Again, thought Francine.
The Stop
The little man's face was creased with pain. At first Blondie assumed he'd caught the full glare of the stun grenade, but the little man's eyes shifted to watch Old Sam as he clanked in. His expression changed from pain to a bland cheeriness faster than a video frame update.
'Hallo,' said the man. 'I'm the Doctor and that was my friend Benny.'
'That's your friend?' said a voice from the back of the cavern.
Old Sam's gun jerked around insect-fast, trying to locate the source of the voice. Kadiatu stood up from behind a table. She was still wearing Blondie's T-shirt. 'That's who we came here to rescue?'
Something was wrong with Blondie's helmet. The target icon stubbornly refused to track Kadiatu when she moved. An ECM warning marker kept flashing in his right peripheral vision.
'She is in fact a very nice person,' said the Doctor. 'At least when she's herself. Did you see where she went?'
'She went right past me,' said Kadiatu, 'and down a bolthole in the comer over there.' She advanced cautiously to the Doctor's side, keeping her eyes on Blondie and Old Sam. 'Do we go after her?'
'No,' said the Doctor. 'Not just yet.'
'I'm glad you said that.'
'Stay here,'
said Old Sam's voice over the comnet and he shot off towards the comer. Kadiatu flinched back as he speeded past.
'Did you arrange this?' she asked the Doctor.
'No, but you must admit it is convenient.'
'Very.'
'There's a straight tunnel heading southwest. I'm doing a reconnaissance now.'
'Are you going to talk to us?' Kadiatu asked Blondie, 'or just stand there doing robot impressions?'
'It's me,' said Blondie unsealing his visor.
'Doctor, this is Blondie,' said Kadiatu. 'Blondie, this is the Doctor.'
'Doctor of what?'
'Don't ask,' said Kadiatu. 'That was Old Sam wasn't it?'
Blondie nodded.
'What are you doing here?'
'We came to rescue you.'
'Why?'
'Because he threatened to rip my head off if I didn't come.'
'That's as good a reason as any,' said the Doctor. 'Has he found my friend yet?'
'Sam. Find anything?'
'No targets so far.'
'Not yet.'
'Some friend,' said Kadiatu.
'She hasn't been feeling herself recently.'
'Hey, boy, you got your visor down?'
'No.'
'Get it down ...'
'What's the matter?' asked the Doctor.
There was a distant concussion, Blondie felt the floor shake under his boots.
'Multiple targets - engaging now,'
said Old Sam in Blondie's earphones. It was followed by a drawn-out ripping sound from the mouth of the bolthole.
'Pulse rifle,' said the Doctor.
Blondie was caught by surprise when his visor snapped down without his mental command. He unlimbered his own rifle and set the helmet on target search. The ECM warning was still flashing but there were no target indications. He noticed that the Doctor and Kadiatu were edging around to put him in between them and the bolthole.
Blondie tried to raise Old Sam on the radio but the signal was dead. He mentally rumbled with the helmet to get an opsit but he was unused to the protocols used by the military software. When the opsit finally came up it gave him a top-down graphic of the operations zone when he tried squinting down his nose. It showed the cavern, two fuzzy dots that he assumed represented Kadiatu and the Doctor. The tunnel leading off from the bolthole extended a hundred metres before breaking off into a
grey
'no data' area.
There was another ripping sound from the bolthole and the tunnel section of the graphic extended another fifty metres. Blondie realized that the helmet CPU was making guesstimates based on its analysis of the echoes.
'Blondie!' Kadiatu's voice, low, urgent.
He looked up and saw nothing alarming.
'Can't you see them?'
'See what?'
'They're coming out of the walls!"
There was no mistaking the real fear in Kadiatu's voice.
Blondie cycled through his vision options but nothing changed. The opsit graphic was clear too.
'I think it might be a good idea,' said the Doctor mildly, 'if you raised your visor.'
There were at least six of them, the same things that had attacked the
Fat Mama
at Rhea, covering the distance between them with the same unhealthy vitality they had exhibited then. Blondie could see the alcoves where they must have been hiding in the far wall.
He put the rifle on full auto and cut the failsafe.
Nothing happened.
An error tone sounded in his earphones.
The rifle was interfaced with the helmet fire control through the touch pad on the gloves. The CPU functions were spread between three shielded Motorola transputers imbedded in impact-resistant plastic at strategic points. Vickers were confident that even if two of the transputers were lost the target acquisition function would be degraded by only as little as fifteen per cent, tops. They were pretty certain they had licked the software problems that had led to unfortunate friendly-fire incidents in the early stages of the war.
Even so most grunts spent the war with their weapons locked on manual.
The Melbourne Protocols were the peacetime rules of engagement for use by the military in police actions. Target acquisition was keyed to weapons.
What was charging towards Blondie carried nothing that the helmet recognized as a weapon.
Blondie figured it out in just enough time to reverse his grip on the rifle and use it as a club.
The Ice Maiden
Brigadier Yembe Lethbridge-Stewart, Commanding Officer United Nations Third Tactical Response Brigade, the Blue Berets, the
Zen Brigade,
jumped first into the complex caldera that surmounted Olympus
Mons.
Jumped first because of tradition and because his family were crazy and always had been. First in, the legend said, last out with not a scratch on him, at least nothing visible. Retired at the end of the war to a hick town in the West African forest, stopped taking his medication and waited patiently for premature implant arthritis to kill him.
Francine got there just in time.
Three weeks later the Brigadier walked into the foyer of Imogen's R&D centre in Leipzig wearing his full combat rig, and gave its occupants thirty seconds to evacuate. Security took one look at the yellow and black trefoil stencilled on his chest and complied.
He walked down sterile corridors and through rooms lit with computer-regulated UV lamps. He found a room full of mechanical wombs filled with baby monsters. Engineered nightmares in the shape of human foetuses. The Brigadier terminated their life support without breaking step.
The final room was painted a soothing pink and filled by three rows of ten cots made from white ballistic plastic. The floor was made of interlocking planks of commercial pine lacquered for ease of cleaning. Only one of the cots was occupied. The Brigadier's boots cracked the floor as he walked over. A pastel-coloured LCD mounted on the end of the cot displayed the child's statistics in primary red alphanumerics.
The monster was three months old and showing the accelerated growth of motor co-ordination that had been predicted in the initial studies. Imogen had taken the genetic code of the Ubersoldaten, all those crazy boys and girls that had fought for humanity on Mars and spun out the perfect warrior. Violence woven into its DNA, Someone, a nurse perhaps, had tucked a stuffed bunny rabbit into the covers beside it.
'Kill it,' Francine had said. 'Kill it before they turn the world into drones and soldiers.' And the Brigadier had agreed. 'Kill it before it breeds.'
He stretched out his gauntleted hand: a single blow to the forehead into the brain, painless and quick. He had to damp the feedback to the armour's servomotors to stop his hand from shaking.
The monster opened its black eyes and smiled up at him. A tiny hand reached out to close around his index finger.
'Dada,' said the monster.
The Stop
Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart had never hit anybody before.
There was a breaking sensation and a cracking sound like shattered pottery. The creature fell back, a section of its forehead driven into its brain, blood spurting from its nose. It had been so easy: the force of the blow had seemed to flow up from her hips across her back and down her arm.
Strange how it fell down so slowly, like an object falling in micro gravity or a dream. She felt surrounded by a stillness as if she had passed through the gaps between noise. The cavern had a sharp stratospheric brilliance.
To the left, from the comer of her eye, she saw Blondie swing again at the creature in front of him, the rifle passing through its arc with lazy momentum. The creature was ducking; Kadiatu could see the movement starting in its thighs, trying to get under Blondie's reach so it could close with its talons. It wasn't going to make it though; she saw where the rifle would intersect with its head just below the ear.
To her right another creature was in midair - the ballistic portion of a jump that had started a long time ago. This one might have been female once; there was a hint of breasts beneath the homy carapace of its chest. Its mouth was open, its outstretched arms were sweeping forward with needle-sharp claws on the end of its fingers.
Kadiatu felt herself twisting almost before she was aware of what she was doing. She let herself go with the flow of her body, feeling the momentum of her turn translate into kinetic energy as her foot lashed out at head height. Her heel caught the creature in the solar plexus, and there was another pottery crack. She fell backwards to absorb the momentum and rolled over her shoulder.
She came to her feet in time to see Old Sam return to the cavern. In the strange slow universe Kadiatu was inhabiting the pulse rifle made a deep zipping sound each time it fired.
Old Sam didn't waste his shots. The tracers burned their way through the air and exploded on impact. Within moments the remaining creatures were dead.
Kadiatu felt the world crank back up to normal speed. A sudden spasm of pain across the knuckles of her right hand made her gasp.
'This is getting out of hand,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu looked over at Blondie who was struggling out of his helmet. His hair was slicked down with sweat. He threw the helmet on to the ground and turned to look back at Kadiatu.
'Where's my moneypen, you rat?' she asked him.
Blondie looked at her wide-eyed.
A strange barking noise issued from Old Sam's massive armoured head.
He was laughing at them.
'My place this time, I think,' said the Doctor.
Central Line
A rumour had started that they were going to Mars. It ran down the train in a chain of furtive whispers from refugee to refugee. People were staying quiet as possible, even the children. The KGB guards posted at the end of each carriage were shirt-sleeved and pretty relaxed looking, but no one was taking any chances.
'Mars,' said the woman sitting next to Zamina. One side of her face was a network of broken capillaries, testament to some serious alcohol abuse. 'Where's that?'
'Down the line,' Zamina told her.
'I heard they got an atmosphere there now,' said a man opposite.
'Do you think they'll put us outside?' said the woman. 'I haven't been outside since I was a girl.'
The man had the same broken hopeless face as the woman, as the whole trainload of refugees. Zamina realised that no obvious gangbangers or streetwalkers had got on the train. The younger people were all kids or babies, clinging on to their parents. These were the structurals, the faceless unemployed that shuffled down to the welfare shops to pick up their weekly ration of cheap protein and even cheaper carbohydrate. Always in little packs of three and four because they were scared of getting ripped off.
Losers, Roberta called them, people too stupid even to be active parasites. Living on the leftovers of the leftovers after the street people like her had finished with them. Getting down on their knees in the hole in the wall churches and begging God for a better life which they didn't deserve. Stupid enough to raise children that would only have to make the same zero sum choices as their parents.
She tried to drag her mind away from Roberta, leave her memory the same way they abandoned her body in the orphanage, but the memories kept surfacing like small silver bubbles. Roberta climbing into the bed between Zamina and Zak, growling that she should get some action from the boy too. They were friends weren't they? Share and share alike.
She used to do dumb things like the time when they both painted their nipples red with lipstick and caught the train to Riyadh during Ramadan. Spent an hour flashing their tits at the Saudi matrons on their way to prayers. Outraged eyes above the black purdah veils. It got them arrested but a policeman let them go on the usual terms. On the way out Roberta stole his sunglasses right out of his shin pocket.
Roberta always said that life was a hereditary disease, sexually transmitted and invariably fatal. Now she was lying on her back with a corpse marker pinned to her face, a second mouth between her breasts. Lips red without lipstick. Zamina was running with Benny now. Caught up in a hustle that had nothing to do with sex, drugs or money. Somewhere she'd stumbled across the line into a world full of monsters and strange little men with sad eyes.
'We're going to Mars,' she told Benny.
Benny didn't look up from the tatty notebook that she constantly read. 'I certainly hope so,' she said. I had enough trouble getting us on this train.'
London Bridge
They sat on a wooden bench under a canopy of wrought iron and frosted glass. Cold radiated from the stone platform. At the far end of the station brilliant sunshine made the parallel tracks of metal shine. The Doctor said that trains ran on those tracks but Blondie was yet to be convinced.