Gunwitch: Rebirth Page 5

  ‘What is that stuff anyway?’ Baltry asked, waving a hand over the man.

  ‘It’s a type of quantum superfluid,’ Annette replied. ‘Basically, it sticks to whatever it touches and then sucks the heat out of it so that it can expand. And, of course, as it expands, it covers more area and sucks the heat out of that…’

  ‘So, you end up covered in a layer of freezing liquid.’

  ‘Fluid. There’s a difference.’ Already, the white sheen was beginning to evaporate from the man’s skin. ‘With the amount I use, it’s reached saturation after about a minute and it sublimes right off the skin. Not such a good idea to touch them before that happens.’

  ‘And it’s non-lethal?’

  ‘Well… For most people, one round should put them to sleep, but two or three would probably freeze them to death. One round might kill a child or an old person. It’s more “not very lethal.”’ Annette frowned. ‘You know, they’ve all been quite young. I wouldn’t say any of them have been older than twenty-five.’

  ‘No one’s going to survive down here for too long,’ Cranfield said. ‘Even if they’re catching rats, or even eating other people.’

  ‘So, what are they doing down here? Why would anyone voluntarily come down here?’

  ‘We’re down here,’ Baltry pointed out.

  ‘Precisely my point. We were sent. The insurgents we’re hunting were sent to do something. These people are down here because…’

  ‘They’re nuts?’

  ‘No one goes mad these days. Education ensures the stability of your mental processes.’

  ‘If that is true,’ Kenya said, looking pointedly at Annette, ‘why are we down here? If that is true, there can be no insurgents.’

  Utopia City.

  Annette sank thankfully into a bath with hot water and some bubbles. One of the great things about the SAU was that its operatives mostly worked within the city, or under it, so they got to live at home. Home had a bath you could stretch out in and soak all the aches out of your muscles. The bathroom had the added advantage that she could lock the door and be away from her father’s queries about her safety. Win-win.

  After ten minutes with her eyes closed, she kept them closed but opened up a connection to the house network. First task was a query window to request information on aberrant psychological conditions broken down by age group. Next was a local news window. Then she stopped to answer Mariel’s IM ping.

  Mariel: So how were the sewers?

  ‘They aren’t exactly sewers, you know? Or I wasn’t in the ones which have sewage in them.’

  Mariel: Sure. And what are you doing right now?

  ‘Taking a bath. But that’s for the aches in my legs and back, not because I smell bad.’

  Mariel: Okay. I believe you. Find what you were looking for?

  ‘No. We found… mad people. Lost, insane citizens who seemed to have given up and found their way down Below.’

  Mariel: Just remember, mad people can be violently insane. You be careful.

  ‘Right back at you, Mar.’

  Mariel: I’ll leave you to soak. Have a good night, Net.

  ‘Night, Mar.’ Annette closed the connection and pulled her query window into view. She was almost surprised to see results, but there they were… with a note at the top indicating that the information was classified for UDF and administrative eyes only. Okay, she could get the information because she had joined the SAU.

  Acknowledged deviant behaviours, their words, leading to violent behavioural patterns tended to manifest between the ages of fourteen and eighteen with some outliers, primarily in older people. It was, however, a curve. Deviancy tended to increase sharply around sixteen and again at eighteen prior to a sharp drop-off. There were also cases of nonviolent aberrancy, primarily manifesting in paranoia and depression, and focused in the sixteen to nineteen age range.

  Annette let the news play in front of her eyelids and considered the data. Formal education ended at eighteen, unless you were approved for higher learning. The spike at eighteen could be explained as a reaction to the loss of structured learning. But what about the rise in numbers before then?

  None of the absolute figures were high. It was a percentage rise in numbers from near zero to not far above zero, to a little higher, to almost nothing. What happened at sixteen? Sex became legal, if discouraged until eighteen. You took elective subjects in education at sixteen; if the idea of a lack of structure at eighteen had validity, perhaps the reduced structure at sixteen was causing the rise then.

  A break in the news stream caught her eye and she found herself watching a short advert for Nutopium. She grinned. Nutopium, the drink of champions! And she saw the reminder that Nutopium was for consumption by those aged sixteen years and over at the end. So, at sixteen you were allowed to drink Nutopium. Annette remembered trying a little from her brother’s bottle when she was fourteen and knew a lot of people started on the stuff before they were really allowed to. Annette disliked the taste for some reason and rarely drank it. Her father appeared to be the same: there was never any in the apartment. But that was something else that started at sixteen… In fact, Nutopium fitted rather well with the pattern: a slow start at around fourteen with a surge at sixteen when just about everyone tried it. If you were going to react badly to the stuff, you would have done so by eighteen, so the numbers fell sharply away…

  As a hypothesis, it needed work. The drop-off was too sharp. A bell curve would have made more sense, perhaps skewed to sixteen-year-olds. She was not going to go to anyone in the Department of Public Health with this unless she could explain the entire thing. Anyway, surely the DoPH would have spotted something like that already. If there was a problem with Nutopium, it would have been banned. Wouldn’t it?

  ~~~

  Another anonymous message arrived in Annette’s mailbox midevening.

  Be careful of what lurks in the darkness Below.

  Cryptic warnings now. Great. She deleted the message and decided to forget all about it.

  Utopia City Below, 24/11/83.

  ‘We’re out of radio range with the surface,’ Kenya announced.

  They were also out of light and the men were relying on their flashlights to pick their way through the darkness. The service robots operated down here using ladar scanners to image the tunnels, and humans simply did not stray this far down, unless they had been told to by UDF Command.

  ‘I’m finding it really hard to believe that the Insurgency operates down here,’ Annette commented. Among her tasks for the day, she had been given ‘finding our way out’ duty since no one seemed to have a map of the tunnels. She had an application running which recorded the way they had come so that they could retrace their steps. Without it, they would be entirely lost within an hour, so how did anyone else do it?

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ Baltry said. ‘Ours is but to wade through muck in search of insurgents.’

  ‘Or get eaten by cannibal super-zombies.’

  ‘I think they’re deeper down.’ Baltry did not sound too confident. ‘I’m pretty sure they are.’

  Annette grinned. ‘Fairy stories, remember.’

  ‘Fine, but you won’t be saying that when one of them’s eating your face.’

  With a shrug, Annette set off further down the tunnel. ‘Never going to happen. No one’s wanted to eat any part of my anatomy since I had my eyes done.’

  ~~~

  ‘This is… unexpected,’ Baltry said. He was keeping his voice low because, well, no one had spoken much above a whisper for the last couple of hours. Raised voices just seemed wrong in the dark silence of the tunnels.

  They had come upon a cavern in the tunnel system. The tunnel they had been walking along ended in a ramp that led down to the floor of something which had to be over a hundred metres long and fifty high. And there was light, just not that much of it. Panels in the high ceiling and along the walls glowed with a dim, blue light.

  ‘There’s power down here?’ Cranfield asked, strai
ning to see anything in the chamber.

  ‘No,’ Annette said. ‘I think it’s radioluminescent. I’m sensing very low levels of gamma radiation from the panels.’

  ‘Radiation?’ Baltry asked, his voice rising a little.

  ‘Must be a radium source. It’s only going to be dangerous after long exposure.’ Annette took a step down the ramp and then added, ‘You are wearing your lead underwear, right?’

  ‘There’s lead underwear?’

  ‘Hush,’ Kenya said. ‘Annette, do you see something down there?’

  Annette scanned the floor below them, widening the frequency spread as she did so. ‘Heat signatures. I make… six of them. One’s a lot bigger than the others.’

  ‘And one is at the bottom of the ramp.’

  Baltry turned his light down the ramp and something appeared in it. At first it was unrecognisable, a distorted, vaguely humanoid figure with mottled skin and lank hair. Then it uncurled, raising a hand to shield its eyes from the brighter light, and it became more obvious that what they were looking at was a man, naked and dirty, and clearly unused to the light. He bared his teeth and growled, like a wild animal in human form.

  ‘I got this one,’ Baltry said, raising his right arm and cocking his wrist.

  ‘Wait,’ Annette said, but it was too late.

  What looked like directed lightning burned through the air between Baltry’s palm and the man-thing’s chest. There was a smell of burned flesh and ozone, and the man collapsed onto the concrete, twitching as he tried to recover his senses.

  ‘One down,’ Baltry began, and stopped at the sounds of growling from the other residents of the chamber. ‘Uh…’

  ‘I think you pissed them off,’ Cranfield said, taking up a position a little way down the ramp.

  ‘Drop them,’ Annette said. Her pod swapped magazines on her pistols and then swung the weapons out for her to draw. The men were already moving toward the bottom of the ramp when she locked target markers on the nearest pair and fired. Chests torn open by hollow-point rounds, the two creatures fell. That just seemed to make matters worse.

  The remaining figures let out howls of rage and started sprinting for the ramp. Baltry caught one of them in his flashlight beam and fired, but the fast-moving target threw his aim off. Annette was having no such problems, but this time when her bullets found their marks, the men seemed to just shrug off the damage and keep coming. They were slower, but they were still moving.

  ‘Shit!’ Baltry snapped. The biggest of the men was at the bottom of the ramp and charging up it toward Cranfield. He was big, not quite up to Cranfield’s stature, but a large, heavily built man with a wild, malign look in his eyes. Baltry lined up his shot and fired, and this time the lightning flared against his target’s chest.

  The creature let out a roar of pain, but just kept on charging at Cranfield. The collision was impressively loud and, even if Cranfield was bigger and had cybernetic limbs, the fact that the hulking SAU agent remained on his feet was impressive. Cranfield shifted his footing and drove his fist into his opponent’s chest. The thing was looking battered, but it was as if he was on drugs: he just kept going.

  Annette’s pistols spoke again and this time the expanding bullets tore so much of her targets’ bodies apart that they simply could not keep moving. They collapsed at the foot of the ramp, two bloody rags which had once been some sort of human. But now the one Baltry had stunned was back on its feet and running toward the team. Kenya intercepted him, driving her fist into his guts, and he turned on her, swinging wildly and catching her on the side of the neck. Kenya was a slight girl who looked as though she might fall down in a strong wind, but she had an advantage in combat: the skin which gave her the ability to blend in with her surroundings was also far tougher than normal flesh. Grinning, she took a step back and threw in another punch.

  Cranfield and his massive opponent were trading punches as well, but neither were making much progress. The man-thing was not the most skilled of pugilists, apparently relying on brute power over precision, and Cranfield had more of both. Cranfield also had armoured skin while his opponent was dressed in a pair of tatty jeans, but the latter seemed oblivious to actual damage. Annette decided to end the matter, lifted her pistols, and fired. Two mutant heads exploded like watermelons. Two bodies folded onto the concrete. Silence fell.

  ‘Is there a reason the rest of us are here?’ Baltry asked after a second. ‘All we need is a few dozen Annettes and we could take over the world.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Annette replied, handing her pistols back to her pack. ‘I need someone to keep the bad guys off me long enough to shoot them. What are these things?’

  ‘Humans,’ Kenya said, crouching down to examine the nearest corpse. ‘They’re just humans, but I think they’re probably Zeroes.’

  ‘They just shrugged off my shocks,’ Baltry said.

  ‘And look how much damage I had to do to put them down,’ Annette added. ‘I practically had to blow them apart to stop them.’

  ‘Berserk rage,’ Cranfield said.

  ‘Huh?’ Baltry responded.

  ‘They went berserk. It was supposed to be something these ancient warriors called Vikings did sometimes. They were so pumped up that they would keep going, ignoring pain and injury, until you hacked them apart. When they were describing the Zeroes, that’s what I thought of.’ The big man frowned and opened his mouth to speak, hesitating.

  Annette watched emotions light up in her visual display: confusion, shame. Shame? ‘What is it, Cran? There’s something else and we’re friends here, aren’t we? Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘It happens to me sometimes,’ Cranfield blurted out. ‘If I get hurt or really angry… I can wig out like that. One of the reasons I wanted to have the Tank implants is that… Well, it’s really hard to hurt me badly now.’

  ‘Normally you’re okay?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t–’

  ‘Well, these guys clearly aren’t so don’t go comparing yourself to them, okay? You’re the guy that stands between… monsters like that and me, Cran. You’re nothing like them.’

  Cranfield smiled, a little weakly, but it was there. ‘Thanks. You know, I figure we’ll run into more of these things from now on, and so would the insurgents. We’ll get nowhere much going further.’

  ‘Agreed. The Insurgency doesn’t have an Annette to turn these things into soup.’

  ‘Also agreed,’ Kenya said.

  ‘Okay,’ Annette said. ‘Backtrack and ask for further instructions?’ There were nods from her companions and she turned to start back up the ramp. ‘Hey, Cran, if you don’t mind me asking… When did you first notice this “berserk” thing?’

  ‘Uh, I was fifteen. Someone was picking on my younger brother, hit him in the face, broke his nose… I just saw red. It took four guys to hold me down while one of my sisters and my brother, with blood all over his face, talked me down. I put the guy in the hospital, but no one said much about it. Seems he had a reputation I hadn’t heard about.’

  ‘How many brothers and sisters do you have, Cran?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘Three brothers, two sisters. Mom really likes kids.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Okay,’ Annette said. ‘Um, had you tried Nutopium before then?’

  ‘Uh… Well, yeah. I know you’re not supposed to, but Dad offered me some of his one day. I didn’t like it. Made me feel a bit weird, kind of dopy, so I don’t drink it as a rule. Maybe that’s why you’re not supposed to drink it too young.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Annette said, but her thoughts were on her research of the night before.

  Utopia City, 25/11/83.

  There was light in the sky and that was about the best you could say about it. Annette looked around at the scene she had been woken up before dawn to come to. It looked bad.

  Tacoma was the home of most of the ‘industrial’ structures in Utopia City. There were robotic factories assembling various large machines, and there were the fabricator
plants which provided components to the factories, among other things. The fabricators were based around nanotech assembler systems and Annette knew more than a little about the way they functioned. They required carefully controlled conditions to operate, and someone had gone to some trouble to disrupt those conditions.

  The evidence of the attack, and who had perpetrated it, was still very evident. There was still smoke rising from one coolant plant, though there were service robots working hard to smother it. Doors had been smashed open, machines of various types reduced to little more than scrap metal. And there were bodies, a lot of bodies, all of them dressed in the more distinctive kind of clothing Zeroes wore. The UDF had slammed down hard on the attackers, but not before a considerable amount of damage had been done.

  However, it all appeared to be over, so why were Annette and the rest of her team there at all?

  ‘A small group of Zeroes escaped,’ Major Raythorn explained to them. Though ‘explained’ was possibly the wrong word, Annette thought. Raythorn did not like having SAU operatives there and his eyes stayed fixed on his surroundings. It was more like he was describing events for a disinterested and absent third party. ‘They ran into one of the entrances to the Below and we need SAU agents to follow them. Service robots have sealed off the tunnel they accessed at both ends. It’s just a matter of finding them and eliminating them.’

  If it was that easy, why had they called in the SAU? ‘Were any of them wearing body armour?’ Annette asked.

  ‘There were no indications of body armour. Weaponry was makeshift. Baseball bats, crowbars, sledgehammers. Nothing ranged.’

  Annette instructed her pod to load kinetic warheads and looked around at her friends. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Where’s this Below entrance?’ Cranfield asked. ‘Might as well get on with this.’

  Utopia City Below.

  Cranfield looked in either direction down the tunnel and then began to cast around on the ground for any signs of people passing through recently. ‘Anyone want to make a guess about which way they went?’ he asked.

  ‘South,’ Annette said, pointing down the tunnel. ‘They went that way.’