I saw clear-plas partitions.

  I crept along peering through them until I found the moaner under lights, strapped on to a surgical table.

  Loyl!

  He was naked apart from bedfilm and the hussy in my heart beat an excited tattoo. ‘Loyl?’ I whispered.

  No answer.

  I tore the partition aside, charged over to him and began loosening the immobilisers. The one that adhered his hands to the inside of his thighs gave me some trouble. I tried not to look.

  In truth, though, I was more worried whether he was still paralysed.

  As I pared away the last restraint, he opened his eyes. Blinking once, he rolled sideways and kneed me hard in the crotch.

  Call it shock, but I staggered, straightened and punched him right back.

  The momentum of my hit knocked him on to the floor. He got up slowly.

  I didn’t help.

  ‘What the freak was that for?’ I whispered fiercely, cupping my pubic bone.

  He held his jaw with a shaky hand and flashed me a look of relief. ‘One sure way to know if it was you.’

  My breath caught in my chest. That could only mean one thing. Shape-changers.

  ‘Brilliant timing for once, Parrish.’

  Hadn’t I just been telling myself that? ‘Whyso?’

  He gestured to a robotic arm with a thermal scalpel attached. ‘They’ve been prepping me for a total skin strip. Seems they wanted to take my skin off in layers. Some heavy ’copter traffic started up and suddenly they all disappeared.’

  I flung back the plas partition and looked squeamishly out to the aquariums with the strange floppy fish.

  Not fish . . . but skin.

  ‘There’s a supply drop going on outside. Mainly weapons, by the look of it. We’ve probably got a bit longer,’ I said. ‘What is this place?’

  He ineptly tried to make a sarong out of the bedfilm.

  I slipped my pack off my back and fished around inside. One pair of fatigues and a tee left. I didn’t turn away as he squeezed into them.

  The tee was too short and left his stomach bare, but I could live with that.

  He talked fast. ‘It’s the old depot. Where the ’gineering factories got their fuel. The underground is littered with huge fuel storage tanks. The dirt was so toxic here even the villa developers didn’t dare build on it. They walled it off instead.’

  ‘Some secret garden, eh?’ I muttered.

  He gave me a funny look and shrugged. ‘He’s converted the buildings to a bunch of labs.’

  I whistled under my breath. ‘Seems to be the thing.’

  ‘Yeah, and this makes it easy.’ He pointed to a humming machine with a perceptible haze over it. ‘It spits motes into the air. With them you can create a sterile environment on a two-day-old corpse. Any science geek with enough money can set up.’

  My gaze ranged over the host of mobile modules wedged between tabletops. They resembled kitchen appliances but their labels read ‘autoclave’, ‘centrifuge’, ‘thermal cycler’ and ‘spectrophotometer’.

  ‘This is more than pocket money.’

  He rifled through a neatly stacked shelf under the bed and grabbed a derm. Checking the label, he whacked himself with it. ‘Someone from outside’s propping up a mini economy here.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured that.’ I twisted nervously towards the door. ‘What else?’

  ‘The loon who runs this show calls himself Ike. I think I know him, or at least . . . know who he was. Used to call himself “Wombat” among other names.’

  ‘Mr Microwave!’ Amazing how the real wackos always survived.

  ‘Yeah. He was the man when I was a kid. His cult was pretty big here. It died out when he supposedly did - but somehow his name stuck. He used to have a saying. Something like “evolve or eff of”. I didn’t go for it anyway.’

  ‘You wouldn’t need anyone else’s religion. You’ve got your own brand,’ I threw back at him over my shoulder. Call me dogmatic, but I just couldn’t let a chance go by on that particular topic.

  He ignored me. ‘Where’s Tulu?’

  ‘She’s with him. They’ve got some deal going between them which included suckering you and me to the happy house of horrors.’ I pointed out of the cubicle to the far end and another set of doors. ‘What’s through there?’

  He brushed past and wrenched a two-handled pincer from a tray of evil-looking instruments. ‘Let’s find out.’

  I squeezed between tables after him. ‘There’s something you should know. I overheard Ike talking to Tulu.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Anna Schaum is alive. Here.’

  He stopped dead and turned. I watched a play of emotions flicker across his face: pleasure, satisfaction and relief.

  How did she warrant that when all I got was a kick in the crotch?

  ‘If she’s here, then there’s a chance the splicing codes are as well.’

  My mood lifted with a jolt. Had the Cabal known that? I wondered.

  ‘So we just have to find her and Mei.’ And the karadji. ‘Give Tulu a hiding, get past the Twitchers and the hell out of here.’

  He glanced at me. ‘Twitchers? You mean the teens? He - Ike - is bringing them in from supercity quods and mucking with their hormones. His idea is to prolong and augment puberty. Something to do with the release of gonadotrophin. Gets some fierce results if you want aggression.’ He smiled grimly. ‘You’d understand all about prolonged puberty.’

  Snap, matey. But before I could get all narky, he held a finger to his lips and gestured me on.

  We crept down a long, makeshift corridor that linked buildings, through three sets of heavy plas partitions and up to what looked like soundproof doors.

  Daac cracked them open enough and scoped two Twitchers lounging nearby. One was squeezing his skin lesions. The other mimed humping Anna Schaum as she bent over a scrub station.

  I knew her from the blemish on her face. It stood out starkly under the lights, like a mask. Other than that she was unrecognisable. Worn dangerously thin, her blond hair hung clumped and mat
ted and her body sagged in the manner of someone who’d rather be dead.

  She finished her scrub and collapsed on to the makeshift cot next to the trough. Alongside that a mockoff jug and a pile of used styrofoams were stacked on a microwave. Looked like she hadn’t been doing a lot of sightseeing or restaurants.

  Daac’s arm muscles flexed and trembled in anger. I forced myself to stay next to him when all I wanted to do was move to stop his skin touching mine.

  My line of sight drifted across the room. I grabbed Daac’s shoulder, the touch of his flesh suddenly forgotten.

  Rows of warm, horizontal bodies lay before us.

  Shamans.

  He moved before I knew what he was doing - a couple of steps and he whacked the zit-squeezer across the back of the head with the pincers and stabbed her in the chest.

  It didn’t take her out. She buckled and recovered, jerking a spear up from her side.

  Shite.

  I was a second behind him, garrotting wire whipping the air. I sliced her hand to the bone before she could impale Loyl.

  With a foot to her chest he yanked the pincers free and jabbed them down her open, outraged mouth. They missed the spine and pierced straight through the back of her neck.

  No Loyl, don’t . . .

  He turned away, but I copped the spurt of blood in the face followed by the tidal wave of nausea which sent the world spinning.

  Blood . . .

  The other Twitcher bellowed with rage. I swiped my vision clear as he threw his spear and ducked but it was Daac who took it in the side.

  Anna Schaum screamed.

  I fumbled for a knife and chucked it.

  It caught the second Twitcher in the shoulder. He barely noticed it as he dropped and charged me. Somewhere between Anna Schaum’s coffee table and the nearest shaman body, he changed.

  Just like Jamon had. Only this was from human to . . . not so human . . .

  Beast-like. Unexplainable.

  Terrible.

  I felt automatically for the Cabal knife and met him head on. The thump jarred every part of me. As I bounced sideways I let go of the Cabal dagger into his abdomen, right about the adrenals. The Twitcher flopped backward over one of shaman, dead. He regained human form as he hung there.

  I went under again with appalling relief that I hadn’t killed an innocent teen.

  There are many of us here now. Many, many, so many . . . we disseminate . . .

  It was absurdly quiet when I came out of it.

  Then Daac moaned.

  Schaum spread over him like an epidemic, sponging the blood away, padding up his wounds, derming him with painkiller, kissing his face and whispering, ‘I knew you would come’ over and over.

  What, no thanks Parrish?

  I got up slowly and turned my back on them, repelled by the tender reunion. Hauling the dead Twitcher off the shaman, I retrieved my knives and wiped them clean, giving my hands time to steady. The shaman had a cobweb of bio-ware feeding from a device across into her skull. Her eyes rolled constantly under her lids. Tiny whimpers escaped worried lips. Whatever the hell she was hooked up to was sticking pins into her while she dreamed.

  I glanced back at Daac, questions tripping over themselves to pass my lips, and saw him pushing Schaum aside to get up and search among the unconscious bodies.

  ‘Mei’s here,’ he said.

  I stumbled to the scrub station and sluiced myself down, then I started searching for faces as well. Karadji faces.

  I met Daac somewhere in the middle of the room. Bruises were beginning to colour his skin and he hunched, favouring the spear wound. His eyes, though, glittered like ruin.

  ‘What are they using them for, Anna?’

  Schaum came to his side and rubbed her weary eyes. Her face was pale beyond pallor. Darkness was tattooed in and under her eyes. I had no time for her, but I understood the depth of her exhaustion.

  ‘Ike - h-he thinks this is post humanism. He’s brilliant and passionate about it but he’s . . .’ She trailed off as if she couldn’t find the words to explain herself.

  ‘Crazy?’ I offered.

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Misguided. The animal woman is crazy. She believes she’s harvesting neuro chemicals.’

  Misguided? Her defence of Ike told me something. They’d gotten to know each other well. Too well. I understood the darkness in her eyes. I’d carried the same look when Jamon was alive, but Anna had gone one step further.

  ‘Neurochemicals?’ I asked.

  ‘She thinks if she can distil the chemical essence of their spiritualism - the alpha waves - and infuse it, it will make her a more powerful shaman. The bio-ware is analysing and sweeping their blood while they’re in a trance state. It’s rubbish but he’s indulging her because she promised him some things.’

  ‘What things?’

  She looked at Loyl. ‘You for one. But there’s more. Ike is being paid to contaminate the Tertiary sector. They want the whole place infected with this . . . discovery we made. In return for spreading it, he continues to get what he needs to run this place.’

  ‘Tulu’s one of them?’

  ‘No. I - I don’t think so. I think she’s working for someone else who wants what Ike knows. There’s some kind of struggle going on in Viva. Ike is smart. He knows that. I think he’s trying to play both sides.’

  Hearing my suspicions so brutally confirmed was in no way consoling.

  ‘Who are they - that want to contaminate The Tert?’

  She shrugged as though it wasn’t important, as though she didn’t care or know, her eyes on the shaman.

  ‘I tried to make them comfortable,’ she said in the drained voice of someone who’d long forgotten any reason for ethics.

  ‘What about them?’ I gestured to the dead Twitchers.

  ‘You know they can’t think for themselves. He’s mutated their cognitive functions and he’s got them wired for his simple, direct orders. They were normal enough when they got here. Just criminals—’

  I interrupted her before the crack in her voice got any wider.

  ‘What have you done to them?’ I asked.

  ‘He forced me to . . . I’ve put them through the same process as our original trial group. The change . . . it starts with something piggybacking on the polmayse messenger. I’ve never encountered its like.’ She spoke only to Loyl now, as though I wasn’t there.

  ‘Is it alien?’ he asked

  Her eyes widened with a fascinated horror. ‘I - I don’t know how to explain it. It’s definitely parasitic,’ she said slowly. ‘It constructs another set of DNA then causes the body to flood with an immuno-suppressant to survive the changeover. The pituitary becomes hyper-stimulated and the hormonal release is astounding. It shouldn’t be possible, Loyl, but I’ve seen it.’

  ‘I know,’ he said flatly. ‘So have I.’

  ‘So all the Twitchers are infected?’ I could hear my voice edging to hysterical.

  Loyl grabbed Anna by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Where’s our data?’ he demanded.

  His self-interest in the face of her revelations made me sick.

  ‘Here.’ She pointed to a small bank of hardware on a tabletop. ‘We can take it but I can’t access any of it without him knowing. He’s got an identical set of data in his exoskel’s processor and wireless connection between the two. While he’s alive and in the skel he can destroy this set and retain his own.’

  ‘While he’s alive . . .’ Daac echoed.

  His face said the rest.

  Schaum blinked and looked at me properly for the first time. She shuddered. ‘Everyone we trialled the splices on will suffer the change. You weren’t one of the original group, yet the Chino shaman says you carry the parasite.’

  I nodded. ‘I swallowed the blood of someone who’d already changed.’

  ‘That would explain—’ She looked quickly at Loyl to satisfy herself she had cleaned him well enough.

  ‘Can you reverse what you’ve done?’ I interrupted.

&nbs
p; She blinked again, this time with a spark of clinical interest. ‘Not once the change has occurred. For you, though, maybe gene silencing is a possibility. Or even gene replacement. Although the fact that ingested blood is the transmitter makes it likely that it is too late . . .’

  I tuned out the rest of her speech. Options. I just needed to know there were options - otherwise everything changed.

  I turned my attention to why shivers had begun to turnstile down my body.

  Daac noticed too. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  I dashed spittle from my mouth, unable to put it into words.

  The door crashed wide and a ’Terro came for us like sudden death.

  Chapter Twelve

  Daac let go a wholly animal moan. I didn’t hold it against him, he’d been tortured by meks before. He grabbed me so hard against him I thought he was going say something sexy.

  ‘You deal with it,’ he gasped.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  I didn’t know who I was more pissed off at - me for hoping for something, or him for saying the wrong thing - but I tackled the ’Terro low, right on its knee, aiming to buckle its knee actuators and cripple it.

  It toppled on to me.

  ‘Go on then, get outta here!’ I gasped from underneath it.

  Why was I doing this?

  Even worse, he didn’t need a second invitation, disappearing out of the door, dragging his precious medic along.

  I wrenched my leg free from the ’Terro and rolled away, but it caught me in a bear hug as I scrambled after them toward the door. I pitched forward deliberately, tumbling us both on to the floor and clawed at every protrusion, stabbing my fingers into its camera sockets.

  It couldn’t get upright without letting me go. When it did, I rolled away on an explosion of adrenalin.

  I was on my feet and lunging for the door again when it got me.

  Crap! Crap! Crap!

  It bundled me under its arm and stalked through the maze of shaman zombies, dumping me next to something labelled ‘chemical analyser’ and resembling a fancy still.