by Jack Yeovil
Armindariz paused in mid-shovel.
“What did that there car mean, Trooper?” asked Tiger Behr, hobbling to Stack’s side. “Demonic activity? What kind of rap is that?”
Stack turned to the old cyborg to explain.
Behr gasped. His eye widened, and his whole face thrust forwards, as if someone had just taken a sledge-hammer to the back of his head. He was choking.
The hostilities had commenced.
“Behr,” Stack said, “what’s wrong?”
The old man’s robo-arm leaped out. Strong, durium-boned, leather-coated fingers seized Stack’s throat.
Stack tasted his own blood, again.
II
Lauderdale watched closely as the techies pulled away the panels in the Ops Centre and snipped the relevant wires. Colonel Rintoon had given him a field promotion to Major, and put him in charge of sealing off Fort Apache against aggressors. All unauthorized communications with the outside world were forbidden, and Rintoon had posted loyal guards outside the Ops Centre with orders to summarily shoot dead anyone who tried to summon aid from any quarter. Rintoon believed that the rest of the US Cav was rotten with Maniak infiltrators. Lauderdale had asked for permission to deploy the android cadre, and the Colonel had put the suggestion on hold. Soon, Lauderdale knew, his androids would be in action.
“There, sir,” said a tech. “No one can talk to anyone except through this room, sir.”
“Good job.”
The tech didn’t say anything. She packed her tools and left. Lauderdale didn’t like techs. They jealously guarded their specializations, throwing up an aura of mystery to exclude others. Of course, androids were different. They were supposed to be secret, supposed to be frightening.
It had been easy rising to his current position.
Williford had refused to execute the traitor Badalamenti, and so the task had fallen to Lauderdale. When it was accomplished, Rintoon immediately jumped him to Captain and had him execute Williford too, the Lieutenant having revealed himself by his defiance of authority to be another Maniak in blue. After that, Rintoon had made him a Major. Lauderdale had wondered whether to have the rank insignia sewn on his old tunics, but fortunately the late Majors McAuley and Faulcon had been about his size, and so he was able to commandeer their wardrobes.
Rintoon was in the process of recalling all field units to the Fort. Their positions were lit up on the map, moving back towards Lake Havasu. The cruiser patrols were being logged in as and when they arrived. The Fort was on a war footing. The Colonel was expecting a Maniak assault at any moment. Lauderdale smiled at that. He wondered how his superior would react when he found out precisely what was attacking Fort Apache.
The Colonel had spent the whole morning weeding out traitors, and having them executed. He had found thirteen in the fort’s compliment of three hundred and two. What with the other casualties, the fort’s tiny morgue was packed to capacity, and the corpses were having to be stored in the hospital beds.
Lauderdale noticed that, apart from Colonel Rintoon, none of the other officers had chosen to talk to him since Badalamenti. It didn’t matter.
Captain Finney was at her regular console, and seemed to be under control, but Lauderdale knew he had to watch her. She was too in tune with the computer systems. He intended to recommend to Rintoon that her access to them be restricted, or perhaps denied entirely. Still, according to Elder Seth, the thing in the database could take care of itself.
“Cat?” he asked.
“Major,” she said, not looking up.
“All systems A-OK?”
“Sir, yessir.”
She punched keys, and sine curves revolved on her screen.
“You’ve run the projections the Colonel wanted?”
“Sir, yessir.” She handed him a sheaf of papers.
“Good work.”
“Sir, thank you sir.”
Lauderdale pretended to look at the print-out. He couldn’t understand any of the figures. But he knew that the Call of Joseph was nearly upon him.
It was a full three hours since he had last spilled blood. And the blood was an essential part of the ritual. Elder Seth himself had explained it to him on his last covert visit to Salt Lake City. Only through the constant spilling of blood could the Dark Ones keep their purchase on this plane of existence. For them, each sacrifice was like a handhold in a sheer rockface.
Lauderdale considered Cat Finney. She was dangerous to him. He could easily convince the Colonel that she had been a Maniak, that she had been gnawing away at the cybernetic foundations of the Apache database. His hand went to his sidearm.
No. There were too many other operators in the centre. Finney had too many friends. Lauderdale’s position as Rintoon’s second-in-command was precarious. There was no telling who the old man would listen to in any given argument. He could as easily be persuaded that Lauderdale was a Maniak as Finney.
“Keep it up, Cat, keep it up,” he said.
“Sir, yessir,” she replied.
He left the Ops Centre, and hurried through the corridors. He hummed to himself, Neil Sedaka’s “I Love, I Love, I Love My Little Calendar Girl”. He reached into the tunic, and felt the switchblade snug in its harness under his arm. The next person to come along would do, he felt sure…
A Trooper rounded the corner. Lauderdale didn’t know him. That was good. Personal feelings tainted the sacrifice. It was important to spill the blood without hate, without love, without emotion.
“Trooper.”
“Lieutenant… Major, sir.”
The Trooper stood to attention.
“Name?”
“Brecher, Michaeljohn T., Company B Smoke-Generating, sir.”
Lauderdale prowled around the Trooper. There was no one in sight. He looked at Brecher’s broad back.
“You’re out of uniform, Trooper. Look, your shirttail is loose…”
Standing behind the man, he drew his knife. The blade silently appeared. With its point, he rugged at Brecher’s shirt, pulling it free.
“And here, you have a button missing from your epaulette…”
“Sir?”
He cut the button off. It bounced on the floor and rolled away. There was a touch of perplexion in Brecher’s eyes as Lauderdale pricked the side of his throat.
“You’re a mess, Trooper,” he whispered into the man’s ear as he eased the knife in through his jugular vein, wiggled it into his windpipe, and scraped it against his vertebrae.
Lauderdale stood back to avoid the arterial spray.
The Maniax had struck again. He went to the wall and sounded the alarm.
The dead man’s throat kept pumping a red tide onto the dirty white floor until the guards came.
III
As his prosthetic hand ground into Stack’s neck Tiger Behr was babbling, “It’s not me, mister, I ain’t doin’ this, it’s not me, it’s not me…”
Chantal brought her gun up, but there were too many people in the way. The Armindariz children had flown into a panic and were running, screaming, around the place like cats on fire.
Chantal made her way through them, gun still raised.
Stack was bent backwards at the waist, limp at the knees. He was feebly scrabbling at Behr’s metal-ringed wrist.
Chantal had a good shot now. She took it.
The gun clicked. She remembered she had emptied it at the bell. There was no time to reload.
Through Behr’s tattered shirt, she saw a patch of scrawny skin unprotected by fleshplate armour.
She braced herself against a tombstone, and vault-kicked with both feet.
Her kick landed hard, and gouged a gobbet from Behr’s back. But she didn’t knock him off his footing, and the jolt shocked through her feet and legs. The tombstone tipped over—the sandy ground was too loose to be an anchor—and she fell on top of it, hurting her hip.
Behr straightened, and turned robotically. He held Stack at arms’ length, lifting him off the ground. His face was greyish now, and he
was bleeding where Behr’s fingers were sinking into the flesh.
“What’d ya do that fer, lady,” he asked. “I tole you it weren’t me. It’s these damn doodads. I cain’t control them all uv the time.”
She tried a double karate chop, either side of his neck. Behr cried out, but didn’t fall.
His half face was crying, she saw. The pain and the frustration must be intense. But his electronic eye was glowing evilly.
“Tiger, did you have an optic burner implanted?”
The old Angel looked awesomely fed up. “Dad blast it, I did, lady. I wisht it weren’t so, but…”
The glow turned red, and Chantal cartwheeled out of its path. Behr’s head wrenched around on his neck, soliciting a shout of pain from him, and the beam raked the graveyard. A stone crucifix exploded into shrapnel fragments, and weather-beaten 19th Century wooden markers burst into flames.
The mourners had mainly taken cover in the church. Those that were armed had their guns out.
Bullets rang against Behr’s armoured chest.
“Careful,” shouted Chantal, “you’ll hit the Trooper.”
No one seemed much to care about that. A long-haired old man in torn leathers jumped out of Father O’Pray’s grave with a shotgun, and primed it. Before he could fire, the optic burn had caught him in the centre of his chest, and he tumbled backwards, dead.
Chantal danced around Behr, realizing that she could move faster than he could turn, and that his range with the burner was at best 120 degrees of his eyeline. She got in close, and struck wherever she saw Behr’s original body.
He continued to complain. “Don’t hurt me, sister. Hurt this thing!”
She had to do something about Stack.
“Shovel,” she shouted. Armindariz was cringing between a pair of tombs, still clutching the spade. “Shovel,” she repeated.
Armindariz stood up, and lobbed the spade to her. It spun end over end until she snatched it from the air. She got a good hold and swung it two-handed at Behr’s flesh-and-bone elbow.
Behr screamed as the blade sliced through, breaking the brittle bone.
“Sorry, Tiger,” she said.
Stack fell, gasping for breath, detaching the severed robo-arm from his throat. It continued to clutch automatically as he smashed it against the ground. Wires and transistors leaked from its stump.
Chantal took aim at Behr’s head and swung again. The optic flashed, and the spadehead exploded into red-hot shards. She was left with a burning pole, which she shoved at the cyborg’s torso. It splintered against his dented chestplate.
Through the glass, Chantal could see red blood leaking into Behr’s mechanism, shorting out some of his electronics.
She ducked under the swing of his left arm, and threw herself against him, hoping to open a crack with her shoulder.
She felt as if she had tried to tackle Notre Dame. The cathedral, not the college football team.
She rolled away from the cyborg. The beam was getting too close.
A huge figure loomed up behind Behr, and a claw locked around his throat. Shell had stepped in. Sweat ran from his ebony-muscled arm and blocky face as he exerted pressure.
“Hold on there, sonny boy,” Behr spluttered.
Shell had his real hand pressed against the back of Behr’s head, to keep the cyborg’s burner pointed away from him. Behr’s head was still turning, inexorably. Chantal heard the old man’s vertebrae straining inside his exoskeleton.
“This freakin’ hurts, ya know,” Behr shouted.
Shell was grunting now, losing his fight against Behr’s neck. There was a sudden crack as Behr’s spine snapped.
The Gaschugger relaxed, but Behr’s head kept turning, until it was facing backwards, his dead face against Shell’s living one.
The optic burned, and Shell fell away from the cyborg, a ragged, smoking hole where his eyes and nose had been. Chantal glimpsed daylight through the headwound as the ’chugger fell. In the church, someone—Miss Unleaded?—howled with unfeigned grief.
What was left of Behr was unsteady on its feet. Chantal stood up, and waited for it to bring its face to bear again. Behr’s tongue lolled from his mouth and his real eye was fogged. The optic was burned out, its solid cell used up on Shell. Inside all the bio-mechanics, he was dead, but the robot half of him was still going to kill her.
It raised its hand to its face, and pushed its tongue into its mouth. Then, using three fingers, it propped its jaw open. Behr had had a partially synthetic voice-box.
“Helllloooo, bayy-beah!” it said.
“The Big Bopper,” she snapped. “J.P. Richardson, ‘Chantilly Lace,’ 1958.”
“Highest chart position, Number Twelve.” The mechanical voice grated. “Trust the Sister from Switzerland to have a photographic memory.”
The dead man lurched forwards, arm out like Lon Chaney Jr as the Mummy. She realized the thing was blind, but guessed it would have some kind of sonar or heat pattern sensor inside it.
“Who are you?” she asked, stepping backwards a pace.
“My name is Legion…” it said.
“… for you are Many. That’s an old joke.”
“The oldies are the goodies, don’t you think, mon petit choux.”
It was using her father’s voice.
“That’s an old trick, too. It didn’t work in California, and it’s not going to work here.”
It took a step, and changed voices. “Chantal, come back,” it said in Italian, in Marcello’s whine, “don’t you like me any more?”
She kicked it in the throat. It was less steady now.
“I’m still dead, daughter,” said her father. “I’m busy ducking rocks in Hell. And what have you done about it?”
Her foot hurt. That last kick had been rash.
“Ahh, the Sin of Pride,” said Father O’Shaugnessy, “that was always your failing, Sister Chantal, always overreaching, always overconfident.”
Someone rushed at the thing, screaming like a banshee, and was bent into broken halves in an instant. It hadn’t been anyone Chantal had noticed before.
“Call me Georgi,” said the Pope, “and come to bed.”
She landed the heel of her hand on the glassex chest. It cracked.
The thing coughed mechanically, and she could see the wheels going round. She punched the crack, and it widened. Something was broken inside.
The people were creeping out of the church now. It must be obvious that the fight was between Chantal and the thing in Tiger Behr’s body. The Behr creature wouldn’t mimic life long after it had killed the nun. Stack was down and out of it, fallen in a swoon by the grave.
Chantal sucker-punched the thing, without any notable effect. Her hard knuckles were bleeding.
She pulled her bowie knife, and embedded its point in the crack in the demon thing’s chest, working it back and forth. It laughed, and took her neck from the back, hugging her to him. The knife wedged into the chest cavity.
“Come to Papa,” it cooed obscenely. She felt nails dig into her.
Then they were both falling into the grave, another active body pressed down on top of them, shrieking.
It was Miss Unleaded, a ladies’ revolver in her little fist. Chantal pushed herself away from the Behr creature, and found herself bunched against Father O’Pray.
Miss Unleaded was pushing the cyborg’s face into the grave earth. A band of peeling skin showed between the helmetlike exoskull and the slatted plates across Behr’s clavicles. The Gaschugger shoved her gun against the gap and emptied it. Some of the bullets must have torn through to the mechanisms, because the creature jolted and jerked, sparks spitting from its wounds. Miss Unleaded cried out and stood up, electrical arcs sparking between the creature and her revolver, her earrings, her overall buckles, her dental fillings. She broke the connection and collapsed, her exposed skin blackened.
The creature stood up, smoke and flame belching from its ruptured torso. Chantal tried to get upright, but the gravewall behind her gave wa
y as she tried to put her back against it.
“Come to Papa,” its hand extended, fingerends turned to bloody spearpoints.
It took a step. Chantal could smell the melting plastic and putrefying flesh inside it.
Its fingers lightly brushed her throat. She chopped at its wrist, but its claw kept coming for her.
“Come to Pa…”
There was an explosion, deafeningly loud in the confines of the grave, and the cyborg’s helmetlike head burst like a dropped watermelon. The creature stood for a moment, then collapsed at Chantal’s feet.
She looked up, and saw Trooper Nathan Stack, a newly-discharged shotgun smoking in his hands.
“The US Cav to the rescue,” he said, priming his pumpgun again.
“Help me with the girl,” Chantal said.
Miss Unleaded was whimpering. Chantal hugged her, and passed her up to Stack, who laid her out beside the grave.
Chantal pulled herself up. The headless cyborg kicked, a last mechanical reflex, and burned steadily.
She knelt by Miss Unleaded, feeling her pulses and her heartbeat.
“Well?” asked Stack.
Chantal snapped her fingers in the air. He was good. He knew what she wanted, and put it in her hand.
Miss Unleaded was gasping, trying to talk, but nothing was coming from her throat.
Chantal stuck the morph-plus hypo into the ’chugger’s neck, and squeezed. The girl’s eyelids fluttered.
“Water,” Chantal said, “from the church.”
“I don’t think she’ll be able to swallow. Look at those convulsions.”
“Water,” she said. “Not to drink.”
“Oh,” Stack said, running off.
Chantal held the writhing girl down, and tried to smooth her hair out of her eyes. Her heartbeat was irregular now. The discharges must have shocked her to the bone.
Stack came back with a leaky hatful of water. He put it down beside her. She dipped her fingers, and began the ritual—the familiar ritual—dabbing the girl.
Chantal gave Miss Unleaded the last rites.
The Gaschugger persisted in trying to talk.
Finally, when Chantal was finished, the girl got her last word out.
