Theme Planet (4 page)

“Stop,” said Jones.

“You see something?”

“Over there. The red-brick
warehouse.”

They were in an old, decrepit,
crumbling section of town. The air had a charcoal texture. Water gurgled in
leaking iron gutters. Dex squinted, and saw a figure slip through a doorway,
wearing a balaclava.

“What’s in there?”

Jones punched up the PNC and
images spun around into the PUF logo, with a gleaming London bobby holding a
traditional electrified truncheon. He aimed the scanner and it gave a
blip.

“Diamond wholesalers.”

“Down
here?”
said Dex. “Are
they
mad?”

“There are probably some tax
implications involved.”

“Yeah, like a lack of
declaration.”

Jones grinned. “That’s just the
way of the world, bro. We both know that shit.”

Jones logged in with PUF central
and they climbed from the BMW Battlecar and checked D4 shotguns. Then, glancing
up and down the street, they splashed through puddles as distant day-lasers
wrote sickspam and junkymail against the grey, rain-filled London skies.

You want VW-Viagra, Big Boy? Telemail
999 696969!

Do you need to get
high?
Without the PUF
porkers
sniffing out your stash? Our
anti-sniff
Sniff Sniffer Sniff-Stash Sniff-Bags
are the bags for stashing your stash!

Dial EASYSNIFFSTASH on your logic cube
right now!!

Letters glowed against the clouds
selling products nobody wanted to idiots who could afford them. Dex could see
the slogans reflected in the dull shine of his shotgun’s twin barrels, and he
squinted, growling in unease. He’d been the victim of far too much sick
sickspam over the years. It made a man want to kill.

Hello sweet friend, I have
unkle in your cuntry who has just
received US$57 billion, and needs help transferring funds into his account For
this help you receive US$3 billion all you need to do is send
your bank
details
and
a skin sample from your inner thigh... and you look very horny and sexy, by the
way. Please send photo and I love you long time sweet friend.

Dex and Jones slammed backs
against crumbling brickwork and glanced up and down the street. “No getaway
groundcar,” said Dex, mouth now a grim line as reality dropped through his
brain. Last day.
Last fucking day
and a suspected heist going down like
bad shit. Fucking
great.
Just fucking
typical!

“They’ll have something planned.”

Dex glanced at the skies. “We
going in?”

“With extreme prejudice,” said
Jones, mouth a grim line, eyes hard, afro wavering. Dex groaned inwardly. When
Jones got in a mood like this, in an
I’m the good guy and I’m going to take
down the bad guys
mood, well, it was hard to get any sense out of the man,
and best just to humour him; let him beat it out of his system. Or at least,
beat it out of the bad guys.

“I don’t want a slaughterhouse,”
said Dex.

“Well, that’s up to them guys,
ain’t it?” said Jones.

Lightning crackled overhead. A
God-venom discharge. Jones peered into the portal, signalled to Dex, and headed
in. Dex followed, out of the rain, nose twitching at the smell of... fuel.
High-octane.
Shuttle
fuel. Shit.

The corridor was long and dark,
crumbling and damp. Jones moved slowly through ankle-deep fluid, and it was
only when they reached the end of the corridor that Dex realised -with a
growing horror - that the fluid through which they stepped was indeed spaceship
fuel. Toxic. Deadly. Probably eating their anti-tox toxboots. And very highly
flammable.

Dex signalled to Jones, and
pointed downwards. An errant spark, and
kaboom!
- Broiled Dexter.
Roasted Jones. Not good. Especially considering Dex was due to take his family
on holiday tomorrow...

They could hear voices up ahead.
And several shouts. There came the
crack
of a pistol and Dex winced.

One spark...

Jones accelerated and Dex went
taut, compact, all thoughts of the Theme Planet vanishing like mist under hot
sunlight as they reached the end of the fuel-filled corridor and stepped neatly
into -

A warehouse.

It was huge, much larger than the
exterior had led them to believe. The roof was constructed from corrugated
plasti-shields which allowed a dull grey light to filter down like nuclear snowfall.
The warehouse was filled with massive H-section struts leading up to the eaves
and crisscrossed with large shelves stacked with truk-containers. It was more
like a shipping complex than a jewellery wholesalers. But then, as Jones had
pointed out, there was probably more tax evasion going down in this backstreet
London shit-hole than in any Banker’s Convention for Top Level Banking
Management. Or maybe
not.

Dex, back against the wall,
surveyed the towering iron shelves filled with truk containers. Again, the
stench of fuel was strong; like acid in his nostrils.

Somebody, a woman, screamed.

Jones and Dex charged into
action, boots stomping down an alloyconcrete walkway. They rounded the corner
to be confronted by a scene which hammered nails of confusion into their
skulls. They both stopped dead, D4 shotguns wavering uncertainly. This was not
the scene they had expected...

Three people, a man and two
women, hung upside down from a beam. They were naked, hands and feet tied tight
together, and one woman bled from her mouth, streaks running past her eyes and
soaking into her long, blonde, dangling hair, and dripping into a puddle. Their
frightened eyes shifted subtly from the two PUF officers who had invaded their
torture, and back to the shadows...

Dex reacted first, D4 shifting to
the darkness where something,
an outline,
stood perfectly still,
camouflaged, only a gentle gleam of eyes watching them without movement.

“What...” said Dex, as Jones
stepped past him, levelled his shotgun, and without a sound opened both
barrels.
Booms
echoed
through the warehouse and Dex blinked, but the figure had flipped out of the
way, and from the darkness came three fast
phuts.

“Down!” screamed Jones, the flat
of his hand slamming Dex, and they both hit the ground hard as a line of
automatic gunfire cut across the clearing, howling, fire erupting to the
backing track of tinkling shell cases. Both men opened their shotguns and more
booms
smashed through the acid in
return fire. Wood splintered. Steel screeched. Concrete crumbled.

For what seemed like hours, there
followed a violent exchange of gunfire. Finally, through the smoke and the
sound of Dex reloading his D4, Jones grabbed him roughly. “We’ve got to get out
of here.”

“But the prisoners...”

“The prisoners are dead.”

Dex glanced up. The three
phuts
had been silenced shots. Straight through their skulls.

“We move. Now!” yelled Jones.

Dex said nothing. Trusted his
partner’s experience and his own screaming instincts. They ran through smoke
and gloom as a sudden crackling came to Dex’s ears, and behind him the flood of
Shuttle fuel ignited. There were cracks and sparks, then a
whoosh
that made every hair on Dex’s
body stand on end and scream a song of desolation right through to his soul.
They sprinted like madmen down a corridor, ignoring the way they’d entered the
warehouse. Because...

Dex gave a crooked smile as he
felt a wash of heat behind him.

Because hell,
that
was the
trap...

They ran hard, boots pounding.
Fire roared through the warehouse. Petals uncurled with heat and energy and
agony. The warehouse groaned and screamed, and Dex and Jones burst from a
second doorway choking on smoke, like unwanted foetal ejections from the glowing
vulva of an alien whore.

Dex stood, hands on knees,
wheezing.

Jones tracked with his shotgun,
face covered by a haze of grey ash, eyes alert.

“What you doing?”

“It’s out here.”

“What is?” Dex scowled, glancing
up.

“The
android,”
hissed
Jones.

That made Dex stand up tall and
finish reloading his shotgun. “Back there? That was a hit?”

“More than that, I reckon,” said
Jones, voice sour. “Much, much more.”

~ * ~

It
was only
when they were
surrounded by an assortment of PUF cars and truks, and five hydroengines
tackled the blaze, that Jones finally allowed himself to relax. But even as
they sat on the pavement, backs to yet another crumbling brick wall, watching
the hydromen fighting the raging blaze and sharing cigarettes, still Jones
refused to lower his shotgun. It was as if he were waiting for a follow-up; for
payback.

“Go on. What happened?”

“It was when I was in the army,”
said Jones, voice low. He took a drag on the dregtube. The tip glowed. Jones
coughed out blue smoke.

“During Helix?”

“Yeah. Helix. I saw this. Exactly
this. Three people, strung up by their feet. The ground doused in high-octane
fuel. If she gets interrupted, then
whoosh.
The whole place goes up.”

“She?”

“She was an android. An Anarchy
Android.”

“They’re illegal. Especially on
Earth.”

Jones looked sideways at Dex. “Yeah.
Right. How fucking naive do you want to be, compadre?”

“Why a
she?
This could
have been a male.”

Jones shrugged. “No. They make
male androids, sure. But females take KillChips with a higher success rate. It’s
very, very rare a male becomes an Anarchy Model. Must be in the genetics, or
something. The female of the species, more deadly than the male? Damn. Fucking.
Right.”

Jones smoked some more. Dex
considered his words as the hydromen finally killed the fire. The street was a
quagmire of foam and black-streaked water. The stench of burnt detritus filled
Dex’s nostrils like toxic snuff.

It started to rain.

“You think she -
it
- will
come back for us?”

Jones shrugged. “No... I don’t
think so. We’re police. They don’t want to raise their profiles. Killing police
gets a lot of attention, yeah? Too much attention. However, if we’d been burned
alive, maybe... well. Fair game, right?” He grinned, then, and slapped Dex on
the back. Both men climbed to their feet and stood beneath the ashy rain. It
stained them. Dirtied their purity.

“Shit,” said Dex. “Just what I
need on my last bloody day of work. A triple homicide.”

“At least you’re going on
holiday! I’ve got more of this to come.” Jones’s eyes gleamed. “Lots more.”

“So they’re bad, these...” Dex
savoured the words, “Anarchy Androids?”

“As bad as they get,” said Jones.
“Experts. At torture. Murder. They have no emotions. They have no fear. And
they’re tougher than a hard-boiled motherfucker. This one we found, out in the
jungle on Tashkan during Helix. Well, it took ten of us to drop her.
Ten
of us, Dexter. And she took out a fucking perimeter tank with her bare hands. “