SF in The City Anthology (26 page)

Much as it pained Charlisle to hear that Ambrose lived in the sewers, he imagined that this situation had a more profound effect on the fourth and final member of the company which had ventured into the “underworld” – Taisei Mori. From what Ángel had told the gangsters, Mr. Mori had worked at Smithson’s Ol’ Factory before it had been burnt to the ground. Charlisle had imagined that a man who worked with pleasant scents on a daily basis would suffer the most in such a revolting locale, but of course he could never have guessed from the sheepish demeanor of his companion that he
had lived in a ghetto as well.

“Why are youse covering your noses and all?” Ambrose asked with little concern in his voice. “Is my humble abode not plea
sing to your olfactory organs?”

“The stench is more dangerous than our mission,” Ángel said from behind the handkerchief that formed a useless barrier between his senses and
the repugnant air around him.

“You prickly poltroons should have been down here a year ago. There are nanomachines in the sewers that digest some of waste now. It makes the air a little more bearable for outsiders, yet no one wishes to venture into my domain for more than a brief stint, even with improved conditions. T
hat’s just the way I like it.”

“Well you wouldn’t live down here quite so easily if I hadn’t brought you a month’s worth of food,” Ángel cocked an eyebrow. “If you hold up your end of the bargain, I’ll give you enough supplies to prevent a journey
to the surface for six months.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Ambrose waved us down the left tunnel. “Even if you sought out help from a sewer repairman, you would find no better guide than me. The CA is so untrusting, they provide their workers with limited knowledge of the sewer network, just en
ough to get their jobs done.” 

“I still feel that it would have been easier to fly to the CA’s newest construction project rather than taking the…less convenient route,” Elegance avoided a large blob that fe
ll from the sewer’s “ceiling.”

“The two of you must never have flown during your travels,” Ángel chuckled sadly, “or watched the news. If you had, you would know that commercial flights are no longer permit
ted in or between prefectures.”

“When did this go into effect?” C
harlisle asked disbelievingly.

“After Yonatan Polzin allegedly fired a missile from a shoulder mounted launcher at a commercial hovercraft, the CA stopped people from traveling by air for the sake of their ‘protection,’ ” Ángel shook his head dejectedly. “We did a bit more digging into the case and discovered that Mr. Polzin was completely framed. A small but effective squad called the Dark Unit was responsible for his ‘fall from grace,’ and now the media is pla
ying it up for all its worth.”

“Why does the CA want people to avoid air travel so badly,” Charlisle cringed as a rat the size of
a small dog scurried past him.

“I haven’t fully explained to you what’s going on under The City Cup’s new stadium have I?” Ángel spoke more to himself than anyone else. “From what we’ve gathered, the secret military base under the stadium has been building top secret aircraft for the sake of launching
a staged
invasion
of sorts.”

“Invasion?” the word felt strange on Charlisle’s tongue. It was an archaic term that hadn’t found much usage since nations ceased to exist, and their wars with them.

“What about the ‘asset’ you said you lost recently?” Elegance chimed in.

“Less than a week ago, we attempted to prevent the assassination of a CA sniper by the CA’s very own Dark Unit. We took the opportunity to explain to him who it was that had nearly ended his life as well as the lives of his family members. Unfortunately he wasn’t too keen on joining us in the fight to end Central Authority, but he made it quite clear that his new mission was to destroy the Dark Unit and everyone involved with it. This will work to our advantage, as long as he stays out of the way of our own operations. With any luck, he’ll hit Central Authority hard in his att
empt to get to the Dark Unit.”

“Here’s a picture of the sniper – Devon Globa,” Taisei thought to the two youth, including the men
tioned image with his message.

“We’re entering the forbidden
sector,” Ambrose said softly.

They found themselves in a large oval shaped chamber with double gates blocking the doorway on its other side. In the dim lighting given off by the company’s glow bars, Charlisle could see a crimson red control box besid
e the entranceway before them.

“Have you ever…actually been farther than this, Ambrose?” Ángel had
a nervous catch in his voice.

“I’ve hacked the control box before, just for the fun of it,” the sewer dweller puffed up his chest proudly, as he approached the control mechanism. Charlisle was secretly pleased that he wouldn’t b
e put on the spot as a hacker.

             
When Ambrose had opened up the gates, the rest of the company gave a unified gasp. The tunnels beyond had a sparkling clean appearance. Their filthy boots would leave tracks for sure.

             
“If I was to guess, I would say that a hovering automaton of some sort normally proceeds from here on in,” Ambrose crossed his arms. “I’ve only been in a few feet from here. There could be sanitation sensors in the floors for all I know.”

             
“How close are we to the base beneath the stadium?” Taisei asked.

             
“I can’t say for sure, but we have to be relatively close.”

             
“Why would the CA keep the tunnel so clean?” Elegance pointed before her doubtfully.

             
“Some of their other strongholds that we’ve infiltrated had a similar setup,” Ángel replied. “It probably signals that the walls are covered with a large colony of self-replicating nanomachines. The CA must be flushing away active biological agents, and they need these devices to break down their waste/evidence.”

             
“What kind of biological agents are we talking about here?” Ambrose asked.

             
“I suppose we’ll find out when we get there,” Ángel took the first step forward.

***

              As it turned out, they had a great deal more stress to deal with than Ambrose had initially promised. Much to his chagrin, the tunnel was part of a labyrinthine network beneath The City Cup stadium, and more dastardly machinations haunted those tunnels than the electrified tripwires they encountered at the tunnel’s first turn.

             
“Here I am a huge fan of soccer and I wind up walking
below
the new stadium,” Charlisle shook his head.

             
“We had best communicate telepathically from here on out,” Taisei thought to the rest of the group in response to a pattering noise in a nearby tunnel. He had forgotten that Ambrose didn’t have a nanotube matrix in his brain.

             
“Well what do you think this is?” Ambrose exclaimed as they turned a corner and saw that the tunnel had been filled up with hanging nets.

             
“Shush, be still,” Elegance spoke gravely. “Do you hear that?” The pattering noise grew louder, and the nets began to move and sway, as if a large mass was approaching.

Ambrose turned and ran for it, fully convinced that his end of the deal with Mr. Ehrlichmann had been more than fulfilled. Taisei raised the Chakra 4200 Assault Rifle in his hands anxiously. He had experienced few trials of combat since he had joined up with his fellow rebels. Ángel pointed his machine pistol towards the oncoming danger fearfully. Among all the company, Charlisle and Elegance seemed to show the least fear. They assumed they couldn’t run into anything worse than the Gorse had thrown at them. In this case, they were deadly wrong.

Backing up till the corner hid them all from view; the members of the band did their best to stifle surprise when their enemy emerged. It was an Ereshkigal Type 120 Intimidator Drone, the stuff of nightmares. A heinous device from the age of nation on nation wars, the Ereshkigal had been banned from usage in The City. As a product of the collaboration between the infamous torturer Winter Heather Oberst and the brilliant engineer Ugo Seamus Ashton, this intimidator drone had a singular purpose, to instill terror in the hearts of an attacking army.

With eight legs, each ending with three flesh rending talons, and an oval body, the Ereshkigal’s appearance uncannily resembled a spider’s; however, the machine had been designed to appeal to the most common phobias found among humankind, so it possessed additional horrors to prick the soul with despair. Its outer skin had the texture and coloration of a snake’s infernal hide, and the cacophonous uttering of the machine sounded more like a colossal, living tidal wave of shrieking rats than the noises usually articulated by automatons.

Taisei and Ángel filled the tunnel with the pungent aroma of gunpowder and smoke as they unloaded their weapons on the singular crimson eye that served as the drone’s primary navigational sensor. It covered its weak spot with two hairy limbs, while a hidden tail cocked itself into position like a scorpion’s stinger. Its hidden appendage ended with a graven image in the likeness of a serpent, and from the facsimile of its jowl, a sticky fluid not unlike a spider’s web flew at the two men.

Charlisle and Elegance were both better acquainted with hand to hand combat the long range warfare, yet they wished they had brought guns themselves at the moment. Ms. Pang pulled the collapsible ax Ángel had given to her from her back, the telescopic weapon clicking to its full length. She had encountered her fair share of abominations as a member of the Harpies gang, but felling this evil machination would bring her the kind of honor long sought out by gangsters. In her other hand she held a katar, the sentiments of warriors past welled up in her soul. 

Charlisle felt a little less enthusiastic about the fight, since he imagined a hacker’s skills would be needed to bring down the beast. If the depleted uranium bullets fired from Taisei’s Chakra 4200 couldn’t pierce the synthetic hid of this monster, how could he hope that the Gladius Graecus in his firm grip could pierce the drone?

“We’re going to have to hack it,” he muttered to Elegance and looked back at Taisei and Ángel as they struggled in cocoons of fibers that made the aerosol string at the toy shop look like, well, a toy. “You’re the better hacker of the two of us.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Elegance approached closer to the drone, which fired another blast of sticky solution. She dodged it with ease. “Its web cannon isn’t as accurate as you would think. I’m going to attack it, and you can hack it. From here I can see that its control panel is on the bottom of its abdomen. Get ready…” With that the young gangstress sprinted towards the monstrosity.

The Ereshkigal shifted its audio recording to sound like a murderous hawk, and it fired another globby round of web at its annoying attacker. No matter how many tens of thousands of hours went into fine tuning a killing machine, it could never fully anticipate every nuance of combat with a human being. Elegance feigned an attack from the right flank, just to attack the drone head on.

Charlisle stood frozen in surprise as he saw his partner leap onto the “face” of the monster. Elegance attempted to drive the blade of her double sided ax into the eye of her livid opponent, but a substance a scientist had spent half a life inventing lied between her and the sensors inside the bulbous head of her enemy. The ax didn’t even leave a scratch.

It was in that moment that Charlisle realized the girl he cared the most for in the world would die if he didn’t do something. He had loathed himself since he made the decision to attempt to spy on Elegance’s telepathic communications. While he didn’t care for the idea of a deity or even a spiritual realm, the hacker had never ruled out the possibility of fate. Granted, he had never successfully violated his crush’s privacy, but the desire and failed venture made him just as guilty. Perhaps he had finally found a way to atone for his mistake. Charlisle would save his partner, even if it required sacrificing his own life to do so. 

From the upper most part of the thing’s back, a host of tentacles, with the same blubbery consistency as the flesh of the species that inspired it, emerged and grasped a struggling Elegance. Spurred on more by the passion welling up more in his balls than his heart, Charlisle ran at the fiend as hard as his legs could carry him. Beneath the machine’s visual orb resided a hideous maw, a pair of spinning buzz saws imitating its fangs. As Charlisle tried to slide under the monster to the control panel on its abdomen, two mandibles made in the likeness of skeletal hands took hold of the hacker by his head. The Ereshkigal attempted to draw his face into the spinning blades, but he swung his sword wildly, cutting the vile clamps from the face of the beast.

Having been released by such a firm grip, Charlisle’s head fell back onto the tunnel’s unyielding floor, a shocking blow. He shook his head, the sight of the monster over him obscured by temporarily blurry vision. As the beastly tentacles of the drone lowered Elegance towards a series of spinning saws within its thorax, Charlisle reached through clouded sight towards the machine’s control panel.

A terrible stinging feeling caused the hacker to withdraw his hand with a quick jerking motion. Charlisle’s vision cleared up, and he saw a series of small appendages swaying around the control box, reminiscent of a familiar but extinct cnidarian the youth studied in school. Disarming these tubular defenses in the same manner that he took the drone’s mandibles, Charlisle broke his way into the machine’s control box, only to have a tidal wave of maggots fall out of it.

“Really,” the hacker moaned in disgust. He had seen enough of the squirming devils in waste heaps throughout the Gorse. They weren’t his favorite members of the animal kingdom.

“Are you into the control panel yet?” Elegance asked as she finally landed a solid hit on a series of pneumatic pumps that ran alongside the spinning discs of death beneath her, stopping their rotations.

The Ereshkigal’s tentacles writhed wildly, as the gangstress cut them off of her body. Shifting tactics, the machine raised its vile tail, and a razor sharp blade the length of a tall man’s arm extended from beneath the appendages web nozzle. Like a scorpion, the drone attempted to impale Elegance with its “stinger,” a foul neurotoxin coating its fell blade. Having nearly forgotten about her katar, the youth opened her weapon, for it was a scissor variant of the katar, and caught the blade on the Ereshkigal’s tale between prongs of her device. Holding the danger at bay, Elegance swung her ax and cut off the beast’s tale. A moment later, the whole drone quivered and let out a morbid shriek. Then it slumped to the floor.

“Oh my…Charlisle!” Elegance jumped off of the fallen drone. She couldn’t see him. His whole body had to be buried under that monstrosity. “Look, you can’t die on me!” She pried at the fallen mechanism, her hope fading as she could barely lift one side.

“I’m right over here,” Charlisle called and emerged from behind the corner of the tunnel where the monster originated.

“You son of a…” she ran up to him and threw her exhausted fists against his chest in frustration. “I thought that thing fell on you.”

“No, I ran for it as soon as I entered a kill code in the drone. To be quite honest, that old tech has really poor barriers against hacking.”

“I guess they never thought guys like you would be a threat,” Elegance looked at her partner with a light in her eyes that had never gleamed for the young man before.

“That’s all nice and good,” Taisei called out from behind a strand of webbing that half covered his mouth, “but could you guys please get us out of here?”

***

After the two older members of the company were freed, the rebels once again turned the corner and eyed the nets that hung in the hallway. Tossing a piece of the Ereshkigal that had broken off against one of the hanging structures, Ángel recoiled when it stuck to the net. “Just like a freakin’ spider web,” he grumbled.

“How much farther do you think we have to go?” Elegance was still breathing heavily after her near death experience.

“If they would put such an old but valuable terror in this tunnel, than we have to be close to the exit,” Taisei suggested.

As it turned out, the hanging “webs” weren’t hard to avoid. After all, waste had to be disposed of in this demented sewer, and that’s what nearly undid the rebels. When a hovering machine carrying a basket of waste flew buy the startled band, it nearly picked them up on its sensors. Fortunately it continued on its way with a foul smelling load to the area where nanomachines would digest it. Continuing on their way, the group found themselves beneath the secret base’s waste disposal chute and lavatories. All of them agreed that crawling up through a toilet would be safer, though less enjoyable, than the waste chutes.

“That’s what we brought parkas for anyway,” Ángel tried to comfort them. As it turned out, their hardest problem was fitting four people in the cramped lavatory.

“You would think they could build a bigger loo,” Charlisle whispered.

“Few people are allowed in here in the first place,” Taisei said. “Since this base will probably be a temporary establishment, they didn’t want to expend money on less important matters.”

“I’d consider taking a crap an important matter,” Charlisle muttered.

“I don’t know what lies beyond the restroom, but we should be prepared,” Ángel turned to Taisei. “We’ll let you handle this.”