12.

Endless corridors and empty rooms, wherever they trudged the vast algae production center had become a desert. They found regular clothes in a storage bin and donned splay jackets, dungarees and boots. Marten found an extra energy cell for his baton. In a guardroom, Turbo shattered a candy bar machine. Several floors down, they opened a hatch into a settling tank. Turbo peered at the thick soup below. He blanched, drew back and shook his head.

Marten looked in. About a hundred workers floated dead in the brine. They’d been shot in the back or in the back of the head. Their blood slicked the goop like oil.

Marten clenched his teeth until they ached.

“Mass murder,” slurred Turbo.

“Like they’re covering their tracks,” said Stick.

“Who is?” snapped Marten.

“PHC.” Stick must have noticed Marten’s incomprehension. “Things got really rough in the pits several months ago.”

“Yeah,” said Turbo. “When the war started.”

Stick nodded in agreement. “When Major Orlov arrived.”

“No way are they gonna lose to the Supremacists,” Turbo said.

“But why are they gunning down all the prisoners?” growled Marten.

Omi smiled sourly.

“Did I ask something stupid?”

“Naw,” said Stick. “It’s just that Omi does the same thing, only in the slums. He takes out the troublemakers, makes sure those he’s hurt can never come around to hurt him back.”

“It’s insurance,” Omi said flatly.

“It is cold-blooded murder,” slurred Turbo. “It’s because they’re bastards.”

Omi shrugged.

They moved on warily, to scenes of greater mass death. Gleaming corridors often ended in piles of gory butchery. Many of the dead had been dumped unceremoniously into the various stages of algae production.

They rode an elevator down to an office section and prowled the next corridor. The halls were shorter and narrower, constantly twisting and turning.

 Marten felt overwhelmed. The mass death appalled him. What kind of choice was there for anyone? Earth was trapped between implacable enemies, with PHC killers on one hand and Highborn on the other. There was no hope for a better future.

Turbo stopped short, his long face twitching. “No, no, no!”

The others watched him.

Turbo tore off his helmet and threw it at the floor. “Why’d they kill everybody?” he yelled. “It don’t make sense.”

“Easy,” said Stick.

“Easy?” shouted Turbo. He laughed wildly.

Marten jerked around. He thought he heard a click from ahead.

“You’re just feeling the stims wearing off,” Stick told his friend.

Turbo laughed even more wildly, a bit hysterically.

“Look—”

“Duck!” shouted Marten. He hurled his body against Omi, throwing him to the floor. He saw a blur fly past, strike the wall, bounce and ricochet around the corner. It exploded with a roar, hot metal pinging off the walls.

With eyes blazing and mouth open, Turbo zigzagged in a crazy-man’s rush around the corner. They heard him roar an insane oath, and then a thud and a rattle sounded. A second later, Turbo yelled, “It’s safe!”

Gingerly, they turned the corner and found Turbo with a short, stubby, shotgun-like weapon, the Electromag Grenade Launcher. It was a small mass-driver that used a magnetic impulse to propel grenades. The guard who’d shot it lay on the floor, gasping. There was a trail of blood leading up to him. It was like a smeared barcode, thicker in the places where he’d stopped to rest. The man had been crawling a ways to get this far.

“Someone must’ve gut-shot him,” said Turbo, his voice ominously flat.

The man’s face was pinched and his eyes were glassy. He had thinning white hair plastered to a sweaty skull and a colonel’s emblem on his shoulders.

Omi crouched before him. “Why’d you shoot at us?”

The colonel lay panting, his life ebbing away.

Marten marveled at the trail of blood: so thick and wet.

“What made him to crawl so far?” asked Stick.

“Wonder who shot him?” said Turbo.

“And why?” Stick added.

Marten crouched beside Omi as he dug the medkit out of his jacket. He pressed it to the colonel’s neck. For a moment, it did nothing. Then it beeped shrilly, as if it couldn’t figure out what to do.

“Override it,” suggested Stick.

Marten waited.

Turbo swore and bent down to do it. Omi grabbed his arm.

Marten thought about it. “No. Let him.”

Omi’s stiff face stiffened a little, but he let go of the lanky junkie. Turbo tapped in override and shot a batch of stims into the dying man. The colonel’s eyes flickered. He shuddered and drew an agonizing gasp.

Deep in thought concerning the colonel, Marten reclaimed the medkit.

The colonel groaned as he dragged his hand from his wound and examined his own blood.

“Can you tell us what happened?” asked Marten.

“Help me sit up,” whispered the colonel.

Marten found him surprisingly light as he propped the colonel against the wall. Blood soaked the colonel’s pants and half his shirt. Marten never knew so much blood could be in a man. A gaping wound in the colonel’s gut kept pumping out more.

“Bastards couldn’t even shoot me face to face,” the colonel wheezed. “Had to do it to me in the back.”

“Exploding bullet,” said Omi with professional detachment. “You should be dead.”

“I am,” the colonel said wearily.

“Who did it?” asked Marten.

“PHC.”

“Why?”

A great and final weariness seemed to settle on the colonel. Before their eyes, he aged into a brittle old man. The drugs gave him a final burst, but at a terrible cost.

“I thought you were them,” he said, “coming back.”

“Where’d they go?” Marten asked.

“Down.”

Marten frowned at the others. Then he told the colonel, “They’ve shot everyone.”

“Wretched villains, murderers, scum. They don’t want to leave anybody for the Highborn.”

“What do you mean?”

The colonel made a supreme effort to focus. With his bloody hand, he clutched Marten’s wrist. “Sydney’s lost, son. All Australian Sector is lost.”

“That’s no reason to go on a murder spree.”

“Don’t tell PHC that.” The dying colonel coughed blood. His pale skin turned sickly yellow.

“You said they headed down,” Marten prodded.

“To the deep-core station, the bottom one.”

“And?”

“And they’re gonna blow it.”

Marten was puzzled. “They’re going to destroy the mine?”

“No!” The old, old man wheezed air. He had maybe ten seconds left. “They’re gonna let it spew, geyser. They’re gonna use lava to destroy Sydney.” His eyelids fluttered and his head almost drooped for the last time. He kept it up with an iron will. “Use the heat flats to the flow canal. Elevator there goes to level forty. There’s an emergency drop to the deep-core station. Stop them. Stop them or everyone in Sydney’s dead.”

They glanced at each other for about three seconds, long enough for the colonel to die.

“We gotta get out of Sydney,” whispered Turbo.

“How are you gonna do that?” asked Stick.

Fear washed over Turbo. He began to tremble.

Omi rose, his face hardening.

Marten considered the colonel’s information, turned it over and thought about the implications. “We can’t go up, right?”

“Not with the Highborn coming down,” said Stick.

“We don’t know that,” said Turbo.

“If you don’t then you’re an idiot,” Stick told him.

“Or a junkie,” Omi added.

“Yeah, that too,” agreed Stick.

“Okay,” said Marten. “Then we have to down.”

“Meaning what?” asked Stick.

“I mean to stop them like the colonel said,” Marten told them.

Surprise and then comprehension filled the knifeboy. He seemed bemused rather than fearful. Turbo kept shaking his head.

“If we don’t stop them nobody will,” Marten said.

“You can’t know that,” Omi said.

“That’s right,” Marten said. “So we hide and cross our fingers and hope somebody else stops them. Is that it?”

“What else can we do?” Turbo whined.

“We can stop them,” said Marten.

“You’re crazy,” said Turbo.

“Crazy is better than waiting to die,” Marten countered.

“I don’t know,” Stick said. “It sounds like quick suicide to me.”

“It’s like this,” Marten said. “Either we do it ourselves or it’s not going to get done. Now we can sit tight and hope the State sends someone else to do the job. Only right now the State is dying and turning on itself and wants to die in a pyre of immolation.”

“What?” Turbo asked.

Marten stood, glancing at each of them. “You coming?”

The three slum dwellers wouldn’t meet his eyes. But as the moment stretched into silent discomfort, Omi finally shrugged.

“Yeah, why not, it’s as good a way as any to die.”