It might have been wondered, by those in a position to wonder, why the various GenTech technicians and operatives were going along with something like the Brain Train. They did not, after all, have the Alienation Syndrome shared by Eddie Kalish and Trix Desoto, and so presumably cared about their fellow human beings and what happened to them-at least so much as human beings generally do.
One reason, of course, was that it is very hard to overestimate what people will do as part of the drudging and day-to-day business of participating in atrocity.
And then there are those who simply have a propensity for cruelty and violence-indeed, the Brain Train’s security force, the outriders and those who handled the weapons systems, were of just that sort. Violent men, and for that matter women, who didn’t care who they might end up fighting just so long as they fought.
Just the sort of people you needed, in fact, out on the dangerous and somewhat crazy blacktops of America.
As for the technicians themselves, most of them didn’t call the Brain Train by that name, and probably didn’t even know it. In the time-honoured commercial tradition of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, most of them thought that they were delivering components for a new supercomputer-system-components which had to be kept in refrigerated canisters on account of their extreme delicacy.
Those who knew the actual nature of the Brain Train’s cargo thought that they were still components for a new supercomputer-system-but they were clone-brains, grown whole in the GenTech skeining vats. One or two might have had their suspicions-in the same way that an employee in a Mister Meaty burger bar might have suspicions as to precisely what goes into the burgers-but not to the point where they might investigate, due to the horrible possibility that their suspicions might be confirmed.
Besides, it wasn’t their job. Let someone else get into trouble and take the heat for it if they wanted.
In short, while they might be living under a certain element of corporate-drone denial, the GenTech Brain Train technical crew were not particularly bad or callous people.
As such, it could be argued that they did not deserve what would happen to them when as squad of US troops from the Base approached them, as they were going about their business, brought up their MultiFunction rifles and began to slaughter them out of hand.
For a while it was bloody. Then the Brain Train’s own security forces woke up to what was happening, weighed in on the side of GenTech and things got bloodier still.
Outside, from outside the Ship, there was a heavy concussion. The ship lurched.
Somewhere in the back of Eddie’s head, a gentle murmuring of which he had been barely aware other than that it was vaguely comforting, suddenly became the shriek of fingernails on slate.
It was the Ship, he realised. Up until now the Ship had just been murmuring about how happy it was to be here and alive and waking up-and now it was squealing in alarm.
“That came from outside!” Trix Desoto snapped. “That was an attack! Go and see what’s happening.”
Eddie Kalish was of the profound opinion that, if something were attacking, the least safest place to be would be outside the protection afforded by a Hammer of God.
“What about the activation?” he said. “We can’t just-“
“I can take care of the rest of the nodes,” Trix Desoto said. “There’s only a few left.” She hefted the case she was carrying meaningfully. “And plus I’m the only one who knows what to do with the… final component. I’m the only one who can get it done.”
“I don’t suppose you could give me a quick run down, then?” Eddie asked. “I mean listen, I’m really not trying to be the rat here-all right, who am I kidding, course I’m being a cowardly little rat. But the fact remains that you’re the lethal one. You’ve got the Loup under control. Whatever’s out there, you’re the one who can flip out and waste it, while I-“
“Trust me, wouldn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s no time to explain it but just trust me but there’s no way it would work. I wish to God, quite frankly, that there was someone else who could go out there and watch my back, but you’re the only one I’ve got. Just get out there and do it, okay?”
Eddie Kalish took of the larger tubes and just trusted that it would lead to a sphincter-hatch that would let him out of the Ship.
Some large part of him, of course, hoped that it would just lead to a dead end, giving him the excuse to just blunder about and get confused and not have to go out in the end at all.
In the event, though, the tube led him straight to a hatch in a matter of minutes, bang on order. Just his luck.
He wondered, briefly, if he should stroke the wall in the same way that Trix Desoto had done, but the hatch simply dilated in front of him. He would never be sure if the Ship itself was trying to be helpful-or if it simply wanted to be rid of him.
The air outside was hazed with smoke. Eddie stuck his head out of the hatch, hauled it back and examined the image imprinted on his retinas. Nothing moving out there. Nothing alive.
Cautiously, he clambered down from the hatch, went into a crouch and scanned his surroundings through the haze. Now that he was through the hatch he became of a loud, low rumbling emanating from the Ship itself. Whatever provided its motive force was obviously on line.
The cavern was a mess. The servomechanisms that had been busily shucking human heads were a tangled, burning wreckage-the source of the smoke. There was the smell of charred flesh from the piles of discarded empty heads.
Somebody had dropped a quantity of hi-ex down the main elevator shaft and taken the various head-processing units out. Eddie wondered if the idea had been to disrupt the Ship’s replenishment, before remembering that part of the operation had been almost done in any case before he and Trix had entered to reconfigure the nodes. Whoever had done this would have known that, or simply didn’t care.
In any case, here and now, there didn’t seem to be any immediate threat. He turned back, intending to return to Trix Desoto and tell her as much, and found that the hatch had contracted shut.
Abruptly, the rumbling from the Ship changed in tone, and added several extra harmonics to the mix. Eddie had been around enough vehicles, of various types, in his life to recognise that several key systems had just cut in. The Ship was in the process of prepping for actual flight.
Eddie Kalish had not the slightest idea what might happen to him, should a starship from the future, or the past, or from some weird dimension of wherever the fuck it was, decided to take off in an enclosed space with him standing right beside it-and it was the considered opinion of one Eddie Kalish that he was fucked if he was gonna wait to find out. He scrambled through the wreckage and sloshed and crunched his way through the detritus of shelled and emptied heads to the alcoves leading to the emergency maintenance shafts-only to find them filled with quick-drying concrete.
The concrete was still vaguely sludgy, but not so much that there would be any possible way through it. When the US Army Engineering Corps start throwing construction materials around, they don’t dick about.
Behind him, the rumbling of the Ship cranked up another notch and became a positive roar.
One chance left, then.
The pylons and the cogwheel rack that had respectively stabilised and given purchase for the main elevator platform were a scorched and buckled, collapsed mess, but he was able to haul himself up on them to gain some height.
Hanging from the elevator shaft itself, in the roof of the cavern, was a length of gear-chain that remained from the mechanism that had lowered the canisters of the Brain Train’s cargo.
Eddie Kalish launched himself for it desperately, brushed the chain with his outflung fingers and fell back-flat-foot boosted himself against the remains of a crumpled stanchion, managed somehow to get his hand round the chain and then clung on for dear life.
(And it was only later, yet again, that he would work out the various distances and dynamics, and realise that what he had done was physically impossible. He was really going to have to get a handle on that, he thought later-work out the limits of what his Loup-informed body was really able to do, if only to stop all this waking up in a cold sweat the night after he did stuff.)
Eddie hauled himself up to get a purchase with his other hand, wondering if he really had it in him to make it up the shaft by way of a gear chain that was already slicing into him.
Below him, the roar from the Ship ramped up yet again.
Problem solved. Eddie climbed.