by John Shirley
“Uh-oh,” Mordecai said. “A pod!”
“A what?” Roland said, aiming the shotgun.
“Just shoot it!”
They fired, and the fleshy excrescence blew apart, but more varkids were tunneling up, two small varkids that seemed to expand, to puff and crinkle up with armor that sprouted even as the things leapt at them. They were still metamorphosing as they came.
Roland wasn’t going to give the things a chance to do any more growing. He rushed to meet one as it came at him in midair, shoved the shotgun into its maw, jamming his barrel between those seeking mandibles, and pulled the trigger.
It blew up from inside, a split-second disassembling in midair. Wiping bug ichor off his face, Roland turned at a warning screech from Bloodwing. It was clawing and pecking at a varkid that was bigger than a man, the chitonous horror gripping Mordecai in an obscene clasp of all of its six legs. Only the barrel of Mordecai’s rifle, vertical and between him and the creature’s jaws, saved him from getting his head bitten off. He fell back, and Bloodwing flapped up to get another attack angle.
Roland ran to the melee, just in time to see the varkid flip about, changing position to drag Mordecai into a newly forming pit in the sand. It had hold of his collar and was dragging him down underground with it; it vanished into the sand, still gripping Mordecai, who shouted till his mouth was stuffed with dirt as his head was pulled underground, then his shoulders, his chest . . . And Bloodwing flapped and dipped and spiraled, shrieking in frustration.
Roland dropped his shotgun and grabbed Mordecai by the ankles and set his feet, pulling, backpedaling slowly, using all his strength, gritting his teeth so hard it felt as if they might crack.
Then there was a squelching sound and a release of pressure, as Roland went over backward, still gripping Mordecai’s ankles.
He lay on his back gasping, horribly afraid he’d pulled Mordecai’s legs from his body . . .
“Dammit, Roland, let go, you’re crunching my ankles!”
Roland sat up and let go of Mordecai, who was brushing dirt off himself, spitting sand from his mouth between curses. He seemed embarrassed.
Roland stood, scooping up his shotgun, as Bloodwing landed on Mordecai’s shoulder, affectionately butting his head with its knobby skull and squawking.
“Yeah, Bloodwing, I’m okay.”
“You think they’re gone for now?” Roland asked, looking around.
“I’m not gonna wait around here to see, are you?”
“Hell no.”
“Hey, Roland? Thanks for pulling me outta that hole. I thought I was done for. Most guys would’ve given up on me.”
Roland shrugged. “Let’s find another place to camp.”
• • •
“We still haven’t heard from Cess or the rest of the female cadre, my General,” Smartun said, coming into Gynella’s headquarters.
She was staring at a 3-D holo map of the Salt Flats, which reticulated in the air between them. It tinted her yellowish gold and seemed to impose veins of red on her, as if she were radiating blood.
Gynella switched off the projected map and frowned at him. “Nothing from the women’s cadre? What the fuck. You call them?”
“Broomy’s not responding to a minicom signal. I’ll try Cess.”
She shook her head. “Probably got into trouble. I told them to back off Brick. He might’ve killed them. I’ve got some things to talk to Vialle about—and you may as well go with me. You’ve got to find out about all of this sooner or later.”
“Find out exactly what, my General Goddess?” he asked gently.
She sighed and sat on the edge of the chaise longue, stretching out her long, powerful legs and pouring herself a drink. “We’re on the run from Dahl. I am not sure they’re going to chase us down here—they got kind of discouraged with this planet, from what I heard. But they just might.”
“Something you can . . . clear up with them? Negotiate?”
Gynella shook her head. “We stole technology from them. Highly secret technology they really don’t want out of their hands. Namely the ActiTone mind-control system. Not to mention a big supply of the best humanoid-effective knockout gas in this arm of the galaxy.”
“Ah. I guessed as much. I saw the barrel he was taking the SusDrug from. Marked ‘Dahl.’”
Smartun was doing his best to hide his excitement, but he couldn’t help smiling. She was trusting him with a secret. That meant she’d decided he was important to her, really useful to her. He was a keeper.
“We didn’t know it would work, when we first came here.” Tense with nervous energy, Gynella crossed her legs, sipped her drink, and clicked her talonlike nails together with the other hand. “But we were confident we could knock them out.”
“So you had it all planned before you came to Pandora?” He smiled. “When I met you, you didn’t have an army.”
She had taken up residence in New Haven, without the flamboyant appearance she wore now. Smartun had been a bandit back then, trying to resettle peacefully in New Haven. He’d hired on with her to scout the wilderness, finding bandit camps, nomads, Psychos, marking their positions, their numbers. He’d supposed she worked for one of the interstellar corporations, scouting the area for some mining project. Then she’d summoned him to this outpost. Where he’d found she already had a small army of thugs doing her bidding.
She seemed to like the fact that he didn’t need the SusDrug to be loyal to her.
Gynella nodded. “It was all planned. It’s time you had the full story. We did a computer model, Vialle and I, searching for the most lawless planet in the galaxy, the most social chaos, the most raw possibilities.” She smiled ruefully. “Found more than we bargained for. There’re big potential resources here and some more or less functioning settlements. But out there in the Borderlands, there’s no one but savages, degenerates who used to be men. To me, they were an army of men who didn’t know they were an army, just waiting to be recruited, if only they knew it. I wanted my own planet. And this one seems perfect.”
He waited for her to go on, not wanting to interrupt her when she was in the mood to talk.
“We took your information, picked a camp of bandits,” she said, “made sure they weren’t wearing gas masks, circled it in a hopper—and fired three big knockout shells in. All but two went down. Those I killed, of course.”
He nodded. Of course.
She clinked the ice in her drink against the sides of the glass. “Then we landed, shot them up with the SusDrug, and used a shocker to wake them up. That was fun—they twitched like they were dancing before they came out of it. Vialle gave me the ActiTone—he wanted to activate it, but no damn way I was ever going to let him do that. I want them fixated on me. They came at me. I activated it.”
“Suppose it hadn’t worked? They’d have overrun you.”
“We were on the hopper, ready to take off. They never got that close. I hit the ActiTone, and the big smelly lugs turned into my happy little joyboys! They just fell to their knees and stared at me with their tongues hanging out and . . .” She snapped her fingers. “Now they follow me anywhere. Like lab animals reacting to wires in their brains. You know the score. What bothers me is, does that work over the long term? And what happens if they develop a resistance or when we . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“When you run out of SusDrug. Yes. I’ve wondered about that. What does Vialle say?”
“He says they’ll be conditioned to respond to me anyway by then. We’ll have them brainwashed—their own brains will provide the SusDrug. They’ll feel the ecstasy because they’ll be wired to, and they’ll submit to, me. But I’m just not sure. And now with word that Dahl operatives are slinking around the planet . . .”
Smartun frowned. Dahl had a bad reputation on this planet. “By operatives, my General, you mean . . .”
“Might be a wet team here to assassinate me. Or just some armed scouts. Either way, they’ll want their goods back, and they’ll want me dead. That much is
certain.”
He shrugged, as if he wasn’t worried. “There’s no taking over a planet without making enemies. May as well deal with them now as later. They take enough casualties, they’ll probably decide it’s too expensive to pursue you any further.”
She smiled. “I like that about you. You stay upbeat and loyal. That’s good. I hate whiners.”
He felt a lift in his heart at that. “I’ll be loyal forever, my General.”
She nodded, as if saying, Of course, that’s just how it should be. She put her drink aside and stood up. She was so very tall . . .
“Come on, Smartun, let’s talk to Vialle, see what he’s got for us.”
She led him out of the headquarters office, past her deformed bodyguard, who leaned against the wall outside her chambers muttering unintelligibly to himself.
They walked down the scuffed concrete hall to a door marked in big red stenciled letters:
VIALLE LAB 1
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY IS DEATH
Smartun followed her in, closed the door behind them, and looked around curiously. He had taken the sign on the door seriously and had never seen the lab before.
It was a medium-large rectangular concrete room, chilly and only spottily lit. Two walls were bare, except for a few cluttered shelves. A third wall was a tangle of transparent tubes filled with yellow and red fluid, blipping with bubbles of green and blue gases. There were a couple of rusty, mucky sinks on opposite walls, and the far wall to his right was covered by a single big screen, a flat digital monitor, which glimmered and flashed with intricate biological readings Smartun couldn’t decipher. He assumed the readings related to the semihuman figure floating in the transparent sarcophagus just in front of the screen.
He found he was a little afraid to approach that naked, distorted, armless figure twitching in green fluid.
There was someone else in the room: a Bruiser bandit lying in a kind of trance on a gurney. The Bruiser was an enormous man of exaggerated musculature, bald head, most of his nose missing—it looked as if it had been bitten off. He was naked and grubby, and Smartun could smell him from ten strides away.
Vialle looked up from studying the image his floating lozenge-shaped AI projected onto the translucent plastic table—it was an image of pulsating viscera. The AI module started to follow him as he came toward Gynella. The scientist waved the module back to the table and turned anxiously to the General Goddess. His long, cadaverous face was pensive, although ordinary emotion was hard to read on that skull-like visage: taut blue-tinged skin, sunken eyes, and mossy teeth. Vialle wore a bloodstained white jumpsuit, and he twined his fingers over his crotch as he spoke. “Is it true about Feldsrum, Gynella?”
Vialle was the only one of her followers allowed to call Gynella by her first name.
She nodded curtly. “It is, Vialle. I just got the report in from our operative. I’m afraid our agent isn’t likely to get much farther. They’ve identified him—he’s on the run. I expect they’ll kill him.”
“They’ll interrogate him first if they can.”
“Yes. I paid him well, but money doesn’t buy loyalty.” She glanced at Smartun and smiled knowingly.
He looked at the floor and tried to seem humble.
“So,” Vialle said, wringing his hands and staring into space. “Mince Feldsrum will be here, on this planet, looking for us.”
“Yes,” she said calmly. “Your old boss!” She chuckled.
Smartun cleared his throat. “May I ask who this Feldsrum is?”
She sighed. “He’s underhead of Dahl security. It appears he took our . . . appropriation of Dahl goods a bit personally.”
Vialle snorted. “Naturally! It made him look like a fool. Their most top-secret project, stolen from under his nose.”
Gynella made a wry moue with her mouth. “I think what really infuriated them was when you destroyed the other prototypes.” She clicked her nails thoughtfully on the ActiTone around her neck.
“Feldsrum!” Vialle shivered visible as he spoke the name. “I just never thought they’d come back to this hellhole. He always said they have as little to do with this planet as possible.”
“That’s right. Smartun made a good point in my office: too many Dahl operatives have ended up as skag snacks. It gets expensive. Leave it to me, Vialle. I just thought you should know.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Now, you had a demonstration slated?”
“Hm? Oh, yes, yes.” Vialle walked toward the hulking man on the gurney, rubbing his hands together as he went. The scientist had a curious way of walking when he was bent on a task, leaning forward so far it was odd that gravity didn’t pull him flat on his face.
Vialle wheeled the gurney toward Gynella. The nude, noseless Bruiser on the wheeled table groaned, and his eyelids fluttered.
“You have a new formulation of the SusDrug?” Gynella asked, looking the Bruiser over with distaste.
“Yes indeed. Much more intense—to try to ensure that they don’t fight the effects of the conditioning. After the ActiTone is used, the subject won’t be in this sedated state any longer. You’d better bring your bodyguard in.”
She nodded, went to the door, and summoned Runch. The ponderous, disfigured bodyguard lurched into the room and took up a post behind her, looming protectively, his bulging eyes looking this way and that, his pincer hand convulsively opening and closing. In his human hand he carried a spiked steel club; a sheath on his hip held a sawed-off shotgun. He had a strange, vinegary smell about him.
Vialle charged an air syringe with the new formulation of the drug and immediately injected it into the Bruiser’s arm.
The Bruiser gurgled deep in his throat, and his eyes popped open. Runch took a good grip on his spiked club.
The General Goddess took a step back from Vialle’s human guinea pig; she put a hand on her pendant and twisted the knob, with her other hand pointing at the Bruiser—though that was unnecessary. It was pure habitual stagecraft.
The ActiTone chimed and vibrated, and the Bruiser, primed with the new supercharged SusDrug, arched his back and let out a long, pealing shriek of mixed delight and terror. His arms flapped, his fists banged on the gurney, and his sexual organ pointed, very suddenly, with what Smartun could’ve sworn was a twanging sound effect, straight at the ceiling.
“Whoa,” Gynella said, taking another step back.
The Bruiser began to claw at himself, giggling. Then he laughed madly, snapping his head back and forth, pummeling his feet on the gurney, until his long-nailed, probing fingers dug deeply into his own skin, and deeper yet, till they burst through, ripping a wound that spurted blood into the air. But he seemed to feel no pain; he kept tittering with mad laughter, every vein in his taut skin standing up, throbbing, his semen staining the ceiling even as his liquefying entrails burst like an oil-well geyser from the rent in his belly, his intestines and inner organs whipping up like eager creatures of the deep sea, eels snapping at their prey.
It didn’t stop there. His outsides buckled and folded under; his insides expressed through the widening wound, muscle, bone, and organs bursting out to declare themselves to the world.
Viscera exploded; blood fountained; bones crackled and flew apart . . .
And the Bruiser turned completely inside out.
Smartun backed away, gagging, and rushed to the nearest sink and vomited so thoroughly and furiously he was afraid he was heaving his own guts out. Then he thought of his Goddess and turned to see that Gynella was all right. She was standing well out of the way of the expanding puddle of shattered entrail matter and blood, shaking her head sadly.
“Oh, that’s not a good outcome at all, Vialle,” she said, seeming only mildly annoyed. “I don’t like to criticize, but I do think the dosage might’ve been too strong.”
Vialle nodded mutely.
A minute passed as the thing on the gurney shuddered, occasionally spouting blood and fecal matter and bile, and at last settled down. It quivered a few times more and subsided into mushy inertn
ess.
There was silence then, except for the drip-drip-drip of blood from the gurney. They stared at the bloody wreckage of the Bruiser.
“Ah, well,” Vialle said at last, handing Runch a mop. “I suppose I’d better tweak the new formula just a tad.”
“Now this,” Mordecai said, as the dawn broke and the sun speared them with new light, “is a good, peaceful campsite. I had a decent rest. We should remember this one, Roland.”
Mordecai was sitting on a rock by the smoking remains of their campfire, which was in the center of the stony, craterlike hilltop. They’d found the campsite a few klicks southwest of the hill where the varkids had tried to make dinner of them. The rocky rim of the hilltop gave them a little cover; there were a couple of outcroppings, too, and three big, stumpy, green growths, side by side, looking like something between trees and cacti and almost as hard as rock. The growths cast long shadows that striped across the camp in the morning sun.
“Where’s Bloodwing?” Roland asked, as he packed his Scorpio turret into the back of the outrunner. They’d had the self-aiming machine gun set up, watching over them all night long.
“Feeding somewhere,” Mordecai said, standing and stretching. “On something. Or somebody. Ah—here he comes. Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?” Roland asked, looking around for his shotgun.
“I don’t like the way he’s flapping his wings—and the way he’s screeching.”
“What’s he trying to say?”
“Not sure yet.”
Bloodwing screeched again.
Roland snorted. “Like you can tell anything from that.”
“Actually—” He looked around. “That sound like an outrunner engine to you?”
Roland listened. “Some kind of engine. Where’s it coming from?”
Mordecai pointed confidently to the south. “Way off that way. To the south. Can’t be very close.”
But it wasn’t an outrunner, it was an outrider, a low-slung hot-rod-like vehicle with the skulls of beasts for its fenders, and it came from the north, so close it was already there, jumping the edge of the crater of the hilltop as if it was a ramp. It came down with a crash in between Mordecai and Roland. Broomy jumped off, a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, as Cess spun the outrider in a tight circle, trying to run Mordecai down.
