Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“Thought that was the Woadskins’s job.”

“Yeah. Well.” Dirk slid the cell door shut. “Basta, he’s no fucking Capricorn, is he?”

Both guards disappeared down the gloomy cell block, tips of their stunsticks whirling electric blue in the dark. Nyx was turning to find his earbuds when the child-killer’s head snapped upright. He squinted puffy eyes.

“You told me it would go off,” he said, pushing words through split lips, shattered teeth. “You motherfucker. You said if they touched me it would go off, but it’s not, it’s not going off.”

“I didn’t tell you shit,” Nyx said. “I don’t know you.”

“Not a bomb,” the man gasped. “You fucking liar. It’s not a bomb, is it? Oh, fuck, fuck. It’s coming. Out.” He was fetal on the syrupy red floor, arms clutched around his abdomen. Nyx straightened up to ask what he meant, what he was talking about.

Something shuddered through the man’s body and made him vibrate like a rag doll, made a noise like a buzz-saw coming to life. His blood-burst eyes winched wide. Burning fat smell, a long rattling howl, and then the man’s stomach erupted.

Nyx stood frozen while clots of gore slapped across his jumpsuit. A grip-pad rasped out of the ragged hole, slicked wet and struggling for purchase. The rest of the limb appeared, and then the next, and then the spidery medroid was pulling itself out of the dead man’s stomach.

Nyx could tell it had been antiseptic white once, but now the plastic plating was drenched in blood and yellow bile. The medroid lurched forward on its tripod legs and Nyx could see the saw it had used to cut itself out, a syringe bundled beneath that.

He jumped backward as the machine made a bee-line for his stash. Red laser light raked the beakers and baggies, lingering on the vial of iodine additive Nyx had been using for the past week. The medroid’s feeler slipped inside, probing, then the machine turned back to face him.

Nyx didn’t move for a sweating minute, two minutes, as the scanner danced carmine lines up and down his body. The medroid’s red eyes blinked once. Then the machine slipped through the cell bars and was gone in the gloom.

“Who else was in your prisoner transport?” Nyx asked faintly, scraping off the front of his jumpsuit, but of course the corpse didn’t answer.

In the morning, three Woadskin lieutenants were dead in their cells. They’d all had their cams scratched, a perk of status, so nobody had seen the shankings. Nyx heard about it in bits and pieces: bodies drained to husks, mysterious needle marks in places not even a headfucked mainliner would inject themselves. The whole cell block was a buzzing hive, and it took until afternoon for someone to come clean up Grigio.

“You really have to bust him like that?” Dirk demanded, rolling the body onto an inflatable stretcher. “Shit, chemist, I didn’t know you even kept a razor. Slashing him belly-open like that? With all this other bullshit going on? Don’t make more fucking work for me, man.”

“So what happened?” Nyx asked. “Cade, Darius, and who?”

The sweeper held out his cupped palm.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Nyx scrambled back to his stash and snatched up a baggie, tossed it over. “Now tell me.”

“Have to get an autocleaner down here,” Dirk muttered, peeling back the corner. “Have to take someone off-shift to supervise, already got too many fuckers clocking security so your Woadskin friends don’t riot—”

“Cade dead, Darius dead, who else?”

“That broad-nose motherfucker from the lunar colonies.” The sweeper raised his mask and snorted a bump. He blinked. “Going to need this today. That’s punchy shit, chemist. Pure. Must be that stuff I got for you.”

Nyx blinked. He stared at the red rim of the man’s nostril. “Yeah. Uh, yeah. Thanks for that.”

“Someone thinks they saw a medroid,” Dirk went on. “You know, one of those field medic things that they used in the Subjugation. Unit in question was slammed to the eyes, though. Not a reliable source. And medroids don’t murder people.”

Nyx paused. “Heard someone smuggled in psychotropics and they’re going around,” he said. “People think they see all kinds of shit.”

The sweeper grunted and resettled his mask, then floated the stretcher out of the cell. Nyx sat down as far as he could from the blood stains.

They found Boniface in the food line, staring down into his empty tray. Basta knocked it away and protein slop gurgled from the nozzle onto the floor. Two Woadskins pinioned Boniface against the wall.

“So.” Basta cocked his head. “Your shipment shows up, one day later, three of my best men get toe-tagged. Who are you?”

“Not the only prisoner on that transport,” Boniface said. The food line shuffled on past him, all eyes averted.

“You’re the only one who went in for a fucking reskin before you got here,” Basta snapped. “Who were you? Who’d you claim before you took off all your tags?” He peered closely into the bruised face. “You remind me of someone, motherfucker.”

“This is my first skin. I don’t like tattoos.”

Basta put himself level with Boniface’s blue eyes. “We’re going to have a conversation, like it or not. But the more you talk, the less it hurts.”

“It was a medroid. Refitted, reprogrammed.” Boniface told it to the tray on the floor. “I convinced another inmate to smuggle it in for me. Grigio Krewer.”

“That lunatic we tuned,” one of Basta’s men mumbled. “Panned him real good in the showers.”

“Knew I saw a droid,” the other one said. “Fucking knew it.”

“Reprogrammed to do what?” Basta demanded.

“It’s the kind they use for triage,” Boniface said. “Assessing injuries on the fly. Dope here, cauterize there. Tag corpses for disposal, live ones for pick-up. They can be out there for a long time. Days, weeks. That’s why most models take biofuel.”

“Those track marks? You saying that thing used Cade for fuel?”

“It’s been reprogrammed.” Boniface looked up. “It’s always hungry, now. It just went after whoever was closest.”

Basta nodded, then suddenly Boniface found himself sprawled on the floor, cheek mashed on concrete. “I’m going to put that thing up your fucking ass when we catch it. Where is it now?”

“I don’t know. It’s got avoidance AI. Probably in a vent. A closet.” Boniface began to cough; Basta’s foot was an aching weight on his spine. “Won’t come out again ‘til night.”

Basta crouched down, brows knit. “You’re trying to fuck with me. Who sent you here?”

“Nobody sent me,” Boniface said, wiping his mouth. A gossamer spit-strand webbed his fingers.

“That thing killed three Woadskins. Not adjacent cells. Nobody else. How would it know to do that, huh?”

“Ask your supplier,” Boniface said. “Ask whoever gives you phetamines.”

Out of the cafeteria, into the corridor. Basta was in a hurry and Boniface was mostly dragged, arms wrenching in their sockets. Nobody looked at them as they passed by. Boniface looked at them all, the feather-white scars and tattooed necks, the steroid-popped shoulders and sinewed arms. He wondered what the chemist would look like now.

They trooped into a large cell, through shatter-proof glass blotched with dry blood. Inside, a man in the standard slam jumpsuit crouched over a stain on the floor, scrubbing at it with a wet rag. He scrambled upright when he saw who was coming to visit.

“Nyx, who is this motherfucker?” Basta asked, pushing Boniface forward.

Nyx’s eyes went wide for only a split second. Then he gave a careless shrug. “Don’t know. Ugly-looking unit. Why?”