Code Breakers: Beta (20 page)

“And the others?”

“Enna, James, Ghanus, and Liza-Marie are currently on their way here.”

“How are we going to fight back with the ’droids flooding the city?”

“Fuentes might have ’droids and the surface,” Elaine said, the familiar smirk coming back to her face, “but we have Enna and the underground.”

“How are we going to explain Sasha to James? He’ll be devastated.”

Elaine didn’t respond. There was nothing to say.

Malik decided it’d be him that broke the bad news. It was the least he could do. He just hoped that it would help focus James’ mind rather than sending him into a pit of despair.

Malik was torn between the two states, but having Elaine’s clinical approach to the job at hand helped him focus on bringing down Fuentes rather than collapsing under the weight of grief.

Chapter 28

Petal found a buggy covered with a desert-camouflaged tarp. The group of boulders sheltered it from view. She got in and pushed the buggy’s throttle to the max.

The passing storm had left clean, fresh air behind, with low winds.

She could already see the masts of old boats that signified Xian’s place, they glinted and reflected in the moonlight like beacons in the darkness. The tears hadn’t yet dried on her cheeks as she sped onwards.

Her last view of Gabe was his hanging onto the ladder with a dozen or more ronin waiting at the bottom. She heard three gunshots after he slammed the hatch. As much as she tried, she couldn’t get it open.

Her fingers still bled with the effort of trying to get back in, and her hands were bruised pulps. It hurt to hold the steering wheel of the ronin’s buggy.

The trade didn’t represent good value: Gabe’s life for transport.

She’d rather have stayed and died with him, but the stupid, old bastard had sacrificed himself for her, made her exchange his death for the responsibility of saving Gerry and destroying Elliot.

Even with Gerry’s mind now fully integrated with hers, so much so she couldn’t tell if he was even in there anymore, getting to Xian’s to restore Alpha was still a risky plan.

There were no guarantees Xian even had parts. But if he did, she’d try to get him to do the repairs, rather than trying to return to Shelley. Without Gabe she didn’t fancy going back there, and there was the added risk of running into yet more ronin.

Although not inherently dangerous, Xian was fucking crackers at the best of times, insane due to the toxins in his body from the sickly fish that he kept eating. Even if the damned things glowed in the dark with radiation poisoning, he’d still eat them raw, like expensive sushi.

That was over a year ago. She couldn’t imagine how nuts he’d be now, if he hadn’t already thought he were a fish and swam off into the ocean. But the fact the old boat masts were still there gave her hope.

She tried putting the image of Gabe out of her mind just for a moment, needing to concentrate on the task at hand. She owed him at least that much.

Petal steered the buggy around the worst of the divots and potholes across the hard-packed soil. Even the rain from the storm hadn’t softened it. After a further twenty minutes of tense driving, she saw something flap in the breeze. The wind here near the coast was stronger than inland, but nothing like the storm that had just blown through. The devastation was obvious as she approached Xian’s former tent city. City was a generous term. There were only ten tents.

She pulled up to the first. It had collapsed under the assault of the storm. Pots, pans, fishing implements, and blankets were strewn across the dirt. She slowed the buggy and weaved in and out of the mess. All of the tents had collapsed; their sheets flapping and billowing in the winds like dying bellows.

Amid the debris, she spotted a number of bodies: two of them were ronin, wearing the same Libertas uniforms as the ones in the bunker. It seemed they’d sent out quite a number to hunt down her and Gabe. She doubted it’d be long before those in the bunker caught up with her. Although there were three other buggies under the camouflaged sheet, she’d sabotaged them as best she could, hoping to buy some time.

Throughout the journey she’d kept checking behind her for any sound of engines or clouds of dust. But no one had come.

She finally navigated her way through the remaining tents and their strewn contents until she parked at the edge of a jetty made from rusted beams and pieces of iron salvaged from the ships that had grounded on the coast.

The jetty led to a group of six old fishing boats, four of which were half sunk and ruined. Two, however, remained afloat and were welded together. This was Xian’s ‘office’. The place he stayed, safely away from the various travellers who came through and made use of his tents.

As crazy as he was, he remained generous. Gabe and Petal had stayed in the relative safety of his tent shelter a number of times. He used to run a series of games, mostly combat sports, for betting purposes. He was one of the first to get a computer network running when he salvaged and fixed a microwave transceiver, and survivors would come from miles around.

She walked down the jetty, her slight weight making the metal planks creak and groan. A light glowed from inside the two fused boats. A crude door had been cut into the side of one of the boats. Inside, Petal knew, heavy metal bars locked the door in place, keeping Xian as secure as a barnacle.

The hull of his makeshift home wore its rust like foundation, the red rash covering any blemish from its previous paintwork. Petal couldn’t even tell what colour it was originally. She saw a dark shape shift past a porthole, briefly blotting out the light.

A face pressed against the aperture, his bulging eyes distorted by the glass. Xian was alive. A small slither of relief rippled across her skin as she heard the grating of metal. A hatch beside the porthole slid back, and those mad eyes stared out.

“What fuck you want?”

“Nice welcome, Xian. It’s me, Petal.” She didn’t have the energy to smile.

His attention roamed either side of her. “Where’s big’un?” he said, referring to Gabe. Xian, being barely over five foot when standing up straight, always assumed Gabe, at six foot plus, to be a giant.

She ignored the question.

“I’m in trouble, Xian. I need your help. Let me in?”

“People looking for you. You bring them here?”

“What? No, I’m alone. You mean the security officers?” She pointed to the two dead bodies mingled in with the tent’s contents.

Xian nodded. “They tried extract information. I stop them.”

“Yeah, I can see that. You did well, Xian, they’re real fucking bad news. Please, let me in. I have a deal for you.”

His eyes lit up then. He was a magpie through and through. Petal lifted the box with Alpha’s parts inside. “It’s real old,” she said. “Pre-Cataclysm.”

“Oh, shiny.” He stepped inside and slammed the hatch closed.

More grating noises sounded from inside along with grunts of effort. The door creaked open, and he stood back to allow her through. Inside, the place didn’t just stink of fish, it looked like fish; dried scales had been stuck to the walls to create a weird shifting feel as the light reflected off their multicoloured surfaces. Various fish heads were hung from the walls with OLED bulbs shining out from their opened mouths.

“Erm, I like what you’ve done with the place, Xian.” She held back the desire to vomit from the stench. When she looked down, she saw that he’d scratched words into the metal of the hull. Some mad diatribe about life on the seas titled ‘Ode to Little Fishy’.

Xian, dressed in a cloak made from old fishing nets, limped his way through the boat, leading her to another door. It opened into the second boat if she had her sense of direction right, but with the overwhelming stench of rotting fish and the general craziness of the situation, she wasn’t entirely sure.

She passed a bundle of rags that looked like his bed. The sheets were black with stains. A dead squid sat on a shelf above the bed, its tentacles hanging down. Squid ink had dried on one of the tentacles. She got a terrible image of Xian lying in bed while suckling the beast.

Thankfully, once into the second boat the madness eased. The second boat was his lab, workshop, and crazy man’s tinker-room. He sat on a decrepit captain’s chair in front of a workbench. Swinging round, he looked at the box she carried containing Alpha’s parts.

“What you bring Xian?”

“A gift from the past that needs your skilled hands to revive.”

She placed the box on the workbench and got the whiff of a pungent, sweet smell. “What’s that?”

His eyes grew wide. He pointed to a shelf made from an old oar hanging above the workbench. On the shelf were a series of jars containing various organs and liquids. A jar containing a lump of grey matter caught her attention. As she got closer, the smell grew sweeter. It had a potent earthy scent to it with a hint of alcohol. It reminded her of some of Gabe’s earlier concoctions to treat wounds before they found supplies of NanoStem.

“What is it?” Petal asked.

Xian smiled; he had half of his teeth missing. Only two front upper teeth remained and the bottom canines with a few molars. She supposed he didn’t really need teeth if he were sucking on sushi all day long. “Ambergris. Expensive for perfumes.”

“What’s ambergris?”

“Whales... what is word? Throw-up? Rare these days.”

She backed away with a lurch and again tried not to empty her stomach.

“Fine. We’re wasting time. I need you to help fix this,” Petal said, ignoring the stink while opening the case.

Xian hovered over it like it was a holy relic. His waxy hands ran gently over the parts as though honouring some deeper significance.

“Is... amazing,” he said, his voice hushed in reverence. “Where you find?”

“It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that my life, and perhaps the lives of a million others, relies on fixing it. The memory is intact, but the motherboard and processor are fried. I need them repaired, preferably with the same parts in situ.”

He sat back on the chair and gripped his chin.

“Xian could do this. And what does Xian get?”

She wanted to say his life, but had to play it cool. Stability was not his thing. “What do you want that I could give you in return for this service?”

“You hack computer systems, yes?”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“You do hack for me, and I fix this, yes?”

“What’s the hack? What do you want to get into?”

“You come.”

Xian grabbed her hand, and she instantly tensed with revulsion. It was like all Xian’s fish consumption had slowly mutated his humanity. His hand was clammy and waxy. He took her out of the boats and down onto a section of beach.

The wet sand and stones glimmered in the moonlight. The tide was going out, leaving a silvery surface behind. A few fish flipped and dove back into the retreating sea. Xian let her hand go and, with his weird half-limp, half-shuffle, hobbled after his prey. He dove onto his front with his arms out, catching a stray fish, a small silver thing no bigger than his palm.

Without hesitating, he bit it headfirst, crunching on the bones.

So his molars were useful, after all, she thought with revulsion.

He sucked out the innards before placing the rest of the fish in the folds of his net cloak.

“You come,” he shouted back to Petal, who’d stopped some metres behind.

“Lead the way,” she said, squelching her boots into the wet sand. The breeze made her shiver. There was a time when she’d have found being here relaxing. A clear night, full moon, receding tide. And the deathly quiet. Only her and Xian’s progress along the beach made any noise. But in these circumstances, without Gabe, and Gerry quiet in her mind, her body hummed with anxiety.

After a further five minutes of trudging along the coastline, Xian stopped at a dark mound. At first Petal thought it was an upturned boat with an old tarp strapped to it, but as she got closer and the shape’s details sharpened, she recognised the distinctive curved cone of a Jaguar.

Xian untied the tarp and pulled it clear. He opened his arms as if to present a prized possession to the world. The thing was rustier than his boats. The VTOL engines were caked in sand and mud, its tail buried beneath the sand, and its windshield featured a crack that fractured its way from one side to the other.

“You hack computer, we fly.” Xian used his hands to model a flying Jaguar.

Petal sighed. “It’s dead, Xian. Just look at it.”

“I fix. Fuel lines good. Engines work. Just need computer hack for control.”

“Give me your flashlight,” Petal said, indicating the OLED light tucked in a rope belt around his cloak. Smiling like an asylum guest, he handed it to her.

She shined it inside the windshield. The cockpit, surprisingly, looked in good shape. The controls were in place; the seats were intact with no signs of prior ejection. She moved around the hull of the craft, shining the light into the areas where the fuselage was welded. She extended one of her spikes and poked at it. The spike went through some of the more rusted areas but the seams were strong and held. Whether it’d stand up to the forces of the working engines was a different issue entirely.

As she scanned it, she brushed away some of the dust and dirt and saw the familiar red Russian markings. “Red Widow craft,” she said, more to herself than anything. Xian was hovering about right behind her, nodding eagerly.

“I shot down. Tried to fix to fly, but software bugged.”

That was the problem with Xian. He was a fiend when it came to engineering and hardware, but software, he hadn’t a clue. His addled brain just couldn’t comprehend the abstract logic.

“I can’t guarantee it won’t pull itself apart as soon as it takes off,” Petal said. “But if it’s just the software you want fixing, then we can do a deal.”

“One more thing,” Xian said.

“What?”

“You fly with me. To the Dome.”

“Um, Xian, I don’t think you’d find the Dome exactly welcoming.”

His facial expression dropped. Even with fish guts staining his lips and chin, she felt a glimmer of sympathy for him. Stuck out here all alone, his tent shelter destroyed, it couldn’t be the most ideal of situations, especially if his mind had continued to deteriorate.

She mulled it over: what was the worst that could happen? The old Jaguar coming apart and them having to eject? She’d done that twice in as many months so that wasn’t new. Xian getting weird and trying to kill her? That’d be unfortunate, but his body was dangerously thin and understrength, so he didn’t pose much of a physical threat—as long as she kept him in her vision.

On the upside, if he could fix Alpha, and the Jaguar held together for long enough, it’d make the journey back to the Dome in a matter of hours instead of days, and even if the populace of Libertas didn’t take to Xian’s alternative personality, at least she’d have returned with Alpha and could attempt to get Gerry out of her head and give Enna and the others a chance of ending Elliot Robertson’s threat for good.