Golgotha Run (24 page)

To do that, though, they need the damn thing up and running. Maintenance and
activation sequences have to be carried out—bit of a tricky thing to do if
you happen to be an entity that can’t access the world in any truly physical
sense without bursting the whole thing like a soap bubble. And doubly
problematic if you then have to rely on a bunch of overgrown monkeys who see
the thing as any and all manner of other weird things, if they can even see it
at all.

The solution, in the end, was to engineer some overgrown monkeys who could see
the thing for what it was—and this is where the operation directly concerns
you. A routine gene-examination of your body, after you got yourself shot up
in New Mexico, threw up a whole bunch of flags.

There are standing orders to bring in anyone showing signs of being legacy
offspring from the old Janus Programmes, because the modifications to their
junk DNA already put them halfway down the road. There was only an off-chance
possibility that you might be viable, but the opportunity was too good to
miss. That’s why we patched you up.

The Faction worked with GenTech in tweaking a whole bunch of back-engineered
Zarathustra processes to produce the Loup. We heaved in a lot of other stuff,
of course, but the main thing—the
important
thing—is that you can
see the
Hammer of God
for what it is and, to some extent, manipulate its
systems. Your mind and body have been retuned to have an affinity with it on
several quite profoundly fundamental levels.

You’re not buying this, are you, Eddie? It’s written all over your face. Okay,
try this one: what if this new alien Faction isn’t a new Faction? What if it’s
just a different aspect of one of the already existing Factions and it’s been
fighting against the other Factions out in space? What if it’s been fighting
them since the dawn of time, is still fighting them now and will, in all
likelihood, be fighting them for eternity?

What if this ship isn’t here by accident? What if the Faction has been using
this planet as storage depot for the last however many years and now they need
the Artefact to wage a war a million billion light years away? What if there
aren’t thousands of different Factions but just four? What if what we think
are different Factions are just aspects of these four?

Do you buy that? Well do you, Eddie? Would you give me a dollar for that? No.
I didn’t think you would.

The upshot is, you took one look at something that drives almost any other
human into the bughatch, in any number of ways, and just went, “Oh, yeah,
that’s a Ship. “You got the right stuff, Eddie boy. Congratulations.

Or maybe everything I’ve just told you has been another huge lie just to keep
you off balance and under control. Either way, I wouldn’t let it bother you.
All that matters in the here and now is that there’s a job that needs doing
and you’re the only person who can do it for us.

Don’t get too far up yourself though. In the end you’re still not much more
than a chimp whose been trained to use a spanner. Now, if we’ve all finished
sucking one another’s dicks, let’s get to work.

The tubular passages running through the Ship were far more brightly lit than
the last time Eddie Kalish had been here. Electrical activity crackled and
seethed along the walls, which had themselves taken on a glowing and
translucent aspect, complicated forms like multicoloured oils mixed with water
spiralling lazily within them.

For hours Eddie and Trix Desoto worked their way through the Ship, following a
schematic that had been, apparently, downloaded by the Faction into the
GenTech datanet in a kind of abreactive cybernetic fit that had cut services
to three entire GenTech-owned compound-blocks for a month.

They worked to a step-pattern so that Trix was always working on a node while
Eddie worked on another nearby. The work itself, it seemed to Eddie, was
remarkably simple; he would simply place his fingers on a node and sense a
change in the energy flows within, redirect them by a repositioning of his
fingers until he felt inside himself that their configuration was correct.
Presumably this knowledge had been implanted on some subconscious level via
the Loup.

He was reminded of the time back in the hospital room of the Factory, where he
had accessed the datanet without ever quite knowing how he was doing it.

Their tandem path took them through spaces that might or might not have been
living-quarters, command centres, chambers that appeared to be armament-depositories or hangars for small craft that were, he supposed, the
extraterrestrial equivalent of tactical fighters. All the while, the throbbing
sense of power accumulating inside the Ship grew stronger.

This reminded Eddie, despite himself, of what was actually feeding it.

“What’s it eating?” he asked Trix. “Neuropeptides or something? And thank you,
Mister the Loup, for throwing up the word
neuropeptides
when I don’t know
what the hell it actually means. What I mean is, if it’s eating stuff you find
in the brains then why can’t GenTech just synthesise it or something?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Trix. “The Ship isn’t digesting the…
material as nutrients.”

The material,
Eddie thought. She’s acting like she just doesn’t care, but she’s putting up another front. Like she tried to turn it into a joke before. Why didn’t I notice that before?

“The Ship’s liquefying and extruding the material,” Trix Desoto was saying.
“Patching it into her own neurotecture. I gather that she operates by way of
an interconnected complex of microtubular filaments, operating on the quantum
level, hooking into the very fabric of space/time. Drawing power from the
fundamental wave-form resonance of the universe itself.

“We got the model from a basic template that the Faction encoded into a clone-host—that old guy I was transporting when we first met, yeah? The
parameters were quite clear. And the only real source for those particular
microtubular constructs, here and now on Earth, is the human brain.”

“Yeah, but if you got it from a clone-host, whatever the hell that is, then
you can clone a—“

“Doesn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “A clone we’re capable of producing
unassisted, under the current state of the art, by its very nature never makes
synaptic links or achieves consciousness. Has to be a brain from someone conscious and alive—or at
least who was.”

“All the same,” Eddie said. “It all still seems a bit—“

“I know what you mean,” said Trix. “Fundamental lack of connection with other
human beings is one thing, but I still think it’s a little bit off.”

Eddie couldn’t work out for the life of him if she had meant that as a joke or
not. It would open up a number of not entirely comforting questions either
way.

He realised that Trix Desoto had said something else.

“What?” he asked her. “What did you say?”

“I said that, on the other hand, what’s the alternative? The destruction of
the universe? Or at least, the destruction of that bit of it with Earth and
all the human beings on it?”

Eddie Kalish pondered that for a moment.

“I’m going to ask you what you said again,” he said at last. “But, you know, I
mean it in a slightly different way.”

“We don’t get the Ship up and running,” said Trix Desoto, “then the Faction
who wants it is just going to lean in—from wherever it is they lean
from—and simply grab it. You think the world’s showing cracks now, just you
wait until the
Hammer of God
starts shaking it up like a snow globe. Didn’t
the Head get around to telling you that?”

“Not as such, no,” said Eddie. “And on the whole I’m somewhat glad it didn’t.”

They continued on through the Ship, reconfiguring the nodes, Trix still
lugging whatever it was that was in her case. The corridors branched and
interconnected in any number of ways, but they followed the schematics on a
rough trajectory spiralling to the centre.

They were getting quite close. It was hot and the Ship was pounding around him
and Eddie’s skin tingled. He felt muscle-masses shifting around under it. Up
ahead, Trix Desoto’s form seemed slightly more bulky, her gait more loping.

He hurried forward to catch her up, laid a hand on her shoulder. She swung
round, snarling, for a moment her eyes blazing. Then she visibly caught
herself.

“I think the Ship’s triggering the Loup,” he told her, taking a somewhat
hurried step back. “Even through the Leash. Maybe I need a booster shot or—“

“An imposed reversion would probably kill you at this point,” Trix Desoto
said. “It’s the other way around. The Loup’s cutting in, despite the Leash,
this near to the core, to compensate for an increase in upsilonic radiation.
My advice is just to go along with it and—“

And it was at this point that the explosive charges detonated outside and
things went, even more than usual, totally to hell.

It might have been wondered, by those in a position to wonder, why the various
GenTech technicians and operatives were going along with something like the
Brain Train. They did not, after all, have the Alienation Syndrome shared by
Eddie Kalish and Trix Desoto, and so presumably cared about their fellow human
beings and what happened to them—at least so much as human beings generally
do.

One reason, of course, was that it is very hard to overestimate what people
will do as part of the drudging and day-to-day business of participating in
atrocity.

And then there are those who simply have a propensity for cruelty and
violence—indeed, the Brain Train’s security force, the outriders and those who
handled the weapons systems, were of just that sort. Violent men, and for that
matter women, who didn’t care who they might end up fighting just so long as
they fought.

Just the sort of people you needed, in fact, out on the dangerous and somewhat
crazy blacktops of America.

As for the technicians themselves, most of them didn’t call the Brain Train by
that name, and probably didn’t even know it. In the time-honoured commercial tradition of the left hand not knowing
what the right was doing, most of them thought that they were delivering
components for a new supercomputer-system—components which had to be kept in
refrigerated canisters on account of their extreme delicacy.

Those who knew the actual nature of the Brain Train’s cargo thought that they
were still components for a new supercomputer-system—but they were clone-brains, grown whole in the GenTech skeining vats. One or two might have had
their suspicions—in the same way that an employee in a Mister Meaty burger
bar might have suspicions as to precisely what goes into the burgers—but not
to the point where they might investigate, due to the horrible possibility
that their suspicions might be confirmed.

Besides, it wasn’t their job. Let someone else get into trouble and take the
heat for it if they wanted.

In short, while they might be living under a certain element of corporate-drone denial, the GenTech Brain Train technical crew were not particularly bad
or callous people.

As such, it could be argued that they did not deserve what would happen to
them when as squad of US troops from the Base approached them, as they were
going about their business, brought up their MultiFunction rifles and began to
slaughter them out of hand.

For a while it was bloody. Then the Brain Train’s own security forces woke up
to what was happening, weighed in on the side of GenTech and things got
bloodier still.

Outside, from outside the Ship, there was a heavy concussion. The ship
lurched.

Somewhere in the back of Eddie’s head, a gentle murmuring of which he had been
barely aware other than that it was vaguely comforting, suddenly became the
shriek of fingernails on slate.

It was the Ship, he realised. Up until now the Ship had just been murmuring
about how happy it was to be here and alive and waking up—and now it was
squealing in alarm.

“That came from outside!” Trix Desoto snapped. “That was an attack! Go and see
what’s happening.”

Eddie Kalish was of the profound opinion that, if something were attacking,
the least safest place to be would be outside the protection afforded by a
Hammer of God.

“What about the activation?” he said. “We can’t just—“

“I can take care of the rest of the nodes,” Trix Desoto said. “There’s only a
few left.” She hefted the case she was carrying meaningfully. “And plus I’m
the only one who knows what to do with the… final component. I’m the only
one who can get it done.”

“I don’t suppose you could give me a quick run down, then?” Eddie asked. “I
mean listen, I’m really not trying to be the rat here—all right, who am I
kidding, course I’m being a cowardly little rat. But the fact remains that
you’re the lethal one. You’ve got the Loup under control. Whatever’s out there,
you’re the one who can flip out and waste it, while I—“

“Trust me, wouldn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s no time to explain it
but just trust me but there’s no
way
it would work. I wish to God, quite
frankly, that there was someone else who could go out there and watch my back,
but you’re the only one I’ve got. Just get out there and
do
it, okay?”

Eddie Kalish took of the larger tubes and just trusted that it would lead to a
sphincter-hatch that would let him out of the Ship.

Some large part of him, of course, hoped that it would just lead to a dead
end, giving him the excuse to just blunder about and get confused and not have
to go out in the end at all.

In the event, though, the tube led him straight to a hatch in a matter of
minutes, bang on order. Just his luck.

He wondered, briefly, if he should stroke the wall in the same way that Trix
Desoto had done, but the hatch simply dilated in front of him. He would never
be sure if the Ship itself was trying to be helpful—or if it simply wanted
to be rid of him.