“Goodnight, fucker,” he said, and
put a bullet between its eyes.
Breathless, his chest hurting,
muscles burning, his mind screaming, he orientated himself. Deep in the forest
there were three sounds of huge lumbering beasts, all in different directions
and cutting off escape routes.
The bastards are forcing me into a narrow
channel,
he realised, mind working fast.
They want me away from the
tourists. Away, so then they can kill me and bury me in a shallow grave. The
bastards. The utter bastards.
So? What did you expect? To find
your family and live happily ever after?
Damn. Fucking. Right.
Dex crouched suddenly, and
reversed into the centre of a thick bush. The scent of pine resin was all
around him, thick and cloying. He closed his eyes, and tuned himself into the
forest. The gun was cold and hard in his hand, an alien thing, a part of a
different culture, a different world.
All I want to do is take my family
home,
he realised.
But no. They’re going to make me fight. Well, I’ll
give them a fight they’ll remember...
Something paced into the clearing
from the right. It was like a panther, but its body was an oiled green. Its
eyes were bright and old and reptilian, and its jaws were open, panting softly.
A tongue flickered out, red and forked. Dex watched the creature, analysing it
carefully. It moved with all the grace of a big cat, fluid, muscles rolling
easily and powerfully beneath thick skin. It dropped its nose to the ground,
seeking his scent.
Aah,
thought Dex.
Aaah.
He readied his gun. He was going
to come out fighting!
And then he saw the second oiled
green cat; it slunk into the clearing, circling its comrade. Both of them, Dex
realised with a start, weren’t
sniffing
the ground, they were
tasting
it, with their flickering forked tongues. A sibilant hissing came to him.
Shivers ran up and down his spine.
What are they ?
his mind screamed at
him.
“We’re danjos,” said a soft
voice, right by Dex’s ear, the words tickling him with proximity; and very,
very slowly, he turned, to look straight into the eyes of the third oil-skinned
beast. It was so close they could kiss, and Dex’s nostrils twitched at the
scent of its sleek hard body. He became suddenly, painfully aware of the
creature’s sheer
mass.
Its bulged with muscle, with power, and exuded a
force that far outweighed Dex’s meagre human form; his shell.
The other two creatures had
stopped their search, their
bluff,
he realised, and orientated on Dex’s
hiding position.
But he didn’t dare shift his gaze
from that ancient reptilian stare, sat so close...
As close as lovers.
Because to do so, to move, to
act, to fight, would be to die...
~ * ~
CHAPTER SEVEN
INTERNAL EXILE
Amba Miskalov stood
in the shadows of the Spikefist Mountain Range,
boots planted firmly on pale rock as she shaded her eyes and studied the
distant mountain. The Firelce Mountain High-Security Military Facility was
clearly visible, two-thirds of the way up the towering rockface of the largest
mountain dominating the range. There was an open-sided hangar, like a
rectangular maw in the bulk of the mountain. All it was missing were teeth.
Looks impenetrable,
said Zi in her mind, her words
like the cool kiss of an iced lover.
Nothing’s impenetrable.
You don’t have the equipment.
I have you.
Zi chuckled then, and Amba got a
momentary glimpse of the woman inside the FRIEND, the
spirit/ghost/demon
not
just inside the FRIEND, but inside Amba’s own body, in her mind, in her fucking
soul.
Yes, Amba. You will always have
me. Until you die. Until we both die.
Why do you think Romero wants her
dead? Why do you think Oblivion want her dead?
Our role is not to question why,
Amba.
Zi
actually sounded shocked. Amba had never before asked such a question. For some
reason, this amused Amba immensely.
What are you smiling for?
You, dickhead. Getting all noble
with me, when we both know what I do - hell, what
we
do is about as low as it
goes. We’re the scum at the bottom of the barrel, Zi. We’re the dregs, my
friend.
I disagree.
Why so?
We are the elite. We do the
things nobody else would ever dream... or be physically able to do.
Bullshit. I’m an android, Zi. I’m
an android, and I’m hated by the humans because I look like them, act like
them, but they think I’m inferior because they created me, they fucking played
at God and I was the abortion. I’m hated by other androids because that’s just
the way with androids, isn’t it? We hate each other, as if we’re all competing
for the same gulp of air, the same slice of life, and we’re afraid it’ll
suddenly turn into a scrum and so we’re always looking over our shoulders,
always keeping our eyes on the ball. Who knows when the order will come from
Oblivion to have us all put down? Not murdered, you understand, but like in an
old filmy: “retired.”
As
if we’re so much old useless scum, detritus, something not real,
not living, not breathing, but a machine to be decommissioned. Well, I’m no
machine, Zi, and I’m getting tired of being treated like a second-class citizen
by every motherfucker who discovers I’m an android.
So what’s the answer?
I’m sick of doing another man’s
work.
So you want to retire yourself?
If by “retire” you mean murder
myself, then no. But if by “retire” you mean turn against my masters, rend and
slay, then find a cave somewhere to sit and live out my life in a simple,
honest existence
-
then maybe.
Zi remained silent. She was
considering.
Don’t worry, Zi. I know you
report back to Romero. I’m going to get this job done. Then I’ll decide what to
do.
Amba, I’m shocked you think so
little of me! I promise you, I am not a puppet of Romero, Oblivion, or any
other organisation; I am here... for you. I am here to help you. Here to help
you achieve what you want.
Yeah. Right.
I am hurt you do not believe me.
Explain yourself, then. What the
fuck
are
you,
Zi? Where did you come from? Where did the FRIEND come from? Why me? Why choose
me? Why help me? I never asked for your help, and I can get by just fine on my
own.
There was a long pause, and Amba
moved across the rocky ground to the hover bike she’d stolen ten hours earlier.
It had been a long, uncomfortable ride through the night, under cold stars and
spirals of fusing hydrogen sculpting patterns in the sky. But now she was here.
The sun was up, and it was warming her android skin. It felt good. All of a
sudden, it felt good to be alive.
I cannot explain it,
said Zi, and her voice was soft,
a gentle tickling in Amba’s mind.
What I can say, though, is that you are
barking up the wrong tree, my dangerously fragile human machine. Have you ever
stopped to consider that maybe I’m not here just for your benefit? Maybe I’m
here for myself, as well.
What, by killing on my behalf, by
doing the things you do - that helps you?
Yes.
Why, Zi, what are you?
“Lay
down your weapons and put your hands in the air!”
commanded the loudhailer of the
police drone, which swept around the rocky outcropping with flashing green and
yellow lights, and hovered, nose down, in an aggressive attack position. Amba
breathed out slowly, eyes fixed on the twin mini-guns that had her in their
sights. She smiled, lifted her hands in the air, then whipped out the FRIEND,
selected and fired quicker than a striking cobra...
The police drone was roughly the
size of a groundcar, and early morning sunlight gleamed from its alloy panels.
Little eddies of dust swirled under its hover jets, and a heat haze shimmered
to the left from hot exhaust ports. Despite there being no human - or android -
occupant, the drone was considered AI, considered
alive.
This was often
a point of bitterness for Amba; after all, an AI - openly a machine - had more
rights than an android. This police drone had more right to exist than a
living, breathing, organic created human.
The FRIEND went
blam
even as the drone realised, a
picosecond too late, that this meat creature wasn’t in fact subserviently doing
what it was told (as most creatures
did
when faced by the terrible
barrels of twin mini-guns) and there came a rattling as the weapons started to
spin up... but by then, it was too late.
For such a small weapon, the
FRIEND had an almighty kick. The police drone was picked up and tossed across the
desert, but it wasn’t a simple blast of energy, this was what was known in the
industry as a
cube blast,
something physicists still claimed was
impossible and attempted to disprove. Maybe it
was
impossible. But the
FRIEND still delivered one...
When the drone had spun for
thirty feet, it was suddenly thrust up into the air and folded down and in upon
itself, over and over, with rhythmical crunches of crushing alloy, then thumped
down to the ground in a quivering, gleaming, raw-metal block.
A silence resonated, and Amba
gave a sideways look at the FRIEND, then placed it back in her chest. She
walked across the rock, eyes scanning left and right to check there weren’t
other drones in the vicinity.
It must have followed you,
said Zi.
When you stole the hover
bike.
Hmm. Yeah. You fucked that up
pretty bad, didn’t you?
You wanted him quiet in the
quickest possible way, yes? You didn’t want to attract any attention from the
damned Military Facility, yes? Well, he got put down and out of the game.
You said “him.”
So?
It was a machine.
Oh don’t start that again,
Amba...
Amba crouched by the compacted
police drone. Inside, there was a buzzing noise, and metallic scraping - as of
metal spinning against metal. Amba stood, and stretched in the early morning sunshine.
She yawned, and moved back to the hover bike.
“Time to go to work,” she said.
How are we going in?
That’s the easy bit.
Through the front door?
Yeah.
~ * ~
The
hover bike
cruised across rock
and sand, the hover jets sending out a swirl in the machine’s wake. Amba, hair
tousled from the wind, focused on the perimeter fence at ground level, and the
fifty towers which lay scattered across the valley, each mounted with a heavy,
automatic, AI pulse laser. She slowed the bike as she approached the fence,
eyes flickering up to the walls of sheer rock beyond - the mountain, and the
high rectangular mouth of the facility entrance. All along the fence, in a
variety of languages, sensory field warnings made the message clear and simple:
KEEP
OUT OR YOU
WILL
DIE.