Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys dc-4

by Mick Farren

  'You mercenaries are very good at retreating.'

  'There are times when it's a lot smarter than standing around and waiting to be killed.'

  The officer's face reddened, and his jaw jutted. 'We're going to stand here and fight, you understand me, mister?'

  Reave shrugged. 'It's suicide, but whatever you say.'

  The officer's rage and frustration suddenly exploded. 'I said, do you understand me, mister?'

  'I understand you,' Reave snarled back at the officer. 'I also understand you've got your tin soldier head up your ass.'

  For about five seconds it looked as though the officer was going to shoot Reave out of hand. Then he must have realized that if he did that, Billy and the Minstrel Boy would undoubtedly waste him in return. Self-preservation won out over anger. He turned and directed his anger at his men.

  'Keep firing at that damned cylinder.'

  Billy crawled up behind Reave. 'We should waste that sucker.'

  Reave shook his head. 'Just be ready to get out of here when I give the signal. Tell Renatta and the Minstrel Boy.'

  There was a shriek like a compacted hurricane, and half the fire post was instantly vaporized. Billy, Reave, and the Minstrel Boy were all alive, if dazed, amid the rubble. Renatta had beenthrown out of the trench but was already up and crawling for cover. The officer and most of the volunteers were gone. Nosmo and Shaef were also dead.

  'That thing's a molecular blaster. I didn't know there were any left.'

  'I can't hear you. I've gone deaf.'

  Reave was up on his feet. 'Let's go, go, go! Inside the registry building. Move it!'

  A full-scale charge was coming up the ramp. Renatta and the DNA Cowboys raced up the steps, followed by the handful of survivors from the fire post, running for the shelter of the central registry building as beams and bullets smashed into the stonework under their feet. Just outside the door Billy fell, but he had only tripped. The Minstrel Boy grabbed him and dragged him inside.

  'Are you okay?'

  Billy nodded as glass from the door crashed around them. 'Yeah, yeah, which way do we go?'

  'We'll make for the basements. There have got to be tunnels down there that'll take us down to other levels. We've got to try and avoid as much of the fighting as possible and make our way to the open nothings.'

  The fighting was closing on the heart of the city. For the next half hour the four of them made their way through scenes of slaughter, skirting the worst combat zones and heading as best they could for the outside quadrants, as far as possible from the focus of the attack. Despite their efforts, though, they could not completely go around the violence that was gripping more and more of the city as the raiders pressed home their attack with alarming speed. The defenders of Krystaleit appeared to have just one desperate strategy: They held their forces at key points until the pressure became too great and the casualties too numerous, and then they fell back deeper into the city. All the while they drew closer the hub of the city, the vital center of the great sphere, the energy core, the primary stasis generator and the huge integrated biomass. They knew that the raiders would take no prisoners and that there could be no surrender.

  The defenders were constantly hampered by the large numbers of refugees who were being driven back by the kill-crazy raiders. Sections of the city that were in enemy hands were already burning. The raiders were routinely torching buildings,sometimes with defenders or unarmed citizens still inside them. If they intended taking the city as a prize, they seemed perversely intent on leaving themselves little more than a blackened ruin.

  In some ways the second wave of the raiders was the worst. They seemed quite prepared to start the looting, raping, and general mindless destruction even before the city as a whole had fallen. The darkened streets were filled with their whooping and yelling, the screams of their victims, and the constant discharge of weapons. The DNA Cowboys were forced to mingle with the bestial mob, doing their best to look like raiders themselves, using the cover of the smoke and moving down streets where dark figures indulged themselves in nameless brutalities against a background of garish flames.

  For the first time the Minstrel Boy observed Renatta registering real shock and horror. She looked around at him with eyes that were wide with revulsion. 'It's like a scene out of hell.'

  'I think I'd rather choose hell.'

  Reave and Billy were a little farther ahead. A smoke-blackened rider with a patch over his left eye grabbed Reave by the arm. The man was on the end of a line of raiders waiting their turn with two unfortunate, terrified women who had been stripped and bound, back to back, against a pillar. Reave's instant reaction was that he had been discovered. He had to stop himself from whipping out a pistol when, a moment later, he discovered that the seeming attack was just an invitation to the party

  'You want to join in the fun, asshole?'

  Reave, nerves still jangling, quickly shook his head and walked on. 'I got orders.'

  The rider's voice boomed after him. 'Fucking snob! You gotta be one of Baptiste's queers!'

  Reave gave a slight shake of his head. The bastard did not know how close he was to the truth.

  Renatta hissed at the Minstrel Boy. 'Isn't there anything that we can do about this?'

  The Minstrel Boy scowled. 'Yeah, we can die trying. Just keep moving. There aren't that many women in this army, and you kind of stand out.'

  They started to cross the Laurel Bridge, which spanned the Elitespace and the Elgin hanging gardens. Hallway across, theyhad to press back against the guardrails as a troop of lancers trotted across, driving a dozen frightened women and four young boys in front of them, goading them on with the sharp tips of their lances. Several levels below, a line of four vehicles with a large escort of lizard riders and horsemen was driving slowly up the broad expanse of Khedive Boulevard. Reave recognized the armored car that was second in line.

  'That's Bapiste down there.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I know his car. I figure Protexus, Taraquin, and Zero are in the other vehicles.'

  'So the warlords have entered the city.'

  'The end can't be long now.'

  Billy caressed the multiplex and looked down, judging the range. 'I've still got half a clip of smartbombs left. We could finish this right here and now.'

  Reave also looked down. 'We'd never get out alive.'

  'I could take them all out at once.'

  Reave regretfully shook his head. 'The army would destroy the city anyway.'

  Billy put away the smartbombs.

  They were approaching the front lines, and there appeared to be no way to their destination without passing through the fighting. Then the Minstrel Boy had an idea.

  'You figure the sewers and conduits are still open?'

  Billy nodded. 'It's worth a shot. This fighting's been pretty simplistic up to now, all blood and dash. It's possible that they haven't considered the sewers.'

  'So we go through the sewers like Harry Lime?' Renatta asked.

  The three of them stared at her.

  'Who's Harry Lime?'

  She shrugged. 'It doesn't matter.'

  As Billy had predicted, nobody had considered the sewers. The only things there were the rats and the marls. Almost bent double, they made their way through the semidarkness. The sewers in Krystaleit ran through the actual thickness of the various city levels, and they could tell when they were passing under the shifting combat zones by the impact vibrations that shuddered through the stone and concrete. At one point they halted as a major explosion shook cascades of dirt and dust from the roof of the tunnel.

  'I feel like a goddamn mole.'

  'Better a goddamn mole than a dead hero.'

  The impact vibrations began to decrease, and it seemed that they were actually behind the lines of the defenders.

  'I think we should try the surface again.'

  They crawled on until they reached a vertical shaft that ran up to a manhole. Reave took the point, climbing the iron run
gs that were set in the wall of the shaft and hoping first that the cover would not be locked down and second that it would not open up on a new firefight.

  He put his shoulder under the heavy cast-iron cover and pushed up. At first it stuck, but as he applied more pressure it slowly lifted. The first thing he saw was three pairs of solid military-style boots standing around the hole. As he pushed the cover back farther, he found that he was looking into the muzzles of three weapons. For a gut-wrenching moment he thought they had come up on the wrong side of the line. Then he saw the militia uniforms behind the guns.

  'Don't shoot! Don't shoot! We're on your side.'

  One by one they climbed out of the manhole under the watchful eye of three very nervous militiamen. They seemed to have emerged into a hastily established command area right in the shadow of the core. The sound of heavy fighting was very close, and the troops that were moving around had the grim if hopeless determination of men who were preparing for a last stand in which they had only the most remote chance of prevailing. There was no attempt to disguise the fact that the preparations being made were for selling their lives at the highest possible price. The last of the heavy ordnance was being ranged along a tight perimeter. A half dozen of the heavily armored troopers stood waiting to be deployed in the final last-ditch effort. Close by, a team of technicians were setting up a complicated communcations unit, while groups of officers clustered around looking worriedly at maps and three-dimensional biode displays. The overall atmosphere was one of single-minded concentration on the tasks at hand. Nobody wanted to think about the future when only a miracle would allow them to live to see it. The DNA Cowboys were left in no doubt that they had once again crawled into the frying pan.

  Two of the militiamen kept them covered while the third hurried off to find an officer. As they waited, a familiar armored figure powered in on dorsal jets, touched down briefly, had a fast conversation with a group of officers, and then took off again. The DNA Cowboys looked at each other in blank disbelief.

  'Jet Ace?'

  'What the hell is he doing here?'

  'Seems to be on our side.'

  'Hurray for us.'

  'I think it's confirmation that the world's gone crazy.'

  Their exchange made the militia guards even more nervous. The one with a noncom badge snapped at them. 'No talking.'

  Renatta tried to reassure them. 'Just take it easy. We're the good guys.'

  A short, harried-looking junior officer hurried up. His expression made clear that the last thing he needed was the arrival of the DNA Cowboys.

  'Who are you people?'

  Reave did the talking. 'Free-lancers. We were separated from our unit, and we've been making our way back through the sewers and conduits.'

  'How do I know that you're not enemy infiltrators?'

  'You don't, but I doubt that the enemy needs to do any more infiltrating.'

  'What's the name of your commanding officer?'

  'Reft Zill.'

  The officer looked around. 'At least that is easily settled.' He called across the area. 'Master Zill, could you come over here?'

  Reave sighed as Zill came waddling up. He could not think of any situation that could be improved by the presence of Reft Zill. 'Hi, Reft. Still alive, I see.'

  'I could say the same for you.'

  'Do you know these men?' the officer asked shortly.

  Zill nodded. 'Sure. They're mine. In fact, I've been trying to locate them.'

  'Can I leave them with you?'

  'By all means.'

  The officer and the three militiamen hurried away. Zill looked the DNA Cowboys up and down.

  'So where have you been skulking?'

  'Skulking? I'd lay bets that we've been closer to the fighting than you have.'

  Zill made a dismissive gesture. 'This is all beside the point. I have a new assignment for you.'

  Reave raised a suspicious eyebrow. 'An assignment? Now? What are we supposed to do? Form a suicide squad?'

  'Our contracts have been transferred.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'You get yourselves to the quadrant J platform. The last we heard, it hadn't fallen to the enemy. If that's the case, transportation will be waiting.'

  'Transportation?'

  'I thought that would get your attention. If you can make it there alive, you'll be getting out of the city.'

  'Why us?'

  Zill shook his head. 'Don't ask me. The biode came up with your names. You'd have been the last ones I would have chosen.'

  Reave still could not believe what he was hearing. 'We can get out of here?'

  'You've been selected to escort a party of the city's metaphysicians out to Palanaque.'

  'Palanaque?'

  Zill nodded. 'Anywhere's got to be better than here.'

  Reave grunted. 'So the rats are leaving?'

  'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.'

  Reave half smiled. 'Have you found a way out, too?'

  Zill's eyes hardened. 'That's none of your fucking business, Reave Mekonta. Just get your ass to J platform and thank whatever miserable gods you may believe in that you've been given a second chance.'

  It was Thelodian who wrote, "In this era of irritating mysteries nothing was more irritating (except perhaps humanity's capacity for accepting virtually anything as normal in the shortest possible time) than the matter of the disrupters." Few of the proffered explanations for the arrival of the disrupters in those troubled final days have come close to being satisfactory. The facts are not in dispute. The disrupters appeared like the sand-worms of Herbert, apparently composed of a thirdform matter that was a full ninety degrees more unorthodox than that which made up the nothings. They came, and they chewed their way through reality. When they were gone, they left a slimetrail of intolerable hallucination that faded only as the nothings reinsinuated themselves.

  The Externalists, with characteristic tunnel vision, maintained that the disrupters were simply the final form of the Draan doomsday weapon that had started by causing the nothings and came to full cycle in the Final Cataclysm. Clearly, this is nonsense. The very fact that the Thousand Years War lasted for a full thousand years seems ample proof that the forces of the Draan and those of mankind were very evenly matched. There is no possibility that in the latter days of the war the Draan were able to command forces so far beyond the understanding of human beings. As with all Externalist arguments, the primary motivation behind the theory would appear to be not so much an arrival at the truth but the absolution of the human race from responsibility for its own destruction.

  The Juxtapositionists were considerably more inventive. Extending their central belief that the entire Damaged World effect was a result of the random encroachment of a neighboring extradimensional reality in the same area of actualspace, they claimed that the disrupters were merely an outside reflection of something that, although ultimately destructive to human reality, was perfectly normal in its own.

  La Vortice, ever handy with the related painpattern and the Burden of Guilt, had his own gloomy and ponderous ideas. Of course, to buy the grim old Master's disrupter concept, one had also to accept his whole elegantly constructed but complex premise that humans brought it on themselves, that man was crushed by the massive monolithic burden of his monstrous history and culture and his inability to adapt when the divisions between the temporal and spiritual, the physical and the meta, became blurred and fragmented. The disrupter, according to La Vortice, was merely a product of that decay, a mutated virus in the already disease-racked body of reality. As he liked to repeat, "What could be closer to the human spirit than an entity that ate reality and shit hallucination?"

  — Pressdra Vishnaria

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  'There's seven of us.'

  'Another fucking mystic number.'

  The biode had picked an escort for the metaphysicians of Krystaleit that impressed even Billy with its radical weirdness. Waiting on the airship dock for their arrival
were the DNA Cowboys and Renatta de Luxe; an armored trooper who had introduced himself as Lister Stent; Jet Ace, who was convinced that as a team they were destined for epic deeds; and Clay Blaisdell, who was drunk. There was also a hexaclone air crew of six, wearing trim, identical leather jodhpur suits, helmets like skullcaps with flaps, and raised propeller insignia. Behind them, the silver expanse of the dirigible R1009 rode gently on its mooring beams against a background of nothings that had become a deep purple. Inside the city all hell was breaking loose. It sounded as if the last organized stand had started.

  The metaphysicians came out of the tunnel mouth. As always seemed to be the way with metaphysicians, their white bodysuits were spotless, and they seemed totally unconcerned about what was going on around them, except for maybe a bare acknowledgment of the need to hurry. There were twenty-seven of them, and they walked in a tight, informal procession, guarded by a squad of militiamen who formed a tense half circle behind them with their weapons leveled back down the tunnel. They seemed to expect that pursuit might catch up with them at any minute.

  The metaphysicians did not hesitate. They walked straight up the lowered gangway and through the main lock of the dirigible. The air crew turned smartly and followed. Nobody had told the escort of seven what exactly they were expected to do, but they did not wait for an order to board. They hurried up the gangwayin the wake of the air crew. Renatta went first, and the DNA Cowboys followed. Blaisdell stumbled after them, and Stent and Jet Ace lumberingly brought up the rear. Reave had expected the militia to follow them — there was certainly enough room aboard the very large airship. Instead, they remained standing on the dock, looking nervously at the access tunnel. As the gangway rolled back and the port sighed shut, he noticed dial they did not even have stasis generators. There was no way out for them.

  The main lock led to a long viewing gallery dial ran all the way around the outside of the lower gondola. Once inside the airship, the metaphysicians gathered in an exclusive group, holding an urgent whispered conversation. Renatta and the other three put down what gear they had managed to rescue from the Victory Cafe and went to the viewing windows to take a last look at Krystaleit. The Minstrel Boy had insisted that they go back and retrieve his veetar, even threatening to go on his own when the others showed an understandable reluctance to risk their lives for a musical instrument, no matter how exotic, particularly as the Minstrel Boy appeared not to play it any longer. Surprisingly, it was Reave who had decided that it was only fitting that they rescue the Minstrel Boy's legendary instrument. When Billy had still seemed disinclined, Reave had pointed out that they had done as much for him when they had rescued Renatta. Renatta had immediately protested being equated with a veetar, but Reave had dismissed her complaint with a casual wave. It was not the nature of the rescuee that mattered. The common point was that both had been gratuitous, even selfless, operations that were carried out at the request of a comrade. His explanation in no way satisfied Renatta, but further argument was short-circuited by the spectacle of Stent lumbering across the deck with the unconscious Blaisdell draped across his outstretched metal arms.