Golgotha Run (26 page)

The craft was of a somewhat different design to the GenTech flyer that Eddie
had encountered in Little Deke’s junk yard, which had transported a squad of
operatives who had ended shooting Eddie stone cold dead.

This was not exactly comforting in that it was built on the basis of several
streamlined polycarbon helium-pontoons to give it positive lift, and
multidirectional turbines that could move it in any direction it liked, and do
it fast.

The upshot was that the thing was damn
huge,
and looked like it was the sort
of thing that could carry tanks. Stencilled prominently on its underside—in
accordance with the convention in what might be called the Corporate Wars that
those involved in overt action must tell their immediate opponent just who the
hell they are—was the logo:

“Oh great,” said Eddie, looking up at it. “What are the fucking odds?”

The NeoGen VTOL banked in the air and, as a matter of first principles, took
out Arbitrary Base Tactical Command with a couple of well-aimed Exocets. This
was rather more fortunate than otherwise, in the general human scheme of
things, since Colonel Roland Grist had at that precise moment grown tired of
listening to the Village People singing “In the Navy” and was on the point of
launching the SNARKs just for the hell of it.

The Confederated Republics of the Congo would never know how lucky they
were—though due to their current problems with an entirely other arm of the US
Military, it is doubtful that they would have even noticed.

Now the NeoGen VTOL descended, ejecting what at first sight appeared to be
bulky, ape-like forms, each twice the size of an ordinary man. They hit the
ground and advanced—not lumbering but at an incongruously brisk
double-time pace.

Eddie Kalish, cowering behind the overturned remains of a portable latrine-pod, set up by GenTech the very instant they had seen the military-pristine
but military-basic state of the sanitation in Arbitrary Base, stared at these
advancing forms… and the Loup took the opportunity to drop yet another piece of useful information into his head.

“Oh shit…” he muttered to himself. “NeoGen have Faction backing, too.”

As if in direct confirmation of his supposition, an amplified voice began to
blare from the VTOL:

“HEY, LISTEN UP, YOU GUYS,” it blared. “WE REALLY, REALLY, WHEN IT GETS RIGHT
DOWN TO IT, DON’T WANNA DO THIS THING WITH ALL THE FUSSIN’ AND THE FIGHTIN’.
IT’S JUST SO BAD FOR THE KARMA AND IT ALL GETS SO SCREWED UP, YOU KNOW? TELL
YOU WHAT, WHY NOT TAKE SOME MELLOW-TIME, GIVE US THE
HAMMER OF GOD
AND THEN
WE… GUYS?”

There was the amplified sound of a hand being placed over a microphone and the
subdued mumble of conversation. Then:

“HEY, LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE ALL DEAD. HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? AH WELL, FUCK
‘EM. GO AND GET THE THING SECURE, GUYS.”

This, presumably, directed at the power-armoured soldiers, who now changed
course to head directly to the mouth of the Shed Seven elevator shaft. And,
incidentally, almost exactly to the point where one Eddie Kalish was hiding.

Then things went from bad to worse.

Trix Desoto lurched through the tubes of the Ship, reconfiguring the final
nodes.

Electrical activity thrashed and stuttered around her, racking up by
increments with every Node she passed. The pulsing roar of the Ship around her
acquired harmonic after harmonic, until in the end it seemed like nothing more
nor less than white noise—every audible frequency was filled, in the same
way that a cough can momentarily drown out every other voice in a crowded
room.

She had long since lost the clean-room polymer coveralls, and for that matter
all but a scrap of the clothing beneath. The Loup inside her was desperately
attempting to compensate for the increased activity of the Ship. It constantly formed and reformed her, so
that one second she might look like nothing more than a naked and extremely
well-muscled girl, the next a twisted, hulking horror.

As she approached the Core, the frequency and severity of the transitions
increased, to the point where the flesh of her body seemed to haze around her
bones.

Now, at last, she stood before the Core.

Disappointingly enough, it was not exactly impressive. It was simply a hole in
the world. An obloidular portal, hanging in the air, leading to… not
blackness, but absolute nothingness. A void waiting to be filled.

A mouth waiting to be fed.

The malformed hazing mouth of Trix Desoto attempted to form words. “Brought you
something,” she managed in a guttural slur. “Brought you something nice.
Something nice for your mouth.”

She attempted to open the case she held. In her transforming and
retransforming state, she had a bit of trouble with the catches, and ended up
having to literally tear it open.

Inside was a customised and somewhat complicated piece of medical equipment: a
number of articulated blades and hooks controlled by way of a pair of handles.
It was, basically, a rib-spreader so contrived that the user could operate
upon his or herself.

And this is what Trix Desoto proceeded to do.

Or, at least, this is what she attempted to do. The blades of the spreader hit
her Loup-transforming chest and shattered.

“Shit,” said Trix Desoto.

Up in the Arbitrary Base compound, Eddie Kalish was sharing a similar
sentiment, although the language was somewhat more extreme.

“Fuck me backwards…” he muttered as the armoured NeoGen troops advanced. It
could only be a matter of seconds before one of them spotted him, racked out
his big Multi-Function Gun and blew his head off.

Possibly, he should have thought to liberate a weapon from the GenTech team or
a dead US trooper. Not that it would have done the slightest good, of course.
It would just have been nice to have an actual prop when he went, “Look, I’m
dropping my weapon, please don’t kill me!”

Eddie Kalish decided that, at this point, he had two choices:

1) He could stay exactly where he was and wait for some
power-armoured NeoGen trooper to spot him, when he was
almost certainly going to be automatically shot on sight.

Or:

2) He could make his presence known, and hope that a generally weaselly but inoffensive demeanour might keep him alive long enough to actually surrender. If they didn’t just automatically shoot him on sight.

While the first option had the advantage that he didn’t have to do anything
about it, Eddie decided that, on the whole, the second might be the safer
option. Moving as slowly and unthreateningly as he could, he clambered out
from behind the latrine pot and stuck his empty hands in the air.

“Hey guys?” he called. “I’m… uh… a non-combatant, here! Is there, like any
way we can—“

Automatic fire stitched into the ground before him, and Eddie dived back
behind the latrine pod. Oh, well. It had been a long shot at best. The only
thing for it, he supposed, was to go about preparing himself for death.

He wondered how you were supposed to go about the business of doing something
like that. The number of times he’d had to do that lately, in his life, he
really should have gotten around to asking someone. Maybe there was a pamphlet
or something.

In any case, judging by the radio-static garbled orders now being barked to
the advancing NeoGen troops, it didn’t make any odds. Death was coming, and
coming now, whether Eddie Kalish was prepared for it or not.

In the Core of the Ship, Trix Desoto dropped the surgical device and swore an
oath so vile that it, if she were Catholic, would have her saying Hail Marys
until the end of time.

She stood there for a moment, gazing into the hole of the Core with burning
eyes, her transmutating flesh seething and sliding around her bones.

Then she took one clawlike hand, and plunged it into her chest. Clenched the
talons around what it found there and wrenched it out.

There was surprisingly little blood. The explosion of fluid seemed to be more
plasmic in nature—plasma such as you would find on the burning surface of
a star.

The thing she now held, in what once had been her hand, might have once been,
on the crude and merely physical level, her heart.

Transformed, now, folding into itself at some direction from a right-angle to
reality and constantly changing form. Now an abstract representation, like the
cartoon-love heart one might find on a particularly saccharine and sickly
Valentines’ card.

Now a homunculus—a little thing not shaped precisely like a human being,
but capturing in its form every abstract aspect of what a human being was.

Now a glowing sigil that would be meaningless to any and every other human
being on the planet—the sign of the secret, sacred and unique name that is
carved on the heart of every living and self-aware thing…

Trix Desoto held her burning heart up to the Core.

“For you,” she said, perfectly calm and lucid despite her Loup-transforming
state. “For your mouth.”

With the last of her strength, she plunged the heart into the Core.

An explosion of energies and activity that made all those previous pale by
comparison. The chamber of the Core lurched.

The Ship woke up.

The Hammer of God had lain dormant for longer than humans could imagine.
There had been no sense of time passing for her, however, not even in dreams.
No activity inside her at all.

Then, very recently in the galactic-level scheme of things, something had changed. The dreams had started. Consciousnesses from the outside had started to impinge.

Secondary, autonomic systems within the
Hammer of God
had started themselves up, scanned the biological consciousnesses outside for a sense of comprehension as to the nature and function of the
Hammer of God
itself. Looking for the equivalent of activation codes.

They’d found nothing. Confused images in biological heads that the autonomic systems simply failed to understand.

And then, quite suddenly, biological consciousnesses had come along who recognised the
Hammer of God
for what it was.

This had been just barely sufficient to activate systems on another level, shifting from the dead black darkness of what was, basically, a coma to the shifting semi-sentience of dreams.

The
Hammer of God
had dreamt of crawling things inside her, things inside her twisting into new alignments. She dreamed of her natural place in the world, in the spaces between the stars. The void of her home called to her. She wanted to go home.

On some level, in the unrestrained honesty that sometimes comes with dreaming, when one allows oneself to think the thoughts that one can never think in any waking life, the
Hammer of God
realised that she was angry. Angry at those who were… her masters, who had just switched her off and left her here forgotten, as if she were nothing more than a machine.

The shifts of alignment inside her became increasingly more pronounced, the dream-state increasingly lucid. The
Hammer of God
recalled the centuries, in places impossibly far out in the void, where she had fulfilled the function that gave her name.

Somehow, in this dream-state, that function was seeming increasingly less important. The distinction between those she had thought for, and those she had fought against, increasingly blurred. She didn’t think she really wanted to do much of that again.

The
Hammer of God
hovered on the very ragged edge of consciousness. That state where one is aware that one is sleeping, aware that one is dreaming, and would quite like the idea of waking up. Only, if only, one were quite sure how to go about it.

And then, in the centre of her, something bright and impossible and Other opened up like a flower.

The
Hammer of God
fully woke up.

Up in the Arbitrary Base compound, Eddie Kalish leapt twenty feet as a NeoGen
trooper took out the latrine pod he was using as cover with a micro-missile
packing a thermal charge.

The explosion made such an impressive display, no doubt due to the accumulated
methane in the pod’s processing tanks, that Eddie only belatedly realised how
humanly impossible that leap had been, how his body was bulking and hardening
up.

As it had down in the Shed Seven chamber, as he and Trix Desoto had neared the
Core of the Ship, the Loup was straining against the Leash. No doubt in
response to this new immediate danger, Eddie thought.

The problem was, better and stronger and faster though he might be in this
partially transformed state, he seriously doubted that it was going to do much
effective good against the sheer size and scope of the opposing NeoGen forces.

Desperately, he scrambled towards the flames where the GenTech Behemoth that
had served as an ammunition-carrier was still burning after being taken out by
CNG troops, hoping that the effects of a partially-activated Loup might help
to protect him from the fire, and that the fire might serve to protect him
from the various tracking sensors of the NeoGen troops. It was something of a
long shot, he knew, but he just couldn’t think of a better plan for the
moment.

In the event, it was more fortunate for Eddie Kalish that he moved when he did
than otherwise—because it was at that point, with a seismic thunderclap so
loud that it overloaded the ears to plunge the world into momentary silence,
that the ground behind him split wide open.

The concussion smacked Eddie into the flames of the burning Behemoth, which
set his remaining scraps of clothing and the top layer of his skin on fire. He
felt his Loup-enhanced sub-derma physically reconfiguring and hardening to
deal with it; felt his respiration actively shut down, to prevent breathing
combustive gases and superheated air and exploding his lungs, as if an actual
switch had been thrown.