“Keenan!” screamed Pippa, and instinctively he pulled both triggers, jerked back by the recoil, and only then saw a long tail hovering behind him, a sting the size of a fist dripping black-tar toxins. The shells at such close contact slammed a hole through the machine’s head. The body started to spasm, twitching, and tiny white sparks of electricity discharged up and down its scales.
Keenan turned, and saw Emerald watching him. She gestured to the trees. Thousands of eyes were watching from the dark confines. Keenan shivered.
“A test?”
“Yes. Come on. We must increase our speed. Can you run?”
“You bet,” snarled Keenan, as Pippa placed her hand flat against his cheek and gazed into his eyes.
“You did well.”
“I killed it.”
“Didn’t you feel it? The pull of its eyes? It tried to hypnotise you... it certainly did me. I was immobilised, paralysed. You have a stronger mind than you think, Keenan. It couldn’t hook you.”
“So their weapons run deeper than simple tooth and claw. I’m beginning to lose my sense of humour with this place.”
“I lost mine years ago,” said Pippa bleakly.
The surreal eyes in the darkness of the metal foliage stayed on Combat K as they moved further and further into the Woods of Mekkra. They travelled in silence for a while, with only the sound of their boots clumping the metal pathway as it twisted and turned. Emerald did not speak. She seemed filled with purpose, with a jiggling energy after her previous display of weakness. After a while, sickened by the oppressiveness and claustrophobia of the place, Pippa glanced back at Keenan, his face drawn and grim, both hands gripping his shotgun like a totem.
“Talk to me, Kee.”
“What about?”
“Anything. This place is driving me slowly insane.”
“I can’t believe Franco is dead. He was... more than a brother to me. I’ve had friends before, you know the score; people come and go, moving in and out of your life; friendships blossom and friendships die. Sometimes you have to be brutal, when somebody close betrays you, attacks you, brutalises you... but Franco, Franco was different. Franco was a lodestone. Franco was not just the man of the moment, but a man to walk the mountains with.” Keenan sank into a sullen silence.
“You know,” said Pippa, “on occasions, by God, he wound me up like a spring. He knew exactly which buttons to press, exactly which dials to turn, but I always understood that it was little Franco being the pain in the arse he always was. I think, when I was back on Five Grey Moons, on
Hardcore,
I always knew you guys were alive. I knew you were OK, you could look after yourselves. And, despite our differences, Keenan, I did think about you, did care about you, but now, seeing Franco die like that, it was... shattering.”
“You don’t realise what you’ve got until you’ve lost it.” Keenan’s voice was quiet. He was picturing, in his mind’s eye, a universe in which his little girls hadn’t died; they’d grown, matured, gone to university, met fine young men, borne healthy robust children who would call him Grandpa...
Cut short. Cut dead.
“It’s funny,” said Pippa, “the number of missions we’ve been on. We’ve faced terrible odds on a multitude of occasions... and yet, deep down, I knew, knew that we would pull through. I think somehow I developed an immortality complex. We couldn’t be beat. We’d dive in, get the job done, get the motherfuck away. Franco’s death has... changed me.”
“Me too,” said Keenan. He sighed. “I feel my whole life has become... pointless. I seek—ultimately—an empty goal. I’ve considered it, a few times, wondered what drives me, because it can only be something dancing along the edge of sanity.”
“I thought revenge meant everything to you,” whispered Pippa. She stopped, on the metal path in the metal woods. Eyes blinked at her from a surrounding metal mayhem.
Keenan shrugged. “What will it achieve? Will I feel any better? Will it bring my family back?”
“No,” said Pippa. Her voice was a wind-blown whisper. “We could always stop, stop right now, turn away from here, backtrack, and leave this place, this horror, this world. We could go somewhere, somewhere the war didn’t touch, somewhere beautiful. We could raise our own family, Keenan. We could begin again.”
“No. We’ve come too far.”
“You can never go too far, Keenan.”
He shrugged, and grinned, a sudden boyish grin. “Anyway, we’re fucked now. There’s no easy way out of this shit, and I don’t think our ancient friend over there would take kindly to us suddenly reneging on the deal. She says she can give me the name of the killer. Well,” he took a deep breath, “despite misgivings, it’s something I will have to do.”
Pippa touched his arm. “This information, it might get you killed,” she said, concern glittering in her grey eyes.
“Then so be it,” growled Keenan.
They caught Emerald up swiftly, just in time to hear the sounds of running water, or, to be more precise, a running but sluggish fluid
.
The trees stopped on a vicious sharp metal overhang to reveal a wide, fast-flowing tributary of oil. The oil was thick brown, just transparent enough to reveal a menagerie of scattered objects: razors, knives, blades, spikes, on the river bed. Anyone attempting to cross would cut their feet to bloody ribbons.
“You see the stepping stones?” said Emerald.
Both Keenan and Pippa squinted, then picked out the tiny oasis of protruding metal: slick, slippery, but a weaving meandering path across the fast-flowing obstacle.
“Looks dangerous,” said Pippa.
“It is, especially the fish.”
“Fish?”
Emerald nodded. “Machine piranha, deadly. Can strip you to the bone in about five seconds, consume your bones in ten. If you fall in, you’ve got a five percent chance of getting out; I advise we proceed with caution.”
Keenan and Pippa nodded.
The jagged near-vertical bank was slippery, and they slithered their way down to the edge of the river. Keenan continually looked around for Cam, but the little PopBot hadn’t returned.
“You worried about him?”
“The fool got himself filled with explosives the last time he went on a jaunt.”
“He’ll be OK.”
Keenan gave a negative grunt, then stared out at the fifty-foot wide expanse. The oil bubbled and churned, gushing between metal stumps that barely rose above the oil level.
“I’m starting to really hate this place,” he said.
“At least you’re still alive.”
“I will go first,” said Emerald. Her black skin seemed to glow, manifest in a vision of human health; even her hair shone, curls filled with a vitality that Combat K had never before witnessed. Emerald was gradually changing, becoming more powerful, more alive the closer they moved to The Factory
.
Keenan welcomed the change. In his eyes, the stronger and more powerful Emerald became, the more likely she would be to furnish him with information, with a focus for revenge. Pippa, however, gave an internal shiver. Something about Emerald shimmered at the verge of insanity and suspicion; Emerald gave Pippa just a hint of the creeps.
Emerald stepped out onto the first metal stump. Then, in an incredible show of athleticism, she moved with great speed, her body low and sleek, leaping from one to the other, movements precise until she landed, lightly, on the opposite scooped bank.
Keenan glanced at Pippa.
“You next.”
“Cheers.”
“You’ve got more chance of making it across. If I... don’t, find out that name for me, and execute the living piece of shit. Can you do that? For me? For one who loves you?”
“I will try my best,” said Pippa, voice husky, eyes dropping to the floor. She released his hands, turned, and leapt onto the first stump. She slid with a sickening lurch on the slick greasy surface; and exhaled with a hiss. She half-turned, and grinned at Keenan. “It’s damn slippery up here.”
“Be careful, girl.”
Keenan watched, heart in mouth, as Pippa leapt from one metal stump to the next, her balance refined, arms outstretched a little, her face a Picasso of concentration. She finally made it, touching down on the jagged metal shore, boots sliding, and finally sitting down with a thump
.
She looked over at Keenan, and he gave her a little wave, but something in her face, an integral horror, made him freeze. She was not looking at him, but behind him, past him and through him.
Without wanting to, Keenan turned.
The metal ridgeline was lined with sentinels, metal wolves, monsters, strange spindly things a hybrid of cockroach and spider. They stood, arraigned in observation, unmoving, except for pale metal eyes that blinked.
Keenan drew in a sharp breath... as the metal horde charged, leaping and howling with metal screams, rampaging down the steep bank as Keenan turned back, stumbled, and leapt out over the fast-flowing oil. His boots hammered from one metal mushroom to the next in a sprint born of panic. He slipped many times, nearly pitching into the oil river, but by some miracle of luck and blind panic he landed next to Pippa, and turned, teeth bared, glaring at the creatures of the woods. They had lined the opposite bank, and seemed almost to be swaying.
“They want you,” said Emerald.
“Yeah, well fuck ’em.”
“They likeyou,” she said.
Keenan pumped his shotgun. He aimed across the river of oil, and smashed a volley of shells on trajectories of fire. Several machines were caught, hammered backwards, limbs flailing, and slack shattered jaws yapping, armour dented, eyes buckled. Metal screams tore the air, and the machines joined in, tongues flickering: a rising ululating cry that sang and grew in the gloomy subdued vault. It seemed to circle above the group like a live thing: a beast of electric and violence.
Pippa covered her ears, face condensed in pain.
The machines halted their noise, turned, and leapt nimbly back up the torn metal bank. Within a second they were gone.
“What an awful sound,” hissed Pippa.
“It is a war cry,” said Emerald. She was sombre. Her eyes shone with a new need. “The hunt has been initiated; the game has begun. We need to move and move fast. There are other ways across this torrent.”
Keenan clasped his shotgun tight. “Let them come,” he said.
The path grew much wider, and Emerald increased their pace, almost leaping ahead in a loping run. Keenan and Pippa sprinted to keep up, and Keenan was soon coughing and wheezing, sweat bathing him, his snarl a constant on a face of pain and suffering.
“Too many cigarettes,” Pippa said.
“Yeah, thanks for the medical advice. If I want a damned nurse I’ll visit a hospital.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Well don’t. I know my bad habits and I’m willing to live with them.”
They made better time, but the wide path made Keenan uneasy. On a narrow path he could hold back the machines with the animal bark of the shotgun; here, it would be much harder, much easier for an enemy to flank him, not a thought he relished.
Something howled in the distance.
They ran for what seemed like hours, moving through the sweeping smash of metal woodland, and then a hot-oil smell came to them, and Emerald abruptly stopped. There was a circular clearing ahead, and Emerald seemed to pause, wary. Keenan and Pippa readied weapons, primed for trouble. Keenan glanced around the clearing; the floor was a detritus of metal shavings, wafer-thin metal discs and scattered iron rods mingled with the gleam and glint of razor blades. The path ended, then continued on the opposite side of the woodland. Keenan frowned, something had created this space, but for what purpose? The only answer he could think of was that it was a killing ground
.
It didn’t inspire hope.
“We’ve got to cross it,” said Pippa.
“It’s a trap,” said Keenan. He glanced at Emerald. “Where are they? And what are they?”
Before she could answer, they were there, leaping from hiding places in the dense metal woodland, scuttling and soaring twenty feet into the air with spindly metal legs bending, small oval bodies—battered and dented—pulsingwith energy and scatters of light as...
Go on,
thought Keenan with a bitter taste in his mouth.
Say it...
As the
spiders
flew above and around in great leaps, perhaps twenty of the machines, sailing over the group with tiny metal teeth chattering and clashing. Keenan’s shotgun
boomed,
smashing a creature from the air in a flail of thin wire limbs and a splash of hot oil. Pippa’s MPK roared, bullets whining, tracer flashing and lighting up the dark woodland. A spider landed on Emerald, and she ripped it apart with her hands. The body trailed wires, sparking electricity, as Keenan’s D5 boomed again and again. The MPK cut holes through metal and everything seemed to happen so fast, in a confusion of moving metal, bullets, clashing teeth and a metal drone that cut through the scene. Keenan ducked a slash of razor talons, slamming the stock of the shotgun into one of the machines, and as it fell his boot pinned it to the ground. Twin barrels touched its casing. Dark eyes coated in a film of thin oil watched him with dazzling intelligence. The shotgun roared and the spider machine disintegrated in fire and shrapnel as something slammed Keenan’s back. He felt legs wrap around him and the shotgun was lifted from him, like sweets from a child, and snapped easily in half as he hit the ground hard. He was smothered by thrashing metal wire, encased in an alloy coffin, and he fought and struggled but there was nothing to punch or kick and it spun him in a web of thin trailing wire which cut into his damaged WarSuit and through the exposed flesh of his wrists, neck and forehead, leaving droplets of blood spattering against the shavings on the ground. Keenan was lifted, then slammed down hard
.
Jarred, stunned, he was blind for a few moments as unconsciousness teased him. He coughed up phlegm mixed with blood from a broken tooth, and spat into a hazy reflection an inch from his hammered face. He strained, and looking right, he saw Pippa entangled in wires, and Emerald as well. They were all caught and spun and wrapped like wriggling fish on hooks. Keenan spat blood again, and watched the machines moving purposefully around the three cocoons, finally congregating on Emerald. Suddenly, limbs punched out, smashing her head again and again, and again, beating her with sodden solid thumps. Keenan looked away, sure they would crack her skull in half. Instead, her eyes closed and her body shuddered, but she continued to breathe. They were hauled across the clearing and into the close-packed metal trees; bumped along the ground, through tangles of wire and into a frightening stinking darkness.