On his attempt at escaping the Factory, Eddie Kalish had not bothered to check out the contents of the warehouse-space around it. On the whole, he realised, it was fortunate that he had not.
Had he stuck so much as his head through the doors, without clearance, then that head would have been burnt off by the plasma-ejectors of automated defences-whether the powers that be had wanted him kept alive and intact or not.
Now, in the company of Trix Desoto, he wandered through the big steel caverns. He somehow expected his footsteps to echo off the walls, for all that sound was as deadened in here as in any recording studio.
The inner walls of the warehouses crawled with polyceramic baffles and steel mesh designed to disrupt tracksat scanning that could ordinarily see right through the flat surfaces of buildings.
Possibly the hybrid processes of the Loup really had left him smarter, because something occurred to him that he was sure never would have, in what he was increasingly coming to think of as his previous life.
“Doesn’t that look suspicious in itself?” he asked. “You know, a NeoGen tracksat looks down and sees a bunch of totally disrupted forms?”
Trix Desoto snorted.
“Give us some credit,” she said. “The baffles are constructed to give the impression of old packing cases and the occasional scurrying rat.”
Indeed, looking up, Eddie could see a lump of vaguely rat-shaped thermal biogel being moved around by a clockwork-driven arm. The use of clockwork, presumably, prevented the mechanism from being identified as such.
It all seemed a bit Rube Goldberg to Eddie. If he could only work out what a Rube Goldberg was…
Most of the space under the baffles was taken up with the big hulks of Behemoth rigs, of a similar sort to those Eddie had seen when he had first encountered Trix.
As had been the case then, the tanker-like construction of most of them was simply camouflage. For all that they were plastered with Hazmat decals, suggesting that a breach would release the kind of chemical-waste sludge that would seriously bring down anybody’s day, the hatches were open to reveal simple compartment space.
Workers in sterile med-tech coveralls were busily filling the compartments with what appeared to be thermos canisters. There were thousands of these canisters. There was no indication as to what they might contain… but the size and squat proportions of them left Eddie decidedly uneasy.
“Couple of hours before they finish loading the Brain Train,” said Trix Desoto, instantly confirming Eddie’s unease.
“And what are we calling the Behemoths themselves?” asked Eddie. “Think Tankers?”
Trix Desoto snorted again, this time it seemed with suppressed laughter rather than contempt.
This little instant of human contact left Eddie feeling momentarily weird. He didn’t know what to think about it.
“So how did you get roped into all this..?” he ventured at last.
“None of your damn business,” Trix Desoto said, flatly. It was like a shutter coming down. “I might tell you the story of my life, someday, but it won’t be today. For the moment you can just keep your grubby fingers out of my head.”
“Suit yourself,” said Eddie Kalish.
Off to one side of the warehouse, a bunch of outriders in bulky leather-skinned body armour were checking the gyro-systems on their flywheel-driven motorsickles. A small group of them were doing the traditional thing of sharing a smoke directly under the sign on the wall that told them, in huge letters, not to do that very thing.
Eddie glanced from them back to Trix, in her skin-tight patent leather, and raised an eyebrow. “You’re gonna be coming it like the biker chick for this thing, yes?”
“I’m going to be riding in command-and-control this time out,” Trix said, her manner easing up again, just a little, now the conversation had returned to the job at hand. “Doing the Third Assistant to the Attache thing, you know? Anyone from the outside looking in, I’m a console-jockey. From the inside out I’m in Command.”
“Good for you,” said Eddie. “So where do I fit into your whole command-structure thing?”
“For the moment, till we get where we’re going, you’re a semi-autonomous unit. You’re gonna be running vanguard; our eyes and ears in front.”
“And when we get there, wherever it is?” Eddie asked, uneasily recalling what Masterton had said about only he and Trix being the only two who carried a viable strain of the Loup.
“That’s need-to-know,” said Trix Desoto. “And you don’t need to, yet. For now, your function is to help the Brain Train get through in the first place, and you should concentrate on that.”
Eddie concentrated on it-or at least, he thought about it.
“Front-runner just seems like one hell of a responsibility, is all,” he said. “I mean, you can pump my head full of all the new info and vocabulary you like; the fact remains that I’ve never done anything like it before. I just don’t have the experience. It’s a screw-up waiting to happen, is all I’m saying.”
“You’ve got experience,” said Trix Desoto. “You spent years out on the roads and you survived.”
“I spent years dicking around, never going anywhere much and rabbiting at the first scent of danger,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, well, those are the senses and instincts the front-runner needs,” said Trix. “Your job is to sense the danger, then rat out and cover your ass while the heavy-duty guys deal with the actual combat. I reckon we can trust to the Leash that you won’t rat out too far.”
Eddie nodded, feeling depressed. Trix would, of course, be supplying him with his twelve-hourly dose of the Leash for the duration of the run.
Come what may, the life of one Eddie Kalish would be inextricably linked to the fortunes of the Brain Train.
“Besides,” said Trix, “you’re really not going to be doing much more, in the end, than sit there on your ass. You’re going to have help.”
“If it isn’t a personal thing about the story of your life,” said Eddie, “what do you think of this thing about cracks in the world and stuff? The thing about how the Loup is supposed to actually work?”
They were working their way through the loading-activity around the Behemoths towards a partitioned-off area before the main doors of the warehouse.
Eddie had noted this when coming in, and had wondered what the partitions concealed. Only he hadn’t wondered enough to take a look, on account of the fact that a security-system plasma ejector had started tracking him, with a whirr of servos, when he had gotten too close.
“What?” said Trix, who seemed a little lost in her own thoughts. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, it just sounded like bullshit, you know? The sort of shit you dream up when you’ve been dancing with Mr Brownstone. But Masterton said that everyone has their own idea of what’s really going on, so I just wanted to hear what you think is really happening, is all.”
“I don’t think about it, much,” said Trix. “To the extent I do, I think it’s just another way that the world’s a sex-killer.”
“What?” said Eddie. “I mean, a what?”
“Sex-killer. Whoever you are, the world just screws you. It screws you up and screws you over, and when it’s had enough of screwing you it kills you. Simple as that. Last few years, it’s just stopped clicking around and decided to be up front about it.”
As a general philosophy of life, there was much in it that Eddie could get right behind. Something inside him, however, was saying that it was all too pat in its bleakness and resignation-and that some large part of Trix Desoto didn’t believe a word of it herself.
Just another front.
“So if that’s just what the world is,” he said, “if that’s all there is, why even bother to keep living?”
“What’s the alternative?” asked Trix. “Here we go.”
They had reached the partitioned-off area, and Trix slid one of the partitions back to reveal what-for one Eddie Kalish at least-was a reason to keep on living at least for a while.
“There’s your help,” said Trix Desoto.
The red skin of the Testostorossa gleamed in the pristine, liquid way that spoke of either fresh wet paint or a well-nigh impervious monomolecular shell. Eddie Kalish had lived around vehicles for most of his life, in any number of states of repair. He had thought he knew from vehicles of any kind.
He had never known an automobile, in and of itself, could be so beautiful. Wonderingly, disbelievingly, he reached out a hand to stroke the liquid-seeming shell.
Smoothly, ramping on an exponential curve, the engine came to life. There was a kind of throaty roar to it, which Eddie would later learn to be due to integral booster-units-the hydrofusion equivalent of turbo-charging.
“ Get your fuckin’ hand off me, ” the Testostorossa growled, in the voice of a New York cabbie. “ You a fuckin’ fag or what? ”
The doors of the warehouse rolled up, and the security-system plasma ejectors racked themselves back on their servos.
The front-runner sped out like a red streak, hi-impact suspension taking care of the worst of what had might once been a street but was not little more than a debris-strewn track.
It put some distance between itself and the warehouse complex, then slowed to match that of the Brain Train tankers which were now emerging, the motorsickle outriders fanning out to bracket them to far as was possible in the current urban conditions.
Over to one side, in the wreckscape of the No-Go there was the rattle of automatic fire, the flash and smoke of frag-detonations. This was a common occurrence at the beginning of any transport-operation: each of the various multicorps had arrangements with one or another of the various tribes that infested the No-Go. NeoGen, or MegaStel, or any number of other concerns, bribed guys to disrupt GenTech traffic as a matter of principle-and GenTech had guys on the ground to take out any source of disruption.
The Brain Train convoy headed up on the somewhat tortuous route that would take it northwards through the San Angeles Sprawl and at last onto the pristine blacktop of the Interways… and an entirely other kind and degree of danger.
The sheer size of the operation made any attempt to run covertly not even worth thinking about. Lights blazing, loaded up for mutant bear, the Brain Train was a sight to see.
Masterton wasn’t watching it. He wasn’t even tracking the Brain Train’s progress via the tracksat readouts in the Factory communications suite. All the same, he knew precisely where it was.
“ Sama slektli,” he was saying, prostrate before his totems in the spare and austere cell that served as his working space and living space combined. “ Tara oorsi sa mamda lami se tarakogla me so sani ta deloka de somata so se hakara de sao soma…”
The words, had there been anyone here to listen to them, would have struck this nonexistent listener as pure nonsense, without basis in any known human language-structure, even to the point of having the glossolaic quality of speaking in tongues.
Indeed, that was rather the point.
Likewise, the collection of artefacts and totems on the floor before him appeared to have no real sense of significance: nothing but a random collection of garbage and junk, the detailing of which would serve no actual or useful purpose.
And, again, this was the point.
The words and totems had, in fact, no more significance than the static and distortion coming from a radio receiver when hunting between stations-save that, at some specific point on the dial, one can learn to recognise a particular blend and texture in the static, and know that one is coming close to whatever station one is actually searching for.
The words and totems merely directed the mind towards… a place for which there are no ordinary terms of human reference.
Masterton looked up.
The air before him shimmered as though with heat-haze-then split open as cleanly and neatly as a razor slits a polythene sheet. A matched pair of barbs, each trailing a thing fleshy line, shot from the slit and speared Masterton, punching through his shades and burying themselves deep into the eye sockets beneath.
The lines connecting Masterton to the rip in the fabric of the world twitched and pulsed; some kind of exchange was taking place. Masterton drooled.
“ Salekmi tekla,” he said through his slack mouth. “ Samo de talekli sama… Food for you,” he continued in more or less distinguishable tones, as though some synchronisation had been reached with whatever it was behind the slit in the world. “Sending food for you. Food for you now. Food for your mouth.”
Reprise: Reset Settings to Start
The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.
The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, now, segueing in on one or other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off, weighing up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on, coming in from both sides.
“The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care about the Brain Train-they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off the front-runner.”
“ Yeah, well,” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “ that would be us. What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a queer to wanna fuck some girlies? ”
“I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip on your lips was just flat-out murder.
Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.
The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.
“Anyhow,” Eddie said, “These kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”
“ Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us, ” the Testostorossa said. “ Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice-and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat. ”
Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked and loaded.
“ I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now, ” the Testostorossa said. “ You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me. ”
Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this..?
Third Quadrant: Impactor Road
From a bedroom a roscoe said: “Whr-r-rang!” and a lead pill split the ozone past my noggin… Kane Frewster was on the floor. There was a bullet-hole through his think-tank. He was as dead as a fried oyster.
“Dark Star of Death” Spicy Detective January 1938
Supplementary Data: A Common Childhood
The light fell in actinic, dust-laden shafts through holes eaten in the rusting corrugated sides of the shed; inched across the ragged forms huddled on the dirt floor. A number of rats slunk through the hut, with a silent inconspicuousness and an utter lack of scurrying that might have seemed, to some observer, slightly overplayed and unnatural. Something the rats had learnt consciously rather than by instinct.
This demeanour had developed in response to the fact that should a rat be detected, here and now, it would last about as long as it took to be torn apart and the pieces squabbled over and eaten. Such useful protein-supplements were beyond price-if anyone had even had sufficient resources to know what a price was-here in the camp.
The gentle purr of an engine outside. A rat which had been, very quietly, very surreptitiously, investigating a particular huddled bundle of rags on the grounds that it might just have stopped moving for good, now joined its fellows in streaking for a bolt-hole in the side of the shed-a trajectory so complicated, designed so that it escaped the slightest breath of detection, as to be barely physically possible.
The bundle that the rat had been perusing twitched, then stirred, then uncurled from the foetal form in which it had slept to show a pinched, pale face. A girl of maybe twelve years old, possibly slightly older, but her state of chronic malnutrition made it difficult to tell. Her matted, filth-encrusted hair could have been any colour. One eye was filmed by a cataract, which glistened silver-grey in the dim light. There was a large, open sore on the side of her neck.
Rubbing absently at the sore, the girl picked her way, silently and cautiously as any rat, through the other occupants of the shed. Heading for the door, even though it would of course still be barred from the outside. She intended to be amongst the first into the food-crush, this morning; she needed to conserve her strength. The last thing she needed at this point was a fight.
Dimly, she recalled a time when she’d had milk-teeth, friable as chalk due to lack of calcium in her diet, but they had at least served to give her some minute edge as a weapon. Her adult teeth, however, had simply never begun to grow. She didn’t even know that she was supposed to have them.
Outside, the sound of engines acquired extra harmonics as they were joined by the tones of another. The girl had never heard that particular sound before, and curiosity got the best of her. She stuck her good eye to a rust-hole eaten in the wall and looked out into the Camp.
Big yellow half-track carriers were parked in the compound. There were little blue bubbles on the top of their cabs, two to a cab, in which small, illuminated, reflective saucers revolved so that it looked as if the little blue bubbles were flashing with light. The girl didn’t know what the vehicles were, of course; her only experience with vehicles was the slop-truck that delivered what passed for food and removed waste. She wondered, vaguely, what the people of the Camp were going to be fed today. With trucks so big and splendid as that, it must be something very special indeed.
Off to one side, she caught a glimpse of men in coveralls busily setting up what looked like a monkey-puzzle of steel, fluorescent tubes and medical equipment. Other men, in bulky yellow corslets of polycarbon body-armour, looked on, hefting black objects that looked a little like the shock-sticks used by the Camp guards, but bigger. The girl wondered what those things were-just not so much that she wanted to be the one who found out.
Behind her, the other occupants of the shed were stirring awake. The girl found herself in something of a quandary. Something new was happening, and it could either be something good or bad. No way of telling which.
Deciding that it was probably better to be more circumspect, the girl backed off from the door and returned to the main crush of occupants, not so far that she would end up at the back. If something bad was going to happen then it could happen to somebody else first. If something good, then there was a chance there’d still be some left when it got to her.
Some half an hour later, the yellow-corsleted men unbarred the door of the shed and herded the occupants out, blinking in the sudden sunlight, into the compound.
Now the girl stood towards one side of a line of children, their ages ranging from those of toddler to adolescent. From this vantage point she could see what was happening to several of the sheds that made up the Camp.
Men in coveralls, with masks over their heads, had opened up the metal boxes sunk into the sides of these sheds-the boxes that the girl, and for that matter anyone else in the Camp, had attempted to get into at some time or another, and see what was inside, purely for the sake of something to do-and were loading them with pressurised canisters. One of them tested a canister as the girl watched, twisting a tap on its neck, then nodded.
Another pair of men were wandering between the rows of standing children. One held a portable data-terminal, the other a camera-though the girl of course did not know what either of those things was.
They stopped in front of the girl.
“You’re a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” he said. “Isn’t she a little sweetheart, Karl?”
“She’s a sweetheart, Lenny,” said Karl. “Yes indeedy.”
“Give us a smile, sweetheart,” said Lenny, sticking the camera in her face.
The girl smiled.
“Turn your head, sweetheart,” said Karl.
She turned her head.
“Visually, Karl, she could be good,” said Lenny, studying the display on his data terminal. “Don’t worry about the rickets or the incipient lupus, those are correctable. She’s got the general facial-structure, that’s what counts. Pity about that sore, though. Looks viral to me. She’s gonna need reconstruction, and that means, maybe, more bucks upfront than GenTech Entertainment needs.”
Karl shrugged. “So, we take a flier, Lenny, and if it doesn’t work out then GenTech Entertainment shoots her in profile. People won’t be looking at her neck, much, anyway. ’Cept the ones who are into it. There are those. Say something, sweetheart.”
This last to the girl, who dredged up as much basic English as she knew how to speak. It wasn’t so much that she was following orders as that it cost her nothing to do so, it was something to do, and she might as well do it as not.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I like the voice,” said Karl. “Personality.”
“Microtremors show an incredible potential range,” said Lenny, waggling his data unit meaningfully. “I think we might just have ourselves a screamer here.”
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Karl.
“Trix,” the girl said. “My name’s Trix.”
“Nice name,” said Karl. “Very apt.” He pulled a paint-stick from his pocket and scrawled a small collection of symbols down her arm. “Now what I want you to do, sweetheart, is go over there. They’ll take care of you over there.”
He shoved her off in the direction of the biomedical monkey-puzzle, and big, old people in white who would babble about path-testing and debriding, and shove a needle in her, arm and that was the last thing she remembered for a while.
Her eyes and lips were crusted with dried mucus when she woke, at last, to find herself lying on something flat, and impossibly soft, and with an IV-drip in her arm.
Dark shapes hazed before her against a blazing white light. Something hard and shockingly cold was pressed against the sore in the side of her neck, and she tried to jerk her head away. She found that her cheeks, however, were pressed between two padded blocks, rendering her head immobile.
Something she simply did not recognise was water, for the simple reason that it was not sludgy and stinking, dropped onto her eyes and lips. She opened her eyes.
A man with a shaven head and a jet-black Suit loomed over her. Impossibly old, even older than the guards in the Camp. Possibly even thirty, if such a thing could be imagined.
Something cold and slim and tubular slid into her mouth. She tried to spit it out.
The man slapped her. Not particularly hard, just hard enough to hurt.
“Drink it,” he said.
Trix drank what she would later learn to be fruit juice warmed to body-heat so that the basic unfamiliarity of it would not be rejected by her body. All the same, her blood-sugar rocketed too fast for an atrophied liver to even begin to cope-and due to the clamped position of her head, she almost choked to death before hands, off to one side that she couldn’t see, found an aspirator.
After she was more or less settled, the man looked down at her and smiled. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but even Trix could see that it was just a movement of his mouth; he’d trained his mouth to move in a certain precise way and didn’t mean it at all. Even though she couldn’t see them for the obloids of black glass that covered them, Trix knew that the smile never had and never would touch his eyes.
“Sorry about that,” the man said. “We’ll have to dilute that for a while. At least until we bulk you up a bit with glucotics.” He paused, looking at her thoughtfully. “Do you know, you really are a lucky little girl indeed.”
Trix just looked up at him. She didn’t feel particularly lucky. Then again, she didn’t have all that much to compare “luck” to.
“You’re a very lucky girl indeed because we’ve been looking out for you. We here at GenTech. Looking out for people just like you.”
The man did the thing with his mouth again.
“You can call me Masterton,” he said. “We’re going to do great things. Would I lie to you?”