by Dave Stone
Abruptly, the rumbling from the Ship changed in tone, and added several extra harmonics to the mix. Eddie had been around enough vehicles, of various types, in his life to recognise that several key systems had just cut in. The Ship was in the process of prepping for actual flight.
Eddie Kalish had not the slightest idea what might happen to him, should a starship from the future, or the past, or from some weird dimension of wherever the fuck it was, decided to take off in an enclosed space with him standing right beside it—and it was the considered opinion of one Eddie Kalish that he was fucked if he was gonna wait to find out. He scrambled through the wreckage and sloshed and crunched his way through the detritus of shelled and emptied heads to the alcoves leading to the emergency maintenance shafts—only to find them filled with quick-drying concrete.
The concrete was still vaguely sludgy, but not so much that there would be any possible way through it. When the US Army Engineering Corps start throwing construction materials around, they don’t dick about.
Behind him, the rumbling of the Ship cranked up another notch and became a positive roar.
One chance left, then.
The pylons and the cogwheel rack that had respectively stabilised and given purchase for the main elevator platform were a scorched and buckled, collapsed mess, but he was able to haul himself up on them to gain some height.
Hanging from the elevator shaft itself, in the roof of the cavern, was a length of gear-chain that remained from the mechanism that had lowered the canisters of the Brain Train’s cargo.
Eddie Kalish launched himself for it desperately, brushed the chain with his outflung fingers and fell back—flat-foot boosted himself against the remains of a crumpled stanchion, managed somehow to get his hand round the chain and then clung on for dear life.
(And it was only later, yet again, that he would work out the various distances and dynamics, and realise that what he had done was physically impossible. He was really going to have to get a handle on that, he thought later—work out the limits of what his Loup-informed body was really able to do, if only to stop all this waking up in a cold sweat the night after he did stuff.)
Eddie hauled himself up to get a purchase with his other hand, wondering if he really had it in him to make it up the shaft by way of a gear chain that was already slicing into him.
Below him, the roar from the Ship ramped up yet again.
Problem solved. Eddie climbed.
24.
Colonel Roland Grist sat on the floor in Arbitrary Base Tactical Command, looking down numbly at the liquid seeping numbly out across the carpet from between his legs.
The liquid, it must be said, was actually the better part of a bottle of Wild Turkey, his fourth in the space of twenty-four hours, which had slipped from his fingers, with which he was currently and unaccountably having some degree of trouble.
Oh, well. He had probably had enough by this point anyway. He still had other bottles salted away in his quarters. And the smell of it helped to counteract the smell of the piss.
One step leading to another. Step by logical step. How could things have gotten so far out of hand so fast? How had it all turned into shit?
The Desoto girl humiliating him the day before had been nothing new to Grist; he had, after all spent the best part of a decade in a state of humiliation.
Jealousy amongst the powers that be in the Pentagon, that’s what it was. Following his successes in Madagascar back in ’09, including the depersonalization and deforestation of the entire island, the powers that be spotted his rising star and decided to slap it down out of hand. Dishonourable discharge they’d called it, not that Grist could see anything dishonourable in using a little napalm to sort out a problem with local insurgents. How can you make an omelette if you can’t break a few eggs?
Following his court martial, the CNG had welcomed him with open arms and allowed him to carry over his army rank of colonel. He had been appointed in Command of Arbitrary Base (Fort Dix, as it was) and its complement of intercontinental ballistic missiles, each capable of wiping out a major city, halfway around the globe in any direction you might like. Half a century before, with actual superpowers standing off under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, that might have been a big deal.
The fact was, however, that by the turn of the twenty-first century, the dynamic of global conflict was shifting irrevocably to the smaller scale. Police actions and surgical incursions were the way to go—and in none of these was there any sensible scenario involving the annihilation of entire major cities.
Grist had become, as the Desoto girl had reminded him, nothing more than a glorified caretaker, taking care of stuff until such a time as there might be a need for it again—and when that time came, of course, the stuff would be taken from him. He wouldn’t even get a go with the button.
Then again, as if in response to their general insignificance to the world, advances in technology had refined the stopping-power of an ICBM into something that could be carried on the back of a roller skate. And while people are forever saying that it’s not the size, it’s what you do with it that counts, that’s a fucking lie and they know it. When Colonel Grist had contemplated the relative size of his arsenal, it couldn’t but have him feeling like a dickless fuck.
And as if to add insult to injury, the jokers had informed him that he was responsible for a subterranean chamber containing what they called the Artefact. Extraterrestrial in origin, they said. Most important thing in the world they said. Second only to the… thing that the Roswell Incident was invented to deflect attention from, they said.
And Grist had believed them. They had seemed so serious about it. Grist had taken up his new post almost bursting with pride… and then gone down the Shed Seven shaft to find nothing but a disused weapons repository. Nothing inside whatsoever. His superiors had been ripping the piss out of him. Laughing at him behind his back.
They were doing that little twirly thing with a finger to the ear, too, in his mind.
Grist had decided, then and there, looking at nothing whatsoever, that he’d be jiggered if he was going to be the one to crack first. For a decade he had played along, each status report on this so-called Artefact adding another little drop of acid to his soul. The only thing that had kept him going was the knowledge that the bastards in the Pentagon knew he knew, and was playing them at their own game, and that it must be driving them completely bugshit.
Evidently, it was working. Now they had stepped up the ante—sending in a bunch of GenTech civilians to rub it in and mock him. Acting as if the so-called Artefact existed and was of supreme importance. Doing it all to mock him and watch him squirm.
There was absolutely no other explanation, given that the so-called Artefact simply didn’t exist.
Grist had decided to let them get on with their little farce, and left them to it. Screw ‘em, frankly. He was just going to go off and get tanked.
After a day and light of miserable drinking in his quarters, however, something had snapped. He just wasn’t going to take it anymore. He could see the way before him clearly.
He had gathered together those of his men who he knew, so far as such things can be known, were not in on the so-called Artefact joke, and informed them that Special Forces Intelligence had reported that these GenTech guys were in fact impostors—here to secure the Arbitrary Base nuclear arsenal in the name of New Congolese Vengeance. He had ordered his men to take them down with all necessary force.
He’d always been good at making stuff up off the top of his head like that, and sending his guys in on the basis if it. It had reminded him of the good old days.
Of course, he could never have anticipated how the GenTech guys responded to an attack. How the hell would a bunch of play-actors and practical jokers be so well trained and armed? There was just no way it made sense.
And then, of course, there were the filthy traitors, who had refused to follow orders. Fortunately, before ordering those he trusted to attack the Ge
nTech team, Grist had contrived to secure those he did not fully trust in their barracks huts, where a number of time-delayed cyanide capsules had taken care of the problem nicely, thank you very much. Problem solved.
Unfortunately, one could not be expected to think of everything.
With the GenTech team fighting back so unexpectedly against his troops, and the Arbitrary Base compound dissolving into chaos, Grist had decided that his proper place was to be here in Tactical Command. He had arrived here, though, to find it guarded by one of his lieutenants, a Lieutenant Butcher, who had promptly attempted to take him into custody. Him!
Then things had gotten just a little bit confused. It was probably the drink. The next thing Grist knew he was sitting here, the entire left side of his head throbbing with pain, and he was somehow holding Butcher’s sidearm.
The body of Butcher lay before him, as it did now, with its head quite comprehensively blown off.
Grist couldn’t remember firing the gun even once, let alone enough times as it would take to inflict the damage done to Butcher. He simply had no memory of it. The term “psychotic cleavage” surfaced through his sodden mind. Then he forgot it.
Now Grist staggered to his feet. Something detonated outside. The ground shook. It was time for action, and he was just the guy to take it.
The control panels in Tactical Command gave direct access to the SNARKs off in their silo-racks. That was the stuff to give ‘em. Make the damn Congolese pay.
Through a combination of drink, psychosis and concussion sustained during his struggle with Butcher, Colonel Grist had simply forgotten that his hastily-invented lie about the New Congolese Vengeance terrorists was a fabrication. There had been a terrorist attack on US soil and the bastards responsible were going to pay!
It occurred to Grist, though, that he might need command-code clearance before proceeding with the launch. Fortunately, Tactical Command had a satellite-hotline overriding any lockdown or communications-blackout procedure.
Grist grabbed the handset. “Get me c-in-c Special Services Operations now,” he barked.
“This is Special Services Operations at the Pentagon.” A chirpy recorded voice said. “If you require our humanitarian intervention in a territorial, religious or political dispute, please press one. If you wish to report an alleged atrocity carried out in the name of Uncle Sam by our boys overseas, please press two. For all other services, please hold the line.”
And then the handset, for some reason, began playing the Village People singing ‘In the Navy’. Colonel Roland Grist stood to attention, handset to his ear, and waited for it to stop.
Eddie Kalish hauled himself from the elevator shaft. The Shed that had enclosed it was gone, at least in terms of being a Shed, having been converted to twisted scraps of metal sheeting spread over quite some area.
The compound of Arbitrary Base, likewise, had been converted to a battlefield devastation of twisted, burning bodies and wreckage. Eddie was reminded of the attempted hijacking of the Road Train, back when he had first met Trix Desoto—but ramped up to the nth degree. Military-spec weaponry and tactics versus the enhanced defences and armaments GenTech had brought along for this operation.
The Mobile Command Centre was totalled. Everybody Eddie could see was dead. There were rather less soldiers than he remembered among the corpses—and this gave Eddie Kalish pause for thought. If there were less dead soldiers then that meant, of course, that there was a better chance of living ones still knocking about.
Eddie made his way through the wreckage, senses alive for any sight or sound of movement or life, ready to cut and run at any moment.
It was a bit depressing, now he came to thing of it, that his life contrived to place him in this precise situation over and over again. He wondered if there was somebody he could complain to about it.
In the end, as it happened, he found a sign of life—but from a different and unexpected direction, and far less welcome than even some surviving Delta Marine with an M37 and an attitude about how many of his friends had been killed would have been. There was a roar overhead and a VTOL descended like the wrath of God—if God had happened to have access to next-generation VTOL technology and was really, really pissed off.
The craft was of a somewhat different design to the GenTech flyer that Eddie had encountered in Little Deke’s junk yard, which had transported a squad of operatives who had ended shooting Eddie stone cold dead.
This was not exactly comforting in that it was built on the basis of several streamlined polycarbon helium-pontoons to give it positive lift, and multidirectional turbines that could move it in any direction it liked, and do it fast.
The upshot was that the thing was damn huge, and looked like it was the sort of thing that could carry tanks. Stencilled prominently on its underside—in accordance with the convention in what might be called the Corporate Wars that those involved in overt action must tell their immediate opponent just who the hell they are—was the logo:
NeoGen
“Oh great,” said Eddie, looking up at it. “What are the fucking odds?”
25.
The NeoGen VTOL banked in the air and, as a matter of first principles, took out Arbitrary Base Tactical Command with a couple of well-aimed Exocets. This was rather more fortunate than otherwise, in the general human scheme of things, since Colonel Roland Grist had at that precise moment grown tired of listening to the Village People singing “In the Navy” and was on the point of launching the SNARKs just for the hell of it.
The Confederated Republics of the Congo would never know how lucky they were—though due to their current problems with an entirely other arm of the US Military, it is doubtful that they would have even noticed.
Now the NeoGen VTOL descended, ejecting what at first sight appeared to be bulky, ape-like forms, each twice the size of an ordinary man. They hit the ground and advanced—not lumbering but at an incongruously brisk double-time pace.
Eddie Kalish, cowering behind the overturned remains of a portable latrine-pod, set up by GenTech the very instant they had seen the military-pristine but military-basic state of the sanitation in Arbitrary Base, stared at these advancing forms… and the Loup took the opportunity to drop yet another piece of useful information into his head.
“Oh shit…” he muttered to himself. “NeoGen have Faction backing, too.”
As if in direct confirmation of his supposition, an amplified voice began to blare from the VTOL:
“HEY, LISTEN UP, YOU GUYS,” it blared. “WE REALLY, REALLY, WHEN IT GETS RIGHT DOWN TO IT, DON’T WANNA DO THIS THING WITH ALL THE FUSSIN’ AND THE FIGHTIN’. IT’S JUST SO BAD FOR THE KARMA AND IT ALL GETS SO SCREWED UP, YOU KNOW? TELL YOU WHAT, WHY NOT TAKE SOME MELLOW-TIME, GIVE US THE HAMMER OF GOD AND THEN WE… GUYS?”
There was the amplified sound of a hand being placed over a microphone and the subdued mumble of conversation. Then:
“HEY, LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE ALL DEAD. HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? AH WELL, FUCK ‘EM. GO AND GET THE THING SECURE, GUYS.”
This, presumably, directed at the power-armoured soldiers, who now changed course to head directly to the mouth of the Shed Seven elevator shaft. And, incidentally, almost exactly to the point where one Eddie Kalish was hiding.
Then things went from bad to worse.
Trix Desoto lurched through the tubes of the Ship, reconfiguring the final nodes.
Electrical activity thrashed and stuttered around her, racking up by increments with every Node she passed. The pulsing roar of the Ship around her acquired harmonic after harmonic, until in the end it seemed like nothing more nor less than white noise—every audible frequency was filled, in the same way that a cough can momentarily drown out every other voice in a crowded room.
She had long since lost the clean-room polymer coveralls, and for that matter all but a scrap of the clothing beneath. The Loup inside her was desperately attempting to compensate for the increased activity of the Ship. It constantly formed and reformed her, so that one secon
d she might look like nothing more than a naked and extremely well-muscled girl, the next a twisted, hulking horror.
As she approached the Core, the frequency and severity of the transitions increased, to the point where the flesh of her body seemed to haze around her bones.
Now, at last, she stood before the Core.
Disappointingly enough, it was not exactly impressive. It was simply a hole in the world. An obloidular portal, hanging in the air, leading to… not blackness, but absolute nothingness. A void waiting to be filled.
A mouth waiting to be fed.
The malformed hazing mouth of Trix Desoto attempted to form words. “Brought you something,” she managed in a guttural slur. “Brought you something nice. Something nice for your mouth.”
She attempted to open the case she held. In her transforming and retransforming state, she had a bit of trouble with the catches, and ended up having to literally tear it open.
Inside was a customised and somewhat complicated piece of medical equipment: a number of articulated blades and hooks controlled by way of a pair of handles. It was, basically, a rib-spreader so contrived that the user could operate upon his or herself.
And this is what Trix Desoto proceeded to do.
Or, at least, this is what she attempted to do. The blades of the spreader hit her Loup-transforming chest and shattered.
“Shit,” said Trix Desoto.
Up in the Arbitrary Base compound, Eddie Kalish was sharing a similar sentiment, although the language was somewhat more extreme.
“Fuck me backwards…” he muttered as the armoured NeoGen troops advanced. It could only be a matter of seconds before one of them spotted him, racked out his big Multi-Function Gun and blew his head off.
Possibly, he should have thought to liberate a weapon from the GenTech team or a dead US trooper. Not that it would have done the slightest good, of course. It would just have been nice to have an actual prop when he went, “Look, I’m dropping my weapon, please don’t kill me!”
