Gunwitch: Rebirth Read online

  ‘Impressive tracking skills there,’ Baltry commented.

  ‘Deduction, not tracking. This is a service tunnel for the robots, but thirty metres that way there’s an access corridor to the storm drains running under this level. I’m betting they went deeper.’

  ‘Great. But, yeah, that sounds like a good bet. Think we can catch them?’

  ‘All we can do is set off and see where we get to. They have a good head start on us…’

  ‘Then we should get moving,’ Kenya suggested.

  They found the access way easily enough, an alcove at the side of the service tunnel with a ramp leading down from it, but there, things got difficult. The main service tunnels, the top-level ones, were mapped, but the drains in this area were not.

  ‘You’d think something like where all the drains went would be a useful thing to know,’ Baltry commented as they looked both ways down the storm drain.

  ‘The service robots take care of all that,’ Annette replied. ‘They survey for damage or obstruction on a regular basis, just cycle through everything. I guess no one’s ever thought it necessary to map the network out for humans.’

  ‘Huh. Which way?’

  No one answered immediately and, coming to a decision, Kenya began to unzip her jumpsuit. ‘I will scout to the north. If I don’t find anything in five hundred metres, we will try the south.’ Her skin was shifting to a mottled, dark-grey colour even as she spoke. There were lights running along the roof of the sewer, but not bright ones. Stripped down to bare skin, the cyborg girl blended effectively into the concrete walls.

  ‘Stay in contact,’ Annette said as Kenya darted off into the gloom.

  ‘At all times,’ Kenya replied over her radio.

  ‘I guess we wait,’ Annette said to the two men.

  Cranfield looked at the pair of boots and jumpsuit he was holding and sighed. ‘I hate it when she does this. She’s naked and unarmed out there.’

  ‘Her skin’s not quite as tough as yours, Cran, but she’s built for this kind of work. It’s what she was made for.’

  ‘I know… But I never know where to look.’

  Baltry chuckled and slapped Cranfield on the arm, plastic and metal striking plastic and metal. ‘I know exactly where to look, Cran.’

  ~~~

  Kenya paused as she saw the tunnel widening out ahead of her. It looked as though she had found some form of junction in the drainage system. She could see at least three tunnel entrances on the other side, all a little narrower than the one she was in. Water came in from multiple points here and would then flow out down the wider pipe, she guessed.

  Something seemed a little off about the chamber, however. Slowly, she scanned the room, looking for whatever it was that had caught her attention and was giving her pause. The room was more or less circular. Water had managed to wash piles of detritus against the walls at various points. Water was falling from somewhere in the ceiling and there was a shallow puddle in the centre of the room. She would need to avoid that, but the light diffracting through the water droplets suggested a reason for another anomaly: the chamber seemed better lit than Kenya might have expected. She moved in closer and, sure enough, there was a vertical pipe coming in through the centre of the ceiling which appeared to go all the way up to ground level. Some light was making its way down from above, brightening the centre of the chamber while it cast the outer walls into deeper shadow.

  There was something wrong here, something she could not put her finger on. She activated her internal radio, subvocalising her words. ‘Annette, I’ve found a junction about three hundred metres out. I’m not sure which way to go from here.’

  Annette’s voice sounded in her head almost immediately. ‘You want us to come up and join you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. There’s something a little off about this place. I–’ She cut off as something stung her side, two sharp pinpricks, and then her nerves were on fire.

  ~~~

  ‘Kenya?’ Annette frowned as her friend’s voice cut off suddenly. ‘Kenya, do you read me?’ There was only static over the radio now. Annette started walking briskly in the direction Kenya had taken and she spoke aloud. ‘Come on. Something’s wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’ Cranfield asked.

  ‘Kenya found a junction in the drains, or something like that. She was saying something seemed off, then she was cut off.’

  Cranfield’s body tensed. ‘Then shouldn’t we hurry?’

  ‘It’s three hundred metres and a possible fight at the end. Pace yourself.’

  They more or less jogged and it took under a minute before they could see the widened area ahead of them. Annette could see one heat source before she could figure out what was causing it. Kenya was lying on the ground just beyond a pool of light which was coming in from above somewhere. Her camouflage was gone, a fairly good sign that she was unconscious, or worse.

  Cranfield apparently spotted her too as they got closer. ‘Kenya!’ he snapped and started to bolt in.

  ‘Wait!’ Annette hissed, bringing her big friend to a halt. ‘If something took her down, it could still be there. Given she’s tougher than she looks, they could still be there.’

  ‘So, we– Okay, okay, so you and Baltry cover me while I check her. There’s no one visible in there so they’ve got to come in from the tunnels or something, right?’

  Annette scanned over the chamber. Nothing showed up on infrared except Kenya, but then Kenya could see in that band and had clearly detected nothing. The entire situation stank of being a trap, but they had to get to their friend…

  They edged into the room, moving carefully with Baltry and Annette watching the tunnels. Cranfield got to Kenya and crouched down. ‘She’s breathing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a pulse. She’s alive, but I think someone hit her on the head.’

  Annette glanced down. There was some indication of blood on Kenya’s neck through her short, dark hair. ‘I can fix that.’

  Scraping noises sounded from around the chamber and a voice said, ‘You won’t get the chance.’ Annette looked up to find men in the scruffy outfits favoured by Zeroes emerging from behind the piles of garbage, which were not piles of garbage. It had to have taken quite some effort to build hollow mounds like that and make them screen out infrared radiation. And there were more than the handful of Zeroes Raythorn had said escaped into the Below. It was a trap all right and they had fallen right into it.

  ‘Get them!’ the man who appeared to be the leader shouted, and the assembled nihilists charged inward. They had baseball bats, lengths of wood with nails in, metal pipes, nothing complex or ranged, but lethal once they began using them. Every one of them had a wild gleam in their eyes and a grin on their faces.

  Annette saw it all in a fraction of a second, took a step away from Kenya, lifted her arms, and began to fire. She had developed her weapons system to be effective under a variety of circumstances, and it allowed her to do things normal people and even the cyborgs normally assigned to the SAU could not do. She normally employed her pistols in a semi-automatic mode: burst fire was a notoriously inefficient use of ammo, suitable primarily for suppression. Now she opened them up to full speed, focusing all her attention on targets and unleashing a bullet as each target marker indicated she was in line. She turned, selecting new targets and firing. There were twenty of them when she started, and when she swept her arms back to have the magazines replaced, all but three of them were down and they still had a couple of metres to cover.

  Baltry hit one of them in the chest, his invisible beam scoring through cloth and the flesh beneath while the jolt of electricity leaped down the ionised channel. His target lurched to a stop, body straining, before falling to the ground, twitching briefly.

  Cranfield took a step forward and met one of the thugs head-on. The big man’s cybernetic fist smashed into the man’s face. Bone splintered and the Zero went down like a sack of potatoes.

  And that left the one man charging at Annette, a piece of two-by-four in his hands wh
ich had had nails driven through it at various angles. It would likely do some damage if it connected with her head, but she was not going to give him the chance. Her right-hand pistol lifted to line up with his chest and she fired at more or less point-blank range, ripping his torso open and spewing blood, flesh, and internal organs over the concrete floor behind him. His body kept moving and she caught him as he fell against her, his club flying uselessly over her head. His eyes were dead before she looked into them and she let him slide out of her arms, leaving a trail of blood down the front of her suit.

  ‘You okay, Annette?’ Cranfield asked.

  Annette blinked and looked around at him. ‘I will be.’ She handed her pistols back to her arming pod and accepted something else from the robot: a short metallic cylinder. ‘Uh, could you check them for signs of life? I’ll take care of Kenya.’ She twisted the top of the cylinder and then dropped it to the ground beside the fallen Infiltrator. A second later, a cloud of greenish vapour burst out of the cylinder, scattering out in the metre or two around it, which included Kenya.

  ‘What is that stuff?’ Cranfield asked.

  ‘Medical nanobot swarm. It’s like an overclocked version of what I have in my body. It takes a bit out of you, but it heals you really fast. She’ll be up and about in a minute, maybe less.’

  ‘Why are they green?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘Uh… Well, they had to be some colour and green seemed like the right one for some reason. Does it matter?’

  ‘Not so long as they work.’

  It was, in fact, maybe forty-five seconds before Kenya let out a groan and rolled onto her back. Cranfield heard her, turned to check, and then averted his eyes hurriedly. ‘Uh,’ Kenya mumbled, ‘did you get them?’

  ‘Look around,’ Baltry suggested.

  ‘Not sure I want to. Feel a little nauseous. And hot.’

  ‘That’ll be the nanites,’ Annette said. ‘It’ll stop in a couple of minutes. We’re just glad we’re not carrying your corpse out of here. Though Cran would probably be happier if you got dressed.’

  ‘He’s got my clothes.’

  ‘Right,’ Cranfield said, and began trying to hand them over without looking. ‘The one I hit is still breathing. Maybe not through his nose, but he’s breathing.’

  ‘I can fix that,’ Baltry said.

  Annette shook her head. ‘No. I think we take him back with us.’

  ‘Orders are–’

  ‘I know what the orders are, but these were Zeroes, and they set up an elaborate plan to ambush and kill the SAU team they knew were going to be coming down after them.’

  ‘They weren’t counting on you and your magic pistols.’ Baltry was grinning, but Annette could tell she had given him pause. Zeroes were not supposed to plan. ‘Okay, so Cran carries him out and we leave it up to the regulars to decide what to do with him.’

  Annette gave a nod. ‘If I were them, I’d want to question this guy as much as possible. This group of supposedly anarchist madmen did a lot of damage up on the surface, and then set up a trap in the Below. That’s not how Zeroes are supposed to behave. If they’re changing their tactics, if they’re getting tactics, I think someone should be concerned about it.’

  Utopia City.

  Somehow, Annette was getting the impression that no one was concerned about it. She had had her internal computer filter every news stream throughout the day and nothing had come up about the Zero attack on the fabricator facilities. She had also put in a request to interrogate the Zero they had captured, only to discover that he had been executed more or less as soon as her and her team were gone. It was as if the administration wanted it swept under a rug as quickly and quietly as possible.

  Lying in the bath before bed, Annette considered the situation and what, if anything, she could do about it. The logical person to talk to was her father. He was part of the Department of Public Information and it was information to the public which seemed to be wrong. Strike that. Information was being withheld and that had to be purposeful. Her father was, almost certainly given his position, aware of the manipulations. Why?

  Obviously, given everything Annette had seen in just a short time with the SAU, things were not quite as idyllic in Utopia as the administration wanted everyone to think. And that seemed like the likely reason: living in a utopia meant not worrying about things. The administration was handling the situation and keeping the public out of the loop so that they did not have to worry about terrorist attacks. Except that the threat of terrorism was there in the form of posters and advids for the Vigilance campaign. No one was exactly afraid, because the Insurgency and the Zeroes never managed to do anything, but there was always that push to be watchful, to keep an eye on those around you, especially strangers. Meanwhile, the city’s terrorist element was actually succeeding to some extent, but their successes were being hidden behind a wall of silence.

  The populace of Utopia City were being treated like… ‘Sheep,’ Annette said to the empty room. The Insurgency tagging made a sort of sense now, and she supposed the line about waking up fitted with that, sort of.

  The start of a headache persuaded Annette that it was time to get out of the bath. She would pop some pills which would hopefully suppress the pain and the drowsiness would work for her now… And her computer signalled the arrival of another anonymous email as she was reaching for a towel.

  There is no free media.

  Don’t believe the lies.

  Be careful who you talk to.

  Well, that just about capped it. It was like her mysterious correspondent was reading her thoughts, but the last line… Be careful who you talk to… She would talk to no one. Something was wrong and it was better if she mentioned her worries to no one else until she knew where they were leading.

  27/11/83.

  ‘You know, that’s two nights of not sleeping so good,’ Cranfield said.

  Annette shrugged. ‘I have problems.’ They had all met up at the White Tower, the administrative centre of Utopia City and the main UDF offices, to see whether there were any assignments needing their talents and, once again, there was nothing. Annette had suggested coffee in the park.

  ‘Well, we’re all friends, right?’

  ‘Right.’ Annette flashed him a grin and lied to him. ‘I get headaches, which wouldn’t be such a problem if I didn’t keep seeing that guy I shot when I close my eyes. The one that ended up falling onto me.’

  ‘Never killed someone up close like that before?’

  ‘No, not like that.’

  ‘He was a bad guy, and he was trying to kill you,’ Baltry pointed out.

  ‘That does not help wash his blood off,’ Kenya countered. ‘It is good that you feel this way, Annette. It makes you more than the men you’ve killed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cranfield said, nodding. ‘You’re not a Zero. You care. Even about them. That’s not a bad thing.’

  ‘Tell that to the bags under my eyes,’ Annette replied.

  ‘Huh, there aren’t any. Bags wouldn’t dare form under your eyes. You’re just a bit paler than usual.’

  ‘Well, it feels like there are bags.’ She sank half her cup of coffee and looked out across Community Park. And decided to shift the subject off her problems. ‘Did you know this place used to be called Volunteer Park? The north end was a cemetery, but down here it was Volunteer Park. They changed the name when they put up White Tower and the war memorial.’

  ‘That,’ Baltry said, ‘was a while ago. You a history buff as well as a genius engineer, computer wizard and weapons manufacturer?’

  Annette giggled. ‘I studied the history of the city and the North-West Enclave, sure. It was interesting to know how we got to where we are.’ Though, now she thought about it, she could not be sure of more or less anything she had learned. ‘Uh, this whole area, what was Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, all the way down to Tacoma, this was one of the big technology centres of the old world. That’s why Doctor White came here.’

  ‘It’s also kind of isolated fr
om the rest of the continent.’

  ‘True, defence was considered too, but there was also infrastructure. Everything needed some fixing up, but there was everything he needed to make Utopia City here, waiting for him. Hell, even the old reactor at Snohomish had been shut down cleanly. It just needed someone who knew what they were doing to restart it.’

  Baltry shook his head sadly. ‘I still don’t know how they could resort to nuclear fission for power. That place is still a radioactive hellhole and it’s been offline for decades.’

  ‘No choice,’ Annette replied. ‘There was a war.’

  ‘Yeah well, that was how they did things back then.’

  ‘This one happened where a lot of their oil was dug up. Supplies were reduced, prices rose. Renewable sources were not up to the task so they built more nuclear plants.’

  ‘And when everything collapsed, a lot of those reactors melted down. We’re still paying for their mistakes.’

  Annette gave Baltry a grin. ‘You’re not so bad on history yourself.’

  ‘If it’s crazy or gruesome, I usually remember it. And conspiracy theories. You know, they say that some of the things down in the deeper tunnels Below, those are experiments the Insurgency did to make crazier Zeroes, then they let them loose in the tunnels.’

  ‘“They” say?’ Kenya asked.

  ‘Yeah, you know, word on the street.’

  ‘Hmm, “they” say a lot of things, but you never seem to meet anyone who knows.’

  ‘True,’ Baltry said, leaning back in his chair and stretching out his legs, ‘but I’m philosophical about it. My philosophy is that if it makes a good story, I don’t much care if it’s true. The truth is overrated, and kind of boring.’

  ~~~

  A chime from her computer attracted Mariel’s attention and she turned her chair, pushing it forward with the joystick control. Her pulse quickened along with her breathing, and she reached out to click the window with both dread and anticipation rising in her mind.

  A worm she had released into the network over a week earlier, her third attempt to crack the administration’s firewalls, had returned data, dribbling it over the course of several hours to reduce the chances of anyone noticing. Now that data was reassembled and waiting to be examined.