Golgotha Run (14 page)

It put some distance between itself and the warehouse complex, then slowed to
match that of the Brain Train tankers which were now emerging, the motorsickle
outriders fanning out to bracket them to far as was possible in the current
urban conditions.

Over to one side, in the wreckscape of the No-Go there was the rattle of
automatic fire, the flash and smoke of frag-detonations. This was a common
occurrence at the beginning of any transport-operation: each of the various
multicorps had arrangements with one or another of the various tribes that
infested the No-Go. NeoGen, or MegaStel, or any number of other concerns,
bribed guys to disrupt GenTech traffic as a matter of principle—and
GenTech had guys on the ground to take out any source of disruption.

The Brain Train convoy headed up on the somewhat tortuous route that would
take it northwards through the San Angeles Sprawl and at last onto the
pristine blacktop of the Interways… and an entirely other kind and degree of
danger.

The sheer size of the operation made any attempt to run covertly not even
worth thinking about. Lights blazing, loaded up for mutant bear, the Brain
Train was a sight to see.

Masterton wasn’t watching it. He wasn’t even tracking the Brain Train’s
progress via the tracksat readouts in the Factory communications suite. All
the same, he knew precisely where it was.

“
Sama slektli
,” he was saying, prostrate before his totems in the spare and austere cell that served as his working space and living space combined. “
Tara oorsi sa mamda lami se tarakogla me so sani ta deloka de somata so se hakara de sao soma
…”

The words, had there been anyone here to listen to them, would have struck
this nonexistent listener as pure nonsense, without basis in any known human language-structure, even to the point of having the glossolaic quality of speaking in tongues.

Indeed, that was rather the point.

Likewise, the collection of artefacts and totems on the floor before him
appeared to have no real sense of significance: nothing but a random
collection of garbage and junk, the detailing of which would serve no actual
or useful purpose.

And, again, this was the point.

The words and totems had, in fact, no more significance than the static and
distortion coming from a radio receiver when hunting between stations—save
that, at some specific point on the dial, one can learn to recognise a
particular blend and texture in the static, and know that one is coming close
to whatever station one is actually searching for.

The words and totems merely directed the mind towards… a
place
for which
there are no ordinary terms of human reference.

Masterton looked up.

The air before him shimmered as though with heat-haze—then split open as
cleanly and neatly as a razor slits a polythene sheet. A matched pair of barbs,
each trailing a thing fleshy line, shot from the slit and speared Masterton,
punching through his shades and burying themselves deep into the eye sockets
beneath.

The lines connecting Masterton to the rip in the fabric of the world twitched
and pulsed; some kind of exchange was taking place. Masterton drooled.

“
Salekmi tekla
,” he said through his slack mouth. “
Samo de talekli sama
… Food for you,” he continued in more or less distinguishable tones, as though some synchronisation had been reached with whatever it was behind the slit in the world. “Sending food for you. Food for you now. Food for your mouth.”

The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.

The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, now, segueing in on
one or other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off,
weighing up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on,
coming in from both sides.

“The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re
just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care
about the Brain Train—they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off the
front-runner.”

“
Yeah, well
,” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “
that would be
us.
What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a queer to wanna fuck some girlies?
”

“I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He
didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to
him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip
on your lips was just flat-out murder.

Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her
quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval
morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded
from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.

The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years
old.

“Anyhow,” Eddie said, “These kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”

“
Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us,
” the Testostorossa said. “
Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice—and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat.
”

Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked
and loaded.

“
I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now,
” the Testostorossa said. “
You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me.
”

Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever
gotten himself into this..?

From a bedroom a roscoe said: “Whr-r-rang!” and a lead pill split the ozone past my noggin… Kane Frewster was on the floor. There was a bullet-hole through his think-tank. He was as dead as a fried oyster.

The light fell in actinic, dust-laden shafts through holes eaten in the
rusting corrugated sides of the shed; inched across the ragged forms huddled
on the dirt floor. A number of rats slunk through the hut, with a silent
inconspicuousness and an utter lack of scurrying that might have seemed, to
some observer, slightly overplayed and unnatural. Something the rats had
learnt consciously rather than by instinct.

This demeanour had developed in response to the fact that should a rat be
detected, here and now, it would last about as long as it took to be torn
apart and the pieces squabbled over and eaten. Such useful protein-supplements
were beyond price—if anyone had even had sufficient resources to know what
a price was—here in the camp.

The gentle purr of an engine outside. A rat which had been, very quietly, very
surreptitiously, investigating a particular huddled bundle of rags on the
grounds that it might just have stopped moving for good, now joined its
fellows in streaking for a bolt-hole in the side of the shed—a trajectory so
complicated, designed so that it escaped the slightest breath of detection, as
to be barely physically possible.

The bundle that the rat had been perusing twitched, then stirred, then
uncurled from the foetal form in which it had slept to show a pinched, pale
face. A girl of maybe twelve years old, possibly slightly older, but her state
of chronic malnutrition made it difficult to tell. Her matted, filth-encrusted
hair could have been any colour. One eye was filmed by a cataract, which
glistened silver-grey in the dim light. There was a large, open sore on the
side of her neck.

Rubbing absently at the sore, the girl picked her way, silently and cautiously
as any rat, through the other occupants of the shed. Heading for the door,
even though it would of course still be barred from the outside. She intended
to be amongst the first into the food-crush, this morning; she needed to
conserve her strength. The last thing she needed at this point was a fight.

Dimly, she recalled a time when she’d had milk-teeth, friable as chalk due to
lack of calcium in her diet, but they had at least served to give her some
minute edge as a weapon. Her adult teeth, however, had simply never begun to
grow. She didn’t even know that she was supposed to have them.

Outside, the sound of engines acquired extra harmonics as they were joined by
the tones of another. The girl had never heard that particular sound before,
and curiosity got the best of her. She stuck her good eye to a rust-hole eaten
in the wall and looked out into the Camp.

Big yellow half-track carriers were parked in the compound. There were little
blue bubbles on the top of their cabs, two to a cab, in which small,
illuminated, reflective saucers revolved so that it looked as if the little
blue bubbles were flashing with light. The girl didn’t know what the vehicles
were, of course; her only experience with vehicles was the slop-truck that
delivered what passed for food and removed waste. She wondered, vaguely, what
the people of the Camp were going to be fed today. With trucks so big and
splendid as that, it must be something very special indeed.

Off to one side, she caught a glimpse of men in coveralls busily setting up
what looked like a monkey-puzzle of steel, fluorescent tubes and medical equipment. Other men, in bulky yellow corslets
of polycarbon body-armour, looked on, hefting black objects that looked a
little like the shock-sticks used by the Camp guards, but bigger. The girl
wondered what those things were—just not so much that she wanted to be the
one who found out.

Behind her, the other occupants of the shed were stirring awake. The girl
found herself in something of a quandary. Something new was happening, and it
could either be something good or bad. No way of telling which.

Deciding that it was probably better to be more circumspect, the girl backed
off from the door and returned to the main crush of occupants, not so far that
she would end up at the back. If something bad was going to happen then it
could happen to somebody else first. If something good, then there was a
chance there’d still be some left when it got to her.

Some half an hour later, the yellow-corsleted men unbarred the door of the
shed and herded the occupants out, blinking in the sudden sunlight, into the
compound.

Now the girl stood towards one side of a line of children, their ages ranging
from those of toddler to adolescent. From this vantage point she could see
what was happening to several of the sheds that made up the Camp.

Men in coveralls, with masks over their heads, had opened up the metal boxes
sunk into the sides of these sheds—the boxes that the girl, and for that
matter anyone else in the Camp, had attempted to get into at some time or
another, and see what was inside, purely for the sake of something to
do—and were loading them with pressurised canisters. One of them tested a
canister as the girl watched, twisting a tap on its neck, then nodded.

Another pair of men were wandering between the rows of standing children. One
held a portable data-terminal, the other a camera—though the girl of
course did not know what either of those things was.

They stopped in front of the girl.

“You’re a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” he said. “Isn’t she a little
sweetheart, Karl?”

“She’s a sweetheart, Lenny,” said Karl. “Yes indeedy.”

“Give us a smile, sweetheart,” said Lenny, sticking the camera in her face.

The girl smiled.

“Turn your head, sweetheart,” said Karl.

She turned her head.

“Visually, Karl, she could be good,” said Lenny, studying the display on his
data terminal. “Don’t worry about the rickets or the incipient lupus, those
are correctable. She’s got the general facial-structure, that’s what counts.
Pity about that sore, though. Looks viral to me. She’s gonna need
reconstruction, and that means, maybe, more bucks upfront than GenTech
Entertainment needs.”

Karl shrugged. “So, we take a flier, Lenny, and if it doesn’t work out then
GenTech Entertainment shoots her in profile. People won’t be looking at her
neck, much, anyway. ’Cept the ones who are into it. There are those. Say
something, sweetheart.”

This last to the girl, who dredged up as much basic English as she knew how to
speak. It wasn’t so much that she was following orders as that it cost her
nothing to do so, it was something to do, and she might as well do it as not.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“I like the voice,” said Karl. “Personality.”

“Microtremors show an incredible potential range,” said Lenny, waggling his
data unit meaningfully. “I think we might just have ourselves a screamer
here.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Karl.

“Trix,” the girl said. “My name’s Trix.”

“Nice name,” said Karl. “Very apt.” He pulled a paint-stick from his pocket and
scrawled a small collection of symbols down her arm. “Now what I want you to
do, sweetheart, is go over there. They’ll take care of you over there.”

He shoved her off in the direction of the biomedical monkey-puzzle, and big,
old people in white who would babble about path-testing and debriding, and shove a needle in her, arm and that was the
last thing she remembered for a while.

Her eyes and lips were crusted with dried mucus when she woke, at last, to
find herself lying on something flat, and impossibly soft, and with an IV-drip
in her arm.

Dark shapes hazed before her against a blazing white light. Something hard and
shockingly cold was pressed against the sore in the side of her neck, and she
tried to jerk her head away. She found that her cheeks, however, were pressed
between two padded blocks, rendering her head immobile.