Golgotha Run (20 page)

“Ma’m,” Butcher said.

It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but there seemed to be a sense of
relief, both in Butcher and his squad, though they gave absolutely no external
sign.

The escort took them into Shed Seven. Eddie had not been quite sure what to
expect—but he certainly hadn’t expected it to be bare-walled and
completely empty.

“What
is
this—“ he began, when the floor lurched under him and dropped with
the whine of heavy-duty servos.

Eddie wasn’t entirely stupid—at least, since undergoing the processes of
the Loup it seemed to him that he was increasingly less so—so by the time
the servos whined down to a stop he had more or less convinced himself that
his underwear was safe.

They were in an underground chamber slightly larger than the galvanised hut of
Shed Seven had been. Along one wall were racked the bulky and somewhat ape-like forms of heavy-radiation armour.

At an order from Butcher, the squad broke formation and began climbing into
the suits double-time. Eddie noted that, for all their speed in doing so, they
were extremely careful about checking the on-board systems and seals.

Trix Desoto, meanwhile, had wandered over to a storage unit, from which she
now returned with a pair of paper-thin polyceramic coveralls.

“There you go,” she said, giving one of them to Eddie.

Eddie looked down at it. The cuffs at the wrists and ankles seemed to be
elasticated.

“The fuck?” he said.

“What do you think?” said Trix Desoto. “You want Mommy’s help putting it on
the right way round or something?”

“Yeah, but…” Eddie gestured in the direction of soldiers busily girding
themselves up for any and all manner of radioactive nastiness.

“Oh, right,” said Trix Desoto. “The coverall isn’t to protect
you
. Nobody
cares what happens to
you,
frankly. We’re going into a clean environment. I’d advise you to look up the term, along with the
word ‘soap’.”

The Shed Seven-sized elevator floor lurched again. Eddie decided that this was
probably because it was built to military specifications as opposed to faulty
design. It was built to do the job, and do it reliably, rather than indulge in
the niceties of giving a smooth ride.

“This is gonna have to be refitted,” said Trix Desoto. “Some of the components
we’re going to be bringing down here are a little too… delicate for all this
lurching around.”

“That was a polite way of putting it,” said Eddie.

He was not in a particularly good temper. The elasticated band around the
polyfabricated hair-cap he was wearing seemed to be increasingly cutting into
his head.

“I was trying for elliptical, myself,” said Trix Desoto.

Like Eddie, she was now in cap and coveralls—though the latter were a
strategic half a size too small for her, to noticeable aesthetic effect. An
effect periodically enhanced by the blasts of air that washed over them as the
butterfly wing hatches of airlock stations slammed shut above.

“So, Eddie,” said Trix Desoto in a loud, clear voice. “You ever seriously
think about getting it
on
with me?”

The question, coming completely out of left field, left Eddie momentarily
dumbfounded, as though several areas of his brain had simply and physically
shorted out.

“I mean, I know what I come off like in my… with my usual look.” Trix Desoto
glanced sidelong at a collectively and absolutely stone-faced squad of Deltas,
what could be seen of their faces behind their visors.

“Couple of guys here,” she continued, “are having a little bit of difficulty
keeping their fingers on their numbers. And you’re, what, seventeen years old?
You should be getting a little chubby on over the thought of dry wall.
Thinking up things to try and talk to me about. Looking for excuses to touch
me and cop a feel.” She turned to look at him meaningfully. “And I just don’t
get any of that from you, Eddie. I wonder why.”

Of any possible scenario while being stuck in an elevator with a squad of
Delta-trained Marines this was absolutely, in the considered opinion of Eddie
Kalish, the very worst.

“My age?” he managed, latching on to one desperate detail in an attempt to
head the conversation off. “You’re maybe two years older than I am…”

“Yeah, well girls notoriously mature faster than boys,” said Trix Desoto. “So
you’re shafted twice, and not in a good way, believe you me. Don’t you
like
girls, Eddie? Is that it? Do you prefer boys?”

Not
absolutely
the very worst thing he could have imagined, then.

“Could I borrow your gun, please,” he said to Lieutenant Butcher. “I think I’d
like to shoot myself in the head.”

A second later, a slightly bemused Eddie Kalish was looking down at his hand,
in which was held the automatic pistol which the lieutenant had instantly
unclipped from the side of his radiation armour and had given to him.

“Good job you didn’t ask him to do the job for you,” said Trix Desoto, a
little sardonically. “You wouldn’t believe your current clearance so far as
these guys are concerned.”

Eddie handed the gun back to Butcher, who racked it back onto his rad-armour
without comment.

“The reason I bring it up,” said Trix Desoto, “is that there are a number of
people out there, you know, out there in the world, with a specific and
particular variety of Alienation Syndrome.”

She pronounced the term in a way that you could hear the capitalisation.

“The effect’s quite subtle,” she continued. “It’s very easy to confuse with
merely having a touch of Asberger’s, or Adoptive Syndrome—you know,
dislocated from any family with a similar genetic makeup—or just being,
basically, a bit of a sad little dork who’s a failure in everything and who
doesn’t have any friends.

“The symptoms include a total failure to understand how humans can go crazy
for things, any number of things—for a girl or a boy, or for money, or for a leader giving orders. A certain lack of concern for other human beings and what happens to them, however bad. There’s a connection simply broken in there.

“These people always seem to have murky and displaced origins—like
foundlings, you know? But whereas most displaced persons tend to spend their
lives trying to find out who they are and where they came from, searching out
living relatives and trying to go home, that sort of thing just never even so
much as occurs to these people…”

Eddie, for his part, was starting to wish that Trix Desoto would go back to
digging at him about his sexuality. At least such jibes could be defended
against by a general and generic response.

This specific detailing of his character and its flaws, on the other hand, was
just hurtful.

“Well pardon me for living!” he snapped. “Okay, so I don’t know exactly where
I came from before, I dunno, the first places I remember being and the first
things I remember doing. Forgive the
fuck
out of me for not tearing my hair
out all the live-long day and wailing about it!”

“Hey, I’m just saying,” said Trix, “that some people just don’t have the
homing-instinct. They don’t have it because they
know,
on the deep
subconscious level, that to have one would be completely and utterly
pointless. There’s nowhere in the world for them to go.”

The elevator platform gave another lurch.

“I think we’re coming to the end of the line,” said Trix. “Don’t take what I
just said to heart. I’ve been trying to prepare you a little, just so’s you
don’t go completely bat-shit on me. And a second from now, you’ll see what I
mean…”

Abruptly, the sequence of butterfly wing hatches slamming shut behind them
became a single armoured hatch locking into place in a rock ceiling. The
elevator platform rack-and-pinioned down support pylons through a cavern.

The cavern was not impossibly vast, just bigger than the mind was comfortable
with.

Visitors to the ventilation galleries of coal mines, or to the overly
grandiose subway stations of the world, have reported just that vertiginous
sensation: it’s not that this empty subterranean space is big, but that it’s
obviously man-made, imposed on the bedrock of the world, and so feels somehow
wrong.

Or if not man-made then at least artificial—and one can ponder that
particular distinction later.

Concrete stanchions reinforced the rock walls in the manner of the support
superstructure of a cathedral dome. Their undressed surfaces seemed to have
been colonised by some strange fungoid organism: fleshy webs of tendrils from
which cilia rippled like the soft spines of a sea urchin; clusters of globular
fruiting-members that by some inner process appeared to give off their own
light. Clusters of jewels sprouting in flesh.

The fungus might or might not have been found anywhere else on Earth, but
Eddie recognised it. If you took into account all the screwing around that
dreams do, where you can go to sleep thinking about a leaky transmission and
suddenly it’s three mice playing maracas, these were the cavern walls he had
fallen through in one of his dreams when being inducted into the Loup.

All of this was purely secondary. The larger part of Eddie’s mind and focus
was fixed on the object that all but filled the cavern, the object that they
were descending towards. The object that for all the world looked liked a
spiked chainmail glove, except about a million times bigger and bristling with
enough weapons to turn the eastern seaboard into nothing more than a ketchup
stain. The object that was floating in the middle of the chamber as if it had
just bitch-slapped gravity and was now enjoying a celebratory drink. The
object that Trix Desoto had, somewhat euphemistically, referred to as the
Artefact.

As Eddie stared at it, he felt several entire areas of his mind shut down…
and several he had never been aware of before, start up.

A number of things, now, became clear—not least being what he had thought
was meaningless taunting on the part of Trix on the way down.

The stuff about how there are some people in the world who never bother
looking for home, for example—for the simple reason that there is nowhere
on this world for them to look.

“Oh God…” he breathed.

“The Artefact,” Trix Desoto confirmed. “I tried to clue you in a little, and
did I get any credit?”

“Yeah, well you could have done a better job,” said Eddie Kalish. “You could
have included the single most salient point. That’s not a fucking Artefact,
that’s a fucking Ship.”

Butcher and his men remained out in the cavern, guarding the elevator platform
against the ravening hordes of those who might, for some strange reason, want
to spirit it away.

Weirdly enough, you could tell by their postures that each and every one of
them was doing his absolute best not to look directly at the Ship.

Eddie Kalish couldn’t help noticing, also, that in addition to their heavy
armour they had taken up position behind heavy lead shields.

“Look, I’m not trying to be funny or anything—“ he began.

“I wouldn’t either,” said Trix, “the material you’ve got. This is
funny,
and
there you are over on the other side of the room, the material you’ve got.”

“Thank you very much,” said Eddie. “You’ve been a lovely audience and I hope
you rot in hell. The thing I was going to say is, how come the soldier-boys
get all the neat gear, body armour and shit and we get…” he plucked
distastefully at the thin polymer of his coverall “this.”

“We don’t need anything else,” said Trix Desoto. “At least, I don’t need
anything else and you probably don’t. You passed the first test.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Eddie. “And what test would that have been, exactly?”

“Here we go,” said Trix.

They were at what appeared to be an airlock hatch, a sphincter-like
arrangement in the skin of the Ship that seemed every bit as semi-organically
repellent, to Eddie, that the word
sphincter
might suggest.

Trix Desoto ran her hand lightly down the… well, down the whatever it was
that the skin of the Ship was made of.

“Come on, baby,” she murmured. “Open up for me.”

Smoothly and silently, the hatch relaxed open.

Eddie gazed dubiously into the darkness beyond.

“I’m not going in there,” he said. “There’s things in there. Things in the
dark. Moving around. I’ve seen them.”

“What are you talking about?”Trix snapped. “What things? Where?”

“Things. Bad things. I’ve seen them in my head.” Eddie had not been entirely
serious, of course, but he was still feeling decidedly nervous.

“So we really have to go in there?” he said. “Would it not, I’m saying
basically, have been an idea to bring along a couple of flashlights?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Trix said, climbing up into the hatch. “You coming or
not?”

Eddie considered this, for a moment, with some seriousness.

Whatever the soldiers were protecting themselves against might be doing
horrible things to his body, but he was probably right in assuming that the
Loup in Trix and himself was counteracting the effects.

Then again, how much worse might those effects be if you were actually inside
the thing that was producing them?

On the other hand, nothing exactly
bad
had happened so far—and how many
chances did you get to go inside a genuine alien starship? With the off-chance
of coming out with your colon and memoplex intact, in any case.

He realised that he was looking at the outline of Trix against a pale and
shifting glow. At least there was light of some kind in there, in any event. He shrugged to himself and followed her inside.

The tunnels winding through the main mass of the Ship had a tubular and
somewhat organic quality, not as if they were crawling through the bowels of
some living organism or some such, but like the ship had in some way been
grown on organic principles.