DARK TERRITORIES BY MIKE COBLEY PART 2 - Continued from Issue 2 Buchanan paused out in the corridor, nursing the anger that Colvin's creature had provoked him. And now there was something else - Ruth Mercer. He switched into his webdata system, selected a couple of vidossiers from an old file and began skimming.... {...bright sunlight on that Naples Street, it's fkagstones rounded by centuries, with barefoot children, with fruit sellers and their barrows....a group statue beneath a pearly cone of museum light, three figures in eroded marble, graces, perhaps furies...golden-haired Gail in dark shades and chalk white flight jacket, trying to look aggressively touristy...Ruth,wearing a plain blue coverall, auburn hair coppery in the sun...both women together, their backdrop a church's intricate frontage...then on a bridge of rough stone overlooking a plywood shantytown, Gail leaning against a parapet and saying something bitter, watched by a frowning Ruth...} highlights from three years ago, from a rare weekend's furlough, cadet officers under the custodial gaze of NCO's. A year and a half later, Gail transferred to Recon, rejoining Buchanan, while her bondsister remained with Combat. It was the drugs she told him, especially the new Clarity variants. She'd felt her identity slowly wearing away, being replaced by darkness, and decided to leave while it was still possible. And there was pain in this, pain in seeing her alive, seeing her move and smile and speak. But he knew what he was searching for and quickly accessed the second dossier... {...a cramped room, cluster of possessions on a neatly made bunk, silvery songdiscs, pens, tiny ornaments, credit cards, and a large brown book. A hand reached forward, took a small mirror from a wall recess and turned to show the observer's face. It was Gail....} Soon after she came to Recon, they'd linked infrawebs and traded electronic images, pieces of each others' pasts from before they met at OTS, and snippets from the eighteen months they were apart. He'd not looked at it all before now - there hadn't been any need to... {...her hands lifted the brown volume onto her lap, opened the cover and leafed through pages of anachronistic photographs...} He'd remembered her photo album, and that archaic shutter camera, remembered her saying, with a laugh, that some memories were too dangerous to keep in the body... {...she stopped at a picture of Combat officers, pointed at herself and Ruth...} He saw the officer standing behind them with his hand on Ruth's shoulder, and froze the shot. then zoomed in on his face... Colvin. He skimmed through the rest of the vidossier, snapshot segments of her childhood at the Montana installation, training camps in Arabia, the Andes and Northern Siberia. And thinking he'd reached the end he was about to reverse to normal vison when a final image appeared.... {...from very close, watching someone lying asleep...} It took a second to recognise himself... {...she put out a hand towards his bare shoulder, as if to wake him. Instead she carefully laid her head on the pillows, facing him...} And that was all. Leaving Colvin's office, the base's ambience of shabby utility suddenly seemed threatening. He walked past the ripple-patterned windows of murky offices, pushed through squealing doors and descended a stuffy service stairwell. Not till he was two floors below and heading along a cool half-lit corridor did his pace slow. But he was still seeing the impermanent face of the Jason creature, still feeling that anger. Ruth was waiting outside the clinic. Wearing a lilac workcoat over crisp surgical whites, she stood with hands in pockets and watched him approach for a second or two before speaking. "The Major said you left his office five minutes ago. Were you delayed?" Her voice was flat, her face impassive. "No, just took my time," he said."You know all about Gail?" She shook her head, slight restricted movements. "No, not all. Let's talk inside." Then turned and opened a door into brightness. Decor of ice-green and white. Sorage filled one long wall of the low-ceilinged clinic, glass-fronted cabinets displaying instruments and components, and shelves of pull-down racks labeled for vials, dermics and ampules. Beside a pair of tall freezers a surgical waldo lay like an upturned chrome spider in the grip of a workbench trestle. On a monitor nearby, a whole-body infraweb scan glowed red and blue as a screen inset crawled with data. She went over the killed display while Buchanan came in after her. "I've only heard a few details about her death," Ruth said. "Tell me what happened." He told her. She listened, eyes averted and gazing at some midair point, then nodded when he finished. "Gail hated stuff like Clarity," she said, "which almost everyone else wasusing. That's why she left, went to Recon. There were doubts about the suppressive back then, but everything's different now. The new Clarity implant releases doses of the required suppressive into the bloodstream according to webdata feedback." "Sure," Buchanan said. "Everything's different." "Yes, like the servitors. You've met the Major so you'll have seen one. Apparently, the Vancouver labs have another six; they're using them to develop ultrafine web control - " "What are you talking about? That's Gail's body I brought back, not some faceless grunt's." She stared at him."I know." "It doesn't look like it." "What did you expect? Hysterics? Tears?" The anger was tight in his throat. "Yeah, I'd settle for that." "What right have YOU to insist that I suffer?" Emotion registered in her face for the first time, gathering in her eyes like the essence of some presapient ferocity. "I'll tell you, Buchanan - none. I have a life to live and research to complete." ore than Gail's got. Still, I'm sure you won't let anything as incovenient as grief get in your way." He turned to leave, "Makes me wonder why the hell you asked to see me." She regarded him with icy calm. "I guess I wanted to know who to blame." His room was narrow, windowless, provided with bed, table chair, and a prewar video console set in the wall between two cupboards. Buchanan's kitbag had arrived ahead of him. Now it lay open and partly unpacked beside him on the bed. He rested with his back against the headboard, pointing a black control pad at the video, cycling through channel after channel, output of a hundred transmitters - news (Marsmedia Flash of terrorist bombing at Lacus Solis; League sympathisers claim responsibility...War Report...Venusat coverage of a freightliner crash at Beta Regio plateau....); movies (green-clad troops dying cleanly on a beach, something about Iwo Jima...a space opera, the impossible romance of it's battles...); light entertainment (some ancient sitcom packed with defunct styles...Game show at 8...); NETZ Teltrans (VIP updates...market bulletins....gallery reviews....Big Science profiles....commodity directories....) He stopped at last, suddenly fascinated by what was mass-produced for frailer humanity. Glittering artifacts out of corporate Europe, opulent manifestations of ultracommerce. He studied them closely, as if by such scrutiny he could deduce something of the people who created them, their technologies perhaps even their purposes. But all he got were aching eyes and gritty fatigue as the lag of his journey from Kornolev moved through him.He turned to the base's armory channel and lay back, eyelids heavy, limbs torpid. Soon he was only half-aware of the screen's silent procession of baroque bioweaponry, every frame inset with columns of performance specs and a glowing red mesh figure where emerald dots indicated each implants possible locations. Slowly his sight slipped into vague shadows edged with disturbing fragmentary images. Finally,he slept. And woke, reflex-alert, with the picture frozen and fading to black as a male voice announced an important transmission from Geneva. A console readout told him that more than four hours had elapsed. The opening ten minutes said nothing new: a brief synopsis of the Ignition, the wave of hot competition that took corporations and combines from Earth-orbit to Mars, venus and the Asteroid Belt. Then further out to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, chiefly Callisto and Phoebe, where small cities grew up around burgeoning industries. The summary of the Jovian and Saturnian uprisings ended with the formation of the Callisto-Phoebe League and its hostility towards Earth and the tiny states and republics of the Belt. Then came the potted history of the Altercorps, from the early (and illegal) research by Teresa Bancroft and others to its foundations, during the first years of the Ignition, under the guise of an exotic prosthetics project. The voice-over finished with a basso minor chord and a still shot of a naked corpse on a metal table. It was almost a pardoy of humanity. Its torso and limbs were heavily layered with muscle grafts and the waxen skin sprouted scores of limp pale filaments. Buchanan recognised one of the less sophisticated varieties of cyborg created by the League's surgeons - all other types carried suicide charges. Then the image dissolved to a document photo of a young man, thin faced, curly black hair, and the name PHILIP CARREAUX below. Buchanan began to take notice. Carreaux was the first Alternian killed in action. And a ripple of premonition ghosted through him as the picture shrank to an inset in the bottom right of the screen, revealing the face of Major Colvin. Some kind of cosmetician program was at work so that the skin glowed with health and sharp features were softened. But the gaze was bright, relentless. Then he spoke, calmly remeniscing on the Altercorps' five years of military operations. His voice was pitched low, words unhurried and sincere, a quite dignity implying concealed strength, resolve. Buchanan felt the premonition deepen, ceasing to be aware of the dim room. Just cold video blue from the screen, and the face of Colvin discussing statistics, casualty rates, frequency among Clarity-modified troops compared to unmodified, extrapolations... Suddenyl knowing what was coming, leaning forward on the bed - "...forced the Command Committee to issue the following directive; effective from tomorrow, Clarity modification will be mandatory for all personnel. The negating agent, MBS 45, is now only available at the discretion of senior medical officers. "Secondly, recent studies have show that a reorganization of command structures is necessary to the Corps' overall efficiency. The initial phase of this is the integration of Recon and Combat divisions. All commanding officers concerned have received new orders and this directive is effective as of now." "Personal considerations are secondary to the duty and responsibility only we can shoulder. Think of those who depend on us, and remember the fallen." And on the screen. Gail Lewis' ID photo, ruffled blonde hair, mystery smile, askance look at the lens. A voice-over - Buchanan's voice - telling the tale of death. "..bastards..."And standing before the wall console, "...they can't do this...." He felt broken, cracked open, and from the breach emerged a memory fragment. A warren bar on Ceres, just after Gail rejoined Recon, with her in a warm dark alcove, him saying, "But they can't just impose Clarity, not even on Combat troops.They won't." - and Gail saying."They can, Simon, and they will. It's only a matter of time.Why do you think I decided to get out?" Colvin,deranged gaze in a clam,mask-face. ...get... The srvitor-Jason-creature, marionette moving to the sound of Colvin's voice, and the the twin voids of it's eyes. ...get out... The station had a vehicle bay, he knew.There would be a truck, a groundcar, something.He ran a finger down the video's touch controls, a line of glassy nubs, and the picture flickered till he found Teltrans, the channels cabled and sat-relayed worldwide from the NETZ. THE NETZ.Sanctuary. In the wartime Mexican standoff of military, corporations and government, the North Europe Trade Zone attained a fusion of all three. >The NETZ Authority possessed considerable political and economic clout and was effectively a state within the global state. Swiftly he turned and grabbed his kitbag, shook out the unwashed contents and fumbled open the Velcro lip of the inside pocket. The anger was in him.He cherished it, let it fuel the impatience of his movements as fingers closed on the cool compact weight of his tiny automatic. Anger said he had to get out, had to run. Then he thought about the negating agent Colvin had mentioned, thought about Ruth and the ice he had seen in her face. Yes, she'd take it and go with him. he would see that she did. Light from the screen gleamed on the barrel of the gun. In the wake of Colvin's broadcast the station seemed to have turned in on itself. Corridors were deserted and silent except for the rustle of ventilation.Lights were down low in the clinic with a solitary anglepoise illuminating a bench where a male tech worked at a terminal, centrifuge humming at his elbow. He was oblivious to Buchanan's stealthy approach till he was dealt a single blow. Buchanan eased the unconscious body to the floor, bound and gagged the man with strips of his labcoat, then dragged him through swing doors into an unlit ward. While propping the tech out of sight behind a bed, he noticed the bright outline of a closed door in the opposite wall. Slowly he turned the handle, peered through the eye-width gap at a narrow glass-walled chamber running the length of an operating theatre. A ceiling gantry of spotlamps cast a mute light on the tall green screens grouped below. Nobody seemed to be around so he stepped inside, went up to a section of the of clear partition that opened to a gentle push. Within there was sudden warmth from the lights, a smell like disinfectant, coppery to the tongue. Then he was rolling the screens aside on soundless rubber wheels. The naked body rested at an angle, while the hands and lower arms rested on a tray bracketed to a padded steel-framed cradle. The fingers were calmly assembling and disassembling a child's puzzle arrangement of coloured nuts, bolts, discs. The hands looked deformed, the fingers curled and coiled like feelers. There were healed incisions at the joints. Fine grey wires trailed from innumerable points in the backs of the hands, gathered in clusters junctioned to a large processor deck on a trolley. And the face.... Horror spread through Buchanan like something old and vicious as images invaded his mind's eye - ...the face of Jason writhing in a grotesque dance of the flesh...an uptrned chrome spider, legs folded.... - watching his trmebling hands raise the automatic level with the side of the head, finger tightened and squeezing the trigger - ...Colvin's knife stare...Gail's face on a laminated ID card... - shattering memory into a thousand cascade shards with the first, dry muffled shot. The body jerked, the head lolling as red, blue, green plastic pieces spilled off the try, ticking on the floor. The arms quivered, flesh rippling, the hands maintaining motions, the pattern. Buchanan put a second bullet into the kneck. And the face... Boneless, the limbs spasmed, the fingers twisting and groping for phantom objects. A third shot and the body convulsed, wires tearing loose as it lurched sideways out of the cradle and sprawled twitching on the floor. Pausing for an instant, seeing what he'd done. tangle of limbs bent in impossible places. Blood on the polished floor. A sound in his throat; and through smothering rage came imagination showing Ruth standing near the table, guiding the waldo, its scalpels cutting into Gail's body... Rage, and a wetness which he wiped from his eyes as he fled the operating theatre. The service bay was a dim, pillared area lit here and there by the pale radiance of vigil spots buried in the ceiling's expanse of equipment housings, gantries and winches. In a large recess near the exit, hydraulic arms tipped with machine tool turrets hung motionless over the exposed engines of two all-terrain vehicles. A maplight glowed behind the windshield of a third where Buchanan had worked on the car's autodrive. He stood at the wall near the armoured exit doors, hand in a maintenance niche, wrist implant linking him to a partly-stripped data line. His infraweb shuffled codes and clearences and, as ghostly readouts flickered in his vision, he tried to understand the numb shock that now filled him.It was as if all that pain and reckless anger had stopped, dead,frozen while his breakout from Augen became a headlong rush of cold purpose. No time for revenge he thought, emptily. Only escape. A sudden glyph signalled completion. he turned to the niche, it's bundles of coplant retract into his hand. With a concrete muffled clunk the doors began to part. He was halfway to his waiting car when something struck him from behind, wrapping itself around his head and shoulders as he was thrown off balance. he hit the ground, elbow jarring on impact.For an instant he couldn't identify his asssailant, seeing only bare arms, pallid and hairless, tightening their grip. Then he knew- it was Colvin's creature, the mindless servitor, deformed past the human frame coiling about him. The realisation triggered his rage and a second later he was miving in the quicksilver wave of his web's sense-force activation, it's dynamic thrill flashing across his perceptions. Ghost in the flesh. Rough callousses rasped his skin as he dislodged a hand from his kneck. Horribly strong, it writhed in his grasp as he tore loose the other.Then he wrenched violently on both wrists hauling the servitor round and kicked it in the stomach. The thing rolled away but Buchanan barely had time to rise to a crouch before it was up and attacking again. It came at him with outstreched sinous arms, fingers of both hands compressed into hooked shapes. he stepped forward quickly to meet it's charge with his shoulder, to slam his fists into that stony face. But the head twisted impossibly on its kneck, dodging his blows as his own feet were knocked out from under him. he went down with the servitor's arms snaking around him. One contorted hand ringed his kneck with scratches, then, in a single moment ripped open his jacket and shirt from the throat. he felt the sting of shallow cuts. Then a surge of dread as corner vision readouts told him that a sedative had entered his bloodstream. In a sudden panic he struggled wildly against the deadly embrace. Broke free and scarambled away, crab-scuttle accross the bay towards an open side-door,hands on the cold concrete, senses spinning. He increased his metabolic rate yet further,but too late. Control slipped,abstract vision flickered into normal.He slumped next to a broad square pillar and through a dizzy blur saw a dark figure stoop nearby to pick up something. Then his sight came back into focus. "Desertion is punishable by death,normally." Colvin stood in the light of a side-door, a fat barrelled flechette pistol in one hand, Buchanan's automatic on the other. the servitor squatted close by, pale form filling out to human proportions. "But since I abhor waste I am prepared to overlook this incident if you go to the clinic and have the Clarity operation. Call it a demonstration of loyalty and discipline." Breathing heavily, Buchanan stared up at him. "Is that what you told Ruth? - that it was her duty to turn her bondsister's body into another of those puppets?" he glanced at the servitor. "Or is that what Clarity lets you make us do? We're part machine already but that's not enough for you and your masters. No, you have to rip out every last shred of our humanity...." "And how human do you think you really are?" Colvin said. "You've lived all your life with the infraweb; can you imagine existing without it? Of course not. We're all involuntary Fausts, the offspring of exponential science. Clarity is merely it's latest consequence, the next stage in our evolution. I hope I can convince you of it's necessity - I don't want to take other measures." Buchanan met his gaze."Gail was my friend and her death means something.Pain means something. And I want to know it and feel it." A sudden image of Ruth mocked him. "Ah death." Colvin gave a thoughtful nod. "Recently our researchers developed new methods of reprogramming the infraweb core for ultrafine operation. Which means that we'll soon achive precision regulation of the body, absolute control at the cellular level. Longevity in other words. His voice was almost gentle. "Is Clarity such a heavy price to pay for that?" Cold forest air drifted in through the open bay doors, faint smells of vegetation of a flow of distilled night. A pulse of nausea thickened Buchanan's thoughts as he stood on unsteady legs. He shivered in the growing chill and saw moisture gleam on the servitor's hands. "How is the reprogramming done?" he heard himself say. Colvin smiled slightly, opening his mouth as if to speak, then froze with a look of surprise. Buchanan's ebony automatic clattered to the concrete as he snatched at the back of his kneck. He brought into view a hypodart which then slipped out of trembling fingers. The flechette pistol hit the concrete floor, before collapsing in convulsions. Behind him in the doorway stood Ruth Mercer, one hand gripping a trank gun, the other clenched in a tight,pale fist. There was sone unreadable intent in her face as she advanced a few steps into the bay. The half-light veiled her features but her long lilac labcoat seemed almost luminescent. Now she stood over Colvin, pointing the gun down at him. "Ruth, I'm getting out...."Buchanan began. "Then go." At her feet the Major was making small choking sounds. "he brought tht zombie to me after we arrived. Must have come on a sperate flight. A dossier on how they made it from some poor asshole who drowned on a training excercise. And he ordered the same done to Gail's body, so I did." her voice quivered."I opened her up...and you killed her again...so I took the Clarity antidote, Simon...and now I don;t know who I hate more - Colvin or me." The trank gun came up, aimed at him. "Or you." Knife-edge moments. expressions of ice-calm and anquish alternated in her face. The gun wavered, then she let it fall to her side. She knelt beside Colvin coolly observing his spasms. Buchanan pictured her in that operating theatre, leaning over the body... "You'd better go. Now." "You can come with me."he said. "I can't" She raised her head and for a second hot fear looked out at him. Then died as a barrier went up behind her eyes. "Base security is on alert status. Without someone in the commander's office, you wouldn't make it past the first screen." She searched Colvin's pockets, held up a glittering cluster of magnetic keys. "He taught me how, so get going..." Swan-necked autobahn lights curved away into the distance behind him like the brilliant vertebrae of some fabulous entity. The car's smoked windows filtered the flicker of their passing to a gauzy strobe. Ahead, the European night was growing cities, a dark territory jewelled with neon. As the car's autodrive negotiated the bright complexities of intersections and bypasses, Buchanan drifted into drowse. And nightmare images plagued him, hideous creatures of flesh, iron and mirrorglass, their features flowing and shifting: Colvin,Gail,Ruth, empty as a vacuum. One face seemed to resemble his own and the shock awoke him. So he settled back into the driverside seat once more, eyes filled with electric memories and blind to the inexorable dawn that was coming in over the world to chase him down the long, long road to the west. Mike Cobley.