The scope of Federal Government, as an instrument of power, might have atrophied; the might of Multicorporations might be split as the individual corporate concerns squabbled amongst themselves for the prize of the world-but the California National Guard (or Arnie’s Freedom Commandos, as certain sectors of the corporate media had dubbed them) were still going strong.
Admittedly, the California state legislature had banned them from operating within their home state but they had enough rich backers among the tech and entertainment industries to buy themselves bases in all of the neighbouring states, ready to strike at a moment’s notice should law and order in California break down completely. Add this to Governor Arnie’s statewide draft programme and the US Army spreading its forces across almost a hundred nations worldwide, and the California National Guard becomes the most powerful military force in North America. Only a few private corporate armies and southern gangcults come anywhere close in terms of both man and firepower and, the California state legislature notwithstanding, there was nobody to challenge their military dominance.
There were any number of reasons for this. Some to do with the functions a well-armed and well-trained military force performed and the responsibilities it had within a chaos-bound overall social dynamic. Others to do with the fact that the CNG’s presence in sympathetic states dissuaded gangcults, terrorists and other assorted whackos from attacking government, corporate and private interests there. Others still to do with their favoured status within the Pentagon and the multitude of homeland security contracts they were awarded by the top brass there. But chief among those reasons must be counted the simple and obvious one that they had a shitload of heavy weaponry, and who was going to take it away from them?
So, foreign wars were still waged and police actions still fought to protect the interests of America but homeland security, unofficially at least, fell under the remit of the CNG.
Johnny Raghead still got the crap kicked out of him before being shipped off to Kandahar, Guantanamo or Diego Garcia if he even so much as looked at a subway air conditioning unit. God-fearing patriots in the northern militias and survivalist groups would get a jackboot up their collective asses anytime they refrained from paying their Federal taxes. ICBMs remained maintained in their various silos and racks. Bomb testing was still conducted-and certain complications attendant to bomb testing, on a whole other level than mere fallout, were still, after a fashion, dealt with.
This latter function fell under the remit of what, over the years, had come to be called Arbitrary Base.
Colonel Roland Grist, Commander in Charge of Arbitrary Base, surveyed the pair of GenTech so-called “civilian specialists” across the expanse of his desk. He was not exactly impressed.
The girl was wearing something in skin-tight PVC that left nothing to the imagination but which, even so, was strategically ripped to leave even less so. With her bleach-blonde hair and overplayed cosmetics she looked like she’d be more at home sliding round a pole.
For all this, she radiated assurance, a sense that if she happened to decide a direction in which the world would go, then the world would fall into line as a matter of suit. Grist was reminded, a little disquietingly, of a nanny employed by his family back when he was growing up on their Cape Cod compound. The girl had done drugs and spent most afternoons screwing his father-but so far as little Roland had been concerned, her word had been strict and absolute law.
The boy was just what the word “boy” implied: a kid around the age of the youngest grunts under Grist’s command, without even the most basic of the training that would have him straightened up and flying right.
The boy was twitchy and pale, hunched sullenly in a gangcult leather jacket several sizes too big for him; shadowed eyes glowering up at Grist under a straggled mass of hair that had long since crossed the border from being merely greasy into the country of the positively matted with filth.
He looked most definitely like a drug addict, this boy-and you could pick any drug you liked, it would probably fit.
For himself Grist couldn’t imagine this pair making it through the Base perimeter alive in normal circumstances, let alone being allowed into the more sensitive areas.
Pentagon orders, however, had been quite clear. They were to be given the run of the place, given any assistance or information for which they might ask, whether that meant launch-codes for the SNARK XIV’s in their silo-racks… or access to the so-called “Artefact” in Shed Seven.
The bureaucrats in the Pentagon were watching him, Grist knew. They were watching him all the time, just to see if he would fumble the ball again. There were Special Forces operatives on the Base that he still had not properly identified, at least to the point where he could be certain where their loyalties truly lay.
He was not in a position, at this point, to blatantly disobey direct orders from above.
He didn’t know how many of his men were in on the joke.
All the same, there was nothing in the orders telling him to make the job of these two easier. If this pair wanted anything, they had to know what to ask and then damn well ask it.
“Sir, ma’m,” he said, the honorifics of respect all-but sticking in his craw. “Our sponsorship arrangement with GenTech Industries requires that we offer you any assistance you might require. I can have a maintenance crew go over your rigs, have you on your way in-“
“Any one of your guys lays a hand on our rigs,” said the girl, “at this point and without clearance, is going to be chopped down instantly. This isn’t the pit-stop, this is the finish line.”
Grist remained impassive. He’d guessed from when they had told him that the convoy was coming that they weren’t going to just be using Arbitrary Base as a maintenance way station; this was just a way of letting this pair know that he was going do to nothing more or less than they actively asked.
“What we’re going to need,” said the girl, actively telling rather than asking for anything, “is your tech-support team scrambled and ready to go. Nobody under Stratum XIV clearance, and you’ll better believe we’re going to be checking the list, and checking it twice, from our own database.
“Step up the perimeter guard, and they can be cleared to any level you like-just keep them away from all GenTech personnel and what they’re doing. Plus we’re going to need a squad of Special Forces Deltas as an escort while we set up shop in the place you dammed well know that we will.”
Grist still remained impassive, biting on the polycarbon tube replacing the cigars to which, in off hours and in the open air, he was partial.
“And that would be?” he said.
“Where do you think?” said the girl. “Shed Seven.”
“So let me get this right,” Eddie said as they headed through the Arbitrary Base compound, watching various military personnel snapping to order in the way that only military personnel can do. “This is what…” He racked his brain for the half-remembered UFO mythology he had picked up growing up in New Mexico-where they had a lot, admittedly, but of a sort that set off so many bullshit detectors that you never bothered to even learn it. “This is what they used to call Area 51 or something, yeah?”
Trix Desoto snorted. “Stop being a tool. You’ve been quite the tool for long enough and it’s been mentioned before. Area 51 never existed. The whole idea of it was fabricated to draw attention away from the things that were really going on.”
“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “So what really happened?”
“Don’t ask,” said Trix. “Just remember, some shit goes down and you hear that things called greys are involved, be very, very afraid. Little bastards aren’t nearly so harmless as they try to make out. This isn’t about that.”
Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that Trix was joking. She gestured to take in the prefabricated barracks huts and storage units of the Base.
“Arbitrary Base,” she said, “is basically a moveable feast; the facilities that make it what it is, that allow it to deal with what it deals with, move between the existing installations, patching into their command structures…”
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Eddie said. “GenTech’s really running Arnie’s Freedom Commandos? Is that how it is?”
“We wish,” said Trix Desoto. “It’s a hangover from the whole Military-Industrial Complex thing. That whole self-perpetuating thing of selling a bunch of arms to guys, then sending in our guys to sort out the situation where you’ve got a bunch of armed guys, you know?
“Anyhow. The Pentagon is split up into as many factions as there are Multicorps, these days. GenTech just happened to end up connected with the faction running Arbitrary Base.” She smiled sardonically. “Lucky for us.”
“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “How so?”
“How so because certain of our… associates have a serious interest in the materials falling under the remit of Arbitrary Base. Or maybe it was the other way around: GenTech had access to those materials, which is why our… associates made contact with us in the first place.”
It might have been all the new knowledge downloaded into him as a part of his induction into the Loup, but Eddie was learning to recognise an ellipse at twenty paces.
“And so just who, exactly, are these dot, dot, dot associates?” he asked.
“You’ll find out,” said Trix Desoto. “For the moment, though, initially, it’s gonna be better to show than tell. And here we are. Shed Seven.”
A squad of Deltas were waiting for them outside of an unprepossessing galvanised steel hut.
Eddie had occasionally come across off-duty military out in Las Vitas, and so some large part of him expected to be greeted with, at best, outright hostility. A supercharged Testostorossa had nothing on off-duty military when it came to assuming that people with more brains than muscle were fags.
Not that he’d had any brains to speak of in the first place, he recalled, which had left him doubly screwed.
He assumed that Trix Desoto herself might be made, well, welcome, for a certain number of reasons, but not in an entirely salutary manner.
Now he came to appreciate the difference between highly trained and not, and off-duty and on. The soldiers snapped to instant attention as he and Trix approached, and the lieutenant in charge of them saluted.
“Butcher,” he said, matching the name tag on his greens.
Eddie thought of several replies to that, but then discounted them more or less instantly as either heavy handed or asinine. A guy in the CNG with the name of Butcher would have heard them all in any case.
“You requested a close-order escort,” said Butcher. It came out as a kind of completely neutral statement, requiring neither confirmation not comment.
“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, confirming it anyway. “Don’t sweat it, There’s no rush; we just want to check it out at this point. You’ll have time to get into your gear.”
“Ma’m,” Butcher said.
It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but there seemed to be a sense of relief, both in Butcher and his squad, though they gave absolutely no external sign.
The escort took them into Shed Seven. Eddie had not been quite sure what to expect-but he certainly hadn’t expected it to be bare-walled and completely empty.
“What is this-“ he began, when the floor lurched under him and dropped with the whine of heavy-duty servos.
Eddie wasn’t entirely stupid-at least, since undergoing the processes of the Loup it seemed to him that he was increasingly less so-so by the time the servos whined down to a stop he had more or less convinced himself that his underwear was safe.
They were in an underground chamber slightly larger than the galvanised hut of Shed Seven had been. Along one wall were racked the bulky and somewhat ape-like forms of heavy-radiation armour.
At an order from Butcher, the squad broke formation and began climbing into the suits double-time. Eddie noted that, for all their speed in doing so, they were extremely careful about checking the on-board systems and seals.
Trix Desoto, meanwhile, had wandered over to a storage unit, from which she now returned with a pair of paper-thin polyceramic coveralls.
“There you go,” she said, giving one of them to Eddie.
Eddie looked down at it. The cuffs at the wrists and ankles seemed to be elasticated.
“The fuck?” he said.
“What do you think?” said Trix Desoto. “You want Mommy’s help putting it on the right way round or something?”
“Yeah, but…” Eddie gestured in the direction of soldiers busily girding themselves up for any and all manner of radioactive nastiness.
“Oh, right,” said Trix Desoto. “The coverall isn’t to protect you . Nobody cares what happens to you, frankly. We’re going into a clean environment. I’d advise you to look up the term, along with the word ‘soap’.”
The Shed Seven-sized elevator floor lurched again. Eddie decided that this was probably because it was built to military specifications as opposed to faulty design. It was built to do the job, and do it reliably, rather than indulge in the niceties of giving a smooth ride.
“This is gonna have to be refitted,” said Trix Desoto. “Some of the components we’re going to be bringing down here are a little too… delicate for all this lurching around.”
“That was a polite way of putting it,” said Eddie.
He was not in a particularly good temper. The elasticated band around the polyfabricated hair-cap he was wearing seemed to be increasingly cutting into his head.
“I was trying for elliptical, myself,” said Trix Desoto.
Like Eddie, she was now in cap and coveralls-though the latter were a strategic half a size too small for her, to noticeable aesthetic effect. An effect periodically enhanced by the blasts of air that washed over them as the butterfly wing hatches of airlock stations slammed shut above.
“So, Eddie,” said Trix Desoto in a loud, clear voice. “You ever seriously think about getting it on with me?”
The question, coming completely out of left field, left Eddie momentarily dumbfounded, as though several areas of his brain had simply and physically shorted out.
“I mean, I know what I come off like in my… with my usual look.” Trix Desoto glanced sidelong at a collectively and absolutely stone-faced squad of Deltas, what could be seen of their faces behind their visors.
“Couple of guys here,” she continued, “are having a little bit of difficulty keeping their fingers on their numbers. And you’re, what, seventeen years old? You should be getting a little chubby on over the thought of dry wall. Thinking up things to try and talk to me about. Looking for excuses to touch me and cop a feel.” She turned to look at him meaningfully. “And I just don’t get any of that from you, Eddie. I wonder why.”
Of any possible scenario while being stuck in an elevator with a squad of Delta-trained Marines this was absolutely, in the considered opinion of Eddie Kalish, the very worst.
“My age?” he managed, latching on to one desperate detail in an attempt to head the conversation off. “You’re maybe two years older than I am…”
“Yeah, well girls notoriously mature faster than boys,” said Trix Desoto. “So you’re shafted twice, and not in a good way, believe you me. Don’t you like girls, Eddie? Is that it? Do you prefer boys?”
Not absolutely the very worst thing he could have imagined, then.
“Could I borrow your gun, please,” he said to Lieutenant Butcher. “I think I’d like to shoot myself in the head.”
A second later, a slightly bemused Eddie Kalish was looking down at his hand, in which was held the automatic pistol which the lieutenant had instantly unclipped from the side of his radiation armour and had given to him.
“Good job you didn’t ask him to do the job for you,” said Trix Desoto, a little sardonically. “You wouldn’t believe your current clearance so far as these guys are concerned.”
Eddie handed the gun back to Butcher, who racked it back onto his rad-armour without comment.
“The reason I bring it up,” said Trix Desoto, “is that there are a number of people out there, you know, out there in the world, with a specific and particular variety of Alienation Syndrome.”
She pronounced the term in a way that you could hear the capitalisation.
“The effect’s quite subtle,” she continued. “It’s very easy to confuse with merely having a touch of Asberger’s, or Adoptive Syndrome-you know, dislocated from any family with a similar genetic makeup-or just being, basically, a bit of a sad little dork who’s a failure in everything and who doesn’t have any friends.
“The symptoms include a total failure to understand how humans can go crazy for things, any number of things-for a girl or a boy, or for money, or for a leader giving orders. A certain lack of concern for other human beings and what happens to them, however bad. There’s a connection simply broken in there.
“These people always seem to have murky and displaced origins-like foundlings, you know? But whereas most displaced persons tend to spend their lives trying to find out who they are and where they came from, searching out living relatives and trying to go home, that sort of thing just never even so much as occurs to these people…”
Eddie, for his part, was starting to wish that Trix Desoto would go back to digging at him about his sexuality. At least such jibes could be defended against by a general and generic response.
This specific detailing of his character and its flaws, on the other hand, was just hurtful.
“Well pardon me for living!” he snapped. “Okay, so I don’t know exactly where I came from before, I dunno, the first places I remember being and the first things I remember doing. Forgive the fuck out of me for not tearing my hair out all the live-long day and wailing about it!”
“Hey, I’m just saying,” said Trix, “that some people just don’t have the homing-instinct. They don’t have it because they know, on the deep subconscious level, that to have one would be completely and utterly pointless. There’s nowhere in the world for them to go.”
The elevator platform gave another lurch.
“I think we’re coming to the end of the line,” said Trix. “Don’t take what I just said to heart. I’ve been trying to prepare you a little, just so’s you don’t go completely bat-shit on me. And a second from now, you’ll see what I mean…”
Abruptly, the sequence of butterfly wing hatches slamming shut behind them became a single armoured hatch locking into place in a rock ceiling. The elevator platform rack-and-pinioned down support pylons through a cavern.
The cavern was not impossibly vast, just bigger than the mind was comfortable with.
Visitors to the ventilation galleries of coal mines, or to the overly grandiose subway stations of the world, have reported just that vertiginous sensation: it’s not that this empty subterranean space is big, but that it’s obviously man-made, imposed on the bedrock of the world, and so feels somehow wrong.
Or if not man-made then at least artificial-and one can ponder that particular distinction later.
Concrete stanchions reinforced the rock walls in the manner of the support superstructure of a cathedral dome. Their undressed surfaces seemed to have been colonised by some strange fungoid organism: fleshy webs of tendrils from which cilia rippled like the soft spines of a sea urchin; clusters of globular fruiting-members that by some inner process appeared to give off their own light. Clusters of jewels sprouting in flesh.
The fungus might or might not have been found anywhere else on Earth, but Eddie recognised it. If you took into account all the screwing around that dreams do, where you can go to sleep thinking about a leaky transmission and suddenly it’s three mice playing maracas, these were the cavern walls he had fallen through in one of his dreams when being inducted into the Loup.
All of this was purely secondary. The larger part of Eddie’s mind and focus was fixed on the object that all but filled the cavern, the object that they were descending towards. The object that for all the world looked liked a spiked chainmail glove, except about a million times bigger and bristling with enough weapons to turn the eastern seaboard into nothing more than a ketchup stain. The object that was floating in the middle of the chamber as if it had just bitch-slapped gravity and was now enjoying a celebratory drink. The object that Trix Desoto had, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as the Artefact.
As Eddie stared at it, he felt several entire areas of his mind shut down… and several he had never been aware of before, start up.
A number of things, now, became clear-not least being what he had thought was meaningless taunting on the part of Trix on the way down.
The stuff about how there are some people in the world who never bother looking for home, for example-for the simple reason that there is nowhere on this world for them to look.
“Oh God…” he breathed.
“The Artefact,” Trix Desoto confirmed. “I tried to clue you in a little, and did I get any credit?”
“Yeah, well you could have done a better job,” said Eddie Kalish. “You could have included the single most salient point. That’s not a fucking Artefact, that’s a fucking Ship.”