by Jack Yeovil
Rintoon cuffed the back of Colosanto’s head. The lieutenant’s hair fell over her face.
“The codeword?”
Colosanto snuffled something.
“What was that? Lauderdale, on the count of three, shoot this officer unless she tells me what I need to know.”
“Yes sir.”
Lauderdale’s put his gun to the back of Colosanto’s head.
“One!”
Her face was in her hands, and her shoulders were heaving. The blip was on the bridge.
“Two!”
Jagged, painful sobs escaped from Colosanto’s lungs.
“Three!”
An eternal second passed.
“SWORDFIST!” Finney said.
Lauderdale’s gun jerked upwards, bumping the back of Colosanto’s skull but not discharging.
Rintoon and Lauderdale looked at Finney.
“I know the codes,” she said. “SWORDFIST is the defence systems keyword today.”
Lauderdale pulled Colosanto’s chair away from her console and spun her across the room. Then he put his gun down, bent over the board and typed. A dull tone sounded. Lauderdale had scored a MISS.
“She lied,” he said, reaching for his gun. “SWORDFISH doesn’t load.”
“Another Maniak unmasked,” crowed Rintoon. “Well, shoot her dead, my boy. No, perhaps we ought to teach her a lesson first. Get me a whip and some rope.”
“What did you type?” Finney asked.
“SWORDFISH, ratskag! Like you said. It wasn’t acknowledged.”
Lauderdale’s knuckles went white as he gripped his gun.
“SWORDFIST, Lauderdale. SWORDFIST.”
Lauderdale made a gesture of exasperation, and typed in the correct codeword.
The screen changed colour. The HIT beep sounded, playing the first few notes of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”.
“Attention, attention,” cooed the seductive, recorded voice on the tannoy (the US Cav had hired Lola Stechkin for the purpose), “this facility is now under attack. Everyone will report to their battle stations. Thank you for co-operating.”
“What do you want to try first?” Lauderdale asked Rintoon. “The rockets, the lases, the napalm or the mortars?”
Rintoon was standing to attention. There must be an incredible band playing inside his head. He raised his hand in a slow salute.
“I think we should all take a moment to talk to God, soldiers,” he said. “I think if Jesus Christ were here today, He’d be urging us on to Victory. We should Love our Enemies, soldiers, for without them we have not the chance for Victory.”
“Colonel?” said Lauderdale “What about the androids? I have them operational?”
“Everything,” Rintoon said, “hit the scum with everything.”
Finney helped Colosanto up off the floor. The lieutenant clung desperately to her, shaking with hysteria.
“God forgive me,” Finney said to herself. “God forgive me.”
Part Eight: Last Stand
I
“We have incoming fire” said Federico, “I suggest we take a course of evasive action.”
They were half-way across London Bridge when Fort Apache’s lases opened up and burned towards them.
“That’s some welcome home,” Stack said.
“Don’t worry,” said Chantal. “The fort isn’t feeling itself today.”
Stack wrenched the wheel over hard, but Federico didn’t respond. The car slipped into reverse and withdrew at 200 miles per…
“What!”
“Federico has a very strong sense of self-preservation. It’s just overridden the driving helmet and is taking evasive action of its own. It can react faster than you. Don’t feel humiliated.”
“That’s easy to say, Mother Superior!”
Stack thumped the wheel, and tried to damp down his anger. He resented being taught to drive by a fancy foreign car.
Federico’s responses, however, were startling. A squirted curtain of burning napalm descended, and the car avoided so much as a splash on the paintwork. Stack thought the car was showing off its virtuoso techniques. Chantal was playing with her laptop console. White darts streaked out of the central turret of Fort Apache.
“Heat-seeking missiles coming in,” said Federico.
“I’m on it,” she replied. “I can reach and reprogram them with an APOSTLE,” she explained. “There.”
The missiles converged and exploded harmlessly, puffs of black and red in the air.
A battery of robot guns rose out of the desert like a whale breaking the surface, sand pouring from the casings. The guns swivelled, but Federico disabled the platform with a surgical lase strike, and the battery discharged its shells in frustration.
“That was a silly thing to do,” Chantal said. “No machine would waste ammunition like that. The fort is possessed.”
“Funnily enough, I believe it.”
Federico did a figure eight to avoid heavy flack. Stack held onto his seatbelt. One corner of the windscreen cracked as a stray bullet struck.
“Took a nick, did’ja, Fed?” Stack sneered, taking something like satisfaction from the car’s proven fallibility. Then, as he watched, the white impact patch went pale and transparent.
“It’s smart glass. All top-of-the-line Ferraris have it.”
“What…? How…?”
“My field is computers, not cars, but it has something to do with recombinant DNA.”
“You mean this thing is alive?”
“You ever doubted it, signor?”
Stack thought he heard a smug tone in Federico’s generated voice, as if he were a preening matador showing off in front of a rival suitor to impress a melting young damsel.
“Your car has a crush on you, Sister.”
Three drones in formation hovered above the car, locking on. Lights flashed around their rims. Stack knew they were warming up for a particle beam thrust.
“Ciao, dumb boulders!” shouted the car as it exploded them one by one. “This is too easy. They’re only using American technology.”
Stack was irritated, but he couldn’t bring himself to hope that the car would be shown up by good ole yankee knowhow.
Across the bridge, the fort’s gates opened.
“Here come the heavies,” said Stack. “Sit tight.”
Three US Cav cruisers drove out, accompanied by a cyke-mounted squad. Stack took manual control of the lase, and sighted on the lead cruiser. This was one thing he was better at than any goddamn computer.
“Hold your fire,” Chantal said. “We don’t know how possessed the people in those things are.”
Stack’s thumb stiffened above the FIRE control.
The cruisers and the cykes advanced to the bridge. Then, suddenly, three of the motorsickles and one of the cruisers peeled off and drove at random across a rocky patch of desert towards the interstate, away from Federico.
“They’re making a break for it,” Chantal said. “There’s still some resistance.”
The remaining personnel sat in or on their machines and did nothing. Federico got a hold on their frequency, and piped in their intercom chatter. Several voices, human and otherwise, were raised at once.
“Repeat: Open fire. The deserters are classed as hostile, and must be removed from the field of battle…”
“… hey, those are our guys…”
“… the girlie in the car was with us yesterday, and we just shot at her…”
“… I never shot at no one…”
“Repeat, obey orders or you will be classed as deserters. And deserters are classed as hostile…”
“… freak, Jennifer, I’m gonna do it…”
“… Bradley, don’t you touch that lase. We’re just getting out of here. Rintoon’s loco, and Lauderdale is worse. We’ll send help back.”
“He’s right, they’re Maniak subversives. You know that.”
“You have thirty seconds to comply with orders. Then, your systems will cease to respond to your control and
the remote will take over.”
“… let me outta this thing…”
“… if you can hear us, lady in the snazz car, pax pax pax, we’re gettin’ out. We ain’t got nothin’ against you…”
“… Jennifer, it’s been a bad day, don’t push me…”
One of the cruiser crews got out of their machine, and walked away. The deserters were nearly at the interstate.
The two Troopers shouted at each other, kicking the sand in waves across the road. One of the cyke Troopers dismounted and joined in the rap session. After a discussion, two of them put their hands in the air and waved at Federico. The other stamped back to the cruiser in disgust. He bent down to get behind the wheel and the roofgun chattered. He went down at once, and the other Troopers scattered. The lase beamed out, and the deserting cruiser exploded as it reached the interstate. One of the motorsickles skidded into the sand, partially burying itself. Criss-cross beams struck at the weaving human forms, knocking them flat in the sand. There wasn’t any blood. Lases cauterise as they pierce.
One of the cykes made a dash across the bridge towards Federico, and nearly made it. The lase caught its gastank and it exploded, catapulting its rider up out of the blossom of flame. The asexual figure flailed in the air, struck the parapet of the bridge and fell like a broken doll to the Colorado bed.
The massacre was over in two minutes. Stack and Chantal were innocent bystanders, just out of range.
“The human element has been purged,” a mechanical voice said over the air. “The action will continue.”
“Thank you,” said a whiny human voice, “my cadre is in place. They will be deployed now. This will be ended soon.”
“Freak,” said Stack, “that’s Lieutenant Lauderdale.”
Chantal frowned. “I know him. He was my liaison. He’s a bureaucrat, isn’t he? Not a battlefield officer?”
“He’s only asslicker-general when they won’t let him play with his toys. Looks like he just got the box down from his playroom.”
Stack took the wheel. Federico let him drive. He did a three-point turn and took evasive action.
“Stack, what’s up?”
“Lauderdale runs the androids.”
“That’s bad?”
“Let me put it this way, during the Joint Action against the Maniax, the Exalted Bullmoose, who once officially endorsed cannibalism, issued a press release complaining that their use was inhumane.”
“That’s bad.”
A row of robotic figures marched out of the fort, into the desert. They moved in unison, implacable like animated chessmen. From this distance, they looked like the Academy Award statuettes. They didn’t have big swords like the Oscars, but Stack knew their gleaming bodies were packed with every other kind of weapon the military could dream up. Squadron leader androids were constructed around a football-sized nuclear device that could be detonated from a distance. The UN had been trying to get the damn things on the table at the Geneva Strategic Arms Limitation Talks for years, and just now Stack was wishing that the Prezz had unilaterally junked the whole program even if it did give the CAC conventional superiority on the other side of the Rio Grande Wall.
A hidden block rose from the road in front of Federico. Stack let the car slow down.
“We’re dead,” he said. “There aren’t enough rocks here. The sand is too soft. Federico would sink and gum up within ten yards of the road.”
“I concur with the Trooper,” Federico said. “I will deploy my defenses, but it is inadvisable that you remain.”
Federico raised his doors. Stack and Chantal got out. Stack pulled his shotgun and a sackful of shells after him. Chantal had her SIG out.
The sun glinted on the advancing column of robot soldiers.
“Ciao, Federico,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
“Goodbye, sorella.”
“You go left and I’ll go right,” Stack said, his eye on the column, “and we’ll meet at the Fort.”
“A good plan,” she said.
“Chantal…?”
“What?”
He kissed her, awkwardly.
“That was for luck.”
She kissed him back. It was a smooth contact.
“So was that.”
Then she was gone, darting towards the bridge and the androids.
He pumped one into the chamber, and waited.
“Come and get me you freakin’ metalhead scuzzballs!”
II
“That’s the Juillerat woman,” said Lauderdale, tapping the freezeframe of the action replay beamed in from the androids, “but who’s the Trooper?”
“Stack,” said Captain Finney. “Trooper Nathan Stack.”
“He’s listed as missing, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he was with Tyree.”
“How did he hook up with Juillerat?”
“It doesn’t matter,” snapped Colonel Rintoon, “they’re both Maniax, obviously. They’ll be destroyed, defeated, terminated, wiped out, exterminated, demobilized, killed…”
“Sir, yessir,” said Lauderdale.
How had the Swiss woman and the Trooper got together? What could they have learned out in the sand? Lauderdale knew they had to be kept out of Fort Apache while the demon was settling in, prepping for the Big Push. This was the crux of the ritual. Nothing must bar the Way of Joseph in the next three hours.
They were haring off in opposite directions. The bigscreen fragmented into the viewpoints of each android, and Nathan Stack was in each of them, discharging his shotgun. One of the viewpoints blanked.
“Shouldn’t we bring in Stack?” suggested Finney. “For interrogation? We still don’t know what happened to Tyree.”
Lauderdale could see the idea of interrogation appealed to Rintoon. Maybe the Colonel would get to use his whips and ropes after all.
Another android went down. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They were armoured against everything up to and including heavy artillery. That was the problem with giving the things free will, Lauderdale supposed. They were free to screw up.
“Interrogation,” said Rintoon, rolling the word around his mouth. Finney was being too clever, playing to the Colonel’s lapses. It was time she was out of the picture, Lauderdale thought. “Yes, interrogation…”
“Sir,” said Lauderdale, “shouldn’t we put it through the computer. We’re in a combat situation.”
“Good thinking, man. Do it, Finney. Call up Stack’s stats.”
Lauderdale hoped he could trust the demon in the machine.
“I don’t see…”
“Do it, woman.”
Finney tapped keys, and Stack’s stats appeared on the screen. Mugshot, personal history, service record. It held still for an instant, then shimmered and was replaced by an urgent override.
The demon came through. NATHAN STACK HAS BEEN POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED AS A SERIAL KILLER, RESPONSIBLE FOR POSS. 159 MURDERS OVER LAST TEN YEARS IN FIVE STATES. SUBJECT IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS, PROFICIENT IN ALL WEAPONS SKILLS, HAS GENIUS LEVEL INTELLIGENCE, AND SHOULD BE TERMINATED ON SIGHT. DO NOT, REPEAT NOT, ATTEMPT TO BRING SUBJECT IN ALIVE.
Finney was shaking her head in disbelief.
“It can’t do this,” she said.
“It seems conclusive to me. Lauderdale, have your androids execute the computer’s directives.”
“You don’t understand, Colonel. It’s just a machine. It’s only a smart filing cabinet. It can’t give you information without someone putting it in there. I have no record of this amendment to Stack’s stats. It didn’t come from outside the system…”
“You’re gibbering, woman.”
“No, this isn’t possible, sir. The system appears to have… to have made something up.”
Lauderdale was using the remote guidance facility to lock the androids onto Stack’s heat patterns. Once that was in their tiny minds, they would implacably pursue him until he was dead.
“I may not be a brain like you, Captain Finney,” Rintoon said, “but I am given to understand
that systems don’t tell lies. Is that or is that not the case?”
“Sir… usually, but…”
“Fine. That’s it then. We’ll finish the sumpsucker now, save the country the cost of a trial.”
“Think about it, sir. Stack’s been Cav for fifteen years. He hasn’t had enough leave days to zap about the country committing 159 murders. And look at that remark there. ”Genius level intelligence.“ You can’t believe our psych profiles wouldn’t have shown that up. The guy is just a Trooper, for freak’s sake!”
“I will not tolerate that kind of language, Finney. Colonel Vladek W. Rintoon runs a tight ship, a clean ship. An officer must conduct herself with honour, dignity and cheerfulness at all times. An officer must be obedient, resourceful, well-turned-out, vigilant, aware…”
Rintoon’s tunic buttons were done up wrongly.
Lauderdale knew he would have to end this charade soon, and take command. He could keep the fort’s personnel busy while the demon did its work in the depths.
Finney stood up and turned her terminal off.
“I resign my commission,” she said, walking for the door.
“This is mutiny, woman, mutiny. I could have you shot down like a dog.”
The automatic doors opened for Finney’s cardkey.
“… like a dog!”
Finney looked around.
“Anyone else had enough?” she said.
Lieutenant Colosanto got up, her eyes cried out, and went to the Captain. A couple of techies darted out into the corridor. Finney looked at the door guard, who stepped aside for her, and followed.
There were alarms sounding all over the fort.
“This is desertion,” Rintoon screamed, “DESERTION!”
The doors closed.
Rintoon wheeled around, looking for someone to tie up and whip, interrogate or shoot down like a dog. Lieutenant Lenihan was clearing his console. He froze as the Colonel bore down on him.
“It’s the end of my shift, sir. I have to stand down. I’ve been on duty for over thirty-eight hours.”
Rintoon grunted, and clenched his fists.
“It’s regs, sir,” said Lenihan. “I’m not allowed to stay at the console longer than a that. I could freak up, and get us all killed. I have to have downtime now. It’s in the book.”
