Pippa breathed deep. She looked into her own eyes, and saw for the first time that, despite their physical similarities, they were
worlds
apart. The clone was alien. The clone was more alien than anything Pippa had ever experienced - only emphasised by their identical appearance. They looked the same, and were genetically the same - but diametrically opposed in every single way. A living contrast. An existence of opposites. An
impossibility.
Pippa gave a short laugh. "Fuck me. A potted history of humanity by a genetic thief. Remind me not to get on your wrong side, hey, love? I wouldn't like to wake up like one of your twitching corpses over there, that's for sure."
"You! You there! Halt!"
Pippa groaned.
It was an angry and officious little voice. It oozed temper. It was the sort of voice Pippa had experienced across the entirety of Quad-Gal, usually from behind bullet-proof glass, and usually whilst demanding some small pedantic payment for some unnecessary service by a bureaucratic government company that should have been dissolved due to lack of any real purpose decades earlier.
A platoon of small men emerged from a nearby doorway. They looked angry. Disturbingly, they carried guns. Big guns. Damn, the guns were nearly bigger than the men!
"We are halted," said Pippa, hoisting her MPK and pointing it across the space. She said, "I think they spotted us," as the squibs formed a line and, without further ado, opened fire.
Bullets roared across the chamber, and Pippa and her clone hit the ground, rolling behind cover and peering out to return fire. The squibs stood proud, faces contorted with anger, firing off round after round, roaring. Tracers streaked through the vast chamber. Pippa peered out, sighted, and fired off a volley. Two of the squibs were caught by her bullets, danced a jig on the spot and crumpled to the ground with little sighs, leaking blood. Obviously, the angry little men died as easily as anybody else, despite their awesome, ganger-supplied firepower.
The conveyor belt of ganger shells, clanking and trundling along high above, was suddenly caught in the cross-fire. Bullets tore into unprotesting, unprotected flesh, and the long line of bodies danced and jigged and jerked spasmodically. Pippa glanced up, and chunks of flesh and globules of thick green fluid rained down on her. She yelped and lowered her head, but the pulped ganger shells coated her. Smoke was filling the chamber. One came apart at the neck where bullets had chewed into its flesh, allowing the stretching skin to tear, no longer able to support the weight. The ganger shell, riddled with holes and leaking anti-rot, slapped onto the floor beside Pippa, making her curse and growl, then scrabble towards the right, through hunks of flesh and strands of pulped spaghetti skin. She shifted around the vat, pulled her MPK to her shoulder, and with a grimace that had more to do with hate than was strictly necessary, unloaded a full one-hundred-and-fifty-shot magazine into the ranks of the squibs, who were wearing big grins and, until that point, seemed to be enjoying themselves...
Two, three, four of the creatures were punched off their feet, flailing backwards, blood ejecting and mixing in a crimson spray. Pippa stood, still firing, moving right, keep on moving, keep on
shifting
, and her clone was firing in parallel, an onslaught from two different trajectories catching the squibs at the centre.
The squibs were ranting, anger-fuelled and foaming at the mouth. They charged, and Pippa and her clone mowed them down. They were punched from their feet, and Pippa coolly changed mags as bullets whistled about her face and head, and above her the empty ganger shells still danced as if in time to some bizarre, charnel-house rhythm. And suddenly -
Silence reigned.
Smoke filled the chamber. Smoke, and the stench of death. The squibs were caught in acts of grotesque impossibility, limbs twisted, bodies holed. Pippa moved forward a little, boots squelching in ganger shell anti-rot preservative.
She breathed deep, and glanced over at her clone. She looked like she'd been rolling in a butcher's bin of off-cuts. Pippa looked down at herself and cursed, lips curling into a snarl. She was soaked in...
whatever
it was. Covered with shreds of white flesh, and splinters of bone.
The trolley above clanked forlornly to a halt, only half its payload still attached. The angry little squibs had taken their tantrums out on the easiest available targets.
Some fucking soldiers,
thought Pippa savagely.
I've never met anybody so suitable as cannon fodder!
"If they're the trained soldiers, I'd hate to see the new recruits," said Pippa's clone. She reloaded her weapon with a
clack
and looked around, nostrils twitching. "We've certainly announced our presence, then."
"They already knew," said Pippa, gently. She glanced up at the swinging shells. With a
click
, the bodies tumbled into the vat, splashing and bobbing, dead skin slick, shifting together just under the surface like so many submerged maggots in a stew. "I get the feeling this is some kind of test. Like those squibs were sent to test us. To gauge our abilities."
"Why would they do that?" said Pippa's clone, frowning.
"I don't know. And I don't like the implication. What I
do know
is that I need to retrieve this artefact - this 3Core. And all I can hope is it's worth all the damn fucking effort."
Pippa strode forward, away from the vat, which was creeping her out more than she could have believed.
I mean, I've been through some shit. I've suffered at the hands of machine gods, medical mutations, government-fed super-soldier super zombies, and a cleaner with her organs on the bloody outside and her heart on a chain around her neck! I've been stabbed, shot, nuked and had implants put in my spine so if I turn on my fellow Combat K operatives, my head will detach neatly from my shoulders! And for what? All for what? To get to some shitty little outworld outpost run by a collection of genetic clones whose idea of a prick-tease is to change shape and copy their best friends. I wish Franco was here. Wish he was here, with his sly humour and wisecracks. And I wish... I wish Keenan was here. With his steady voice, his order, his unflappability. Law in the midst of chaos. A calm centre at the heart of the storm.
"Damn it. Come on."
"What's next?"
"I don't give a shit. Whatever it is, I'll break its fucking nose." Pippa stalked ahead, stepping through the massacred squibs, boots squealing in their genetically modified blood.
Silently, her clone followed.
The interior of the Slush Pits was timeless. The temperature was constant, and the light - its tint and intensity - were even. Pippa felt like she'd stepped into a stasis field.
The clanking noises grew subtly louder.
Down more corridors they moved, one boot at a time, taking their time, checking every space for enemies. They saw the occasional squib, scowling at them from the gloom before running off and disappearing into the narrow spaces between the pipes and walls. Pippa's first impulse was to shoot them in the back, and she did blast a few, hitting them between the shoulder blades, watched them crawl along the floor before giving them a double-tap to the back of the skull. But in the end, she didn't have the heart, and simply let them run off on whatever errands they had in mind.
"You shouldn't let them go," said her clone, glassy eyes emotionless, hands steady on her MPK. "They'll report our position."
"But it's like shooting fucking oompa loompas!" complained Pippa. "If Franco was here, he'd be having a blue frothing rage at the sheer brutality of it! He believes in a fair fight. He was always a sympathetic little sap like that."
"A fair fight? I take it you do not," said her clone, calmly.
"No." Pippa frowned. "I believe in doing the job, and getting the job done. As a very old friend once said - get in, and out, and the motherfuck away. That's the only way you survive in this job. If, indeed, survive we do."
They continued through the near-subterranean gloom. They passed several more huge chambers containing vats of body parts, ready for a fresh recycling. Each time Pippa saw the vats, she shivered. It didn't matter to her that these were supposedly emotionless, brainless, mindless
shells.
It was one thing to shoot an enemy soldier in the back of the head, but quite another to watch streams of endless, helpless bodies churned into slush. And she realised: Slush Pits. The place where the dead went for organic recycling.
Nice.
After journeying for what felt like hours, with the temperature rising to that uncomfortable level where sweat beads the upper lip and crawls like spiders down the spine, Pippa halted. The mechanical thumping had grown louder now, as they drew near.
The corridor ended in a door. There seemed no other path.
"We should double back," said Pippa's clone. "I don't like the sound of that."
"It's a machine, nothing more," said Pippa.
She stepped forward. On the door was small, white lettering. It read: GUN Workshop.
"A GUN workshop? They make guns here?"
"No," said her clone. "Genetic Urban Necrolatry."
Pippa frowned. "What's Necrolatry?"
"Worship of the dead."
"Sounds... unnecessary. And awful."
The clone blinked. "I suppose it's what gangers do - our ability to
change.
To die, and live again. Only, it's not really like death. It's like a snake shedding a skin. Death bringing about life. That's what this whole place represents. The Slush Pits are about
rebirth.
"
Pippa gritted her teeth hard, and shut her mouth. Sometimes, it was just better that way.
She reached forward and pushed open the door. In the gloom, there was lots of movement. The room was long, with a high ceiling, and crates stacked high around the walls. Conveyor belts ran the length of the room, and between four sets of thick, wide, armoured conveyors was a machine - an industrial robot, to be exact. It was a ball, about the size of a large groundcar, maybe eight metres in diameter and made from dull, silver metal. It was plain to the eye, no fancy lights or markings other than an industrial stencilled stamp: Thumper mkIV, in dark grey lettering. From the casing emerged four arms of steel, each with a different appendage for carrying out jobs in the workshop, and as crates came along different conveyors, the Thumper, mounted on four large bubble tyres, rolled around at the heart of the conveyors carrying out various tasks. One pincered arm lifted the lids onto the crates and smacked them into place. Its second arm, a nail-gun, punched nails through the lids at high speed, rat-a-tat-tat. The third arm was a hammer, and occasional crates were selected - to Pippa's eyes, apparently at random - and placed to one side on a huge metal plate, where they were smashed into oblivion (hence Thumper, thought Pippa; oh, how those industry types like their onomatopoeias!). Once firewood, the square would flip down and the offending tinder swallowed by a big black tube. The final appendage was a large polished cone; the Thumper didn't ably demonstrate a use for that one.
Pippa and her clone watched for a while, gauging the level of intelligence of the Thumper mkIV. After all, if it was an AI model it might, at the very least, alert the authorities or cause some obstruction under some bizarre, corrupt and misplaced Health and Safety legislation. Pippa had seen it before. H&S Bots gone policy crazy and locking people up in restaurants and factories, thinking they were simply "upholding policy" but really "condemning people to horrible deaths." The H&S SafetyBot v2.9 had, on the 15th Julius one year, caused the deaths of three hundred and nineteen workers in an insurance office block because somebody spilt a cup of Hot-O-Coffee CoffeeMax on the stairs. The H&S SafetyBot v2.9 had cordoned off the offending Hot-O-Coffee CoffeeMax with steel struts, effectively sealing the stairwell. On a higher floor containing the Superziplift computers, an electrical fire had subsequently started, rendering all lifts immediately unusable and disconnected because of the H&S SafetyBot 2.9 in charge of "Lift Safety Policy." So, as the fire happily raged out of control, the two H&S SafetyBots had imprisoned everybody in this new cage, effectively sealing them
inside
the fire zone under the pretext of Health and Safety Policy. Two days later, when the insane inferno was finally wrestled under control and the H&S SafetyBots taken down by TAK squad laser bursts, three hundred and nineteen roasted corpses were found in states of immobilised shock. The H&S SafetyBot 2.9 had been fitted with a PG - a Paralysis Gun - to enable its necessary enforcing of Health and Safety Policy. The dumb bots had immobilised the screaming, panicking people trying to escape the fire. Effectively, frying them like bacon in a pan. Since then, the base unit H&S SafetyBot had been...
upgraded
.
And so, with lives so readily threatened by the crap machinery invented to protect them, Pippa and her clone were loath to step happily into the workshop environment without at least a few tests. First, they eased into the factory and stood for a while in the Thumper's line of vision (using whatever visual sensory apparatus it used, as nothing was obvious from Pippa's perspective). The machine simply ignored their presence and continued fastening lids on crates - and Pippa shuddered to think what the crates might contain, but she was sure it was something organic, because the place stunk like a charnel pit in high summer after the Twenty Year Plague.