Golgotha Run (13 page)

Masterton visibly took control of himself, then shrugged.

“I have to admit that I haven’t quite worked it all out yet,” he said. “I was,
like, totally stoned when I thought of it. I also thought, for a while, that the three-dimensional construct that we know as the
world, seen from outside, was bright purple and shaped like a walrus.”

Eddie Kalish nodded, understandingly. It seemed like the only way, at this
point, that someone would eventually get around to loosening the polycarbon
straps.

“Anyhoo,” said Masterton. “The primary cause doesn’t matter, any more than you
need a thorough grounding in atomic theory to know that if you bang a couple
of pounds of enriched plutonium together you get one big bang.

“The plain fact is that cracks are appearing in the world, allowing the
incursion of elements from some other reality, like the way you sometimes get
references and ideas from somewhere entirely else dropped into a book.

“What we’re trying to do, here in the Factory, is to patch elements of that
new… call it
subtext
… into the existing structural coding of the
Zarathustra lexicon. We call the end result the Loup.”

“The Loop?” said Eddie, completely failing to get it.

“Ell-oh-you-pee,” said Masterton. “Scots for
leap,
apparently. Quantum jumps
and so forth. Plus it’s French for
wolf
—bringing in the whole idea of
lycanthropy. For obvious reasons.”

Half-buried memories of the carnage in the Mimsey San Angeles Adventure
surfaced with a vengeance. Eddie gulped and shuddered as he tried to force
them down. He strained his neck again to face Masterton.

“What happened out there?” he asked, when he could more or less speak again.
“What did I turn into?”

“Near as we can tell,” said Masterton, “the Loup opens up a… portal, let’s
call it, and
something
comes through. The precise nature of it is still
unclear. It doesn’t seem to think in what we imagine of as human terms, though
it certainly has impulses and reactions.

“The Loup converts energy from the life-forms around it, seemingly at random,
and uses it to transform the host. We think it’s trying to build the
equivalent of a pressure-suit, so it can survive in this world…”

Eddie Kalish was following all of this. It was just that he couldn’t believe
it.

“Why the hell would you
do
this to me?” he said at last.

Masterton frowned. “I told you, you’re nothing. You just happened to be on
hand.”

“No, I mean why would you do it to
anybody
? What possible use would it be?”

“It’s useful if it’s contained and controlled,” said Masterton. “Trix Desoto
was the first test subject who developed techniques for controlling it. You
wouldn’t believe some of the things that girl can do.”

Abruptly, his expression clouded into one of bad-tempered spite.

“But there’s no point telling you now,” he continued. “We were gonna stream
those hard-earned control-techniques to you, on the subconscious level, but
you went off the damn script and bugged out. Now you’re going to have to learn
them the hard way—if you end up learning them at all. Look familiar?”

Masterton, Eddie saw, was holding up a hypo of the sort with which Eddie was
being periodically tranqued.

“This contains a compound we call the Leash,” said Masterton. “And don’t even
bother to try working out what that means. The name describes what it does,
not what’s in it or how it works.

“It keeps the thing inside you dormant. You go twelve hours without a
booster-shot and the thing goes overt. Then it tears everything it can get its claws
on apart, which is sort of an inconvenience for anything it gets its claws on.
And plus it gives out a psychic trace like you wouldn’t believe.

“We don’t get there in time to haul it back, it tears itself apart under its
own internal forces—which is certainly going to be an inconvenience for
you
…”

“I seem to recall,” said Eddie, “you’ve already told me you own my ass. So
what difference does all this make?”

“Just emphasising the point,” said Masterton. “I let you loose, you’re still
on a choke-chain. There’s a reason why we’re inoculating people with the Loup, a specific job we need them to do.

“Haulage and delivery to… well, let’s just say that where you’re going,
where you’re going to end up, only someone infected by the Loup has any chance
of surviving.

“At the moment, apart from Trix Desoto, you’re the nearest thing we have to a
viable option. And time’s getting tight.”

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.