Dealer's Choice w-11

by George R. R. Martin

Modular Man dropped down the long tube of the tower. At the bottom he found Travnicek’s door still sealed. He knocked, received no response.

  He put a hand to the door. It was hot to the touch.

  He took the tarp off his weapon and aimed it at the door.

  The gun’s official designation was XM-214, but was better known as a Six-Pack. It was a six-barreled Gatling gun developed for the military, a little over two feet long and capable of firing 4000 rounds per minute. Modular Man had stolen it, along with most of his other conventional weaponry, from a military arsenal.

  He couldn’t mount it normally because the Turtle had seriously wrenched his shoulder mounts, but he’d lightened the weapon by removing the power pack and run a cable through the torn shoulder to his own generators. He set it for the lower rate of fire — a mere 400 rpm — stood so as to minimize the chance of ricochet, and aimed the weapon at the door.

  He had to know. He had to know officially. Otherwise he’d just have to obey the last set of orders, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.

  The barrels spun too fast for the eye to follow. The weapon was very loud in the closed space. The Six-Pack tore ragged chunks out of the door. Gas and smoke boiled out. The android reached through the door, spun the wheel from the inside, and opened it.

  A cruise missile dropped dozens of cluster bombs somewhere on the Rox, the rolling boom going on forever, the light so bright it flashed through the semitransparent tower shaft and cast weird, flickering shadows on the dense, swirling smoke.

  Travnicek was lying dead on his smoldering carpet in a sprawl of extended, flaccid neck organs and torn cilia. Modular Man bent by the body, turned it over, touched the neck, and sought a pulse. He couldn’t find one.

  Modular Man stood up on his single leg. He paused a moment to see if anything would happen, if there was some hardwired circuit he didn’t know about telling him what he’d have to do next.

  Nothing.

  He was free.

  He wondered what kind of moral universe he’d just entered. Probably, he thought, the same one Travnicek had lived in all along.

  Somehow, though, he’d gotten away with it. That’s what seemed to be going on here, people getting away with things. The jumpers had got away with an appalling amount of carnage, so much the military had to be called in to suppress them, and Bloat had got away with an immense amount so far, and whoever was in Pulse was probably still getting away with it, with killing thousands in what seemed to be a personal war against all.

  There was a huge explosion and the Rox seemed to jump six inches to the left.

  Time to get himself and Patchwork out of here.

  Modular Man bent to wrap his weapon in the tarp again. Something on the floor caught his attention.

  Patchwork’s brown-gold-flecked eye, gazing blankly from a mass of rubble.

  The young Aborigine walked along the beach toward the besieged castle. He glanced out across the water at the topless towers of Manhattan. There seemed a respite in the fighting. Could there be a truce?

  Something whistled low and fast across the bay. As it neared the Rox, it simply blinked out of sight. There was a small clap of thunder as air filled the void where the cruise missile had been. Air displacement made the end of the smoke trail suddenly all ragged.

  Wyungare smiled, but not happily. No truce.

  Certainly there had not been for the past two hours since Wyungare had packed the motley convoy of Jack the Gator, Bagabond’s old black cat, the bruised Detroit Steel, an exhausted Reflector, and a nearly comatose Mistral back across the dangerous waters of the lower bay toward safety.

  Wyungare had then spent nearly an hour hunkered on a canted slab of broken concrete, staring at the war-torn skies, but not truly seeing them. He was inside, down in the lower world, talking with the guardian warreen, the spirit of Wyungare’s companion beast. He had not reacted to or even noticed when debris from the increasing number of shells and ground-based missiles had sliced the air around him. There were priorities, and now it was more important to gather strength and resolve for the trial the man guessed he would be faced with soon.

  The warreen had bid him farewell and good fortune with both affection and weariness. It was, Wyungare knew, not at all a goodbye.

  In his second hour after escaping from the collapsed dungeon, Wyungare felt the fine engines of his muscles and bones beginning to function in harmony again as he wandered the tattered beaches of the Rox. Occasionally he found injured survivors he could help. For some he stanched the bleeding with bits of multicolored wire as tourniquets. He found ragged bushes, the leaves of which reminded him of mallee scrub. He made rudely blended poultices. He taught one woman to press the point on her torn artery that would keep her from bleeding to death for now. He tried to give her the courage to stay patiently in place — and alive — until aid might arrive.

  Another man, he realized, was too close to death and in too much pain. Wyungare gave him release as quickly and mercifully as he could. He used his hands.

  After that, Wyungare knew it was time to face that which he had discussed with the warreen. He walked upright and deliberately along the margin of raw sand toward the castle.

  What looked like three cruise missiles came in low across the water from three different directions. The scream filled the skies and Wyungare’s hearing. Two of the blunt torpedo shapes flickered out of existence at the last possible moment before detonation. The third slammed squarely into the golden dome.

  The explosion lifted Wyungare off his feet and hurled him back along the sand. Shards of castle flipped lazily end over end, then started spiking the packed sand like the knives of little boys playing mumblety-peg. The Aborigine lay dazed for a few moments, and saw a ton chunk of masonry bury itself a few meters from his feet. The ground coughed in pain and then was still.

  He heard a few desultory splashes as the last of the sky-born debris plunged into the water.

  Wyungare shook his head, sat up, then levered himself to his feet. Bloat’s refuge had been in bad shape before; now it looked like a sandcastle kicked to wreckage by a tribe of feral children.

  Could there be anyone left alive inside?

  Wyungare concentrated. Yes. Some of the life within the destroyed complex was agonized, but it was still vital.

  He would go inside and find Bloat.

  There were echoes of a scream and then the sound of an explosion. Somewhere in that reverberation, Bloat heard bodysnatcher and Kafka arguing. “You can’t disturb the governor!” Kafka shrieked. “He’s sleeping. He needs to rest.”

  “Fuck that, roach!” bodysnatcher shouted back. “He hasn’t got time to rest. None of us have any time left.”

  Bloat’s eyelids seemed to have the weight of manhole sewer lids, but he forced them open. “Shut up, both of you,” he managed to grate out.

  Kafka whirled around stiffly, craning his roach-head back to look up at Bloat. “Governor, I —”

  That was all he got out. In that second, Bloat heard the alarm from one of the remaining radar units — far, far too late. In an instant that seemed to last a year, Kafka stood there, his mouth open, the shell-like body bowed backward. Pulse — bodysnatcher — stood behind him with hands on hips. His joker guards were arrayed before him like a shield, their weapons at ready and trained on bodysnatcher. The Great Hall glittered around him, glistening in the dark from a thousand lamps.

  And it all shattered.

  The image of his face graven on the ceiling collapsed in a ruin of steel, glass, and plaster. Something dark and sinister streaked overhead, tearing through walls and into the room behind him. The world exploded. Fire rained back into the Great Hall, the concussion tore at the building with violent sound, and suddenly he could hear nothing but the thundering and see only the fire and the falling stone and brick and steel and glass and even his immense bulk was lifted up and thrown sideways and he — mercifully, he thought — lost himself again.

  He had pretty much decided that she wasn
’t coming when the dogs began to bark.

  Tom went out to the porch to wait for her. He’d left the gate open and put the dogs on chains. As he watched her headlights come down Hook Road through the fog and turn into the junkyard, he asked himself for the hundredth time just what the fuck he thought he was doing. He still didn’t have an answer. He never told anyone his name. He never brought anyone to the junkyard. But this was a night for firsts.

  She parked right in front of the shack. It was his Danny who got out of the car. The first one he’d met. But somewhere along the way, she’d combed out her hair and traded her blue jeans for a dress. She looked around at the junkyard, gave him a lopsided grin. “This isn’t the way it is in your comic book.”

  “Tell me about it,” Tom forced himself to say. His mouth was dry. “Come on in.”

  Danny took something out of the car. It looked like a baseball bat, wrapped in canvas. She carried it up to the house.

  “What’s that?” Tom asked as she stepped into the shack. He felt incredibly awkward. His house was a mess, a rundown fifty-year-old shack in a junkyard. Why the hell had he let her come?

  “The Coast Guard fished it out of the drink,” she said. “They thought it was part of a body.” She put the packet down on the table, opened it.

  Inside was Modular Man’s leg.

  “You must have pulled it off just when Mistral hit us.”

  Except for the torn wires and burnt circuitry dangling from the upper thigh, it looked almost human. Tom stared at it with revulsion for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Oh, great,” he said. “Just what I needed.” He gestured toward his television, where the head of the first Modular Man stared sightlessly across the room. “Pretty soon I’ll have enough parts to build my own.”

  “Speaking of heads,” Danny said, “how is yours?”

  “Better,” Tom said. He’d taken a long shower, changed into fresh clothes, and swallowed a couple of heavy-duty painkillers Dr. Tachyon had prescribed for him years ago. The headache was still there, but not like before.

  “You should have let them x-ray you,” she said.

  “I only reveal my secret identity to one person a day,” Tom said. “It’s a little rule I have.” He changed the subject. “How is your sister doing?”

  “Fine. Sleeping. They anaesthetized her to set the leg. Just as well. The pain was bleeding through to the rest of us pretty bad. Now we don’t feel a thing.”

  It had been so long since he had entertained a visitor, Tom had almost forgotten how. “I’m not much of a host,” he said, suddenly awkward. “You want a drink, or something?”

  “No,” Danny said. She stepped close, looked up at him. “I want a kiss.”

  Tom stood frozen. He didn’t know what to say. What to do. “Danny,” he finally managed. “I don’t think…”

  “Don’t think,” she told him. “Don’t talk.” Her hand went around his head, and pulled his face down to hers. “Just feel,” she whispered, as their lips touched.

  Ray held up his hand. What was left of the team stopped behind him. He glanced back. It was just him and Battle, Danny and Cameo. Him and a nat, an ace who could talk with her so-called sisters and an ace who could channel the dead if she had anything of theirs to channel through. He wished that Battle would give her Black Eagle’s jacket like he’d promised, but then wondered if that was just another of Battle’s lies. He wondered if the agent even had the jacket.

  All and all they were a ragged, sorry-ass bunch. The rest of the muscle was gone. It was up to Ray to see them through.

  But, Ray wondered, through what? Battle was still hot to kill Bloat, but assassination was never Ray’s style. Still, what could you do with the fat bastard?

  The corridor through which the Outcast — was that really Bloat? Ray wondered — had disappeared suddenly opened up into a large chamber that was dimly lit by the internal phosphorescence of its walls. Ray hesitated on the threshold. It was bigger than any of the other rooms they’d come across so far and it was relatively open with few rock formations to provide cover.

  There was something about it that made Ray uneasy. He moved into the room slowly, motioning the others to follow at a cautious distance. He was well into the chamber before he noticed the figure at its far end, still and gigantic, looking like a statue in a park in hell.

  It was a big man sitting on a big horse. Only the man’s legs were shaped like those of a stag and he had eyes that glowed green and a rack of antlers that would do any stag proud. The horse, too, had eyes that glowed. Ray recognized them right away. He had run into them both yesterday morning on New York Bay.

  “I’ll he a son of a bitch,” Ray murmured, and grinned his lopsided grin. Here was something clear-cut, something he didn’t have to worry about. Here was serious ass begging to be kicked and Ray knew he was just the one to do the kicking. Grinning, he stepped forward as the big joker on the big horse raised a battered gold horn to his lips and blew upon it. The notes echoed eerily inside the cavern, bouncing and rebounding off the rock walls, striking Ray’s ears and stopping him with an involuntary shiver.

  A crackle of green lightning pulsed through the air, playing counterpoint to the joker’s tune and suddenly there was a spear in his free hand. Ray didn’t like that, but he liked the horn’s other effect even less.

  It called dogs, goddamn ghost dogs slipping through the cavern ceiling, running on air like it was ground. As they neared the cavern’s floor their ghostly bodies became more solid. At first Ray could see through them, but once their paws touched the floor they were as real-looking as any pack of white dogs with blood-red ears who were four feet tall at the shoulder and had green fire burning in their eyes and dripping from their tongues could be. There was a shitload of them.

  The joker took the horn from his lips and smiled savagely, his dogs howling in a whirling pack at his feet. He pointed his spear at Ray and the others and spurred his night-black stallion. As he charged the pack howled like a chorus of the damned.

  “Shit!” Ray said to himself. He turned and sprinted back to the others.

  “What the hell is that?” Battle shouted.

  “Goddamn Twisted Fist ace,” Ray panted. “Start shooting before the fuckers get all over us!” It was good advice.

  The hounds were faster than the stallion. They outstripped the horse and its rider, giving tongue to cries of ferocious blood lust that sparked an answering surge in Ray’s veins. He ripped his Ingram out of its holster and triggered a long burst that plowed into the front-running dogs like burning hail.

  The others all fired after Ray’s initial burst, all except Cameo, who was now wearing an incongruous-looking fedora that she’d taken from her pack. She had apparently summoned another ace, one who was swearing Catholic oaths while hurling balls of electricity at the charging hounds.

  The carnage among the hounds was terrific, but they had neither fear nor blood. When they were hit hard enough they were blown to bits, but they neither bled nor cried out in pain. They dissolved into phosphorescent green mist. Half the pack was destroyed as it charged across the open cavern, but there were still maybe forty hounds left. Some were maimed and limping, but all were crying ferociously as they struck the team.

  Ray suddenly found himself the center of a snarling pack of mad dogs. There were so many of them that they snapped at each other in a frenzy to get at Ray.

  “All right you mother-fuckers, come and get it, come on, come on,” Ray snarled, not even knowing what he was saying. His expression was a locked, frozen grin as he fought like he’d never fought in his life, whirling and striking with hands and feet, growling back at the hounds, snapping limbs and breaking necks, dodging slashing fangs, ignoring the half-dozen wounds he received in the first half-dozen seconds of combat.

  Four bodies lay at his feet, then dissolved, making room for more to attack. Part of his mind told Ray that he wasn’t going to make it, that he was going to be gutted again like when Mackie Messer opened him up on national television and
he tripped in his own intestines as he tried to fight the psychopathic ace. But the other part of his mind didn’t care because this was what he lived for and it didn’t matter that his foes were goddamn ghost dogs or aces, as long as they were tough, as long as they were good.

  He killed two more of the hounds and then a big brute fastened his teeth in Ray’s left forearm, biting through flesh and muscle. Ray bit back a cry of pain as it shifted its grip, trying to get the arm back far enough in its jaws so that it could crush Ray’s forearm like a candy cane, and then Ray heard the scream.

  It was terrible, high-pitched and wailing, full of pain and fear. It stopped even the hound for a second as it lolled its eyes in the direction of the scream and looked, as Ray did, to see Danny Shepherd go down under a wave of the dogs.

  Ray screamed in return. He grabbed the dog’s lower jaw and ripped it off. He flung the jaw away and grabbed the hound by its front legs. He surged to his feet, swinging the thing like a flail, instantaneously creating an open space around him.

  He glanced around wildly. Battle had his back to the wall and was firing as quickly as he could at the circle of dogs closing in on him. Cameo, or whoever she now was, was holding the hounds at bay with balls of crackling electricity that were more deadly than bullets. But Danny was down and one of the brutes worrying at her pulled her back and lifted his muzzle to howl at the ceiling, his jaws running red with Danny’s blood.

  The Fist ace, finally close enough to participate in the brawl, lifted his arm to fling his spear and Ray realized that he was the target.

  He threw the hound at three others who were springing on him just as the ace loosed his spear, and grinning like a madman, he snatched the weapon out of the air. It felt good and solid in his hands.

  Staring straight ahead, he cut through the pack of hounds ripping at him, the spear slicing through them like a sword through smoke. Ray locked eyes with the ace as he charged and saw more astonishment in his foe’s expression than anything else. One of the hounds rose up in front of his master and leapt at Ray, but Ray caught it on his spear and skewered it. It worked its way down the shaft and snapped its jaws inches from Ray’s face, but Ray kept charging. He felt another shock run through his arms. When the dead hound dissolved Ray saw that he’d speared the stallion in the side and the force of his charge had run the shaft through its rib cage and knocked it off its feet.