"We have incoming fire," said Federico, "I suggest we take a course of evasive action."
They were half-way across London Bridge when Fort Apache's lases opened up and burned towards them.
"That's some welcome home," Stack said.
"Don't worry," said Chantal. "The fort isn't feeling itself today."
Stack wrenched the wheel over hard, but Federico didn't respond. The car slipped into reverse and withdrew at 200 miles per…
"What!"
"Federico has a very strong sense of self-preservation. It's just overridden the driving helmet and is taking evasive action of its own. It can react faster than you. Don't feel humiliated."
"That's easy to say. Mother Superior!"
Stack thumped the wheel, and tried to damp down his anger. He resented being taught to drive by a fancy foreign car.
Federico's responses, however, were startling. A squirted curtain of burning napalm descended, and the car avoided so much as a splash on the paintwork. Stack thought the car was showing off its virtuoso techniques. Chantal was playing with her laptop console. White darts streaked out of the central turret of Fort Apache. "Heat-seeking missiles coming in," said Federico.
“I'm on it," she replied. "I can reach and reprogram them with an APOSTLE," she explained. "There."
The missiles converged and exploded harmlessly, puffs of black and red in the air.
A battery of robot guns rose out of the desert like a whale breaking the surface, sand pouring from the casings. The guns swivelled, but Federico disabled the platform with a surgical lase strike, and the battery discharged its shells in frustration. "That was a silly thing to do," Chantal said. "No machine would waste ammunition like that. The fort is possessed."
"Funnily enough, I believe it."
Federico did a figure eight to avoid heavy flack. Stack held onto his seatbelt. One corner of the windscreen cracked as a stray bullet struck.
"Took a nick, did'ja, Fed?" Stack sneered, taking something like satisfaction from the car's proven fallibility. Then, as he watched, the white impact patch went pale and transparent. "It's smart glass. All top-of-the-line Ferraris have it."
"What…? How…?”
"My field is computers, not cars, but it has something to do with recombinant DNA."
"You mean this thing is alive?"
"You ever doubted it, signor?”
Stack thought he heard a smug tone in Federico's generated voice, as if he were a preening matador showing off in front of a rival suitor to impress a melting young damsel. "Your car has a crush on you, Sister." Three drones in formation hovered above the car, locking on. Lights flashed around their rims. Stack knew they were warming up for a particle beam thrust. "Ciao, dumb boulders!" shouted the car as it exploded them one by one. "This is too easy. They're only using American technology."
Stack was irritated, but he couldn't bring himself to hope that the car would be shown up by good old yankee knowhow.
Across the bridge, the fort's gates opened.
"Here come the heavies," said Stack. "Sit tight."
Three US Cav cruisers drove out, accompanied by a cyke-mounted squad. Stack took manual control of the lase, and sighted on the lead cruiser. This was one thing he was better at than any goddamn computer.
"Hold your fire" Chantal said. "We don't know how possessed the people in those things are."
Stack's thumb stiffened above the FIRE control.
The cruisers and the cykes advanced to the bridge. Then, suddenly, three of the motorsickles and one of the cruisers peeled off and drove at random across a rocky patch of desert towards the interstate, away from Federico.
"They're making a break for it," Chantal said. "There's still some resistance."
The remaining personnel sat in or on their machines and did nothing. Federico got a hold on their frequency, and piped in their intercom charter. Several voices, human and otherwise, were raised at once.
"Repeat: Open fire. The deserters are classed as hostile, and must be removed from the field of battle.."
"…hey, those are our guys…"
"…the girlie in the car was with us yesterday, and we just shot at her…"
"…I never shot at no one…"
"Repeat, obey orders or you will be classed as deserters. And deserters are classed as hostile…"
"…freak, Jennifer, I'm gonna do it…"
"…Bradley, don't you touch that lase. We're just getting out of here. Rintoon's loco, and Lauderdale is worse. We'll send help back."
"He's right, they're Maniak subversives. You know that."
"You have thirty seconds to comply with orders. Then, your systems will cease to respond to your control and the remote will take over."
"…let me outta this thing…"
"…if you can hear us, lady in the snazz car, pax pax pax, we're gettin' out. We ain't got nothin' against you…"
"…Jennifer, it's been a bad day, don't push me…"
One of the cruiser crews got out of their machine, and walked away. The deserters were nearly at the interstate.
The two Troopers shouted at each other, kicking the sand in waves across the road. One of the cyke Troopers dismounted and joined in the rap session. After a discussion, two of them put their hands in the air and waved at Federico. The other stamped back to the cruiser in disgust. He bent down to get behind the wheel and the roofgun chattered. He went down at once, and the other Troopers scattered. The lase beamed out, and the deserting cruiser exploded as it reached the interstate. One of the motorsickles skidded into the sand, partially burying itself .Criss-cross beams struck at the weaving human forms, knocking them flat in the sand. There wasn't any blood. Lases cauterise as they pierce.
One of the cykes made a dash across we bridge towards Federico, and nearly made it. The lase caught its gastank and it exploded, catapulting its rider up out of the blossom of flame. The asexual figure flailed in the air, struck the parapet of the bridge and fell like a broken doll to the Colorado bed.
The massacre was over in two minutes. Stack and Chantal were innocent bystanders, just out of range.
"The human element has been purged," a mechanical voice said over the air. "The action will continue."
"Thank you," said a whiny human voice, "my cadre is in place. They will be deployed now. This will be ended soon."
"Freak," said Stack, "that's Lieutenant Lauderdale."
Chantal frowned. "I know him. He was my liason. He's a bureacrat, isn't he? Not a battlefield officer?"
"He's only asslicker-general when they won't let him play with his toys. Looks like he just got the box down from his playroom."
Stack took the wheel. Federico let him drive. He did a three-point turn and took evasive action.
"Stack, what's up?"
"Lauderdale runs the androids."
"That's bad?"
"Let me put it this way, during the Joint Action against the Maniax, the Exalted Bullmoose, who once officially endorsed cannibalism, issued a press release complaining that their use was inhumane."
"That's bad."
A row of robotic figures marched out of the fort, into the desert. They moved in unison, implacable like animated chessmen. From this distance, they looked like the Academy Award statuettes. They didn't have big swords like the Oscars, but Stack knew their gleaming bodies were packed with every other kind of weapon the military could dream up. Squadron leader androids were constructed around a football-sized nuclear device that could be detonated from a distance. The UN had been trying to get the damn things on the table at the Geneva Strategic Arms Limitation Talks for years, and just now Stack was wishing that the Prezz had unilaterally junked the whole program even if it did give the CAC conventional superiority on the other side of the Rio Grande Wall.
A hidden block rose from the road in front of Federico. Stack let the car slow down.
"We're dead," he said. "There aren't enough rocks here. The sand is too soft. Federico would sink and gum up within ten yards of the road."
"I concur with the Trooper," Federico said. "I will deploy my defenses, but it is inadvisable that you remain."
Federico raised his doors. Stack and Chantal got out. Stack pulled his shotgun and a sackful of shells after him. Chantal had her SIG out.
The sun glinted on the advancing column of robot soldiers.
"Ciao, Federico," she said. "I'll be back."
"Goodbye, sorella."
"You go left and I'll go right," Stack said, his eye on the column, "and we'll meet at the Fort."
"A good plan," she said.
"Chantal…?"
"What?"
He kissed her, awkwardly.
"That was for luck."
She kissed him back. It was a smooth contact.
"So was that."
Then she was gone, darting towards the bridge and the androids.
He pumped one into the chamber, and waited.
"Come and get me, you freakin' metalhead scuzzballs!"
"That's the Juillerat woman," said Lauderdale, tapping the freezeframe of the action replay beamed in from the androids, "but who's the Trooper?"
"Stack," said Captain Finney. "Trooper Nathan Stack."
"He's listed as missing, isn't he?"
"Yes, he was with Tyree."
"How did he hook up with Juillerat?"
"It doesn't matter," snapped Colonel Rintoon, "they're both Maniax, obviously. They'll be destroyed, defeated, terminated, wiped out, exterminated, demobilized, killed…"
"Sir, yessir," said Lauderdale.
How had the Swiss woman and the Trooper got together? What could they have learned out in the sand? Lauderdale knew they had to be kept out of Fort Apache while the demon was settling in, prepping for the Big Push. This was the crux of the ritual. Nothing must bar the Way of Joseph in the next three hours.
They were haring off in opposite directions. The bigscreen fragmented into the viewpoints of each android, and Nathan Stack was in each of them, discharging his shotgun. One of the viewpoints blanked.
"Shouldn't we bring in Stack?" suggested Finney. "For interrogation? We still don't know what happened to Tyree."
Lauderdale could see the idea of interrogation appealed to Rintoon. Maybe the Colonel would get to use his whips and ropes after all.
Another android went down. That wasn't supposed to happen. They were armoured against everything up to and including heavy artillery. That was the problem with giving the things free will, Lauderdale supposed. They were free to screw up.
"Interrogation," said Rintoon, rolling the word around his mouth. Finney was being too clever, playing to the Colonel's lapses. It was time she was out of the picture, Lauderdale thought. "Yes, interrogation…"
"Sir," said Lauderdale, "shouldn't we put it through the computer. We're in a combat situation."
"Good thinking, man. Do it, Finney. Call up Stack's stats."
Lauderdale hoped he could trust the demon in the machine.
"I don't see…"
"Do it, woman."
Finney tapped keys, and Stack's stats appeared on the screen. Mugshot, personal history, service record. It held still for an instant, then shimmered and was replaced by an urgent override.
The demon came through. NATHAN STACK HAS BEEN POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED AS A SERIAL KILLER, RESPONSIBLE FOR POSS. 159 MURDERS OVER LAST TEN YEARS IN FIVE STATES. SUBJECT IS HIGHLY DANGEROUS, PROFICIENT IN ALL WEAPONS SKILLS, HAS GENIUS LEVEL INTELLIGENCE, AND SHOULD BE TERMINATED ON SIGHT. DO NOT, REPEAT NOT, ATTEMPT TO BRING SUBJECT IN ALIVE.
Finney was shaking her head in disbelief.
"It can't do this," she said.
"It seems conclusive to me. Lauderdale, have your androids execute the computer's directives."
"You don't understand, Colonel. It's just a machine. It's only a smart filing cabinet. It can't give you information without someone putting it in tbere. I have no record of this amendment to Stack's stats. It didn't come from outside the system…"
"You're gibbering, woman."
"No, this isn't possible, sir. The system appears to have…to have made something up."
Lauderdale was using the remote guidance facility to lock the androids onto Stack's heat patterns. Once that was in their tiny minds, they would implacably pursue him until he was dead.
"I may not be a brain like you, Captain Finney," Rintoon said, "but I am given to understand that systems don't tell lies. Is that or is that not the case?"
"Sir…usually, but…"
"Fine. That's it then. "We'll finish the sumpsucker now, save the country the cost of a trial."
"Think about it, sir. Stack's been Cav for fifteen years. He hasn't had enough leave days to zap about the country committing 159 murders. And look at that remark there. "Genius level intelligence." You can't believe our psych profiles wouldn't have shown that up. The guy is just a Trooper, for freak's sake!"
"I will not tolerate that kind of language, Finney. Colonel Vladek W. Rintoon runs a tight ship, a clean ship. An officer must conduct herself with honour, dignity and cheerfulness at all times. An officer must be obedient, resourceful, well-turned-out, vigilant, aware…"
Rintoon's tunic buttons were done up wrongly.
Lauderdale knew he would have to end this charade soon, and take command. He could keep the fort's personnel busy while the demon did its work in the depths.
Finney stood up and turned her terminal off.
"I resign my commission," she said, walking for the door.
"This is mutiny, woman, mutiny. I could have you shot down like a dog."
The automatic doors opened for Finney's cardkey.
"…like a dog!"
Finney looked around.
"Anyone else had enough?" she said.
Lieutenant Colosanto got up, her eyes cried out, and went to the Captain. A couple of techies darted out into the corridor. Finney looked at the door guard, who stepped aside for her, and followed.
There were alarms sounding all over the fort.
"This is desertion," Rintoon screamed, "DESERTION!"
The doors closed.
Rintoon wheeled around, looking for someone to tie up and whip, interrogate or shoot down like a dog. Lieutenant Lenihan was clearing his console. He froze as the Colonel bore down on him.
"It's the end of my shift, sir. I have to stand down. I've been on duty for over thirty-eight hours."
Rintoon grunted, and clenched his fists.
"It's regs, sir," said Lenihan. "I'm not allowed to stay at the console longer than that. I could freak up, and get us all killed. I have to have downtime now. It's in the book."
Lenihan backed towards the door, and fumbled with his cardkey. Rintoon had his sidearm out…
Good, let the Colonel take care of spilling the blood…
Rintoon fired at the Lieutenant, and missed. The doors opened, and Lenihan was running down the corridor.
Lauderdale took a console, and finished feeding Stack's patterns to the androids.
"Desertion, mutiny," muttered Rintoon. Lauderdale ignored the mad old man. "Desertion, mutiny, treachery, betrayal…"
Behind him, Rintoon slumped in a chair, burbling to himself.
Lauderdale got on with his business.
Chantal knew London Bridge was too obvious, too easy. The fort would have it completely covered. It was probably mined, too. So she headed through the ghost town for the Colorado basin. She ran past the dilapidated row of Olde Englishe Pubbes, dodging mortar fire from the battlements. A red phone box up ahead exploded, and she had to roll behind a Hyde Park Bench to avoid the flying fragments of glass and metal.
She had never been to London, funnily enough. Unless she was careful in the next few hours, she would never get the chance.
A drone made a pass, its beam strafing a row of statues. Noel Coward came apart at the waist. David Niven got it at chest-height. Charlie Chaplin's bowler-hatted head rolled. Mary Poppins' umbrella melted. Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker was sheared off just above his beaklike nose. Queen Victoria was not amused. And a chirpy Pearly King grinned at it all.
From what she had heard, London was a drab, gray place these days, full of people complaining about rationing and the queues. Maybe she would give it a miss.
She assumed a position, up on one knee, and followed the drone with her gunsight.
She potted it with her first shot. It cracked apart like a clay pigeon.
All the commotion flushed a sandrat out of his hidey-hole. He had been inside one of the pubs. Still clutching a bottleneck, and wrapped from head to foot in Royal Family commemorative towels, he ran out of The Stoat and Compasses and looked around, obviously annoyed.
"Get down," she shouted.
The sandrat's brain must have been completely fried by the sun and his liquid diet, because he gave her the British V for Victory sign and raised the bottle to his lips, dislodging the towel around his mouth so he could take a swig. He had the face of the heir to the throne wrapped over his own.
A shell exploded near the sandrat, and his bottle splintered in his hands. Yellow fluid showered around him. He put his fingers up again, but a piece of shrapnel had gone into his forehead. Prince Andrew's face soaked up the blood, and the sandrat went down. The Stoat and Compasses collapsed on top of him.
Chantal jumped off the quay, and landed like a cat. There were still rowing boats hanging from the mooring rings in the quay wall, thirty feet above the dry riverbed. It would be a dash across the open to the next cover, the other bank, and then a scramble up to the walls of the Fort.
The Colorado basin stank, its mudflats streaked with rainbow-coloured pollution traces. Quite apart from the dead Trooper lying out there, the riverbed had become the repository for all manner of garbage.
Explosive rounds slammed into the crumbling stone and earth wall behind her, and she pushed herself away.
She remembered Mother Kazuko, and concentrated her thoughts within her body. It was a dangerous sprint. The mud was soft, still damp in places, and there were too many half-buried bedsteads, bicycles and prams over which she could easily trip…
…and if she tripped, she wouldn't just have a sprained ankle. She would be dead.
She ran like a dancer, on the points of her toes, hurdling the more obvious obstacles.
Her time for the 300 meters wasn't as good as it would have been on a track. But no one was shooting at you at athletics meets.
Her heart hammering, she shot into the loose earth of the riverbank, and pressed herself flat against the gentle slope. She was close to the fort now. None of the major defences were good against her. If they still poured boiling oil or molten lead, she would have a problem.
There was still fire from the battlements, but the angle was too steep. The best the gunners could do was to place their shots twenty yards behind her.
She elbowed herself up the bank, keeping her SIG out of the dirt, pushing with her toes.
She wondered how Stack was doing in the desert.
Finally, she was out of the river, and, after another sprint, had her back to the wall of Fort Apache. She was next to a sign reading PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS that was incongruosly planted in bare sand. The metal was warm, and smooth. She would have to edge her way around until she found a way in.
The cutting lase in Federico would have been useful about now. She would have to prise her way through a batch with her knife. Or hope someone inside wasn't too far gone to give her some assistance.
She trusted that the Lord would see her through. But she was prepared to give the Almighty some help.
Another sign, reading THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, was burning steadily. The melting plastic gave off noxious fumes.
Twenty yards down the wall, an aperture opened.
Chantal, knowing she should favour caution, ran for it, and slipped herself through, into the darkness.
Inside, strong hands grabbed for her.
Stack had been lucky with his first shots, and put a couple of Oscars in the dirt. He had aimed high, and caught their heads just as their durium visors were raising. Where a human being would have eyes, these things had twin lases. Lauderdale would be looking at his prey through the remote cameras in the Oscars' heads. Stack ran across the soft sand towards Lake Havasu. The heavy androids would have to step carefully or sink. That gave him a chance to get to cover.
A high whine started.
Stack picked up speed.
The noise got louder, painfully so.
One of the Oscars was mounted with maxiscreamers. At close range, within ten seconds, the noise would trigger epileptic fits in those susceptible to them, and make susceptible 7 % of those not previously afflicted. Within twenty seconds, it would cause motor neuron dysfunction, triggering nausea, vomiting, diorrhea, internal and external bleeding, uncontrollable hiccoughs, loss of bladder control. Within thirty seconds, it would crack your skull like a plate and cook your brain like a microwave. By then, Stack would have been dead anyway, because at about twenty-five seconds the pitch would be enough to detonate the slugs in his pumpgun and, more importantly, the ScumStoppers in the rings of his bandolier. Stack beat any and all of his own personal records over the distance.
Behind him, rocks flew apart as the waves of ultrasound vibrations hit them.
Stack grit his teeth as they began to rattle, and resisted the temptation to jam his hands over his ears. That would just slow him down, and his only chance was to get out of the range. The maxiscreamer was a riot control device. It was supposed to put people within a few hundred yards out of commission so the mop-up squads could move in. Its drawback was that you couldn't send anyone or anything into the field while it was turned on. If he could outrace the sound, then he would have a head start on the Oscars.
He felt a trickle of blood come form one of his ears. Later, he would find whether he had a ruptured eardrum. Later…If there was a later.
He was between the half-buried hulks of buildings now. Twenty feet below there would be the street level of old Lake Havasu. The necks of streetlamps stock out from the sand. The business signs were flush with the ground level.
There would be whole buildings down there for future archaeologists to pick through.
Up ahead, looming out of the sand, was a battered hardboard cut-out of John Travolta, greasy pompadour half-broken away, grin still in place, and rhinestoned arm reaching for the sky. Behind him were broken letters. This had been the Rialto, the local movie-theatre. The curtain must have come down on Havasu during the run of the Grease-Saturday Night Fever reissue double bill in the early '80s.
Stack had heard that John Travolta was out of show business these days. The story was that the star had joined the Josephites and was out there in Salt Lake City. That might have been a smart decision, Stack figured. It didn't look like the gentiles were going to come out of this well.
The dome behind Travolta was cracked like an egg. Stack squeezed through, dropped fifteen feet and found himself crouched between rows of rotting velvet seats. He was up on the balcony. A withered corpse in an usherette's uniform, with a tray of dusty confectionary, lay a few feet away. The carpets were thick with sand, ticket-stubs, cartridge cases and used Trojans.
Incredibly, there were pictures playing in the dark. There was no sound, and the silver screen had three long horizontal rents across its Panavision breadth; but the projector was still working.
It was a bizarre assemblage of spliced-together offcuts from late '70s Hollywood, up-to-date porno, Russian musickie video and newsnet footage. Down there in the stalls, there must be an audience. Stack realized he had stumbled into a sandrat nest.
Clint Eastwood raised his Magnum .44, mouthing "do you feel lucky, punk?" The German hardcore star Billy Priapus— who had bio-implanted horns and goat's feet—strutted his stuff, slobbering. Petya Tcherkassoff preened to a disco beat. A pair of esperadoes slugged it out mentally in a Puerto Galtieri backstreet, veins popping.
The Oscars would be here soon. He supposed he ought to get out of range before innocent people got killed in the crossfire.
He found the stairs, and barreled down them. People, no more than skeletons in rags, were sleeping in the corridors, huddled against the walls. The foyer was lit by a burning torch. Outside the reinforced glass doors, the sand was a solid wall.
"Have you got a ticket, boy?"
Stack turned, his gun up. An old, old man in what was left of a commissionaire's coat staggered at him. His eyes were dark voids.
"Quick, how do I get out of here?" Stack asked.
"Can't get out without a ticket, boy."
"How do I get a ticket?"
"You pays at the counter. Kids today don't know nothin' about respect. You forms an orderly queue and you pays at the counter."
Stack glanced at the cashier's box. A bald fashion mannequin was stuffed into it, her ballerina's tutu fluffed up around her, her stiff arms broken.
There was a commotion outside. The secured doors shifted, and sand dribbled through at the bottom.
"I can't stand customers who track dirt all over the carpets, you know."
Sand was being scraped away from the doors. Stack saw the metal face of an Oscar, and the glass exploded inwards. The shards were followed by fifty tons of sand.
"You can't come in like that," said the commissionaire. "You can't…"
Stack barged through the double doors into the auditorium. The Oscar was floundering through the sand behind him. Stack had heard the creak of a lase visor being raised.
The show was over, and the audience—sandrats, gaudy girls, no-hope gamblers, AWOLS, a few Indians—were on their feet, singing.
An MC with protruding cheekbones and a top hat led the chorus in "America the Beautiful, 1999".
"Oh beautiful,
for spacious skies
Oh amber heaps of sand…''
The Oscar was in the auditorium, its lase lashing out like a whip. A row of seatbacks burned through. Some people scattered. Others kept singing.
"Oh poison mountain majesties
Above the blighted land…"
Stack whirled and fired the pumpgun. His shot clanged harmlessly against the Oscar's durium torso. The android's head swivelled, trying for a lock on Stack's heat pettems.
"America, America,
God spat His curse on thee…"
The audience was panicking, crushing through the exits. The MC kept singing, waving his thin arms, keeping the beat with a conjurer's wand.
"And made it worse
With massacres
From sea to stinking sea…"
There were two more Oscars in the cinema now. Sand pressed in after them like a slow wave. A chandelier fell from the ceiling, and draped around the first Oscar like an incredibly ostentatious diamond necklace.
Stack fired again, and got the machine in its lase hole. The Oscar stood stiff, and fell forwards, smashing seats like balsawood. Its companions came for him.
Stack backed away, towards the screen. There were pictures playing again. Marlon Brando as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The old sage of the spaceways was ranting, cotton falling from his cheeks, at C-3PO, a golden-skinned robot. As a kid, Stack had seen Star Wars twenty or thirty times.
The Oscars came down the aisles. Bitterly, Stack wished all robots could be cute and bumbling like C3PO.
He climbed upwards, the picture playing over his body. He plunged through the fabric, which parted with a steady rip, turned, and fired again. The shot went wild, mainly perforating the ruined screen. One of the Oscars detached its hand, and threw it. The thing sprouted waspwings and dived at Stack, red lights winking where the electrodes were. Stack knew it was a shock-sticker, and if it touched him he was fried for sure. He reversed his gun, getting a grip on the hot barrel—searing his palms in the process—and swatted at the hand. He connected, and hit a home run. The shock-sticker smashed, sparking and spitting, to the floor.
There was a ladder set into the wall. He climbed fast, gun tucked between his arm and body. The plaster was crumbling and the rungs were loose. If he could make it alive to the hatch he saw in the ceiling, be would have lost these Oscars. With their weight, they would never be able to use the ladder.
A shell exploded in the air near him. The pumpgun slithered free of his armgrip, and clattered on the floor below. Shit, that left him with only his side-arm.
Stack wondered if Chantal was still alive.
He headbutted the skylight hatch, and it flew up. He scrambled through onto the roof of the Rialto. The sun was going down.
"You know, don't you?" a woman's voice said in the dark. "What's going on?"
"Yes," Chantal said.
The lights went up. She found herself in a small room with a rack of guns on the wall. Her arms were being held by the beefy, red-faced sergeant—Quincannon—she had seen excercising the intake yesterday. Her questioner was the Captain—Finney—who had been at the monitor when they traced Stack's cruiser to Welcome. Neither of them looked happy, and they were both violating Standard Operational Procedure.
"I have diplomatic immunity," Chantal said.
Captain Finney wasn't impressed. If she couldn't get through to these people, Chantal would have to hurt them. She didn't want to do that.
"Tell me," ordered Finney.
"Quincannon? That's an Irish name, isn't it?"
"What?" The Captain was bewildered. The Sergeant was surprised.
"Irish. You're Catholic?"
Quincannon's grip relaxed on her as he nodded.
"You, Finney. You're a sufi. You said so yesterday."
"What does all this have to do with it?"
Chantal had graduated from prisoner to advisor. Quincannon stood back respectfully.
"I'm a nun. I'm on a special mission from the Pope."
Finney was still off-balance.
"Do you believe in the Devil? In a personalised force of Evil?"
Quincannon grunted an assent. Finney took a deep breath, "Well, that's a hard question for a sufi. You see, we believe the world is composed of balances and…"
"Enough. What has happened here since I left?"
Finney took another deep breath, but was terse this time. "Younger is dead. Rintoon's gone mad. Lauderdale's a homicidal maniac. And the computer is doing things computers can't do…"
"As I thought, Fort Apache is possessed."
Quincannon crossed himself.
"You must take me to a terminal."
"Possessed?"
"By a demon. I have to perform the rite of exorcism."
"Holy Mary, Mother of God," said Quincannon.
“I'll take all the help I can get. Are you in?"
The Sergeant saluted, and Finney opened the door. "There's a conduit through here. We can get into the access space under the Ops Centre. There's a terminal there."
"Lead the way…"
The demon was taking a time-out for gas and oil. It wanted to have total dominance of Fort Apache before it spawned again and made a push for the next node. It was hungry for the multiple inputs of El Paso, but it knew the triumph would be all the sweeter if it waited, nourished its own desires, its lusts, its needs…
Defer the gratification, and the blood tastes better.
Lauderdale was an annoying acolyte, a messed-up pissant in blue, pretending to be naughty, gingerly dipping a toe into the Dark but holding back. Deep down, he was just another chickenbelly scared sumpless of the monsters. He lacked the force of will of The Summoner. He was a zeroid waster even set beside the Frogman between whose ribs the demon had nestled. But Lauderdale was serving his masters adequately, and he was sure to be rewarded for his efforts.
Too bad; the demon would have got its rocks off teaching Lawdy-Lawdy-Lauderdale the true meaning of the word torture.
Before the Summoning, it had never been more than a servitor of the Dark Ones, fed with the cast-offs of the Great. The tongue-tentacles of his original ectoplasmic body were scraped raw from assaulting the Big Boys of the Outer Darkness. Here, on this Earthly Plane, it was a Giant, it had found a destiny.
"Destineeeee," it sang, to the tune of Jealousy, "I got me a destineee…"
The power was building up. It coursed through the channels of the Fort. It sealed off the underground garages, and sucked out all the oxygen in the air. Thirty-eight personnel tried to fill their lungs and collapsed, blue-faced. "Suck on that, airheads," it boomed over the tannoy as they asphyxiated. Score another bunch of notches for the killer. The demon was riding high, itchy souls wriggling in torment under its clawhomed feet.
And yet it sensed danger. There were still humans struggling against its will. They were trivial. They could be ignored until he was ready to stick it to them. He owed that Swiss Miss a thorough freaking-over for living through their rumble in Welcome, but that could wait. There was something else, something which carried within it the Light that was anathema to the Dark Ones, the burning, cleansing Light that had always banished the Night.
Outside, the Sun was setting. But there was Light blazing.
For an instant, the demon knew Fear. Then, it felt better within itself. The Light was a puny, paltry thing. The Light could be dispelled.
The sun was down. And night-time was the right-time for the rituals of blood and iron. Night was for the masters, not the slaves.
It launched all the fort's missiles, trusting them to find targets in the desert somewhere.
"Just gimme that rock and roll carnage!" it screeched, sending feedback throughout the fort.
"Two-four-six-eight, time to de-cap-it-ate!" An orderly halfway through a dumbwaiter hatch found the door slicing down.
'Three-five-seven-nine, killin' folks makes me feel fine…"
A chaingun above the courtyard opened up. Troopers scattered or fell.
"This is the life," the demon thought to itself.
The moon was up. In the desert, the temperature had plunged. Stack, in his shirtsleeves, was shivering as he darted from cover to cover. Lauderdale's androids were still tracking him. One of his knees had popped, and every step was like taking a bullet in the leg.
A while back there had been a mess of explosions. Fort Apache had fired its missiles. Even if there hadn't been any nukes in the parcel, a lot of damage must have been done in Havasu. Stack wondered if the bridge had got it. That would be a shame. It had come a long way to wind up in pieces in a dried-up river.
Sooner or later, he would drop from exhaustion, and the patient robots would bear down, lases slicing, electrodes primed. That would be it. Stack hoped Chantal was making some difference, because he was certainly out of the picture.
Thirty-eight wasn't so young to die these days. It was more years than Mozart had managed, than Keats, than Alexander the Great, than Billy the Kid, than Bruce Lee, than Jean Harlow, than James Dean, than Chuck Berry…And LeonaTyree, who had been thirty-three last month. And Miss Unleaded, who probably hadn't made fifteen.
He thought he couldn't hear out of his left ear, which was gummed up with blood. His knee was on the point of giving out completely.
The Oscars moved silently, without fatigue, without sustaining wounds. His sidearm was about as useful against them as a cap pistol, but he couldn't bring himself to throw it away.
He felt as if he was wading through a last-running stream. His shins were frozen. The cold was numbing, almost pleasantly so. His aches and pains faded.
Finally, his legs refused to work, and he pitched face-first into the fast-cooling sand.
He crawled a few yards, his bruised chest flaring up as he rubbed it against the ground..
He heaved himself onto his back, and looked up at the silver circle of the moon. As a kid, watching Star Wars, he had wanted to be part of the space program. He had tried out, but came along just too late, just after the moonbase fiasco and the final collapse of the Satellite Weapons Systems. Uncle Sam hadn't been in the market for spacemen. And so it had had to be the Cav. Obi-Wan wasn't being any help.
He called upon the Force. Nothing. He was still incapable. He thought he heard heavy, thumping footsteps. The Oscars were closing in.
He prayed. Chantal would have liked that, he thought. He still couldn't believe that the Op was a nun.
He heard something besides the marching androids. Out in the sand, somewhere. Something was coming, something that clumped, but jingled, almost subaudially, at the same time.
He rolled over, and looked across the desert. The dunes were silvered by the moonlight, and a figure was moving fast, coming at him out of the Great Empty.
Great. Someone else to try to kill him. It was open season on US Cav tonight.
At first, Stack thought the stranger was on a motorsickle. But the shape was too tall, and lurched too much.
It was someone on a horse. The jingling he heard was spurs. There was something magical about the sight, as if one of the ghosts of the West were galloping out of the Past to be in at the loll. Who was it? Wyatt Earp? The Lone Ranger? Shane? Sir Lancelot?
From the other direction strode the four remaining Oscars, the shining, soulless embodiment of the techno-fascist's Utopia of the future. They were the mechanist nightmare made metal and plastic and glass. One of them would have a nuclear heart, ready to burst with loving death at the touch of a button
Between the past and the future, crippled in the present, Stack pushed at the ground. His knee burned inside.
The horseman came onwards. In the still night, Stack could hear the horse breathing heavy, the slap of the rider's legs against his mount's flanks, the thump of his saddlebags.
The stranger got to him first. Stack forced himself to stand up, but the rider still towered over him. He wore a long slicker, a battered grey hat that seemed to sparkle in the moonlight, and had his neckerchief up over his mouth and nose. The horse was a grey, tall and well-muscled, steaming in the night. It reared up, and the rider kept his seat. Outlined in the moonglow, the apparition was awe-inspiring. Stack felt tears stand out in the corners of his eyes, and his spine tingled with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.
A lase beamed by from the Oscars, cutting empty air.
The horseman pulled his kerchief away from his face. It was lined and leathery, but his blue eyes were sharp and strong. He had a shaggy moustache and a strong jaw, hawk's cheekbones and white-blonde hair.
"Son," he said to Stack, "you look like you need a friendly gun."
"I think we're in time," Chantal said, squeezing into the confined space. "It's just here. It hasn't seeded into the communications channels."
"What does that mean?" Finney asked.
"It's trapped. In the fort. If we're lucky, we can slam the door on it. Can we seal all the electronic egresses?"
Finney looked at the monitors. "Most of them are down anyway. The datanets pulled out. We're just on the straight Cav line."
"Can that be shut off?"
"Well…there are back-ups, and Standing Orders are that the line should never be terminated under any circumstances."
"Can it be done?"
Finney nearly smiled. "Not officially. Not from the Ops Centre." She thumbed towards the low ceiling. "Everything is shut up behind durium panels, but down here there are wires. Sergeant, pass me the clippers."
Quincannon handed Finney the pair of rubber-handled shears from the toolkit they'd scavved. The Captain snapped at the air. Outside, alarms were still sounding, and voices were coming from all the public address speakers. There were many voices, all taunting, all vicious, all evil…
There were curtains of wires, and circuit-breakers hung in them. The place was the seamy side of the fort, with all the works crammed into a small space and left to gather dust until there was a malfunction. With Chantal at the terminal, it was impossible for either of the others to do more than get their heads and arms into the hole-sized room. One tangled skein of multi-coloured wires combined into a rope and fed into a hole in the concrete. Finney tapped it.
"All the outside channels are here. It's a weakness, actually. I've been trying to get the design changed. Any saboteur could cut the whole place off from the outside world by striking here…"
"Do it."
Finney opened the shears, and crunched them into the rope. Sparks flew, and meters burst. Chantal covered her face. Finney flinched, and cut again. She wrestled with the rope, which was kicking, and fell back, her hands smoking. The shears hung, embedded in the wires.
Finney waved her hands and shoved them into her armpits. The shears jerked, and arcs danced on the blades.
Quincannon pushed forwards and grabbed the handles, forcing them together. His face showed the strain, but he persisted. The access room was thick with smoke, and Chantal was coughing, her eyes streaming.
The shear blades met, and the rope parted. Quincannon fell back, dropping the tool on the floor.
"Done, Sister," he said.
"Fine. We've got the genie in its bottle…"
She pulled the vials of Holy Water—refilled at Welcome— from her belt, and set them on top of the terminal.
She said a brief prayer, and crossed herself. Quincannon and Finney had done their bit. Now it was her turn.
She started tapping the Latin words into the database.lt was just a way of getting the demon's attention, but it ought to give a litle pain to the creature.
She tried to think in sync with the system, projecting herself through her fingers into the machine's space.
Finally, the thing inside turned round and roared its hatred at her.
With a leather-gloved hand, the stranger swept his slicker back from his hip. A pearl-inlay on the stock of his revolver caught the moonlight. In one smooth, easy movement, he drew a six-gun, a long-barreled beauty with a filed-away sight.
The Oscars halted, and stood as still as the monoliths of Stonehenge.
Stack turned, and looked at the machines who had come to kill him. The stranger pointed his gun without seeming to take aim, pulled back the trigger, and fanned the hammer.
Six shots went into the first Oscar in a vertical line from the centre of its visor to its metal crotch. The black holes looked like buttons.
Stack's breath was held. There weren't supposed to be bullets that could pierce durium plate like that.
The Oscar leaked fluid from its lower holes, and toppled backwards. Stack felt its impact in his ankles as the ground shook.
The stranger spun his gun on his trigger-finger and holstered it. Then, his hands moving too fast for human eyes, he pulled a repeating rifle from a sling on his saddle.
The Oscars' visors raised.
Nothing is faster than a lase. It is an instantaneous weapon. It strikes its target simultaneously with its ignition. The beam doesn't travel through space, it appears in the air and anything in its way is cut through as if a red-hot wire had materialised out of another dimension and the object of the attack happened to be occupying the same space in this world.
The stranger outdrew and outshot three lases.
His hand was a blur as he pulled down the trigger guard lever three times. There were three sharp flames, and three shots.
He put each bullet into the hole in an Oscar's head.
The night air was sharp with the aftertang of honest gunsmoke. The Oscars collapsed like broken statues.
The stranger's horse was a little spooked. It shifted, and he gently tugged his reins, calming the beast.
He swung his rifle back into its sheath with an easy motion.
"What is that?" Stack gasped.
"It's a Henry, son. The 1873, manufactured by old Oliver Winchester himself, to the design of Benjamin Tyler Henry. Best rifle there ever was."
"A Winchester '73?”
"Yup."
Out in the Big Empty, something howled at the full moon. Stack shivered again.
"That thing must be a hundred and twenty-five years old."
The stranger grinned. His teeth were white and even.
"How can you do that? How can you bring down an armoured android with an…with an antique?"
"You do what you have to, son…"
Stack knew he had gone crazy, and was hallucinating. This was where his brain checked out on him, and he was left to flounder in the desert. All those wounds, all that ju-ju, all the strain. It had finally been too much for him. In retrospect, he was amazed that he had held out against madness so long.
But the stranger was here. There was no doubt about that. The man and his horse were massive, not in size but in substance. This was reality. The stranger pulled a pouch and paper from his waistcoat pocket and rolled himself a cigarette one-handed. He struck a match on the horn of his saddle and lit his smoke.
"Who are you?"
The cigarette burned. "Just a drifter."
"Where did you come from?"
He threw the cigarette away, ash in the sand, and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
"No place special, son," he waved a hand at the desert, "out there somewhere, I guess."
Stack's head hurt. Sand drifted against the Oscars. A wind was rising, whipping the tops of the dunes.
"Why did you come?"
"You needed help. I always try to help."
The stranger adjusted his hat, fixing it tight to his head. An unheard-of cloud drifted across the face of the moon. No, not a cloud, a shadow. The stranger looked up, a touch of concern in his expression.
"Looks like a sandstorm's blowing up," he said. "I'd best be on my way."
Stack opened his mouth, but had nothing to say.
"So long, pilgrim," said the stranger, pulling his kerchief up, and turning his horse away.
Stack finally got it out. "Thank you…"
The horse picked up speed, and the stranger's slicker billowed around him like a white cloak. He raised his hand to clamp his hat to his head, half turned in the saddle, and waved a farewell.
"Thank you, thank you."
The stranger rode off into the night. Darkness and the wind swallowed him. For a few moments after he was gone, Stack could hear hooves, then there was just the whistling of the wind and the shifting of the sands.
He turned, and walked past the dead Oscars, back towards Fort Apache.
Everything was going wrong. The androids weren't responding. Lauderdale had had Stack in his sights, but a sandstorm had blown up and his viewpoint blanked out. He tried to activate the nuke, but hadn't been rewarded by a big bang. There was someone in the desert with Stack, but there was no way of telling who. He didn't like that.
Also, half the Ops Centre had shut down without warning.
Rintoon was still crying "mutiny."
Lauderdale pushed angrily away from his console, and wheeled around, looking for a course of action.
The demon had stopped coming through the speakers. It was still in the works, Lauderdale knew, but it was busy with its own battle.
What would Elder Seth want him to do now? What was the Path of Joseph?
“I'll have them all flogged within an inch of their lives!" screamed Rintoon. "Flogged, flogged, FLOGGED!”
The Colonel was making whipping motions with his arm, relishing in his imagination the thwack of leather against flesh.
At least, he was happy.
What to do, what to do?
Lauderdale's hands were shaking, and his heartbeat was up. He loosened his tunic collar.
"Lay open their backs, and pour salt into the weals…"
Lauderdale was afraid. His mouth was dry and his tongue was swollen. He trembled with the fear that he had lost his way, had strayed from the Path of Joseph.
Elder, help me!
He had bitten his lips and his tongue. There was blood in his mouth.
Blood!
"… stripe 'em with the cat. Nobody defies the will of Colonel Vladek W. Rintoon, and gets away unmarked! Nobody, nobody, NOBODY!"
The Path was clear. Lauderdale would see the way ahead if only he performed one more blood sacrifice.
He looked at the ranting, mad old man and knew what he must do.
The sabre mounted above the map was from the Battle of Washita in 1868. Some people said it was Custer's. That had been a massacre too. He hummed "Garry Owen," the tune the 7th Cavalry Band had played that day when the long-haired general put Black Kettle and his sleeping Cheyenne men, women and children to the sword. Not feeling the pain, Lauderdale punched through the glass and gripped the weapon by the hilt. He pulled it free, and swung it in a neat arc towards Rintoon's neck.
The Colonel paused in mid-rant as the sharp sabre bit deep.
Lauderdale drew the sword from its scabbard of flesh, and plunged it in again.
"Mutiny," breathed Rintoon. "Mutiny!"
Lauderdale's mind went red, and he hacked until his arm was too aching to hold the heavy sword. It clattered on the floor.
Blood pooled around his boots. He dropped to his knees, and washed his face in it.
Blood!
In the mind of the machine, Sister Chantal wrestled with the demon.
It tormented her as it had done before, but with its energies applied a thousandfold. It was like being caged with an angry lion.
"Suffer, sssissster!" It sang in Petya Tcherkassoff s mainly synthesized voice, "ssssssuffer and burn!"
It wore the faces of her ghosts—her father, her mother, Marcello, Georgi—and screamed obscenities. It tried to force its way into her skull, and make her wallow in filth, rubbing her face into every discarded scrap of herself. Every unfulfilled, unnameable desire, every impulse, every vice was trotted out in brain-filling Technicolor and graphic three-dimensional detail, with stereophonic agony on the soundtrack.
Her fingers tapped the keyboard automatically as she regurgitated the text she had been taught.
The horror show played on.
Mlle Fournier discovered her in the nursery, carving chunks out of Marcello's chest with a breadknife as she rode the boy to a bloody climax.
"Chantal, Chantal, you wicked child, wicked child, you should be punished, be punissssshed, you sssshould die, die, die…"
Marcello screamed, pain co-mingling with ecstasy.
"Chantal, Chantal, don't you like me any more? Cut deeper, cut deeper. Cut where the blood runsssssss black…"
In a whore's bed, while Isabella watched, she was sandwiched between Thomas Juillerat and the Pope, screeching.
"Oh, Chantal, Papa and il papa, how tiressssome of you. And that nightgown, it's so…ssssssso…1980s!"
"Mon petit choux…"
"Kissssss my ring, Sister!"
In the dojo, she scooped out Mother Kazuko's insides with her bare hands, plunging her knife-hard fingers again and again into the woman's chest, finally the victor in their eternal pretend-battle.
"Very good, Chantal. More pain, more pain. Kill me, kill me, kill me…"
Back during her battle with the California Diabolists, she hesitated at a crucial moment, and saw Mother Kazuko collapse, the hellspawn crawling over her.
"You nearly got me killed then, Chantal. Now you can finissssh the job."
She killed her enemies, and exulted in the hunt, the slaughter, the communion of blood. A fallen Gaschugger looked up at her, pleading for the last rites, and she poured napalm into his eyes.
"This is not me," she told herself.
She jettisoned her mean flesh forever, and poured her consciousness into a datanet, copulating mentally with banks of information, forcing herself into forbidden files, spreading herself out through the world's cobweb network of datalinks. Fattier O'Shaughnessy studied her, won Nobel prizes.
"You're going to die, bitch!"
She pulled her mind out of the maelstrom, and concentrated.
"Die and be damned!"
Chantal fastened on the task at hand, and her fingers fed in the ritual.
"Ssssslut!"
She slipped once. The screen flashed ERROR IN LINE 10: EXURGO IS PAST IMPERFECT TENSE FIRST PERSON—PLEASE ENTER CORRECT TERM directly onto her cerebral cortex. She sped the cursor to the glitch, and made the correction. She pressed RUN, and the Exorcism loaded.
"Die…"
It was terrible. She tried to contain a miniature atomic explosion inside her skull. It was as if she were being broken down into bits of information and built up fromthe ground again within nanoseconds. The pictures the creature was playing inside her head stretched out of shape, slowed down, crumpled, fragmented. The races of Mlle Fournier, Isabella, Marcello, Mother Kazuko, Thomas and Georgi collapsed in upon themselves and whirled together, coalescing into a grotesque composite. The many-eyed, many-mouthed lace rippled and was surrounded by darkness.
"Bittttch!"
She beheld the true face of the fiend. It wasn't anything, just a formless chaos, crawling and writhing. Briefly, it was what she had been taught to expect, a horned, cloven-footed, batwinged, beast. But then it was a tentacled blob, wormlike apendages wriggling around a glowing violet nucleus. Then, it wasn't a body at all, just a foul smell, a dissonant chord, a vile taste.
She clamped her hands together in prayer, and fought the demons inside herself. Finally, all that was left was terror.
But in the terror, there was triumph. The demon was beaten. It could cling for a while, but it was being dislodged from the system.
"The Power of Christ compels you," she said, sprinkling the Holy Water onto the keyboard. Circuits shorted out inside.
"Freak you, ratskag," the demon shrieked at her, shrinking away as the water seeped into the wiring.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She banished the memory of the vicious pictures from her mind, saw how false they were, dispelled the demon's foul suggestions. Black death bloomed on the screen, the Latin standing out in letters of flame.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
"Gimme some soul, sissstuh. Done let no pore imp go down the tubes. We had some good times together, didn't we? We boogied til dawn, tired out the band, then freaked till we were peaked, huh? You got the kind of sssugar Daddy lurves. Cmon, done do nothin' you'll re-gret tomorrow."
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
"Pope's whore, roundheels sexclone, freaking ratskag, hagwitch, slut-nun, sumpsucker, rathergrabber, deatheater, slagdriver, motherfreaker, scum, scum, scum, scum…"
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She emptied another vial onto the screen. Where the blessed water—consecrated by the blood of that good man, Father Miguel O'Pray—dribbled, the blackness paled into dead static.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
There were no more conjuring tricks. There was a hint of the pathetic in the demon's screams now. A wheedling tone was creeping in. Instead of threats, it was offering promises…wealth, position, pleasure, the papacy.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She saw herself ascending to the Throne of St Peter, each step of the path marked by the mangled corpse of a cardinal. Georgi, eyeless, was the last step. She assumed the robes, and the crowds cheered. The illusion was ridiculous.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
Chantal knew she had the upper hand. The demon was flagging, its schemes becoming tacky, absurd.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
It whimpered and pleaded, retreating into the depths of the fort, withdrawing all its tentacles.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
The demon begged for mercy.
"BEGONE!"
The main gates were open, and people were pouring out. Stack grabbed a Trooper he knew—Lizzie Tuska—and screamed in her face, asking her what was going on. She cringed away from him, and broke his grasp.
Two months ago, he had seen Lizzie go alone into a cellar and take out five Maniax with seven shots. Now, she was crying in the dirt, her nerve gone.
"It's Hell in there," someone shouted. "Freaking Hell."
A cruiser was coming. Stack picked up Lizzie, and pulled her out of the way just in time. The vehicle crashed towards London Bridge, and wedged against.the balustrades. There were about six people crammed into it.
There was a fire in the courtyard, and a few half-dressed Troopers with extinguishers were trying to keep it at bay. People were still fighting back.
There were dead people all over the place. Someone had rigged up a makeshift gallows, and a corpse in a sergeant's uniform was dangling from a broken neck.
Jesus Christ!
He fought against the tide towards the Ops Centre.
Lauderdale stood up, red and sticky from his face to his waist, and returned to his terminal.
He would recover his androids, and march on the Fort. With his infallible mechanical catspaws he would restore control. Everything had failed him. Every human agency. The demon had been a damp squib. The Path of Joseph had been betrayed. But his androids were not like the other resources. They would never let him down.
He touched his fingers to the keyboard, and a spark leaped from the terminal into him…
He was dead, but his body kept moving…
The demon was uncomfortable. To be reduced to such a lowly form after the glorious freedom of the datanets was humiliating, and confining. But the church's hagwitch had driven him to it.
It ran its hands over the terminal, getting the feel of the flesh. It would not do. He smashed the plastic casing of the machine, and reached in, pulling out a fistful of transistors, wires and metal interstices. One by one, it stuck them to its face, latching them into his skin, feeling the machine parts meld with the blood and bone.
There was a battering at the door. Someone was trying to get in.
It tore its tunic and shirt open, and scored deep lines in its chest, then shoved in the innards of the machine. Electrical currents sparked in its brain, and sped through its new, mutating body. Its heart ceased to beat, but an accumulator pumped energy into his copper-laced veins.
There were shots, and the doors jerked open a crack. Fingers appeared in the slit, and the protesting metal shutters were forced apart.
The demon found what it was looking for in Colonel Rintoon's chest.
"Come and get me, popish tart," it shouted.
Stack got the Ops Centre doors open, and strode in. He realized Chantal was with him. And Captain Finney and Sergeant Quincannon.
He held out his hand, and Chantal took it. They didn't need to say anything.
The thing standing over Rintoon's butchered corpse turned, ropes of blood flying from its face, and raised a dripping, red sabre.
"Lauderdale," Stack shouted.
"No," it said. "He's not in just now, If you'd care to leave a message at the tone, I'm sure he'll kill you later."
Chantal squeezed past, and stood face to face with the creature. Stack knew this would be a last stand for one of them.
The thing had torn itself apart and stuffed itself full of machine components. Lights winked in the ruptures in its flesh. On its shoulders, above its spindly human arms, were three-elbowed, claw-tipped waldoes, greasy with blood and oil. From its torso sprouted spikes like the one the cruiser had grown in St Werburgh's.
Stack knew what he was looking at.
"This is it," Chantal said to the demon. "You can't retreat any further. Your back is against the wall. You have to defend that body until it drops. Then you're lost. There's no way back into the darkness."
It lashed out at her with a new cyberlimb it had grown out of Lauderdale's coccyx. It was like a six-foot scorpion's tail. She dodged it, and landed three sharp kicks on its chest, toes sinking in between the deadly spikes. The creature was unsteady on its feet. It was changing so fast that it couldn't adapt its centre of gravity.
Stack had his .45 out. Quincannon was slipping the safety off his automatic. The Cav men exchanged looks, and took aim.
"Come on in and get me, coppers," it screamed.
Stack's first shots went into the thing's back near the tear through which the tail was protruding. Quincannon emptied his clip into its head. The thing swallowed the bullets and incorporated them into its body. The head was lumpy with lead now, the bullets visible under the skin like hard boils. It no longer resembled anything human.
It was laughing.
It reached down with its tail and took the sabre from its frail human hand. The blade whirled, and fastened to the limb.
The tail lashed at Chantal, and sliced across her hip. Her uniform was cut, and she bled.
She kicked again, aiming for the flesh between the metal.
Chantal closed with the creature, and hugged it. Rasping, artificial laughter sounded. A knifelike blade lunged out of Lauderdale's body and scraped past Chantal's cheek.
Stack leaped into the room, and joined the fight. He grabbed the creature's leg, tugging at it, weighing it down. Finney and Quincannon had machine pistols which they didn't use for fear of hitting Chantal or Stack. Finney picked up a wooden map-pointer, and thrust it into the creature's body. Quincannon punched it in the head.
It staggered and fell.
"Freak you," the thing said. Chantal grabbed its voicebox, and tore it out. The component came free with a sucking noise. A rattling hiss escaped through the new mouth in its neck. Up close, Stack could see plastic-coated wires and maggotlike muscles knitting inside the creature's body. It was out of control.
Quincannon kicked its head with a heavy boot.
Stack climbed along the twisting body, and got a two-handed grip on the tail. It was wired to shock, and he felt an electrical charge for a second before it went dead as he tore it from the body.
Finney swung a heavy chair at its head, and dented the plate over the forehead with a caster.
The chair bounced off the skull and out of Finney's hands. One of the waldoes extended, claws pyramided together in a spear-point, and punched the captain in the belly. The waldo burrowed into her ribcage, ploughed up through her heart, and burst out between her neck and collarbone. The claw opened like a grapple, and the dying woman's eyes clouded. Slowly, Finney brought her hands round, and took hold of the waldo running through her. Stack saw her fingers getting a good grip. Gritting her teeth, Finney pushed herself away from the wall. The claw shook impotently and bit into her shoulder.
The waldo tore free of the creature, pulling a long string of flesh and wire with it. A spray of biofluid exploded from the uneven, stringy hole in its flesh. Finney stiffened, slipped and fell.
Chantal, one hand pressing the head to the floor, held up a glass tube of clear liquid in the other, and muttered something in Latin.
The throatless thing screamed as she poured the contents of the tube into the hole in its forehead.
"The power of Christ…" she gasped.
The creature arched. Chantal rode it, and continued her ritual. As she spoke, she slapped its face, commanding its full attention.
Inside its head, the mechanics flared and burned out. It collapsed.
Chantal stood up.
"It's gone," she said. "It'll never have a body again."
"What now?"
"We pray for the souls of the dead."
In Salt Lake City, Nguyen Seth floated in his isolation tank, seething at the small defeat that had been visited upon him. So, the datanets still linked the Continental Americas, and the temporal power of the Catholic Church ran unchecked. In the end, that would not matter. In the end, it was a simple question of the Inevitability of Nightfall, of the strength of the Dark Ones.
After all, the Catholic Church was not an impregnable body. The Path of Joseph had found more than a few converts even as high as the Inner Councils of the Vatican itself. But the setback was bitter. Under the energy-enriched fluid, Elder Seth's lips curved into a smile. The Sister who performed the exorcism would have to be watched. Perhaps he would take her himself. He did not care to be inconvenienced, and he lusted after a chance to avenge himself.
The Dark Ones had given him longevity, had made him more than other men. He would not fail them. They would not fail.
In the End, there would be a War, fought in the Great Wastes of the New World, and all the powers of the world would be aligned against the Dark Ones.
His hands knotted into fists and his teeth ground.
They would fall. The Dark Ones would prevail. It would be as it had been prophesied.
Elder Seth put the recent irritation out of his mind, and concentrated on his new business. The Duroc, latest of his servitors, was in Europe, preparing a new course cf action.
This time the Dark Ones would be rewarded.
Now the mission was over Chantal felt curiously flat. As always, she was drained. Mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Once the demon was banished and she had done what could be done for the dead and the dying, she turned off. Sergeant Quincannon had helped her to her room, and tucked her in bed. As if she needed one, she had found another father. Her wounds turned out to be a superficial cuts, so she told the medical orderlies to leave her alone and see to the needier cases.
Three days later, and things had not changed. She sat at her desk, and plumbed the emptiness inside herself. She felt the need to visit Mother Kazuko, and not only to give her teacher whatever comfort she could during her recuperation. Mother Gadzooks O'Hara had been her confessor before she was her martial arts master.
It was like this every time. She reached the accomplishment of her purpose, and found too many important questions still unanswered. It had been a grueling assignment, and she felt she had much to confess. She knew the demon's attempts to assail her faith, in God and in herself, had been base stratagems, but she needed to talk through the feelings that had been stirred. She could never be thoroughly rid of the pictures the fiend had planted in her mind, but Mother Kazuko would help her deal with them, would help her cleanse herself. Perhaps there would be time to stay at the retreat, to pursue her theoretical work. She could do with some cloistered tranquility and contemplation.
Recently, her missions had been getting closer together.
Someone knocked at her door.
"Come in."
It was Nathan Stack. She looked up from her breviary—she hadn't been focusing on the words for over a quarter of an hour—and smiled at him.
Stack was recovering well. He was strong. He would survive. Many hadn't. The US Cavalry had airlifted the mentally and physically wounded out to a facility in the Phoenix PZ, and buried the dead within sight of Fort Apache. There had been enough to fill a new graveyard. They hadn't had individual funerals, just a mass ceremony conducted by the regimental chaplain. Chantal hadn't felt able to speak, but she had vowed to light a candle for Cat Finney in St Peter's. She hoped the woman had gone where the good sufis go.
"We've got Federico back. The Quince has run a systems check, and there doesn't seem to be any damage. The sergeant and your car are getting along famously."
Chantal got up, and went to the door. She accompanied Stack down to the courtyard. Newly-assigned personnel were supervising the repairs and reconstruction. Major General Hollingsworth Calder, the new commandant, had promised General Ernest Haycox, the overall c-i-c of the Cav, that the fort would be on line within the week. Haycox himself had flown in from Fort Comanche to take a look at the site of the disaster. There were rumours of resurgent Maniak chapters out in the desert. And the corps were complaining about the the roads left unpatrolled.
You could tell from their faces which of the Troopers had been just shipped in and which had lived through the demon download. It was in their eyes.
Quincannon saw her, and saluted.
An ops captain walked over. She was new, and didn't look anything like Finney.
"Sister," she said. "We've had a communication from Rome for you."
The woman handed over a sealed print-out, and left.
Chantal broke the papal seal, and read her orders. They were countersigned by Cardinal DeAngelis, and didn't tell her more than the basics.
"I've been recalled," she told Stack.
"I thought you wanted to go to California?"
She sighed. "I do, but it will have to wait. It's marked urgent. I have a mission. Somewhere in Europe."
Stack didn't look happy about it. Quietly, he had come to rely on her. There was something he hadn't told her about, but which he wanted to. Something he found difficult to get straight in his own mind. She could tell. She had found she could catch his moods.
"I have to go," she said.
"I know."
"And you never told me how you escaped from Lauderdale's androids."
He hesited, "I know. It's kind of complicated."
"Save it for when I come by again."
"Sister…"
"Yes?"
"Never mind," he kissed her on the cheek, like a brother. She tried not to be disappointed. "Goodbye, Chantal."
"Goodbye, Nathan."
He walked away, and vanished into the shadows under the eaves of the fort. She turned to Federico, and keyed in her door-open code.
"Good morning, Sister," it said.
She felt comfortable with Federico's leather seat under her, and experienced that slipping-into-a-warm-bath thrill she always had when she was in the car. Federico played The Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love," but she didn't want to hear that. She selected Nat King Cole's "Route 66."
The main gates of Fort Apache slid open, and she drove over London Bridge. Ahead of her was the Big Empty, the desert heart of America.
"Ciao," she said, mainly to herself.