by Jack Yeovil
Stack grit his teeth. Exxon drew his fist back and took a good shot. Stack’s jaw popped, and he felt rather than tasted his mouth fill up with blood. He tried to roll with it, but he was held so that only his head could move. His skull rolled on his neck like a punchball. Everything was shaking. His lips were mashed against his teeth, his cheek was squeezed against the bone. Blood was trickling from his nostrils.
“Ouch, that hurt,” Exxon complained, holding up his hand. His knuckles were red and black with blood and soot.
“Well, looky looky looky here comes cookie, what have we got here?”
He wiped his hand on his overalls, then took an oily rag from his pocket and rubbed Stack’s face. The soot came off.
“Pardonnez-moi, Trooper Damfool. We’ve been labourin’ under a misapprehension, ain’t we boys? You sure ain’t a person of the negroid jungle bunny persuasion after all. You’re as white as they come.”
The ’chuggers laughed. The black ’chugger caressed his claw and gave a slow-burning grin. One of his teeth was inset with black dots like a die. He snapped the air with his robobit. It looked like expensive workmanship. GenTech, maybe, or Sony. He clacked his claw like a lobster.
“Such a shame. We got laws here in Welcome, Trooper. Don’t you know it’s an offence to impersonate a nigra? We gonna have us a trial.”
The ’chuggers whooped and cheered.
“Mr Persecution?” Exxon asked.
“Yes, your honour,” replied Mobil.
“Sum up the case for the State of Arizona versus Freakin’ Zeroid Ratskag, here?”
Mobil shoved his thumbs under the lapels of his overalls, and strutted up and down. “Well, Your Judgeship, it seems to me that what we have here is a plain case of violation of the law. The accused ain’t no nigra, that’s clear as can be. But he certainly was attemptin’ to deceive the good folks of this township. I calls me a witness. Call Mr Shell…”
The lobsterman stepped forward. “Present.”
“Mr Shell,” began Exxon, “do you promise to tell the whole truth, the only truth, the truthiest truth and nothing but the Big T truth or else Gawd come down and rip your gazebos off?”
“Ah do,” Shell said in a rich bass, holding up his claw.
“Have you anything to say?”
“Yeah, Ah’d like a babycham!”
“Objection!” shouted Mobil.
“Suss-stained,” said Exxon. “Witness will keep to the point.”
“Sorry, your dealership,” said Shell. “But it’s as clear as the day is long. Honky moonfaced motherfreakin’ pig whiteboy cracker candy-ass citified whelk-lovin’ yellowlegs old cowhand from the Rio Grande scumsuckin’ geek here is guilty as Judas and twice as dead.”
“Yeah,” agreed Mobil, “an’ he’s got a charge sheet as long as my dick.”
“First offender, huh?” said the girl. Everyone except Mobil laughed. Mobil sniffed the air, his face reddening, and backhanded Stack across the mouth.
“Mr Persecution, Mr Persecution, I request that you respect the honour o’ this court or else I shall be compelled to have you removed from here to a place of animal husbandry and forcibly washed until you are clean.”
“I apologize, Mr Judge.”
“Apology suss-stained. We will hear from the Council for the Fence. Miss Unleaded?”
The girl stepped forwards, tears starting from her eyes, and waved Stack’s pumpgun dramatically in the air.
“The quality of mercy is not strained,” Unleaded began. “It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed…”
The ’chuggers quieted down. Shell kicked the jukebox, and it shut up too.
“… it blesseth him that gives and him that takes. ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown; his sceptre shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above the sceptred sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute of God himself, and earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. But, in this case, my client is guilty as a fatcat in a fishtank and it is the recommendation of the Fence that you shoot the freaker’s head off tout de suite.”
“Thank you for your eloquence, Miss Unleaded. Members of the Jury, have you reached a verdict?”
Everybody roared in the affirmative.
“And is it the verdict of you all?”
Another roar.
“How do you find the accused?”
“GUILTY!”
Exxon took a black handkerchief from his pocket, folded it into a sailboat, and perched it on his head. Then, he pulled a revolver out of his waistband. It was a Wildey, one of those class tools they made a lot bigger than they needed to.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to execute you on the spot, Mr Accused. Sorry, chum, but that’s the way it’s gotta be. We don’t have no choice in the matter. It’s the laws that made this country great.”
He pulled back the hammer and cocked the gun. If he fired it one-handed, he was going to break his wrist. If he fired it now, the ScumStopper—he just knew Exxon would be packing SS balls—would make an inch-wide hole going in below his nose and above his mouth, and take off the entire back of his head. The frags would probably kill Mobil and the ’chugger holding his arms.
But maybe Exxon didn’t care. Whatever, it wouldn’t make any difference to Stack.
Exxon shut one eye, and exerted pressure on the trigger. He was showing off, and didn’t have the strength in one hand to apply the pull. He took a two-handed grip, and shimmied a little to get a good stance. The gunsight scraped Stack’s bloody nose.
Mobil and the other ’chugger got out of the way.
“Do you have any last words, convict?”
Stack couldn’t think of any, so he spat blood and said “freak you.”
“Time will pass, Troopie, and seasons will come and go. Soon, summer with her shimmering heatwaves on the baked horizon. Then, fall with her yellow harvest moon and the irrigated hills growing golden under the sinking sun. Then winter with its biting, whining wind and the land mantled over white with snow…”
This had the feel of a learned-by-rote speech. Golden hills were a long time ago.
“… and finally, spring again with its waving green grass, and heaps of sweet-smelling flowers on every hill…”
The hammer went back. Exxon’s fingers began to squeeze.
“… BUT YOU FREAKIN’ WONT BE HERE TO SEE NONE OF THEM, PECKERWOOD!”
A gun went off. A skull exploded. A body stood for a moment, strangely relaxed, then fell like a bag of laundry, sprawling on the barroom floor.
Stack, still shaking, looked from Exxon’s corpse to the saloon doors, and the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life walked through carrying a smoking gun.
If she had been three foot ten, weighed four hundred and ninety pounds and wore a goatee beard, she would still have been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
Part Five: All God’s Chillun Got Guns
I
The fort had changed. Nothing had exploded in flames. The consoles weren’t spitting out showers of sparks. Blood was not running out of the shower-heads. Lauderdale’s cadre of armoured android “pacifiers” had not turned on their masters and put every human being in sight to the electrosword. Apart from Younger’s jammed elevator, nothing was obviously malfunctioning. But something had changed. Captain Cat Finney was running a complete systems check, and nothing irregular was showing up. The big input had apparently vanished.
Colonel Rintoon was still going around muttering “monitor error,” but Finney wasn’t swallowing that. If there were false readings, they were getting them now rather than earlier. What would the Mullah I Naseruddin do, she wondered? Probably give up until it went away.
“The corps still don’t want to mix with us,” Lieutenant Rexroth told her. “ITT won’t even talk to us on the telephone, and GenTech just barred us
from the fax machine.”
“Looks like we have a dose of the computer clap.”
Rexroth didn’t smile.
Finney went along with it. She was a good sufi. This shouldn’t bother her. What was that phrase her counsellor kept using? “It’s all part of life’s rich pattern.” In everything, there is a harmony.
Yeah, right.
“How are we at home?” she asked.
“Hanging even. No anomalies.”
“And what does that tell you?”
The young man looked baffled. “Er… that we’re running steady?”
“Let me put it this way, when was the last time you can remember that this place was running steady, with no anomalies?”
“Er…”
“Never, that’s when. We’re here to watch for trouble. And, as this blighted century draws to its blessed close, there is always trouble.”
“I’ll run the checks again.”
“You do that.”
Finney tried a few rear-entries of her own into the system, and got the same predigested answers. Even the spyholes she had put in place for her exclusive personal use weren’t showing up anything out of whack. She was the best programmer and analyst in Apache, but just now she thought what was needed to deal with the machines was an exorcist.
“You know,” she said to nobody in particular, “sometimes I think that maybe brown rice isn’t enough.”
Captain Lauderdale came over. “Cat, the post office just pulled out. It’s just us and the RCs.”
“Great. Have you talked to the cardinal or whoever?”
“It’s hard to establish territoriality. I never knew the Catholic church was so complicated. St Columba’s in Phoenix keeps trying to refer us to some spick bigwig in Managua.”
“Archbishop Oscar Romero?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy.”
“So, get Romero.”
“But he’s the former head of state of a confederation hostile to the United States of America. We don’t take our troubles to guys like that.”
“Give me the strength, Lauderdale. This isn’t something much affected by lines on a map.”
Lauderdale was annoyed. “Tell it to Colonel Rintoon, Cat. He wants to keep this an Arizona thing. He’d bust us to latrine orderlies if he thought we were going to Texas for help, let alone the freakin’ CAC!”
“I’m sorry, Lauderdale.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s sorry.”
Finney had noticed how on edge Lauderdale had been since this thing started. It was getting to everyone. There had been more minor arguments in the Ops Centre than were usual. People were getting testy, locking horns, ruffling feathers. She hoped she was above and beyond that, but her nerves were fraying too.
It would be nice if she could see what was wrong, rather than just feel it.
“Maybe the place is haunted?”
Lauderdale raised a lip. ,
“No, really. We’re slap next to a chunk of ancient history, Lauderdale.”
“London bridge?”
“Yeah. Its stones must be soaked in blood. You know London. It’s the most haunted city in the world, they say. Plagues, fires, the blitz, massacres, murders. Jack the Ripper, Christie, Dracula, Burke and Hare…”
“Edinburgh.”
“Huh?”
“Burke and Hare killed in Edinburgh.”
“Whatever. Maybe they imported the ghosts along with the bridge.”
Lauderdale raised his hands and shook his head. “Cat…”
“Yes?”
“Have you been having enough sex recently? You’ve been getting some… pretty damfool ideas, you know.”
Finney slapped him across the face. He smiled slowly.
“That’s it, sufi. Get in touch with your emotions. Let a few of them out.”
“Captains,” shouted someone. Rintoon had come into the room. Finney and Lauderdale saluted in unison.
“I don’t care what’s going on here. I just don’t want to see it again, okay?”
“Sir, yessir.”
“Fine.”
Rintoon’s hair was uncombed, and his tie loose. Those were firsts. Finney knew the world was falling apart.
“Finney, we need you up in the shaft. We’ve cut through to the back-console, but it’s flashing at us. You know all the codes.”
“Yes sir.”
“Any contact with Major General Younger, sir?” Lauderdale asked.
“Brevet Major General Younger, Lauderdale. And no, he’s observed radio silence ever since the Unknown Event.”
The Unknown Event. The UE. That was how Rintoon was dealing with it, slapping a military label on the thing, tying it up with jargon and filing it away with all the other UEs he didn’t have to think about.
Finney ceded her console to Lenihan, and went with the Colonel. Lauderdale came along. Passing from the white-walled, immaculate and ordered corridors into the thickly-grimed liftshaft, with its dangling cables, unidentifiable accumulation of detritus and shower of sparks was a shocking lesson. This was what it was all like under the surface. Finney liked machines. They did what they were told. But even machines had a subconscious these days.
Climbing the access ladder to the stalled elevator was like trudging through the forgotten dreams of the fort. She wondered if she’d be able to get her hips through the open panel in the bottom of the cage, but didn’t have any trouble. Two techies pulled her up with a minimum of scraping. She realized that these greasy-overalls power toolmen had been able to order Rintoon to go and fetch her. On some jobs, a colonel was surplus personnel.
Rintoon and Lauderdale joined them in the elevator. It was slightly uncomfortable. The techies had exposed all the workings of the door, and pulled out a spaghetti tangle of wires. An LED redstrip blinked a row of eight eights. The memory had been wiped.
“That shouldn’t happen. The doors wouldn’t open because the mechanism no longer recognized the c-i-c’s code. But even if the central computer goes down there’s a failsafe. The code is wiped but automatically replaced by the simplest possible combination. Eight zeroes. This won’t even recognize that.”
“So?” asked Rintoon.
“So,” she replied, twiddling the master dial, “we program in a code. One two three four five six seven eight.”
The numbers appeared, and were held.
“Then, we punch the code.” Finney pressed the buttons sequentially. “And, voila! The doors open.”
The lift doors opened.
“Jesus Christ!” someone said. One of the techies vomited through the hatch in the floor.
Younger was scattered about the kitchen in pieces. His appliances were humming. There was a lot of smoke about, and a power point was sparking, but nothing had caught fire. A still vibrating electric knife was stuck through Younger’s chest. His head was black and smoking in the microwave oven, lids shrunk away from dead white eyes like hardboiled eggs.
“The Major General’s been… dismembered!” stuttered Lauderdale.
“Brevet Major General,” corrected Rintoon.
No one got out of the elevator.
II
The Gaschugger girl primed the pumpgun, and found herself looking down the barrel of the SIG 7.62.
“Don’t,” Chantal said, staring at the child’s face. She had tattoos on both cheeks, and hair in rat-tails.
The ’chugger dropped the gun.
“Kick it over to the Trooper.”
The girl followed orders. The Trooper picked up the weapon, and stopped looking frightened. He wiped blood off his face with the back of his hand, and stepped over the dead man.
Chantal had followed her training, and had made a snap judgement. But that didn’t do anything about the guilt.
The man on the floor joined all the others in her collection of night horrors. Eventually, there would have to be a reckoning.
A hyperactive little ’chugger pulled a sharpened screwdriver from his toolbelt and tried to stick it into the Trooper’s ear. Chantal trusted th
e Cav man to take care of that. The Trooper ducked under the thrust, and jammed the butt of the shotgun into his assailant’s chest. Then, when the ’chugger was doubled over, rapped him smartly on the back of the skull. He fell over his dead leader, insensible.
“Seen enough?” she asked.
The girl shrugged and looked at Chantal. There were centuries of something in her eyes.
“You and me,” the girl said. “We’re the same, aren’t we?”
“I hope not,” said Chantal, ignoring the little fishhook tearing at her heart. “I certainly hope not.”
The others picked up their dead and wounded.
“Now, go home.”
The Gaschuggers left the saloon. The girl was the last. She turned and waved to everybody.
“G’night, all!”
Then the gang were gone, swallowed up by the darkness outside, saloon doors swinging behind them.
Chantal holstered her pistol, and walked over to the bar.
“Lady,” said the Trooper, “can I buy you a drink?”
“Water.”
“Even that. Nothing but the best. Pedro, you chickendirt, get us a couple of waters. Make them pure or I’ll promote you from innocent bystanding coward to accomplice in my report.”
The bartender shuffled along behind the bar, and produced two glasses and a bottle.
“The Gaschoggers are regular customers, Senor. I can’t do notheeng that’d bee bad for beesneess.”
“Yeah? Do you have many ‘trials’ in this place?”
Pedro grunted noncomittally.
Chantal sipped the water. It was pure-spring, uncut.
“Trooper Nathan Stack, at your service ma’am,” said the Cav man. The name had been in the initial report.
“You were with Tyree?”
A look of pain came into his bruised face. “Yes. How d’you know about Leona?”
“I’m from Fort Apache.”
“You weren’t there when I left. I’d have remembered.”
“I got in just yesterday. My name is Chantal Juillerat.”
“I beg your pardon.”
She spelled it out for him. “Juillerat. It’s Swiss. I’m working closely with your government and with Major General Younger. Here is my authorization.”
She handed him the papers countersigned by the State Governor, General Haycox and the President’s representative. He whistled through his teeth, then winced with pain. He must have taken quite a battering.
