Cloneworld - 04 (8 page)

Franco shrugged. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

"Don't mess with me," said Mrs Strogger. "Don't betray me. Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

"I'm pretty sure I don't like it when you're happy, either." Her face darkened.
Gods,
he thought,
here we go again! Is there nothing a rampant switch-on cool-dude Combat K squaddie can say that doesn't rub this org chick up the wrong way?
He changed tactics. "Listen. Listen. We are, you know, symbi... sybet... we need to rely on each other, reet? You scratch my back, and I'll, er, rub my nails down your scaled iron exoskeleton. Get me out of this damn and bloody bullocks prison complex, and I'll guarantee you a flight home."

"Done," said Mrs Strogger, and held out a mechanised claw. Franco shook it, aware she could probably rip out all his fingers with one wrench.

"Agreed. Now, which way?"

"First, I need to reactivate and recharge my weapons. There are many gates and bars between here and the outside world."

"Are your weapons that hardy?" said Franco.

"Oh yes," said Mrs Strogger, and gave him a dazzling smile full of machinery.

The two pursuing guards crawled along the corridor, truncheons raised, showing willing but knowing their hearts weren't really in it. After all, in terms of ganger employment, they were pretty near the bottom of the scummy heap. The Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility wasn't renowned for paying good wages. In fact, it was known as being
a really shit employer.

"There they are," said Grandall, stopping. His friend, Bebooz, bumped into him from behind.

"Shit. We caught them up. What're they doing?"

"Talking."

"Arguing, more like."

"Hey, maybe they'll shoot each other?"

"We could hang on a few moments, see if they throttle each another?"

"Sounds like a plan."

They waited, stepping impatiently from one foot to the other to the other.

"Hey, if one kills the other, there'll still be one left."

The guards considered this.

"Yeah," said Grandall, "but he, or she, will presumably be weakened. Maybe even wounded."

They brightened at this concept.

They waited some more. They could see the big one, the old org blend, getting madder and madder. Then the little one, that Sourballs had called a "human intruder," pacified her. Grandall and Bebooz grumbled to one another, and further down the corridor heard Teddy Sourballs screaming orders at what they assumed were guards come to back them up. Backup! Their faces soured further. What they had to do now was perform a delicate balancing act; they had to approach the escapees, so that they were in the act of confrontation when Sourballs arrived with the troops. Do it too late, and Sourballs would sniff out their cowardly ruse and demote them to the slush bins. But attack too soon and they'd have to face the horrible pair...

Franco hoisted his two laser cannons, and whilst they didn't have the same sturdy weight and killing smash as Kekra quad-barrel machine pistols, they felt better than using his hands against guards armed with guns.
Gangers,
he corrected himself. These were all clones.

Franco scowled, and at that moment a pair of guards shuffled unhurriedly into view, looking nervously over their shoulders. They seemed to be whimpering. They stood in the shadows, illuminated by the flickering red prison panic lights, and stared uneasily at Franco as if hoping he wouldn't spot them. But he did. He grinned at them, as behind him Mrs Strogger rose threateningly on her core waist-piston with a sound like an industrial ratchet.

The guards ambled forward, looking again over their shoulders, and Franco snapped, "Drop your weapons!"

Obediently, they dropped their weapons. Franco approached, laser cannon aimed, and said, "Throw me your keys, key cards, and any other entry devices we need to access the gates."

"Please don't shoot!" wailed Grandall.

"We have wives! Families!" blubbed Bebooz.

"Rubbish," clanked Mrs Strogger, grinding forward. "Your families are from the clone vats, picked out to look like whatever deviant sexual fantasy you had on the day! Your children are slush grown puppies designed to give you a hard time! So stop your whining, you sadomasochistic wriggling maggots!"

"Hey, it's easy for you to criticise, you mechanised heap of junk! Get back to the fucking scrapyard!" shouted Grandall.

"Keys!" hissed Franco, prodding the cannon into Grandall's face. The guards both fumbled and produced hefty bunches of digital card keys. Franco looked around for a pocket to stow them in, realised his underpants had no such compartment, and handed the keys to Mrs Strogger, who slipped them neatly into a battered alloy drawer, scarred by fire and bullets.

"Don't kill us!" mumbled Grandall.

"Don't hit us!" whined Bebooz.

Franco knocked Bebooz out with a straight right, and Grandall froze, his steel truncheon half raised. He was like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. Like a SPAW caught in a helium-blasted meteor storm.

"It's either my fist, or answering to Sourballs," grinned Franco, toothily.

Grandall closed his eyes, and made an impatient gesture.

Franco whacked him, and Mrs Strogger opened the gate, which buzzed and shunted open. They moved through, and Mrs Strogger closed the gate behind them, pulling a thick-bladed drill on a long, black, rubber cable from a compartment in her chest. The drillbit
whizzed,
and Mrs Strogger plunged it into the slick door control panel. Sparks erupted, and thick oil flooded out, staining the alloyconcrete floor.

"To stop them following?" said Franco, raising his eyebrows.

"Yar," said Mrs Strogger, stowing away her flexi-drill beneath an alloy tit.

"Let's go."

Sourballs and twenty guards emerged from the corridor. She grabbed the bars and howled after her quarry, as her guards opened fire and green laser pulses slammed down the corridors, scorching alloy and steel. Franco and Mrs Strogger ducked and ran, and then were gone...

The Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility was a vast and incomprehensible maze. Mrs Strogger, despite claiming to know the way, seemed to have got them lost and Franco was grinding his teeth in annoyance, trying not to lose his temper.

They stopped at a sixteen-point junction. Around them, the screeching alarms had quietened. Only the red stroboscopic lights flickered, casting eerie shadows and underlining to the prison authorities that they were still in a state of high alert, and that fleeing fugitives were still on the run.

"Which way?" said Franco.

"Give me a minute. I must orientate."

"Orientate? Why don't you just pull out your MonkeyMan satnav, that should guide us through the damn place..."

"Do not be criticising," said Mrs Strogger primly. "I am simply working out the best route."

"Stuff the best route," snapped Franco. "Just get us out of this shithole!"

Guards tramped past the end of one corridor, boots slapping dully on the alloyconcrete floor. But they did not turn. Franco hunched, waiting, then relaxed as the threat passed. He turned, and caught a glimpse of what looked like paper. He gaped at the old org mech.

"Are you
really
looking at a map?"

"No!" snapped Mrs Strogger.

"What's that? There? In your claws?"

"It's paper."

"And what's on the paper?"

"Um. A map. But listen, it's reliable, it was drawn by an old inmate I met, before you arrived. He sold it me for a carton of puffweeds."

"Give me that!" snapped Franco, snatching the paper from Mrs Strogger. Now, Franco was no genius, but he could see the actual structure of the map was an impossibility: corridors crossed one another, or occupied the same time/space. He snorted. "This is crap. This is a map of your own arsehole. I thought you were going to get us out of here in exchange for an airlift to The Org States? Eh?"

"What I
said
was that I knew the prison and Nechudnazzar well. You extrapolated what you wanted to hear from my dialogue. As I said before, there is definitely a tunnel, way down in the bowels of the prison. We have to head down, looking for our means of escape."

"Hmm," frowned Franco, unconvinced, and handed the absurd map back to Mrs Strogger. "Go on, then. Looks like I haven't got much of a bloody option, do I?"
Except maybe breaking away on my own, carrying out mass slaughter and escaping into the wilds without the ball and chain of Mrs-bloody-Strogger round my constricted throat. "
You lead the way."

With a hiss of hydraulics, Mrs Strogger led the way.

They'd travelled down endless corridors, through endless gates and barriers. It was hot. Unbearably hot. And getting hotter. Franco, despite being in underpants and flip flops, wiped sweat from his brow and flicked it to the steel and alloyconcrete floor.

"By all the gods, it's like a furnace down here!"

"It's going to get hotter," said Mrs Strogger.

"Why's that?"

"We've got to pass through the kitchens."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Mrs Strogger gave Franco a sideways look. "Have you ever eaten prison food?"

"Er. Yes. But how is that relevant?"

"Well, you should know the sheer amount of toxins floating around make any prison kitchen more lethal than the core of an active volcano."

"Ah."

"And the prison chefs are pretty good shots with a thrown cleaver."

"Ah. Can the kitchens be avoided?"

"Not according to my map."

Franco stared at Mrs Strogger. She clanked to a stop, hydraulics hissing and machines whirring, and her metal toes flexed, chipping the concrete. Franco acknowledged to himself, there and then, that there were indeed people in the world who were a damn sight more insane than he. Mrs Strogger, third human, third machine, third...
something else,
was one oil-fed nutjob.

They moved on, dropping down deep stairwells into shadowed gloom. High above, large extraction fans spun in eerie silence. Down they moved, laser cannons poised for combat, Franco's head twitching left and right as he scanned for enemies. But there were none. Curiously, the Nechudnazzar Correctional and Reintegration Facility seemed deserted. And Franco realised:
they think we're trying to escape. Heading upwards... and so concentrating their searches that way! Nobody tries to escape by heading down into the bowels - but they'll catch on, soon enough, and then we'll be flooded and overrun by the bad guys.

It would seem time was of the essence.

After yet more stairs, that saw Mrs Strogger clanking and moaning and groaning, and occasionally leaning against the wall to puff and pant, and allow oily clouds of steam to ooze from her mechanical vents and orifices, they reached a long, straight corridor. It was lined entirely in steel and gleamed with the sort of shine given by chefs with a particularly anal obsessive compulsive disorder.

Franco stared at the steel. Floor, walls and ceiling gleamed. At the far end of the corridor were large double doors, also of polished stainless steel. Somewhere, echoes of red stroboscopic light gave the scene an eerie cast.

"I don't like this."

"This is our route," said Mrs Strogger.

Franco felt like saying,
Go on, show me the bloody route on the bloody map then, because it's more like a tracing of your mad cyborg arterial system than any damn map of a prison I've ever seen,
but he didn't. He acknowledged, deep down somewhere, that maybe -
just maybe
- this org, in all her insanity, could read an insane map - as if both insanities cancelled one another out, making the end product whole and normal and understandable.
Yeah, right.

"You lead the way," said Franco through gritted teeth, and pressed his implanted earlobe comm in the hope that Pippa and that Fast Attack Hornet were on their way with a few 65 Stroke Missiles to rescue his ass from this shit. But the comm was dead. Pippa wasn't there. There would be no rescue. "Damn and bloody bollocks," muttered Franco as his situation went from worse to worse to bad to
serious shit, brother.
And it was about to get a whole lot badder...

Mrs Strogger seemed to be using some kind of stealth mode. She hunkered down, her body compressing and hydraulics gliding, and she moved sideways, feet not so much
clanking
as sliding. She obviously thought something bad was beyond those double doors. Franco wiped his sweating hands on the only bit of cloth available; his underpants.
Shit. What I'd give for a decent Permatex WarSuit right now! And a Bausch & Harris Sniper Rifle with SSGK digital sights. And a D5 shotgun! Oh, for a D5 shotgun!

As they reached the doors, Mrs Strogger suddenly stopped. She glanced at Franco. "Lots of chefs beyond," she said. "Bad ganger chefs, if I'm not very much mistaken, and they're all fast and tough, and jabber-jabber when they attack. I am not at full power; I need a recharge socket. There will be a recharge socket in the prison kitchens."