Xenoform, page 24
As they crawled down Springham Street a gyrocopter weaved into view from their right. It was ducking and lurching randomly, narrowly avoiding a tall dilapidated shopping centre as it crossed the road ahead of them.
‘What’s up with that thing?’ wondered Spider aloud. He craned his neck to follow the ’copter’s course.
‘Dunno, Spidey. Let’s just get us home.’ Voices were rising from the pavement beside the road. People were pointing up at the ’copter, some of them crying out and running for cover.
The gyrocopter rose sharply with a lurch that must have subjected its human crew to several gee. One of its machine guns began to fire into the street several blocks away. Something exploded over there. ‘Shit!’ Spider exclaimed, flinching instinctively. Suddenly the harvesters felt desperately exposed and vulnerable.
People were screaming now, fleeing into buildings, falling over each other. Some drivers were trying to squeeze their pods between the lanes of traffic and affect some sort of escape. Some simply got out and fled on foot. One of these was hit by a ground-cycle and thrown into the air like a rag doll, over the crash barrier and gone, his flailing form briefly silhouetted against the sky. The cycle-rider, joined to his mount only by his hi-flo cable, skidded along the road and hit the back end of an old van. The cycle thudded into him and his body seemed to collapse into an impossibly small space.
Spider looked back at the gyrocopter, which was doubling back on itself, dipping steeply down on one side. Its machine gun was out of ammo but Spider could see the barrel smoking as it continued to spin, madly trying to shoot with bullets that didn’t exist. A police officer fell out of one of the ’copter’s doors and dropped out of sight into the road. A unified cry of horror went up from the bystanders. And then the ’copter darted erratically to its left, sideswiped an office block and exploded in a rose of fire. The huge skeleton of the ’copter’s internal gyroscope, still spinning, bounced playfully off the office building, smashing a gaping hole into its face and landed in the road, crushing several gridlocked gravpods into components.
‘Holy shit!’ bellowed Spider. ‘Get us out of here, man!’
‘I can’t!’ yelled Roberts, thumping the dashboard in frustration.
Several police officers on foot were pelting towards the area where blazing wreckage was raining down into the street. Pods were shuffling to and fro, trapped by each other, their computers trying to affect escape by routes that weren’t there. One driver, fleeing on foot, was bumped by a large silver pod – gently, it seemed, just a nuzzling, really – and began to scream, ‘I’m stuck! My legs! My legs!’ He was indeed pinned between the silver pod and another in front of it. Far from backing off, the silver pod seemed to press, lovingly, further into the man’s legs. Spider watched in horrified fascination as those legs were pinched off at the thigh and the still screaming torso of the man flopped onto the bonnet of the silver vehicle. Judging by the limp quality of his truncated form the man had mercifully lost consciousness.
A voice from a loudspeaker was shouting instructions at the crowd, mostly ignored: ‘Drivers must remain in their vehicles! Pedestrians are to seek shelter indoors! Please move away from the accident scene! Move back or we will open fire!’ It wasn’t clear which accident scene the voice was referring to – it seemed the whole city had become an accident scene as far as the eye could see, as evidenced by another booming explosion from somewhere off to the north, in the direction of the Lanes.
‘There!’ shouted Spider, pointing to a gap that had opened between an HGV and a small pod on their right. Beyond was the narrow gulley of Duplex Street, which bore west and then turned to cross the old Stevens Canal before bearing south again. ‘Go down Duplex, it looks almost empty!’
‘Right,’ said Roberts quietly.
He inched the nose of the van around as all hell broke loose about them, until it was pointing into the small gap in the traffic, and then opened the throttle all the way. The van took off like a bullet from a gun, clipping the corner of the pod and shunting it round. The driver shouted some sort of abuse (quite justifiably, in Spider’s opinion) through his loudspeaker, but it was lost in the rising whine of the drive system. The van squatted back on its suspensor cushion and burst into the narrow side street.
‘Yeah!’ enthused Spider, clapping Roberts on the shoulder. They tore along beneath the snaggled drapes of cable-car wire and half-rotten effluent pipes that had once dumped illicit industrial waste into the canal, back in the days when there had been industry in these parts. Roberts swerved onto the pavement to avoid an abandoned pod in the road, narrowly missing a dog-faced girl who ducked back into cover just in time, yelping in surprise. The van smashed into a wheelie bin as Roberts struggled to dismount the pavement, obliterating it in an explosion of decayed refuse and rusted metal. Neither of the harvesters flinched – the van was made of sturdy stuff.
‘Looks like we’re away,’ said Roberts with restrained satisfaction.
Just then, the chequered nose of a police pod, in the livery of Resperi Police Corporation, appeared from a side street, inching into the path of the van.
‘Damn!’ declared Roberts through clenched teeth, pulling back sharply on the control to brake. Spider knew they weren’t going to stop in time – they would hit the pod. He barely had chance to brace against the dash.
The van clipped the front quarter-panel of the Resperi pod, spinning it sideways into the far wall of the side street. It gave a brief, protesting howl of siren as it smashed into the brickwork. Spider noticed a rack of missiles on the pod’s roof.
He was jounced hard, cracking his knee painfully on the dash and almost dropping the rifle as the van stopped sharply just beyond the police vehicle. ‘Fucking Resperi!’ he muttered under his breath. Their immunity contract extended to include RPC, but the force had a bad reputation for organisation and professionalism. Rubbing his knee angrily, Spider cracked the skin of the van and shouted out, ‘What the fuck are you playing at? Turn the damn sensors on! You came out of there blind, idiot!’
Roberts put a restraining hand on Spider’s slab-like shoulder. ‘Hang on, Spidey. I think they’re pissed.’
A fight-modded female officer was getting out of the police vehicle. She moved at a trot to block the van’s continuance down the road. Her body was an angular explosion of shiny knife-edges, a complex multi-faceted fractal of blades. She was carrying a machine pistol and deep within the razor-edged surfaces of her head her eyes looked thoroughly furious and also a little frightened. Bad combination. Looking back, Spider could see her companion – a brutish man with some sort of facial piercings – sitting in the passenger seat, presumably with his hands on the controls of that missile rack.
‘Listen, Officer, we’ve got a contract with your force and we just want to get home!’ shouted Spider, a little more reasonably. ‘So if you’d get out of the damn way, we’d appreciate it!’
‘Step out of the van with your hands up!’ called a metallic voice from somewhere within the officer’s strange body. She was almost within spitting distance now.
‘Looks like they don’t mean to honour our contract,’ mused Roberts.
Spider briefly considered shooting her straight through the damaged windscreen of the van with the new mag-rifle, but he knew that those missiles would launch before they could even bring arms to bear on the police pod, what with the van’s automatic systems off-line. And if they started the computerised weapons systems up, then instruments in the police pod would likely register that, also provoking an attack. What to do?
‘Oh dear,’ mumbled Roberts. ‘Look, I’ll get out, Spidey – you stay in the van. When the time is right, shoot that bastard in the pod. You’ll know when the time is right. Right?’
‘Right. What are you going to do?’
But then Roberts was bailing out of the open door, which whooshed shut again behind him, keeping himself between the officer and the van as he went. Spider didn’t think he was armed.
‘Both of you!’ screamed the Resperi woman, her machine pistol levelled at Roberts. Spider knew she couldn’t see him through the van’s one-way skin but she knew he was there. He wished he had kept quiet.
‘Hey, what’s the matter?’ Roberts was asking in his most diplomatic voice, arms spread wide, closing nonchalantly with her. ‘You guys should look where you’re going. Look, we’ll pay for any damage, okay? We just have to get home. Whole city’s going to hell, if you hadn’t noticed.’
The police officer was on him, gun waving him down onto the floor. ‘Get down!’ she shouted in her tinny voice. It must have issued from a speaker somewhere because Spider couldn’t see her lips move. ‘You in the van, come out now!’
Far from getting on the floor, Roberts moved quickly, inside the arc of the officer’s weapon. She hadn’t expected him to close with her and she was taken off guard and off balance. Roberts had a stunner in his hand, previously concealed, now revealed like a magic trick. Spider knew the time was right and twisted in his seat, bringing the mag-rifle up in one motion, squaring the male officer in the sights. He fired, once, trusting to instinct, right through the rear wall of the van. He didn’t take the time to carefully draw a bead as he usually would with the dumb-firing weapon. This one shot would have to be right. Fly, he thought as the gun hissed softly against his ear.
Maybe the weapon wouldn’t shoot through the side of a tank, even with liquid points, but it certainly killed the officer in the pod spectacularly enough. A small, neat hole appeared in the armoured hide of the van and then the windscreen of the Resperi pod disintegrated in a glittering spray. Spider heard a small, understated pop and the interior of the pod filled with a red mist. Through the gory vapour he could see the body of the beheaded officer jerk once and then slump. Blood splattered the bonnet of the vehicle with decorative colour. The dreaded missile rack remained silent.
Spider swung the gun instantly back round to face front, where Roberts was struggling with the female officer and losing. The numerous sharp planes of her arms and legs were cutting him to pieces. Droplets of blood flew like confetti. He seemed to have the stunner jammed up against her angular midsection as she struggled to bring her gun between them. The stunner was discharging uselessly into her, wreathing her form in a crackling aura. Her actual organic body must have been well insulated from the exterior blading because she seemed to feel no effect whatsoever.
Spider couldn’t get a clear shot and so, without hesitation, he leapt out of the van, expecting Resperi reinforcements at any moment. As he did so he heard the machine pistol rattle percussively, saw bullets ricocheting off the road surface. Roberts screamed – a wordless sound of pain and rage. The officer slashed upwards with the sword-like edge of one arm, catching Roberts under the chin and sending him arching backwards in a fountain of blood. Using the space that this created, she kicked him further off balance and brought the gun up. The little eyes inside that mess of metal twinkled with satisfaction.
And then Spider shot her with the mag-rifle. The liquid point melted through her armour with blinding speed, disintegrating inside the meaty core of her body. Blood burst from between the creases and crevices of her blades and her dying hand squeezed the trigger of the machine pistol one last time. A chattering stream of bullets tore along the road, stitching the tarmac, pattering off the front of the van. Roberts staggered and fell in a crumpled heap, his trench coat billowing around him. Spider shot the woman again, this time in the head. Jellied chunks of flesh and shards of metal flew.
‘Look where you’re fucking driving next time!’ he screamed at her collapsing form. He could have shot her all day, the way he felt. He had one hundred and ninety-seven rounds left, after all. But Roberts needed help. Spider went to him and knelt beside his battered body, laying the rifle on the road beside him. He was aware of sirens blaring in the streets around them, knowing that any number of them could be heading here.
He cradled Roberts’s head tenderly in his powerful claws, his huge chest heaving with deep, ragged breaths. Roberts’s face was a pulverised ruin and his body was slashed and torn. His chin had been split by that last powerful blow and his teeth jutted out at crazy angles. He lay in a formless heap, his arms and legs splayed at improbable angles. The stunner was on the floor beside him in a pool of gore. His eyes, however, were sharp and clear within the remains of his face.
‘So much...for our...damn...contract,’ he rasped. And then he died.
Spider knelt beside the body of the man who had stood beside him through years of madness and danger, utterly drained, utterly defeated. The rifle lay next to him, forgotten. He felt nothing, but it was a nothing more intense, more blanketing than any emotion could have been. It was a great, voluminous nothing as blank and black as a midnight sky. Part of his mind urged him to go, leave the scene of the crime, but that part was distant, so distant. He didn’t even notice when men and women in the chequered colours of RPC filtered from the streets around him, closing in, weapons drawn, to surround him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lifkin Oman heard the incredible detonation of the fuel barge crashing into the city. Possibly a part of his mind understood and was horrified by what was clearly a huge catastrophe, but the kernel that remained of Lifkin’s original being had retreated far inside. It squirmed there like a cowed and beaten dog, unable to assert any influence over the actions of what had once been Lifkin’s body.
Lifkin had broken all the mirrors when it became clear what was happening to him, and so even if he had wanted to, and had actually been able to control his traitorous body, he would not have been able to see the full extent of the completed metamorphosis anyway. This was one small island of mercy in a sea of random cruelty.
Some days ago he had gone to bed with a raging headache and uncontrollable shivers following the installation of the most attractive pair of amber cat’s eyes that money could buy. He had assumed at the time that he was suffering from some sort of infection caught during the surgery and of course, in a sense, he was.
His girlfriend had called him around ten pm that night, asking why he hadn’t shown up at her flat as arranged. Communicating by DNI had intensified the pressure of the headache unbearably and it had taken all of his resolve not to scream, Just leave me alone! Leave me alone, I’m in agony! He had managed to put her off for the night, underplaying just how truly awful he had felt when she had woken him. It’s probably just a hangover from the anaesthetic, he had told her. I’ll catch you tomorrow.
It had turned out to be more than just a hangover from the anaesthetic. He had failed to return to sleep that night – in fact he hadn’t slept since then. Parts of his new mind shut off here and there, quite unknown to him, shuffling responsibilities between each other as the very structures of his brain and body were ruthlessly re-written. After all, the new Lifkin hadn’t had much to do so far – he was mainly just waiting for the signal. Resting was part of the process, even if actual sleep was not possible.
That second morning he had got up from his fruitless attempts to relax when the savage burning of the daylight filtering through the window sent his head into fresh paroxysms of torment. He had stumbled to the window, one hand over his slitted eyes (those new, expensive eyes) and dragged a tall wardrobe over to cover the glare. Maybe, he thought, they set the brightness too high on these damn implants. That would explain a lot. I’ll have to call them – this can’t be normal.
But he hadn’t called them. He had sat, exhausted by the exertion, on the sofa, feeling nauseous. Then, when the reeling and swaying became too much, he had lain down. He had stared blankly at the wall, unaware that he was doing so, for six hours and fourteen minutes. And then, gradually, he had become conscious of the fact that he had fouled himself. This had brought him round a little and he had almost got as far as sitting up when there had been a knock on the door. His head had whirled sickeningly as the sound hammered through it. A voluminous anger swelled within him. Whoever it was, he had vowed, they would regret disturbing him today.
