by John Shirley
Even from there, Daphne could see the medallion vibrating, could hear the weird chime emanated from it. The men fell to their knees, writhing, foaming at the mouth, clawing at their crotches in sensual rapture, many of them reaching orgasm—judging by the bucking of their hips—and all of them ecstatic. She noticed that Flugg and Skenk seemed unaffected; they stood and watched the others impassively. Doubtless the “goddess” needed them to keep their wits—probably she gave them their “blessings” in private. Could be they had to be specially treated first.
Watching the writhing Psychos, Daphne shook her head. “Wow,” she muttered to herself. “Where do I get one of those medallions?”
Panting, the men gradually settled down, and Flugg walked around them, growling commands, occasionally smacking someone with a gun butt, bullying them back into some semblance of order. At last he gestured to Skenk, who pushed a prisoner out ahead of him, a medium-sized Psycho walking clumsily in his ankle shackles. The prisoner, looking blearily around, was without his mask or helmet; there was a bloody crater where his right eye had been.
The prisoner was brought to within ten paces of Gynella, and then he was halted by Skenk. The bald, one-eyed prisoner cocked his head to focus his single remaining eye on her, and he swallowed, over and over, licking his lips between swallows.
“Goddess,” he whined. “Goddess!” He began to shuffle toward her, stretching out shaking hands.
“Stop!” Gynella ordered, giving him a wilting look.
He stopped, blinking his single eye in confusion.
“This one!” She pointed at the prisoner, shouting to her men. “This one tried to touch me at the last blessing. Normally I would simply have killed him, but this time I’ve saved him . . . to show you something special! A quick death is too good for a man who breaks my rules! Watch and learn what happens to those who do not keep a proper distance from their General. See what becomes of a soldier who does not respect what is sacred!”
She turned to the prisoner. “So—you want a blessing from me, do you?” she asked him.
He gaped and then nodded slowly. “Goddess . . . Goddess . . . touch you . . . touch!”
Gynella’s eyes gleamed; her teeth flashed in a cold smile. She pointed a finger at him, her other hand twisting the medallion. “You wish to feel me? Then feel this!”
His back arched. She kept pointing, kept turning the ring on the medallion, staring at him. He bucked in ecstasy—and then a look of sickened horror came over his face. His entire body quivered like a plucked wire. He screamed, “No, Goddess . . . no!”
His hands ripped at his belly; blood spurted from a gash just above his navel, and then it erupted. His innards exploded from the gash, and he fell onto his back; his body contorted, and his skin seemed to have a will of its own, wriggling away from him, as if he were a hideous gift unwrapping itself. His mottled intestines whipped up and flailed in the air; his bones jolted from the widening wound and snapped upward.
As Daphne watched, the man turned inside out. And still he lived. He was beyond screaming, and yet his agony could be felt vibrating in the air, at some pitch higher than men could hear.
The Psychos watched in a kind of sick fascination, almost seeming to enjoy this nightmarish death. Gynella turned to them. “So, you like that, do you? Would you like it to happen to you? Is that what you want?”
The men began to fall to their knees, some of them kowtowing, slamming their heads to the dirt in obeisance. “No, Goddess, no! Please . . . We will respect . . .”
The smell of the man who’d turned inside out rolled across the open ground to Daphne . . . the smell of feces and blood and ruptured tissues.
She turned away and retched.
A few moments later, when she had herself under control again, Daphne heard the sound of footsteps. She turned to see Gynella strolling up to her cage, hands on hips; Runch followed close behind her.
Gynella stopped a step beyond the steel-link fence and looked imperiously down at Daphne.
“Do you know why you are still alive?” Gynella asked, her voice pitched low.
Daphne shrugged. “The way I heard it, I’m part of a show.”
“Oh yes, there’s that, but I wanted to make sure you lived till I could watch you die in person. You see, I know who you are. And I know what you did.”
Daphne’s heart sank. “You . . . are from the guild of assassins?”
“No. I have my own reasons for wanting you here. For wanting to see you debased. To see you slowly—very slowly—put to death.”
Daphne’s heart thudded, but she set her expression of cool defiance in stone. “Yeah? Going to share your reasons for wanting that?”
Gynella licked her lips, just once. “You are Daphne Kuller. And you assassinated Merritt Granick.”
Daphne considered denying she’d done the hit. But this woman seemed so convinced she’d probably found proof.
Daphne waved airily. “Granick was a mass murderer. A crime lord. I killed him because his rivals wanted to take over his territory. It was just another job. What of it?”
“Oh, nothing. Except that Merritt Granick was my husband. The only man in the galaxy who could possibly be worthy of me. And you killed him. You are the creepy-crawly little assassin who snuck past his defense system. You shot him from hiding, with a poison dart, like the sneaking little coward you are.”
“He died quick and clean.” Daphne nodded toward the mess that used to be a human being out in the center of the coliseum field. “Not like that. I would never kill like that. I take pride in doing a good, clean job. But that—what you did, lady—is sick.”
“Is it?” Gynella favored her with a twisted smile. “That’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you. And it’s going to happen this very day, Daphne. Enjoy the show . . .”
“We’re gonna need transportation, now that you got yours blown up, like the genius you are,” Mordecai pointed out. “There’s no Catch-a-Ride station around here.”
Bloodwing squawked in agreement.
Roland nodded. “That’s why we’re in the cemetery.”
“Somebody buried an outrunner?”
“Funny. You’re gonna win us an outrunner.” It was almost high noon in the Jawbone Ridge cemetery. A thin breeze blew scraps of paper through the grave markers.
“Cemeteries,” Mordecai remarked, looking around. “There are so many on this planet. More graves on this planet than living people.”
Roland heard engine noise, spotted the outrunner he was waiting for, showing up right on time. “Here he comes!”
The outrunner came rumbling down the dirt access road and pulled up. A big man jumped out of the driver’s seat. He wore a red leather helmet, red goggles, a scarred black sleeveless leather vest that showed off his muscular arms. The man reached into the back of the outrunner, drew out an Atlas combat rifle, then strutted confidently toward Roland and Mordecai. As he came he bared his teeth—more of a feral challenge than a smile, his teeth coated in metal. That was a fashion around Jawbone Ridge, getting your teeth coated with steel. Roland didn’t get the appeal, although it probably helped if you had to bite somebody’s ear off.
“Mordecai, this is Gumble,” Roland said. “I know him from New Haven. Ran into him today while you were buying ammo.”
“Ammo for that?” asked Gumble, scowling at Mordecai’s Cobra combat rifle. “Kind of a worn-out-looking piece of junk you got there.”
“Once I get to know a gun, it works for me,” Mordecai said, sounding bored. “And I know this one. You got some kind of competition in mind, Roland?”
“If you’re game for it, Mordecai. Target shooting! You win, we get the outrunner. He wins, we pay him ten grand.”
Mordecai’s eyes widened. They didn’t have ten grand, as Roland well knew.
“You are out of your mind, Roland,” Mordecai said, in a low voice behind his hand.
“I’ve got faith in you, is all.”
Gumble looked Mordecai up and down. He snorted
. “This guy is a better shot than me? He looks like the recoil of a decent gun’d knock him flat on his ass.”
Mordecai pushed his goggles back and stared at Gumble. Then his eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared.
Bloodwing made a gravelly heh heh heh sound deep in its throat.
Roland chuckled. He knew he had Mordecai hooked now.
“Let’s do this,” Mordecai said, between clenched teeth.
There was an open grave someone had started and not quite finished; above it was a grave marker made from planks that had no name on it yet.
Roland reached into his open jacket, pulled out a poster he’d torn from a fence in town. The poster had a large picture of Gynella looking like an empress, smiling regally, a rifle in one hand like a scepter. Above the picture were the words:
THE GENERAL GODDESS
WILL BRING PEACE
TO ALL THE WORLD
JOIN HER
AND MARCH TO GLORY!
“Ha, look at that!” Mordecai said. “Pretty propaganda!”
Roland hung the poster on the grave marker, using a couple of nails sticking out from it.
He stepped back and nodded. “You’ll shoot for targets on the poster. Shoot out the O’s in ‘Goddess’ and ‘Glory.’ And, say, her eyes.” He turned and pointed. “Take your shots from way back there. Far as you can go and still see the targets. No sniper rifles, of course—just standard combat rifles. Single-shot setting.”
Gumble snorted. “Is that all? Hell, I could shorten her eyelashes for her. Let’s do this. And start counting that money out!”
Mordecai turned and stalked back, back, back, away from the open grave and the target, Gumble following. Roland moved to one side of the grave, well out of the line of fire.
“Hold it, hold it,” Gumble said, when he’d gone so far Mordecai couldn’t make out the words on the poster at all anymore. “We gotta get close enough to shoot at those O’s and all that.”
“This is close enough,” Mordecai said calmly. “How about another twenty paces farther?”
He kept going, and Gumble reluctantly came along. At last Mordecai turned and looked at the target. “You want to shoot first, Gumble?”
Gumble muttered something inaudible, shook his head, but set his Atlas combat rifle to single shot, adjusted the sights, raised it, tucked it into his shoulder, and squinted. “I’ll go for the top O and two of her eyes.”
He took a long breath. He licked his lips.
He fired. Once. Twice. Three times. The cemetery echoed with the gunshots.
Mordecai shouted to Roland. “Well?”
“He hit her around the navel once!” Roland shouted. “The other two missed the poster, just chipped the marker!”
“Bullshit!” Gumble snapped. He strode quickly back to the grave marker. Mordecai waited behind.
Gumble stared. Roland was right. “Bah!” Gumble grumbled. “No one could do any better from that range.”
Roland shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out. Let Mordecai have his shot.”
Gumble drew back, with Roland, out of the line of fire. Roland waved.
Mordecai pushed back his goggles, aimed his Cobra, and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. The gunshots echoed.
Roland looked at the poster. Mordecai had punched out Gynella’s eyes and the first O in the text.
“What the—!” Gumble yelled. “Fakery! He’s using some kinda secret sniper scope, maybe had his eyes altered! Cheat! It’s a cheat!”
Mordecai walked slowly toward Gumble.
Gumble shook his fist at Mordecai. “I’m telling you, I know when I’ve been cheated! You used some kind of electronic cheat! I don’t know how you did it, but you did it!”
Mordecai kept coming.
“You’re not getting away with this!” Gumble bellowed.
Mordecai walked up to Gumble and Roland. He calmly handed Roland his rifle. Then he took four steps back from Gumble. “You have a pistol on your hip there, Gumble. Drop the rifle. Then take your time. And go for that pistol. I don’t take accusations of cheating lightly. You can examine my rifle, and you can examine me. I didn’t cheat.” He looked Gumble in the eye and said, carefully, “I’m just . . . plain . . . better . . . than you are.”
Gumble glared. “What? You’re challenging me to a gunfight?”
Mordecai shrugged. “You could always hand Roland the key to your outrunner and . . . walk away.”
Gumble shook with barely suppressed rage. “So you cheat me, and now you think you’re gonna kill me when my back’s turned! Well, you’ve got a little surprise coming. And I’m gonna send that surprise right through your heart, you little prick!”
“Talk is cheap,” Mordecai said calmly.
Gumble took two slow steps to his right, sidling so he and Mordecai were face-to-face.
“Wait a minute,” Roland said. “Let’s make this clean and fast. No shields.”
Gumble frowned. “He turns his off first.”
Mordecai switched off his shield. Gumble licked his lips, glanced at Roland, who hefted the Cobra combat rifle meaningfully. Gumble swallowed and switched off his shield. Then he looked at Mordecai. And prepared himself for a kill.
Mordecai’s hand hovered near the pistol on his hip. He had equipped himself with a Dahl Anaconda revolver early that morning, bought from a Jawbone Ridge weapons dealer. But he didn’t touch the gun yet. He simply kept his hand near the butt of the pistol, watched Gumble, and waited.
The big man in the red helmet let his fingers slide over the butt of his Hyperion Lightning Nemesis . . .
And then Gumble snatched it up—
Mordecai was already leveling his revolver. He fired two neat shots, so fast they almost blended together.
Gumble’s eyes vanished, replaced with bloody pits. The bullets went right through his eyes and into his brain. He swayed. And fell backward . . .
. . . into the open grave.
Roland nodded. He’d never doubted the outcome. He knelt by the grave, reached down, fished in Gumble’s pockets, found the key to the outrunner. Then he stood up and kicked a little dirt over Gumble. “Well, that’s buried enough. What the hell, the trash feeders have to eat too.”
He looked at Mordecai, who was replacing his gun in its holster and walking toward the outrunner. “Nice shooting, Mordecai. I didn’t know you could fast-draw.”
“Neither did I.”
• • •
The day was wearing away, Daphne saw. Soon the moon would rise. The lights would flare up around the coliseum. The show would begin.
Brick was awake and alert. They’d given him some Dr. Zed, and some food. Not enough to get him back to full strength but enough to make for a good show.
She waved to Brick, who was standing in another cage, about ten meters to the right of hers. He glanced at her and winked. “Wait’ll I get my hands on ’em!” he called. His fingers were clutching at the metal link, and he fell to examining it. She supposed he was thinking about tearing through that fence. But she knew what it was—molecularly reinforced steel. You couldn’t break through it without a nuclear flamecutter.
Brick tried anyway, squeezing the metal links with his powerful fingers. To her surprise she saw it bend—but it held, and when he released it, it snapped into place, just as it had been before.
Brick shook his head. He wasn’t going to have the initiative.
“Another couple hours,” came the rawboned voice to Daphne’s left.
She looked, knowing who she’d see: Broomy, leering at her with yellow, snagged teeth.
“What do you want, you pathetic old cow?” Daphne asked mildly.
Broomy laughed. “Keep it up, girlie! We’ll see how brave you talk when they start in on you. Do you know what they’re going to do? After Brick is killed by the Goliath, why, they’re gonna chain you down on that Brick’s dead body! And they’re gonna let the Goliath rip into you and pull you apart and—”
“I’ve already had the preview on that, thanks. Charming stuff.”<
br />
“Soon, girlie! Soon! When the moon rises, the fight commences!”
“Suppose Brick wins?”
“Against a Goliath? It’ll never happen! But if it did, why—” She laughed. “They’ll kill him with four or five rocket launchers! And they’ll chain you down on what’s left of him and then—”
“Right. You already mentioned that. Have I mentioned, by the way, that I’ll kill you . . . before the moon sets?”
“Ho ho ho! Keep telling yourself that, little girlie!”
And Broomy walked away, laughing.
• • •
The outrunner was bumping and grinding through the raw countryside in the dusk. There was a thin trail, winding along between outcroppings. They were following the southern edge of the Salt Flats, heading west.
Roland came upon a sudden small gulley where they glimpsed a big, armored badmutha skag they wanted no part of. He accelerated around the gulley away from the skag and its whelps as fast as Gumble’s beat-up old outrunner would go.
He looked over his shoulder at Mordecai, who was standing at the machine-gun turret. Mordecai swung the turret around to watch their backs and sent a judicious burst of machine-gun rounds into the badmutha skag just then leaping up to pursue them. It was a big, bristly creature, like an oversized armored wolf with trisected jaws. The burst didn’t take the badmutha out but discouraged it, along with their outdistancing it with the outrunner, and the skag turned away.
Roland looked back at the faint trail up ahead just in time to avoid smashing headlong into an outcropping of stone.
“Hey, Roland!” Mordecai shouted, over the engine noise. “We on track to get to the Eridian Promontory?”
“Yeah, if we don’t have to detour too far around that bunch of Psychos playing soldier!”
“We need to get there, harvest some crystalisks, load up on Eridium, and get the hell to Fyrestone!”
Roland chuckled. He knew it wouldn’t be that easy. And suppose they found a lot of Eridium? How would they move it? Not in this outrunner. They’d need to hijack a truck somewhere.
“Roland?”
“What?”
“You notice anything tracking us, in the sky?”
