Ellie Quin - 04 - Ellie Quin in WonderLand (7 page)

Ellie followed with Jez behind, muttering irritably to herself as she carried the cumbersome boots in her arms. They walked slowly towards the the distant world, Shelby filling the echoing silence with a detailed explanation of the skydome programming language interface; it's faint glow growing ever brighter and more distinct as they gradually made their towards it.

Ten minutes later they were standing outside the hatchway leading into World 3. Ellie looked back the way they’d come, back at the central biome. From this distance it looked to be the same size and as faint as this one had from afar.

‘As I mentioned, we left this world in a bit of a mess, I’m afraid,’ said Shelby. ‘It does need a clean up and a complete reconfiguring.’ He shrugged. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting guests today.’ He laughed with a wet snort and a
hyuk
-
hyuk
and Ellie realised that was his idea of a funny. She smiled dutifully.

He pressed his hand against a touchscreen beside the hatch, and once again, with a soft hiss and blast of air, warm this time, the hatch glided sideways and opened.

Both girls gasped.

CHAPTER 9

Before them was another world; an entire mini-world within a mile diameter bubble. This world though, was entirely implausible. The ground was an undulating gently rolling landscape textured with raspberry-ripple pink and vanilla swirls. Here and there speared outcrops that looked like giant amethyst crystals. The sky was a cheerful orange bisected by an almost cartoon-like rainbow.

Jez guffawed with delight. ‘It’s like a huge world made of candy!’

‘It’s not actually made of anything edible,’ said Shelby. ‘The biome’s landscape can be sculpted into any shape and textured with any design you want.'

Ellie took a step forward. Then suddenly lurched back to stand on the firm rim of the archway's doorplate. ‘The ground’s kind of squidgy!’

‘Yes, you can also configure the surface tension and pliability of the landscape.’ He looked at Ellie. ‘Relax. You’re quite safe, you won’t sink.’

Ellie stepped forward again, feeling the ground give slightly beneath her feet like a body-form gel mattress.

Jez joined her, barefoot. ‘Ooh, it’s warm.’ She curled her lip. ‘It’s like I’m walking on someone’s belly.’

Shelby looked around at the landscape, shook his head and tutted. ‘This really is quite a ridiculous choice of design. Not something I'd come up with.’

They wandered out a little further. Jez towards a nearby cluster of giant crystals thrusting upwards out of the ground like bloody spikes emerging from ragged flesh and Ellie towards an area of open ground. She closed her eyes and felt the warmth of the fake sun on her cheeks. Fake it might be, but it was bliss after weeks of being shoehorned into the freighter's one spare crew cube and living under the feeble glow of a pallid cabin light.

She breathed in. The air smelled sweet. Not pleasantly sweet, sickly sweet. It was actually a vaguely familiar smell. Her mind scooted around and produced a memory; back at the farm, the time their entire crop of meat bulbs had perished overnight. She opened her eyes. 'Smells like something died in here.'

Shelby was standing beside her. He must have wandered over while her eyes were shut. 'Something
did
die in here. A lot of somethings.'

He strode forward a few yards, up a gentle hump and stood on its brow. He beckoned Ellie to join him. As she joined him he pointed. 'That's where the smell is coming from.'

Before them was a large, half-a-mile-across shallow bowl; like a crater, as if some giant spoon had scooped a serving of raspberry ripple ice cream out of the ground. Ellie could see the bottom of it was covered with a jumble of
somethings
.

‘Are those…are those
bodies
over there!’

Shelby nodded. ‘Oh yes. Decomposing bodies. That’s part of the mess that needs to be cleared up.’ He shrugged. ‘I do hate tidying up afterwards. It can be such a tedious chore.'

Decomposing bodies?

Ellie suddenly felt her skin warm and prickle with panic. She looked around for Jez and saw her fifty yards away, inspecting something on the ground.

Please may he not be a weirdo. Please may he not…
.

‘Tell me, those…they’re not dead
people
, are they?’ Ellie felt the blood draining from her face. ‘They’re not…
guests
?’

‘What?!’ Shelby’s eyes widened. Appalled. Then amused. He laughed with his wet snort and his hyuk-hyuk. ‘No! Of course not! They’re
products
.’

‘Products?’

‘Uh-huh. Genetic products just like all the other things you’ve seen. Frasier, the jimps in the gardens, the butterflies, the birds, the-’

‘But they’re all
dead
!’ She took several steps down the candy-patterned slope towards the bottom of the bowl, towards the dark carpet of bodies littering the ground. ‘What happened?!’

‘A last stand.’ Shelby said as he followed her down. ‘It was a complete massacre. They didn’t stand a chance.’

Ellie picked up her pace, striding swiftly – with a slight bounce – towards the nearest of the corpses. Then a dozen yards short she stopped.

‘What? That’s….OhMyGod. They’re….they look a bit like…’

Shelby joined her. ‘Chocco-Chops Bars. Yes. That’s quite right.’ He shook his head again and cocked a disapproving brow. ‘It really wasn’t my choice. I prefer to programme in historically accurate scenarios. But this time,’ he sighed. ‘How did his stupid idea go? Oh yeah, ‘
Hey, Shelby, who’d ya reckon would win; an army of Chocco-Chops Bars or
…’

‘Oh my…’ Ellie took another few steps forward, and knelt down and inspected another body lying nearby. ‘Is that a giant Sugar-Beany?!’

Shelby looked down at the three foot long, lemon coloured corpse. A kidney bean shaped body with short, spaghetti thin arms and legs. It had a face of sorts; two beady black eyes that stared dully, lifelessly up at the tangerine coloured sky. No mouth or nose. Its’ body had been cleaved almost in half by some sharp
edged weapon, and a pile of very human-looking organs and blood had spattered out onto the raspberry-ripple ground.

Jez had joined them and now stared slack-jawed at the bodies. Hundreds of corpses dotted around the bowl formation of the ground, and an epicentre where they seemed to be piled on top of each other, several deep, tangled in a thick scrum of the dead. All slowly rotting, filling the air with the sickly sweet stench.

Shelby looked vaguely embarrassed. ‘Yes. An army of Chocco-Chops Bars verses an army of multi-flavour Sugar-Beanys. I know…’ he rolled his eyes, ‘utterly ridiculous and completely pointless. But it was
his
turn to choose the conditions of the game not mine.’

Ellie turned to him. ‘A game?’

He nodded. ‘Hmmm. Yes of course, a game; a war game to be precise. Although…’ he looked at the mess of dead candy-bars and jelly beans, ‘…this does look really quite childish. It’s actually quite embarrassing.’

Ellie made a face. ‘This is horrible. All these things were alive…and they were what?…
forced
to kill each other, because of a
game
?’

‘Not forced. They really
wanted
to kill each other,’ replied Shelby. ‘Of course that’s a behaviour pattern you have to engineer in, otherwise,’ he smiled, ‘you’re not going to get much of a fight out of them, are you now?’

Jez nudged one of the dead Sugar-Beanies with her foot. A thin, child-like arm flopped lifelessly to one side and a short sword clattered from the grasp of its mitten-like hand, onto the ground.

‘I think I'm going to be sick,’ muttered Ellie.

‘You said
his
turn.’ Jez looked at him. ‘Someone else? Who’s that? Not your pet monkey, Frasier?’

Shelby shook his head. ‘No, obviously not Frasier.’ He grimaced, clearly angry with himself for letting
something
slip. He sighed, sensing they were going to pester him with further questions. ‘I play against my colleague.’

‘Another technician?’ said Ellie. ‘Another one of your maintenance team?’

‘Yes.'

'Well?' Jez hunched her shoulders. 'Where the hell are the others, anyway? We've only seen other
products
so far.'

Ellie nodded. 'You said earlier there was a team of twelve of you?'

Shelby froze. His brow knotted for a moment. 'You asked who I was playing war games with?

He just skipped that other question
.

'He's called Graham. Although he like to call himself Gray. I think he thinks that sounds cooler. Hmmm, he's an annoying idiot, by the way. I’m almost certain he’s not taking our war games seriously anymore. Almost certain.’

'So is this
Gray
around?' asked Jez. 'Nearby? Can we meet him too?'

Shelby curled his lip. 'You won't like him. He's a complete moron.'

Jez had a barrage of questions about 'Gray'. Clearly she was encouraged that Shelby wasn't the only male specimen on the facility. But Ellie was quiet. Wondering why Shelby seemed so reluctant to talk about the others.

CHAPTER 10

Deacon touched the rewind icon on the floating holographic display projected from the tablet. The footage of Harvest City's port - it's main thoroughfare - ran quickly backwards. He stopped it and then studied the still, grainy image.

The data-cam carried a wide angled image of the busy avenue, looking down on traders and their stalls; passengers, tourists and freighter crews squeezing past each other going about their business buying in necessities and luxuries. This particular cam had been covering the section of the thoroughfare where he and his hitman had been waiting for those girls. The hitman's name was
Karl
. Deacon had finally bothered to ask them their first names now that it looked like their contracts might need to be extended a few more weeks.

He paused the video.

This one,
Karl
, the ex-marine seemed to be the most competent of the two. Deacon narrowed his eyes as he touched an icon on the hovering display and the video ran forward.

Hundreds of heads began bobbing once again, a lazy river of foot traffic compressed into a slow moving choke-point as the thoroughfare narrowed between the supporting struts of a vast bulkhead. Slow movement from everyone, pressing impatiently and irritably past each other. But then - there it was again - the flicker of someone moving quickly down the left hand side of the main passage, pressed up against the wall at the rear of the stalls on that side.

The two girls.

On the video, Deacon could see himself on the other side of the thoroughfare and the river of people. There was his reaction, as he caught a glimpse of the girls trying to sneak past him, his gun was already out and he was calling across the heads of the people to catch Karl's attention.

The girls were sprinting along that narrow space between the rear of the stalls and the large sloping wall, racing towards Karl, hurrying to catch that freight barge that was waiting for them.

How the hell does he not see them coming towards him?

Deacon raised his hand to the floating video, pinched a section of the flickering holographic image between his fingers and splayed them. The image spread and magnified.

There were the girls, running towards the man. There was Karl, gun ready, waiting for them. Even looking in their direction! Doing nothing. Thirty yards, twenty. Then the girls both stopped dead in their tracks as they finally noticed him ahead of them.

Deacon paused again. Frowned.
Why the hell isn't he doing anything? Has he not seen them?

He resumed watching the video, once again expanding it with a hand gesture. He zoomed in so much that the image was starting to pixellate. It looked like one of the girls was waving her hands at…
Karl
. Signalling something to him. Then he noticed Karl slowly, subtly, nod and lower his weapon, just a fraction. A sign that they could pass him by.

And they did. The girls squeezed past him and carried on up the way.

Deacon cursed under his breath.

A moment later, the echoing babble of traders and customers was interrupted by the sharp crack of gunfire; Deacon's gun. Instantly the river of people cowered and dropped down to the ground. Deacon watched himself picking his way hurriedly through the cringing carpet of people, firing his gun again at the fleeing girls. Sparks flying off the wall near their heads.

He paused the video file once again.

Karl was
finally
stirring to life, now aiming his gun at the girls as they fled away from him. But quite clearly aiming high.

'Well…bloody well,' Deacon uttered under his breath. 'So, Karl, it seems as though somebody else is paying your wage.'

He sat back in his gel-chair and sighed. He touched the play icon again. Right there on the video, Karl fired at them and missed. Appallingly bad marksmanship for an ex-marine, for such an expensive freelancer.

That makes sense of one or two things
.

There'd been that earlier incident, at the ruins of the abandoned colony outpost the day before, hadn't there? Again, those girls had somehow managed to get right past him. Yet, he'd been rather clever, hadn't he? Making a last ditch effort to chase out of the ruins after them. To clamber heroically onto the loading ramp of that rescue shuttle just as it began to lift off, only to let go a couple of seconds later and tumble heavily to the ground.

All of that above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty charade had looked rather convincing to Deacon at the time.

'You devious bastard,' he whispered.

Good God, it would be tempting to amble over to the TravelCube hotel where his hired guns had rented cubes, kick in the door to Karl's, put his gun to the man's head and spread his brains up the wall. But then there'd be only short-lived satisfaction in doing that.

Like scratching an itch. It would achieve nothing.

Far better to actually take the traitorous fool alive, interrogate the double-playing bastard and find out who, other than The Administration, was paying his wages.

Then, of course…kill him.