Up on the mesa, out past the burning remains of Las Vitas, a pollutant-mutated scorpion was in the process of laying its eggs in the still barely-living flesh of a hairless dog.
There was no one to see this, and therefore no one to remark on how the air around scorpion and dog now shimmered, how a sickly light hazed from their forms.
Instantly, as though some switch of unlife had been thrown, both arachnid and canine flesh crumbled into their component molecular parts, leaving nothing but skeletal remains and a perfectly intact chitionous husk.
“We got troubles,” Eddie said, slamming back into the van. “Looks like soldiers.”
“TWO MINUTES TO SURRENDER,” the bullhorn-voice boomed cheerfully, “THEN WE GET LETHAL. IT’S LIKE TOTALLY YOUR DECISION, GUY.”
“Mercenaries,” Trix Desoto said. “Delta-trained. NeoGen runs a cadre of them for hunting parties.”
Eddie strained his eyes on the dead black shadows outside, imagining the stealthy figures as they silently and invisibly took up position. He didn’t actually hear and see anything, of course, on account of the meaning of the words “silent” and “invisible”.
He wouldn’t hear or see a thing, he realised with a cold sick certainty, until they dropped the hammer.
“MINUTE AND A HALF…” the bullhorn boomed. “SAY, YOU A SPIC, BOY? YOU A CATHERLICK? TIME FOR A COUPLE OF HAIL MARYS IF YOU REALLY FEEL THE NEED FOR A QUICK RATTLE ON THE ROSARIES!”
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Eddie muttered to himself. There might or might not have been some Hispanic in his parentage-it was about as likely as anything else-but he couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.
“Destabilisation tactics,” Trix Desoto said. “Like the disco. Keeping us off-balance for when they come in to take the package.”
“Package?” Eddie said.
Trix Desoto indicated the supine form of the unconscious man.
“THAT’S THE BUNNY!” came the bullhorn. “NICE OF YOU TO GIVE US A GOOD LOOK AT THE MERCHANDISE!”
For a second, Eddie was unaware of what the bullhorn guy had meant. He sat there in a cold sweat, looking at the van’s interior light, trying to work it out.
Then he lurched towards it with a curse and shut the light off.
“CLEVER GUY!” came the bullhorn. “WE GOT NIGHT SIGHTS AND THERMAL-IMAGING SYSTEMS OUT THE ASS, MAN! YOU JUST LEFT YOURSELF BLIND AND IN THE DARK. THIRTY SECONDS!”
If there was one thing, absolutely one thing, that Eddie Kalish was not going to do it was turn the light back on again.
Besides, what with the spill-in from the big Kliegs outside, it didn’t make any real difference. The guy was just trying to find another way to rattle him and keep him from doing something all resourceful and heroic. Not that that made any difference, either. If the resourceful hero in Eddie Kalish was waiting to make itself known, it was taking its own sweet time about it.
“That’s it, then,” Eddie said. The choices had come down to sitting here and dying, or even pretending to believe in this “surrender” crap and dying in the open. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Oh there’s something we can do,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s something I can do.”
Looking at her in the in the glare of the Kliegs, it finally percolated through Eddie what had been odd about her since he had made it back to the van. Gone was the delirious swinging between lucidity and alien-sounding gibberish.
Now she seemed entirely and unnaturally sanguine-and not in any sense relating to the catastrophic blood-loss from the wound in her gut.
In fact, she was looking pale but strangely healthy. The body in the comedy-nurse uniform seemed somehow bulkier and stronger.
It might have simply been the light, but Eddie thought he could see weird muscle-masses moving under the skin. Half-thoughts of vampires, of zombies, flashed through Eddie’s mind. Walking corpses, monstrous after death.
“There’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto repeated, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted zebra-striping of light and shadow from the Kliegs. “And I’m going to do it now.”
In the burning ruins of Las Vitas, the flesh of any number of scavenging animals hazed instantly into molecular dust-along with the remaining flesh of that on which they were feeding.
Is was not as if something were sucking some actual life-force, if that word can be made to mean anything in the first place. It was more as if something were feeding on some product of life-coherence…
Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler, heading up the wet-squad out of NeoGen, was suffering from a small gap in basic expectations.
The fact was that, over the years, military-grade command technology had evolved to the point where with a single and suitably controlled squad of operatives one could subvert the infrastructure and take command of an entire city or country.
Schematic analysis of anything from the power and informational grids to the plumbing, plus detailed psychologistical profiling of the principle characters amongst the enemy, ensured that force could be applied to critical targets with a zero-tolerance of error: the equivalent of assassinating Franz Ferdinand because you really hate a bunch of limpid individuals banging on about the corner of some forgotten field, and want to see the lot of them end up dead.
Such seriously shit-hot Control and Command equipment didn’t come cheap, of course, but NeoGen supplied its Retrieval people with the best-especially if said people were going up against such an equally-matched rival as GenTech.
Such tactical control-processes had worked perfectly in the matter of setting some local jackgang on a GenTech road-train, manipulating the various factors in such a matter that the forces neutralized each other. Then Drexler and his squad had moved in to pick up the pieces… and hit that gap in expectations.
There was another factor on the board. And that factor, simply, was just some guy that nobody gave a flying fuck about.
There was not a single person who particularly knew or cared if he lived and died-and that was the problem right there. It was like some idiotic squit of a kid going up against a Grand Master in chess; the kid does things so flatly idiotic that it leaves the Grand Master momentarily flummoxed.
The kid and the package, together with the package’s medical support, had fled the site of the road-train ambush just before Drexler and his NeoGen forces had arrived. Tracksat systems had pinpointed the little RV almost instantly, but the forces on the ground found themselves with a problem. NeoGen had come armed and ready to deal with GenTech or jackganger survivors; they were perfectly capable of leaving some escaping piece-of-crap van a smoking hole in the road that not even micro-engineered algaeic heal-sealant would be able to fill.
What they did not have, however, was the capacity to intercept and stop it without damaging the package irreparably.
Tracksat extrapolation had showed that the van was heading for Las Vitas, and military-spec four-wheel drive had made it in half the time, even over rough terrain. Drexler had looked around the shithole and not reckoned much to it. Too many holes and corners. Street-fighting could get messy.
So Drexler and his boys had broken out their heavy-duty armament and removed the town from the equation.
He didn’t feel particularly good about that, but then again he didn’t feel bad either. It was just what you had to do, sometimes.
The only other place, within practical distance and with communications, had been the junker’s yard here. Strategic modelling of all available factors placed the probability of containing the target here in the upper ninetieth percentile.
That, at least, was what MIRA had assured Commander Drexler. Drexler, on the other hand, was rapidly coming to the conclusion that MIRA was at this point just making it up off the top of her cybernetic head and winging it.
“What was that shit about calling the guy a spic?” he asked MIRA. “Plus all that, you know, religious stuff?”
Ordinarily, the Mobile Intrusion and Recon Application was capable of pumping all kinds of psychological disruption to a target: insults based on their specific gangcult, dark intimations of what the subject really felt about some family member and the so forth. This had just seemed unnecessarily basic and crude.
“Yeah, well, I just don’t have the hard info,” MIRA said cheerfully. For all that the voice issuing from the exterior bullhorn-attachment had been deepened, roughened and masculinized, MIRA “herself” tended to adopt a female persona. That is, a lighter, higher and feminine voice, while still in some subliminal way failing to be human in any way whatsoever.
“Filesearch on the girl throws up nothing, just like all these total blanks, yeah?” MIRA said. “Like someone went through the files and wiped her footprints out. And the guy never left no footprints in the first place-he’s just some kid, you know? I’m just playing the law of averages and throwing out some generic insults. I’m having to improvise.”
Drexler ran his glance across the display-monitors bolted to the dash of the NeoGen-modified Humvee-or HumGee-parked under mimetic camouflage-netting outside the junker’s yard and which was serving as a scratch C amp;C for the guys inside.
Wireframe topographies of the yard itself, thermograph readouts of the targets in the van overlaid with extrapolated bio-data. Outputs from the microcams of the three wet-operatives inside.
“Don’t try to improvise when you don’t have the data,” he told MIRA. “It just sounds wrong. It doesn’t sound like anything a real human would say.”
MIRA gave what sounded like a contemptuous little snort-possibly a sound-sample designed to convey that precise effect.
“I’m a sentient-grade AI, chum, even if I occupy the lower end of the scale. You just follow the orders and do the job and come it like a frigging robot. I sound more human and alive than you do, most of the time.”
“That’s my prerogative, MIRA. You don’t have the option.”
“Yeah, whatever you say, boss,” MIRA said with marked cybernetic sarcasm. “And speaking of time, boss, we’re well over that deadline I gave the targets. You wanna give the go-word to take ‘em out?”
“Do it,” Drexler said. “Remember that the package is our top priority. They can do what they like, but only after the package is secure.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all know that,” said MIRA. “I’m relaying the order to… hang on. Something’s up…
“Check the bio-readouts on the girl. Something freaky’s going on with the girl and it’s-oh my God…”
There was a blinding flash from outside, washing out the Klieg-illumination in the intensity of its glare, and human-sounding or not, that was the last thing MIRA ever said.
Shafts of magnesium light blasted from the windows and roof-ports of the van, from the rust holes eaten in its sides. Tendrils of electrical discharge arced to the junkyard-compound’s generator unit, travelling the leads to which it had been hooked to NeoGen’s Kliegs and exploding them in a shower of sparks.
Vestigial petrochems left in tanks out in the junk piles spontaneously ignited; the tanks detonated. The junk began to burn. The van itself exploded-torn apart by forces within it that were not entirely physical.
And something dark burst from it. Something dark in a wholly different sense than a mere absence of cast light.
Something big. Something shrieking. Something coming now.