by Mick Farren
"They trust us with all that stuff!"
"We stand guard in threes. One of them and two of us."
"Who's them?"
Fenton treated Vickers to a look of scornful disbelief.
"You should have figured it for yourself by now or else you ain't as smart as I thought you were. You must have seen that Stretcher's got four of his boys and the rest of us are recruits. Guess they think it's safe to put two of us to their one because, as of now, we don't have too much to be in cahoots about."
"It's a pretty weird bunch of recruits."
"You noticed that?"
"I've been wondering what you could expect from a bunch like that. We're a very odd combination for any kind of mission."
"And?"
Vickers smiled. He knew that he was expected to give out with something. Fenton seemed to be making a kind of overture. Vickers wasn't sure what he wanted. Was it just an offer of mutual back-watching or was something deeper going on? It would have been handy to note the sex of Fenton's earlier bed companion. He was fresh out of jail. Vickers decided to play along.
"I can't see how we could have been assembled for any specific missions. We don't fit any project that I could imagine. We're not a conceivable team. With the exception of you, everyone's either a loner or a couple. We're all general issue, all-purpose killers. There are no specialists. Only you, and possibly the four girls, have a record of being team players. There's just one function that fits us all like a glove."
It was Fenton's turn to smile. "Yeah?"
"We're intimidating. If you wanted to put the fear of God into someone you'd only have to walk in with the whole bunch of us. There's an old western movie called The Magnificent Seven."
"The Magnificent Seven! You got to be putting me on. I thought you were supposed to be one of the best."
"You know the movie?"
"Of course I know the movie. I was brought up on it, wasn't I."
"So think it through."
"Okay, listen up. You all look like shit. You've all got these big, inflated reputations but the truth is you're soft and lazy. You've been sitting here with your thumbs up your asses for too long. A lot of money's been spent on you and it's now time to start justifying it. It's time to go back to work."
It was eight thirty in the bright desert morning of Vickers' fourth day at El Rancho Mars. It seemed that, with the arrival of Vickers, Streicher had his full complement of recruits and he was now ready to start whipping them into some sort of shape. They had already been at it for two hours. They'd run five laps on a track that completely circled the house and had followed that with a strenuous bout of calisthenics. Some took the punishing exercise in their stride while others were a little green and sweaty behind it. Vickers stood halfway between the two extremes. The sudden exertion hadn't hurt him but he knew, as he fought for breath after fifty sit-ups, that he could have survived without it. After this first taste of what Streicher considered work, they were given fifteen minues for breakfast, fifteen minutes for a shower and then were expected to reassemble by the heart-shaped pool wearing combat clothes and with their weapons.
As they straggled back from their quarters, Streicher was there waiting, positioned so that he cast a dramatically long shadow. There were now only two of his boys flanking him. There had been all four of them around for the first workout phase. Vickers wondered what the other two were doing now. Fenton fell into step beside him.
"You think Streicher's going to give us any idea of what we're training for?"
Vickers grunted and hefted his Yasha. "I doubt it."
Stretcher pointed out in the direction of the cult's abandoned ring of pillars.
"For a hundred meters, out to that last clump of trees, we've laid an electronic combat course. There are mines, traps and flip-ups of both good guys and bad guys. The idea is to get to the other side and back again as fast as you can without either being shot or blown up. There's nothing actually lethal in this system, but there is some stuff that can shake you up some. As the flip-ups and the holograms come at you, you'll find that some represent hostile opposition while others will be innocent bystanders. You are supposed to distinguish. You fucking psychopaths who can't tell one from the other, you'll do the course over until you can. Is all this clear to you?"
There were some growls among the general nodding. No professional ever wanted anything to do with combat simulators. Nobody actually protested, however, despite all the low grumbling. Streicher allowed himself a sardonic smile.
"One last thing, ladies and gentlemen, as you move into the combat run you'll find that the system has been tuned to the maximum degree of skill. Consider it a test of all these highly touted reputations."
Morse was the first one up. He was armed with a 12 guage Neilsen Autoshot with a police stock. As he loaded it, Streicher described the course.
"It's a two-way street. All the way to the end and back again. You'll find that we've laid out a complex of trenches, wire and sandbags. All real World War I. You can use them however you like. There's also a three-meter wall and a steel culvert. You go over the wall on the way in and through the culvert on the way out. That's mandatory. Move ahead, Mr. Morse."
Morse nodded and started toward the ring of pillars at a slow, careful walk. Streicher called after him.
"You're on the clock, Mr. Morse. If you don't complete the course in four minutes, you do it over."
Morse broke into a reluctant trot. The ground fell away quite steeply beyond the pillars and he was quickly lost from sight. There were a few seconds of silence and then all hell broke loose. There were explosions, the wump of sound shocks and the rapid-fire bark of Morse's shotgun. Multicolored smoke billowed up. Some of the recruits glanced at each other. There was a slight pause and then another eruption of noise.
"Two minutes. He's had half his time."
Streicher stopped his clock at 3:55 as Morse came trotting back through the ring of pillars. He looked out of breath and a little the worse for the wear.
"Just under the wire, Mr. Morse."
Morse flopped down onto the ground.
"Thank Christ; I wouldn't want to go through all that again."
Streicher grinned nastily. "Oh you will, Mr. Morse. You can count on that, but maybe not today. In the meantime, Miss Debbie, you're up next."
During the four days that Vickers had been at El Rancho Mars, he had learned to take Debbie and the three other girls a whole lot more seriously than first impressions had indicated. They were clearly hardened professionals and, since they were so exceptionally striking, he wondered how it was that he hadn't heard about them before. Debbie looked both practical and sexy in cut-off jungle greens. There was nothing frivolous about the lightweight M20 that she cradled on her left arm. One of Streicher's boys handed her a banana clip; she slapped it into the machine gun with the ease of long practice and then set off for the pillars at a purposeful lope.
Debbie was back in 3:12. She looked a good deal less ruffled than Morse.
"You're up next, Mr. Bronce."
Bronce flexed. A long-barrelled ultramag nestled in a brown leather shoulder holster next to his perfect pects. To Vickers it was a somewhat lightweight weapon for the kind of course it seemed to be. Bronce, on the other hand, was as struttingly confident as ever. He started down the course as if he were aiming to break a record. As soon as he was out of sight the firing started. When he was about a minute into the course, Streicher looked down sharply at a unit on his wrist. He tapped a button. The explosions stopped. Streicher signalled to his two boys.
"Curtis, Gomez. Something's happened to him and he's down. He probably walked into a beanbag. You'd better go in and fetch him out."
Curtis and Gomez hurried down the course. They came back lugging the limp body of Bronce. Fenton moved beside Vickers.
"He'll be madder than hell when he wakes up. The asshole likes to think he's Superman."
Streicher, Gomez and Curtis came back from the house where they'd left Bronce i
n the care of Hey Nurse.
"I hope that hasn't put you off, Mr. Vickers."
"I could think of better things to be doing, but what the hell."
"What the hell, indeed. You want to go ahead?"
"Whatever you say."
Gomez was in charge of handing out the ammunition.
"How many clips do you want?"
"Three."
He handed Vickers three clips for the Yasha. Vickers taped two together back to back and dropped the third into his pocket.
"Start the clock, Streicher."
Streicher had been right when he'd said that the course was "real World War I." The slope beyond the pillars was an untidy mess of trenches, razor wire, sandbagged parapets and flat representations of buildings like an unfinished movie set. He had no time, however, to stand and get his bearings. The computer that controlled the training course was programmed to play him like a rat in a maze, tracking his footfalls with sound sensors, following his body heat with thermals and all the time barraging him with an infinite variety of unpleasant surprises. An explosion of bright orange smoke went off uncomfortably close to him. He dived into the nearest trench, feeling that there was quite enough anxiety in his professional life without having to put himself through vicarious simulations. He hit the floor of the trench on all fours. A life-size cartoon samurai flipped. He let go a short blast from the Yasha and it went down again. There was an explosion behind him. This time the smoke was Prussian blue. A hail of rubber bullets slammed into the wall. He lay flat for a second and then scuttled, frogwise, up the trench. He really was a rat being goaded through a maze. Flip-up! A Nazi soldier on the edge of the trench. Burst! Gone! Red explosion! Green! Two trenches intersect. Flip-up! This time it's a little old lady. Don't fire! Magenta explosion and he's at the wall. The bad news is that it's made of vertical logs, Fort Apache style. The good news is there's a rope. Scrambling one handed and complaining how he's an assassin, not a fucking commando. Almost to the top there's a flip-up firing high velocity beanbags. Swing! Bean-bags miss but only just. Swing back, twist, bring up the Yasha. Burst, and the bad guy's gone. Straddle the top. The logs are sharpened to points. Drop. The clip in the Yasha is empty. Pull out, reverse, slam it. For an instant, he thinks about Debbie's legs, and then on again.
He's going across an open space and suddenly he doesn't feel so good. His own legs are heavy and his stomach's churning. That bastard Streicher! There's a Burroughs Tube in this set-up. He's being drenched with subsonics. He's surfing on solid ground and rubber bullets are snapping at his heels, but it's the end of the course. Hit the button and back. Flip-up, burst. Flip-up, burst. Flip-up good guy, hold your fire in the nick of time. Boom! Boom-boom! The smoke is lime green. Here's the culvert. Down on hands and knees. There's something black blocking the pipe. Fire ahead blindly. He's almost deafened but it's gone. Out into the light again. YLO gunman. Z-i-i-ppp! Down into the trench. Crawl, crawl, crawl. There's gas and his eyes are tearing. And then he can see the tops of the pillars and he's through, doing his best to look nonchalant as he walks back to the group. The asshole likes to think of himself as Superman.
"3:51, Mr. Vickers. Only just adequate."
"I'd give a lot to see a TV."
"They've got us completely cut off."
"But no movies? No tapes, no card chips?"
"I guess they figured if they gave us monitors one of us at least would be able to rig them to pick up satellite signals." Debbie turned to Gomez. "Ain't that true, Gomez?"
"Believe me, I don't know any more than you do."
"I don't believe you. You're full of shit. You've got some idea of what's going on here, you just aren't telling." Gomez shrugged. He was used to this sort of thing. "Whatever you say."
Vickers, Debbie and Gomez had been teamed for guard duty. It was the midnight-to-dawn watch of Vickers' eleventh day at what he still thought of as El Rancho Mars.
"I know one thing, I'm getting fucking sick of that training. I can't see any point to it. It's not like we're training for anything. There's no pattern to it. It all seems to be make-work."
"No gain without pain."
"No gain period."
"What's the word, Gomez, is there any pattern to it?"
Gomez was starting to get a little irritable.
"What am I supposed to say?"
Debbie mimicked his flat, colorless accent. "I just do what Streicher tells me."
"Will you lighten up?"
There were times when Debbie could ride someone beyond any productive limit. Vickers was also getting tired of the way she was beating her frustration into the ground.
"Yeah, knock it off. We've got to spend the whole night together in here. It'd be better to get along."
Debbie slid deeper into her chair, at the same time crossing her bare legs. The outburst of body language wasn't missed by either Vickers or Gomez. The two men glanced briefly at each other but held their silence. Debbie had a petulant streak.
There was something womblike about the red room. It was dark, quiet and strangely oppressive. The deep-padded contour chairs were just a little too comfortable. The air was just a little too warm and a little too dry. The smell of rubber and electrons could wrap itself around those on duty like a cocoon. The lines and columns of LEDs glowed red, amber and green. They could hypnotize anyone who stared at them for too long. There was one, dim worklamp. All other light came from the sixteen scopes that monitored the perimeter and approaches to the house. The gray-green of the ground radar, the red ghosts on the heat scopes and the patchwork multicolors of the thermals were reflected in their watching faces. The dim, concentrated quiet was like that of the cabin of a large aircraft, except it slightly lacked the calm but watchful tension. The red room quickly became boring. Vickers drank coffee from a styrofoam cup. He wished that he had two or three Marvols, even a greenie. He knew, very soon, the repetitive nothing on the screens and scopes would put him to sleep.
"It's a pity we don't have a TV. I wanted to see what happened with Tomoyo Nakamora and the gorilla. I wonder if they ever got to fuck."
"The whole thing was disgusting."
"You don't believe in cross-species sex?"
"How would you like to fuck a dog?"
"Plenty of guys fuck sheep. At least, that's the legend."
"That's only…"
"Wait a minute!" Debbie was staring intently into the screen.
"What?"
"I thought I saw something."
"Where?"
"It was just a faint blip on the ground radar. It could have been a jack rabbit or nothing at all. It was right out on the edge."
"Let's take a look. You got a bearing?"
"Maybe oh one five."
"We'll go out on oh one five, on thermal."
Gomez tapped in instructions and, on the main screen, an image moved outward from the house in the rough direction that Debbie had indicated, segueing slowly from one clump of sensors to the next. The color patchwork of the thermal showed nothing but the blue groundheat of the rocks and sand.
"Looks like it was nothing."
"They ought to have robots out there. Then we could all go to bed."
"You can't use robots in this kind of country. Whatever they do, the sand always fucks 'em up."
"You sound pleased."
"I'm working."
The scan was now feeding from the outermost cluster of sensors. There was still nothing doing.
"We could go around the perimeter."
Debbie shrugged. "I don't know. It was probably nothing."
"Hold it."
There were four yellow smudges. Five, six, there were nine yellow smudges rapidly getting bigger.
"Faces. They give out more heat. Here come the bodies."
There were nine… no, ten of them, moving toward the house.
"Put up the audio."
Vickers pushed up a fader. The room was filled with the soft crunch of feet and the superamplified rustle of clothing. There was a quiet curse.
Gomez picked up the phone.
"Streicher… yeah, right. Yeah, but listen, we've got a bunch of people out on the perimeter and moving this way; you'd better get down here."
He hung up. Debbie tapped the screen with a long, tangerine-flake fingernail. "What do we do about this?"
Gomez brought in the redscope. Ten figures were trudging across the desert. They appeared footsore.
"For the moment, we watch. Streicher's on his way down."
Vickers was thoughtful. He regarded the screen in front of him.
"If I were going to take a place like this, this is exactly the way I'd do it."
"Oh yeah?"
"The only other way would be to come in by air, but they'd have to figure that we've the capability to take out an unauthorized chopper."
Debbie was also staring into the screen.
"Why not just stand off and flatten the place with some kind of missile?"
"I don't see how it could be that kind of an emergency unless there's something that Streicher's really not telling us. You need a hell of a lot of justification before you start rocketing another corporation's real estate."
"They could just be lost. Massacring civilians is hardly encouraged."
Vickers grinned at Gomez. "That's why I'm glad I'm only offering advice and not making the decisions."
"And what advice would you offer, Mort?"
The three swivelled in their chairs as Streicher came in.
"If I was you, I'd play the odds and grease them right away but, then again, I'm not you."
Streicher scowled. "And that's a fact." He glanced at Gomez. "Try metal on them. See if they've got any weapons."
The presence of metal was indicated by a violet glow on the thermal screen.
"Three guys carrying frame packs that contain metal objects. I can't tell if they're cans of food or weapons. One other guy's got a pistol and the rest are clean."
"It all looks innocent."
"Or they could be trying to confuse you by loading all the weapons into three packs."
"Perhaps you should ease up on the advice, Vickers."
"We should have hit a fucking road by now."
The muttered comment boomed and reverberated through the red room, blown out of proportion by the speakers.
