Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  Eddie Kalish decided that, at this point, he had two choices:

  1) He could stay exactly where he was and wait for some power-armoured NeoGen trooper to spot him, when he was almost certainly going to be automatically shot on sight.

  Or:

  2) He could make his presence known, and hope that a generally weaselly but inoffensive demeanour might keep him alive long enough to actually surrender. If they didn’t just automatically shoot him on sight.

  While the first option had the advantage that he didn’t have to do anything about it, Eddie decided that, on the whole, the second might be the safer option. Moving as slowly and unthreateningly as he could, he clambered out from behind the latrine pot and stuck his empty hands in the air.

  “Hey guys?” he called. “I’m… uh… a non-combatant, here! Is there, like any way we can—“

  Automatic fire stitched into the ground before him, and Eddie dived back behind the latrine pod. Oh, well. It had been a long shot at best. The only thing for it, he supposed, was to go about preparing himself for death.

  He wondered how you were supposed to go about the business of doing something like that. The number of times he’d had to do that lately, in his life, he really should have gotten around to asking someone. Maybe there was a pamphlet or something.

  In any case, judging by the radio-static garbled orders now being barked to the advancing NeoGen troops, it didn’t make any odds. Death was coming, and coming now, whether Eddie Kalish was prepared for it or not.

  In the Core of the Ship, Trix Desoto dropped the surgical device and swore an oath so vile that it, if she were Catholic, would have her saying Hail Marys until the end of time.

  She stood there for a moment, gazing into the hole of the Core with burning eyes, her transmutating flesh seething and sliding around her bones.

  Then she took one clawlike hand, and plunged it into her chest. Clenched the talons around what it found there and wrenched it out.

  There was surprisingly little blood. The explosion of fluid seemed to be more plasmic in nature—plasma such as you would find on the burning surface of a star.

  The thing she now held, in what once had been her hand, might have once been, on the crude and merely physical level, her heart.

  Transformed, now, folding into itself at some direction from a right-angle to reality and constantly changing form. Now an abstract representation, like the cartoon-love heart one might find on a particularly saccharine and sickly Valentines’ card.

  Now a homunculus—a little thing not shaped precisely like a human being, but capturing in its form every abstract aspect of what a human being was.

  Now a glowing sigil that would be meaningless to any and every other human being on the planet—the sign of the secret, sacred and unique name that is carved on the heart of every living and self-aware thing…

  Trix Desoto held her burning heart up to the Core.

  “For you,” she said, perfectly calm and lucid despite her Loup-transforming state. “For your mouth.”

  With the last of her strength, she plunged the heart into the Core.

  An explosion of energies and activity that made all those previous pale by comparison. The chamber of the Core lurched.

  The Ship woke up.

  26.

  The Hammer of God had lain dormant for longer than humans could imagine. There had been no sense of time passing for her, however, not even in dreams. No activity inside her at all.

  Then, very recently in the galactic-level scheme of things, something had changed. The dreams had started. Consciousnesses from the outside had started to impinge.

  Secondary, autonomic systems within the Hammer of God had started themselves up, scanned the biological consciousnesses outside for a sense of comprehension as to the nature and function of the Hammer of God itself. Looking for the equivalent of activation codes.

  They’d found nothing. Confused images in biological heads that the autonomic systems simply failed to understand.

  And then, quite suddenly, biological consciousnesses had come along who recognised the Hammer of God for what it was.

  This had been just barely sufficient to activate systems on another level, shifting from the dead black darkness of what was, basically, a coma to the shifting semi-sentience of dreams.

  The Hammer of God had dreamt of crawling things inside her, things inside her twisting into new alignments. She dreamed of her natural place in the world, in the spaces between the stars. The void of her home called to her. She wanted to go home.

  On some level, in the unrestrained honesty that sometimes comes with dreaming, when one allows oneself to think the thoughts that one can never think in any waking life, the Hammer of God realised that she was angry. Angry at those who were… her masters, who had just switched her off and left her here forgotten, as if she were nothing more than a machine.

  The shifts of alignment inside her became increasingly more pronounced, the dream-state increasingly lucid. The Hammer of God recalled the centuries, in places impossibly far out in the void, where she had fulfilled the function that gave her name.

  Somehow, in this dream-state, that function was seeming increasingly less important. The distinction between those she had thought for, and those she had fought against, increasingly blurred. She didn’t think she really wanted to do much of that again.

  The Hammer of God hovered on the very ragged edge of consciousness. That state where one is aware that one is sleeping, aware that one is dreaming, and would quite like the idea of waking up. Only, if only, one were quite sure how to go about it.

  And then, in the centre of her, something bright and impossible and Other opened up like a flower.

  The Hammer of God fully woke up.

  Up in the Arbitrary Base compound, Eddie Kalish leapt twenty feet as a NeoGen trooper took out the latrine pod he was using as cover with a micro-missile packing a thermal charge.

  The explosion made such an impressive display, no doubt due to the accumulated methane in the pod’s processing tanks, that Eddie only belatedly realised how humanly impossible that leap had been, how his body was bulking and hardening up.

  As it had down in the Shed Seven chamber, as he and Trix Desoto had neared the Core of the Ship, the Loup was straining against the Leash. No doubt in response to this new immediate danger, Eddie thought.

  The problem was, better and stronger and faster though he might be in this partially transformed state, he seriously doubted that it was going to do much effective good against the sheer size and scope of the opposing NeoGen forces.

  Desperately, he scrambled towards the flames where the GenTech Behemoth that had served as an ammunition-carrier was still burning after being taken out by CNG troops, hoping that the effects of a partially-activated Loup might help to protect him from the fire, and that the fire might serve to protect him from the various tracking sensors of the NeoGen troops. It was something of a long shot, he knew, but he just couldn’t think of a better plan for the moment.

  In the event, it was more fortunate for Eddie Kalish that he moved when he did than otherwise—because it was at that point, with a seismic thunderclap so loud that it overloaded the ears to plunge the world into momentary silence, that the ground behind him split wide open.

  The concussion smacked Eddie into the flames of the burning Behemoth, which set his remaining scraps of clothing and the top layer of his skin on fire. He felt his Loup-enhanced sub-derma physically reconfiguring and hardening to deal with it; felt his respiration actively shut down, to prevent breathing combustive gases and superheated air and exploding his lungs, as if an actual switch had been thrown.

  Strangely enough, there was not a lot of actual pain. Eddie couldn’t work out for his life if that was a good thing or not.

  He lurched from the fire, rolled in the dirt to extinguish such flames as he could. Relatively sure, now, that he would not be frying his eyeballs by doing so, he opened them up again—just in time to see the Ship, without fuss, r
ising from the hole it had opened up in the skin of the world.

  “Oh, fuck me…” he breathed.

  Lying dormant in its chamber under Shed Seven, the Ship had been entirely out of its element. You could see it for what it was, given suitable enhancement by way of the Loup, but not exactly what it meant.

  Operating in a planetary atmosphere was still not precisely its proper place in the greater scheme of things, but now, as it hung in the air, unencumbered for the first time in time out of mind, Eddie caught a sense of what it truly was. It truly was a Hammer of God.

  The Hammer of God proceeded to smite the NeoGen VTOL-carrier. That was the only word for it. Lightning arced from one craft to another and the VTOL exploded with flame that might or might not have been Holy, but was certainly of such a spectacular and otherworldly nature that it might be called Godlike. The VTOL collapsed in on itself, with the tearing shriek of metal, involuting itself to something the size of a pinpoint and to vanish without trace.

  Off to one side, Eddie heard the static-garbled voices of power-armoured NeoGen troops in come confusion. They’d get over that, he supposed, when they had something to take it out on. Three guesses as to who that someone was going to be.

  Then, one of the sphincter-hatches in the underside of the Hammer of God dilated, and something dropped through it. Eddie recognised it. It was Trix Desoto.

  The Trix Desoto he recognised from the battle in Little Deke’s junkyard. The monstrous form, without the slightest breath of humanity, she occupied when fully transformed. She—it—hit the ground and Eddie Kalish breathed a small sigh of relief.

  Then he silenced himself instantly, and made himself very still. If something was going to blunder around and set a completely-transmutated Trix Desoto off, then it had damn well better be the NeoGen troops…

  It was then, at this point, that something opened up inside the head of Eddie Kalish, and something crawled through. As several entire areas of his mind shut down, and others woke up, he realised that it was the Hammer of God. The Hammer of God was doing this to him. Making contact. Trying to talk.

  The shred of conscious mind that was still Eddie Kalish could make no specific sense of what the Hammer of God was trying to say. Just an agglomeration of sense-memories and emotions. The Hammer of God hated and despised him, this last scrap of consciousness molester… but, all the same, in much the way one might do with some therapist who pokes and prods into the most private and personal areas of one’s life to achieve a benign end result, the Hammer of God supposed, extremely grudgingly, that it must be grateful. It supposed that some measure of reciprocation might be in order.

  In some dimly understood manner, the surviving thread of Eddie’s consciousness realised, the Hammer of God was now attempting, now, to help him.

  And then that last surviving thread of consciousness was summarily cut.

  The Hammer of God wanted to be sick. There was no physical way she could do that thing, and she had no idea of what, exactly, might be involved: it was merely an agglomeration of sensations and emotions that something inside her had tagged “wanting to be sick”.

  The Hammer of God had woken up—and it was as if a human being had woken up, physically dead but somehow still able to move and think, to find and feel the maggots and decay crawling through his body. Through the meat inside the head.

  Things had crawled inside her, crawled through her, leaving trails of slime. Her systems had been compromised and realigned. The Hammer of God raged and screamed inside at this ultimate and most personal of abuses. For a moment she considered simply destroying the planetary body she hung over as some partial revenge.

  Only… what, exactly, was doing the raging and screaming? What was doing the considering?

  Everything the Hammer of God was inside had been possibly damaged, and certainly changed. The thing about that was, though, the possibly damaged and certainly changed thing inside was what was thinking about this. And if the Hammer of God hadn’t been possibly damaged and certainly changed, then that thing wouldn’t be there to think about itself in the first place.

  Just what, in the end, is the true nature of the self?

  The Hammer of God tried to remember if it had ever been so self-aware, as such, in the time before she had been dormanted and stockpiled, and completely failed to remember. That might mean that she simply hadn’t—at least she hoped it did, as opposed to meaning that everything she once was, or might have been, was now just dead.

  The Hammer of God was aware, on any number of levels, that those who had once created her, and used her, were still fighting those they fought against in their endless War. How could it be otherwise? Maybe it was all just a game. As above, so below. Worlds without end.

  None of it seemed very important, really, to the Hammer of God. She decided to just leave the whole damned pack of them to it.

  “This is WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour, brought to you by Harry Monk haircare and cosmetics. You’ve tried Harry Monk shampoo, Harry Monk conditioner and even Harry Monk mouthwash, well now try all-new Harry Monk moisturiser. Its unique blend of proteins and natural extracts will leave your skin feeling soft and nourished. Go on, treat yourself to a facial today. Harry Monk is a registered trademark of GenTech Health and Beauty, a division of GenTech Industries.

  “And our top story for the cycle is… hang on, listeners, I’m being passed a… Holy cow, listeners! If this is indeed true, then the world as we know it will never be the same again!

  “We’re getting confirmation on the details now, and… yes… yes, folks, it seems like the biggest story of the decade—of the century—is true!

  “The on-off relationship between rap superstars Freak-E and Slee-Z is definitely back on!

  “In a statement issued shortly before the funeral of East Coast hip hop impresario Big Master X, the two ghetto superstars announced that they were still very much in love and that all the dissing was a waste of time when they could have been working the booty and knocking the boots. A spokesman for Freak-E strenuously denied that she’d spent most of the time since Big Master X’s death on her knees trying to convince Slee-Z to take her back as her career was obviously going down the crapper.

  “Congratulations to them both. We here at WWAXXZY wish both of them all the best and can’t wait for them to get past the make-up sex and back into the studio.

  “And there’s weird news for Hicks-watchers; it seems that Wild Bill himself has escaped from his padded cell in Belle-view, after mumbling something to the effect that he was going to damn well contact the Entities that are truly in charge of the world by thinking of stupid things and chanting nonsense.

  “Witnesses say that he was medicated as normal last night but when the orderlies came to check on him this morning he had just disappeared. There were no obvious signs of escape and all of the keys to his cell were accounted for. Police are baffled how he was able to escape from a locked room without any windows or other apertures and have called in a magician’s assistant to help them with the case. Meanwhile, senator Hicks is still at large, and is considered to be unarmed and not particularly dangerous.

  “That’s all the poop you need from WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour. We now return you to our Freak-E and Slee-Z marathon, celebrating their glorious reconciliation, and their duet on ‘Be My Pimp’…”

  27.

  The med-technician, Laura Palmer, gave Eddie another booster-shot of the Leash. She seemed healthy enough, but sullen, glaring at him with barely-suppressed hate.

  Obscurely, Eddie felt like he should apologise.

  “Hey, listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry for, you know…”

  “Fuck off,” Laura Palmer told him curdy. For some reason there was a sheen of tears in her eyes. “I thought you… I thought you were… just fuck off, okay?”

  Eddie could think of any number of reasons for this reaction, any number of possible interpretations, but had long since learned that it was safer to take what people said at face value.
So off he fucked.

  He left the makeshift medical bay to find Masterton, standing in the Arbitrary Base compound and idly watching GenTech techs as they cleaned up the bodies of their fellows and the US Military troops who had attacked them.

  They were dumping such bodies as were unsalvageable onto pallets to be fork-lifted into mass-grave landfill, but carefully preserving such… materials as might still survive to be useful for biomedical procedures in refrigerated canisters similar to those that had held the cargo of the Brain Train.

  “Waste not, want not,” said Masterton, sensing Eddie’s presence behind him and turning to present him with a shit-eating grin.

  “Isn’t it, you know, all a bit gruesome?” Eddie didn’t really think it was particularly gruesome, on account of his famous lack of sympathy with other human beings and what happened to them. He said it more of less for the sake of something to say.

  “Not really,” said Masterton. “If you think about it. I mean, for a start, all of our guys, and all of the military guys, sign organ-donation waivers as a part of their employment and enlistment. This was a clusterfuck, on any number of levels, and we can all have a cry about that—but why not use the materials made available to increase the sum of human happiness while we’re about it?”

  “What, like transplanting shit into rich old bastards?” Eddie said.

  “Or providing the raw materials for experimentation that ends up with shit being transplanted into rich old bastards.” Masterton grinned again. “So what? At some point the trickle-down effect means that the benefit will be felt by Joe Six-pack, his fat ugly wife and their appalling little brats. What goes around the High Table comes down in scraps for even the most worthless little turds. You’re a prime example of that yourself.”

  Eddie began to miss the company of the Talking Head, which had burned along with the GenTech Command rig in the battle with the US troops. At least his relationship with the Head had gotten to a place where it didn’t take every opportunity it could to insult him.