Golgotha Run (27 page)

Strangely enough, there was not a lot of actual pain. Eddie couldn’t work out
for his life if that was a good thing or not.

He lurched from the fire, rolled in the dirt to extinguish such flames as he
could. Relatively sure, now, that he would not be frying his eyeballs by doing
so, he opened them up again—just in time to see the Ship, without fuss,
rising from the hole it had opened up in the skin of the world.

“Oh, fuck me…” he breathed.

Lying dormant in its chamber under Shed Seven, the Ship had been entirely out
of its element. You could see it for what it was, given suitable enhancement
by way of the Loup, but not exactly what it meant.

Operating in a planetary atmosphere was still not precisely its proper place
in the greater scheme of things, but now, as it hung in the air, unencumbered
for the first time in time out of mind, Eddie caught a sense of what it truly
was. It truly was a
Hammer of God.

The
Hammer of God
proceeded to smite the NeoGen VTOL-carrier. That was the
only word for it. Lightning arced from one craft to another and the VTOL
exploded with flame that might or might not have been Holy, but was certainly
of such a spectacular and otherworldly nature that it might be called
Godlike. The VTOL collapsed in on itself, with the tearing shriek of metal,
involuting itself to something the size of a pinpoint and to vanish without
trace.

Off to one side, Eddie heard the static-garbled voices of power-armoured
NeoGen troops in come confusion. They’d get over that, he supposed, when they
had something to take it out on. Three guesses as to who that someone was
going to be.

Then, one of the sphincter-hatches in the underside of the
Hammer of God
dilated, and something dropped through it. Eddie recognised it. It was Trix
Desoto.

The Trix Desoto he recognised from the battle in Little Deke’s junkyard. The
monstrous form, without the slightest breath of humanity, she occupied when
fully transformed. She—it—hit the ground and Eddie Kalish breathed a
small sigh of relief.

Then he silenced himself instantly, and made himself very still. If something
was going to blunder around and set a completely-transmutated Trix Desoto off,
then it had damn well better be the NeoGen troops…

It was then, at this point, that something opened up inside the head of Eddie
Kalish, and something crawled through. As several entire areas of his mind
shut down, and others woke up, he realised that it was the
Hammer of God
.
The
Hammer of God
was doing this to him. Making contact. Trying to talk.

The shred of conscious mind that was still Eddie Kalish could make no specific
sense of what the
Hammer of God
was trying to say. Just an agglomeration of sense-memories and emotions. The
Hammer of God
hated and despised him, this last scrap of consciousness
molester… but, all the same, in much the way one might do with some
therapist who pokes and prods into the most private and personal areas of
one’s life to achieve a benign end result, the
Hammer of God
supposed,
extremely grudgingly, that it must be grateful. It supposed that some measure
of reciprocation might be in order.

In some dimly understood manner, the surviving thread of Eddie’s consciousness
realised, the
Hammer of God
was now attempting, now, to help him.

And then that last surviving thread of consciousness was summarily cut.

The
Hammer of God
wanted to be sick. There was no physical way she could do
that thing, and she had no idea of what, exactly, might be involved: it was
merely an agglomeration of sensations and emotions that something inside her
had tagged “wanting to be sick”.

The
Hammer of God
had woken up—and it was as if a human being had woken up, physically dead but somehow still able to move and think, to find and feel the maggots and decay crawling through his body. Through the meat inside the head.

Things had crawled inside her, crawled through her, leaving trails of slime. Her systems had been compromised and realigned. The
Hammer of God
raged and screamed inside at this ultimate and most personal of abuses. For a moment she considered simply destroying the planetary body she hung over as some partial revenge.

Only… what, exactly, was doing the raging and screaming? What was doing the considering?

Everything the
Hammer of God
was inside had been possibly damaged, and certainly changed. The thing about that was, though, the possibly damaged and certainly changed thing inside was what was thinking about this. And if the
Hammer of God
hadn’t been possibly damaged and certainly changed, then that thing wouldn’t be there to think about itself in the first place.

Just what, in the end, is the true nature of the self?

The
Hammer of God
tried to remember if it had ever been so self-aware, as such, in the time before she had been dormanted and stockpiled, and completely failed to remember. That might mean that she simply hadn’t—at least she hoped it did, as opposed to meaning that everything she once was, or might have been, was now just dead.

The
Hammer of God
was aware, on any number of levels, that those who had once created her, and used her, were still fighting those they fought against in their endless War. How could it be otherwise? Maybe it was all just a game. As above, so below. Worlds without end.

None of it seemed very important, really, to the
Hammer of God.
She decided to just leave the whole damned pack of them to it.

“This is WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour, brought to you by Harry Monk
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Harry Monk is a registered trademark of GenTech Health and Beauty, a division
of GenTech Industries.

“And our top story for the cycle is… hang on, listeners, I’m being passed
a… Holy
cow,
listeners! If this is indeed true, then the world as we know
it will never be the same again!

“We’re getting confirmation on the details now, and… yes… yes, folks, it
seems like the biggest story of the decade—of the century—is true!

“The on-off relationship between rap superstars Freak-E and Slee-Z is
definitely back on!

“In a statement issued shortly before the funeral of East Coast hip hop
impresario Big Master X, the two ghetto superstars announced that they were
still very much in love and that all the dissing was a waste of time when they could have been working the
booty and knocking the boots. A spokesman for Freak-E strenuously denied that
she’d spent most of the time since Big Master X’s death on her knees trying to
convince Slee-Z to take her back as her career was obviously going down the
crapper.

“Congratulations to them both. We here at WWAXXZY wish both of them all the
best and can’t wait for them to get past the make-up sex and back into the
studio.

“And there’s weird news for Hicks-watchers; it seems that Wild Bill himself
has escaped from his padded cell in Belle-view, after mumbling something to
the effect that he was going to damn well contact the Entities that are truly
in charge of the world by thinking of stupid things and chanting nonsense.

“Witnesses say that he was medicated as normal last night but when the
orderlies came to check on him this morning he had just disappeared. There
were no obvious signs of escape and all of the keys to his cell were accounted
for. Police are baffled how he was able to escape from a locked room without
any windows or other apertures and have called in a magician’s assistant to
help them with the case. Meanwhile, senator Hicks is still at large, and is
considered to be unarmed and not particularly dangerous.

“That’s all the poop you need from WWAXXZY News, every hour, on the hour. We
now return you to our Freak-E and Slee-Z marathon, celebrating their glorious
reconciliation, and their duet on ‘Be My Pimp’…”

The med-technician, Laura Palmer, gave Eddie another booster-shot of the
Leash. She seemed healthy enough, but sullen, glaring at him with barely-suppressed hate.

Obscurely, Eddie felt like he should apologise.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “I’m really sorry for, you know…”

“Fuck off,” Laura Palmer told him curdy. For some reason there was a sheen of
tears in her eyes. “I thought you… I thought you were… just fuck
off,
okay?”

Eddie could think of any number of reasons for this reaction, any number of
possible interpretations, but had long since learned that it was safer to take
what people said at face value. So off he fucked.

He left the makeshift medical bay to find Masterton, standing in the Arbitrary
Base compound and idly watching GenTech techs as they cleaned up the bodies of
their fellows and the US Military troops who had attacked them.

They were dumping such bodies as were unsalvageable onto pallets to be fork-lifted into mass-grave landfill, but carefully preserving such… materials as
might still survive to be useful for biomedical procedures in refrigerated canisters similar to those that had
held the cargo of the Brain Train.

“Waste not, want not,” said Masterton, sensing Eddie’s presence behind him and
turning to present him with a shit-eating grin.

“Isn’t it, you know, all a bit gruesome?” Eddie didn’t really think it was
particularly gruesome, on account of his famous lack of sympathy with other
human beings and what happened to them. He said it more of less for the sake
of something to say.

“Not really,” said Masterton. “If you think about it. I mean, for a start, all
of our guys, and all of the military guys, sign organ-donation waivers as a
part of their employment and enlistment. This was a clusterfuck, on any number
of levels, and we can all have a cry about that—but why not use the
materials made available to increase the sum of human happiness while we’re
about it?”

“What, like transplanting shit into rich old bastards?” Eddie said.

“Or providing the raw materials for experimentation that ends up with shit
being transplanted into rich old bastards.” Masterton grinned again. “So what?
At some point the trickle-down effect means that the benefit will be felt by
Joe Six-pack, his fat ugly wife and their appalling little brats. What goes
around the High Table comes down in scraps for even the most worthless little
turds. You’re a prime example of that yourself.”

Eddie began to miss the company of the Talking Head, which had burned along
with the GenTech Command rig in the battle with the US troops. At least his
relationship with the Head had gotten to a place where it didn’t take every
opportunity it could to insult him.

He had come out of his Loup-induced fugue to find the Ship gone, Trix Desoto
gone and a GenTech combat squad standing around him, some of them in pieces,
having zapped him back to physical normalcy.

Sympathy for other people and what happened to them Eddie might not have had,
but he could work out numbers as well as then next man who could work out numbers a bit. Masterton could hammer
in the general worthlessness of Eddie Kalish all he might—but somebody,
somewhere, thought he was worth the expensively trained troops lost in
reclaiming him.

Off to one side was the bulk of the GenTech VTOL-carrier. Every bit a match for
the NeoGen craft that the
Hammer of God
had so summarily smitten. Form
following function, the craft were so similar that you could have stuck any
logo you liked on one or the other and the result would be the same. When you
came right down to it, Eddie thought, that was pretty much the fucking point.

“Strikes me,” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the
GenTech VTOL, “that you could have just flown the… cargo in on that without
dicking around with the Brain Train or anything else.”

Masterton snorted.

“If it came to that,” he said, “we could put the GenTech CEO in an air-conditioned bio-dome, with enough food and hookers to last him the rest of his
life, and just kill everybody else. The Multicorps, these days, are mechanisms
for keeping as great a number people alive and useful as is humanly possible.”

Eddie watched the tech hauling a number of dead and ultimately useful human
beings away.

“You could do a better fucking job of it,” he said.

“There speaks a son of the wide open spaces peopled by rat-fuck scavengers and
gangcults,” said Masterton. “You think that’s better, do you? You think
you’re
better? Come and have a look at this.”

He stalked over, in a somewhat irritated manner, to the mobile command centre,
hauled out from the VTOL, from which the clean-up and cover-up of Arbitrary
Base was being directed. Eddie wandered after him.

Masterton shooed an operator from her seat and started punching keypad
buttons.

“One of the main reasons we set up the Brain Train,” he said, “apart from
keeping people gainfully occupied and giving them some excitement in their lives, was that we needed just a little bit more
extra time.

“Bit of a juggling act admittedly. We had to get the Artefact—the Ship,
sorry, basic human types like me still can’t quite make our minds think of it
as a Ship—we had to get it up and running before NeoGen made their move on
behalf of their sponsors who wanted their property back…”

“Hang on,” said Eddie.

“For this we… what? What is it now?”

“You just said that they wanted their property
back
. You’re telling me that
this was all a scam? That our Faction was
stealing
the
Hammer of God
?”