Golgotha Run (5 page)

“That’s it, then,” Eddie said. The choices had come down to sitting here and
dying, or even pretending to believe in this “surrender” crap and dying in the
open. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“Oh there’s something we can do,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s something I can
do.”

Looking at her in the in the glare of the Kliegs, it finally percolated
through Eddie what had been odd about her since he had made it back to the
van. Gone was the delirious swinging between lucidity and alien-sounding
gibberish.

Now she seemed entirely and unnaturally sanguine—and not in any sense
relating to the catastrophic blood-loss from the wound in her gut.

In fact, she was looking pale but strangely healthy. The body in the comedy-nurse uniform seemed somehow bulkier and stronger.

It might have simply been the light, but Eddie thought he could see weird
muscle-masses moving under the skin. Half-thoughts of vampires, of zombies,
flashed through Eddie’s mind. Walking corpses, monstrous after death.

“There’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto repeated, eyes a kind of burning
black behind the slatted zebra-striping of light and shadow from the Kliegs.
“And I’m going to do it now.”

In the burning ruins of Las Vitas, the flesh of any number of scavenging
animals hazed instantly into molecular dust—along with the remaining flesh
of that on which they were feeding.

Is was not as if something were sucking some actual life-force, if that word can be made to mean anything in the first place. It was more as if something were feeding on some product of life-coherence…

Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler, heading up the wet-squad out of NeoGen, was
suffering from a small gap in basic expectations.

The fact was that, over the years, military-grade command technology had
evolved to the point where with a single and suitably controlled squad of
operatives one could subvert the infrastructure and take command of an entire
city or country.

Schematic analysis of anything from the power and informational grids to the
plumbing, plus detailed psychologistical profiling of the principle characters
amongst the enemy, ensured that force could be applied to critical targets
with a zero-tolerance of error: the equivalent of assassinating Franz
Ferdinand because you
really
hate a bunch of limpid individuals banging on
about the corner of some forgotten field, and want to see the lot of them end
up dead.

Such seriously shit-hot Control and Command equipment didn’t come cheap, of
course, but NeoGen supplied its Retrieval people with the best—especially
if said people were going up against such an equally-matched rival as GenTech.

Such tactical control-processes had worked perfectly in the matter of setting
some local jackgang on a GenTech road-train, manipulating the various factors
in such a matter that the forces neutralized each other. Then Drexler and his
squad had moved in to pick up the pieces… and hit that gap in expectations.

There was another factor on the board. And that factor, simply, was just some
guy that nobody gave a flying fuck about.

There was not a single person who particularly knew or cared if he lived and
died—and that was the problem right there. It was like some idiotic squit
of a kid going up against a Grand Master in chess; the kid does things so
flatly idiotic that it leaves the Grand Master momentarily flummoxed.

The kid and the package, together with the package’s medical support, had fled
the site of the road-train ambush just before Drexler and his NeoGen forces
had arrived. Tracksat systems had pinpointed the little RV almost instantly,
but the forces on the ground found themselves with a problem. NeoGen had come
armed and ready to deal with GenTech or jackganger survivors; they were
perfectly capable of leaving some escaping piece-of-crap van a smoking hole in
the road that not even micro-engineered algaeic heal-sealant would be able to fill.

What they did not have, however, was the capacity to intercept and stop it
without damaging the package irreparably.

Tracksat extrapolation had showed that the van was heading for Las Vitas, and
military-spec four-wheel drive had made it in half the time, even over rough
terrain. Drexler had looked around the shithole and not reckoned much to it.
Too many holes and corners. Street-fighting could get messy.

So Drexler and his boys had broken out their heavy-duty armament and removed
the town from the equation.

He didn’t feel particularly good about that, but then again he didn’t feel bad
either. It was just what you had to do, sometimes.

The only other place, within practical distance and with communications, had
been the junker’s yard here. Strategic modelling of all available factors
placed the probability of containing the target here in the upper ninetieth
percentile.

That, at least, was what MIRA had assured Commander Drexler. Drexler, on the
other hand, was rapidly coming to the conclusion that MIRA was at this point
just making it up off the top of her cybernetic head and winging it.

“What was that shit about calling the guy a spic?” he asked MIRA. “Plus all
that, you know, religious stuff?”

Ordinarily, the Mobile Intrusion and Recon Application was capable of pumping
all kinds of psychological disruption to a target: insults based on their
specific gangcult, dark intimations of what the subject really felt about some
family member and the so forth. This had just seemed unnecessarily basic and
crude.

“Yeah, well, I just don’t have the hard info,” MIRA said cheerfully. For all
that the voice issuing from the exterior bullhorn-attachment had been
deepened, roughened and masculinized, MIRA “herself” tended to adopt a female
persona. That is, a lighter, higher and feminine voice, while still in some
subliminal way failing to be human in any way whatsoever.

“Filesearch on the girl throws up nothing, just like all these total blanks,
yeah?” MIRA said. “Like someone went through the files and wiped her
footprints out. And the guy never left no footprints in the first place—he’s
just some kid, you know? I’m just playing the law of averages and throwing out
some generic insults. I’m having to improvise.”

Drexler ran his glance across the display-monitors bolted to the dash of the
NeoGen-modified Humvee—or HumGee—parked under mimetic camouflage-netting outside the junker’s yard and which was serving as a scratch C&C for
the guys inside.

Wireframe topographies of the yard itself, thermograph readouts of the targets
in the van overlaid with extrapolated bio-data. Outputs from the microcams of
the three wet-operatives inside.

“Don’t try to improvise when you don’t have the data,” he told MIRA. “It just
sounds wrong. It doesn’t sound like anything a real human would say.”

MIRA gave what sounded like a contemptuous little snort—possibly a sound-sample designed to convey that precise effect.

“I’m a sentient-grade AI, chum, even if I occupy the lower end of the
scale. You just follow the orders and do the job and come it like a frigging
robot. I sound more human and alive than you do, most of the time.”

“That’s my prerogative, MIRA. You don’t have the option.”

“Yeah, whatever you say,
boss
,” MIRA said with marked cybernetic sarcasm.
“And speaking of time, boss, we’re well over that deadline I gave the targets.
You wanna give the go-word to take ‘em out?”

“Do it,” Drexler said. “Remember that the package is our top priority. They
can do what they like, but only after the package is secure.”

“Yeah, yeah, we all know that,” said MIRA. “I’m relaying the order to… hang
on. Something’s up…

“Check the bio-readouts on the girl. Something freaky’s going on with the girl
and it’s—oh my God…”

There was a blinding flash from outside, washing out the Klieg-illumination in
the intensity of its glare, and human-sounding or not, that was the last thing
MIRA ever said.

Shafts of magnesium light blasted from the windows and roof-ports of the van,
from the rust holes eaten in its sides. Tendrils of electrical discharge arced
to the junkyard-compound’s generator unit, travelling the leads to which it
had been hooked to NeoGen’s Kliegs and exploding them in a shower of sparks.

Vestigial petrochems left in tanks out in the junk piles spontaneously
ignited; the tanks detonated. The junk began to burn. The van itself exploded—torn apart by forces within it that were not entirely physical.

And something dark burst from it. Something dark in a wholly different sense
than a mere absence of cast light.

Something big. Something shrieking. Something coming now.

In a place that has no name, a place indefinable in spatial or temporal
terms—or for that matter, any terms that might apply to organic matter,
let alone life—something vast and inimical and unknowable stirred.

Something was calling to it. Something had made a small fracture in the world. A tiny imperfection, to be sure, but one that could be worked upon. Something that could be forced further apart, with time. If time had any meaning, of course, for this vast and inimical and unknowable thing, which it didn’t. It had an eternity in which to operate, after all.

It would be a mistake to believe that the subsumation and destruction of all we know would be anything more than a light snack to this vast and inimical and unknowable thing. The equivalent of a quick pack of potato chips between real meals.

Then again, potato chips come in a variety of interesting flavours, and a pack of them is just the thing to hit the spot. When you’re feeling peckish—as the vast and inimical and unknowable thing decidedly was.

For the moment, though, it was in the position of having worked the pack open just enough to insert a finger. Just enough, if it inserted the smallest extremity of itself into the world of men, for a small taste. And this it had proceeded to do…

Half-blinded and gibbering with terror, Eddie Kalish scrambled through the
junk piles, trying to catch his bearings. Things had shifted around, of
course, during the time he had spent away, but Little Deke’s had never been
what you might call a roaring concern. Things, for the most part, had tended
to stay where they were put; Eddie still had some idea of the layout. That was
an advantage.

That was, in fact, the only advantage he might have over the people out here
in the dark. People and, of course, the…
thing
out here in the dark.

“Oh yes, there’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto had said, eyes a kind of
burning black behind the slatted light, “and I’m going to do it now.”

She had ripped her hands from the hole in her stomach, trailing strings of
some viscous substance that hadn’t quite seemed even organic, let alone
something that a human body could produce. A mass of this stuff seemed to have
clotted in her wound, tendrils of it forming and intertwining and pulsing of
its own accord.

The hands had seemed bigger—impossibly bigger, like those anatomical
models where the limbs and extremities are distorted to a size comparable to
the area of the brain controlling them. The nails had elongated to the point
of talons.

Trix Desoto had run one of these claws down her face—for an instant Eddie
had thought that she was trying to claw her own eyes out in agony, but instead
the tip of a talon had run gently down the side of her face, cutting a slit
from the inside of which something glowed like embers in some long-banked
fire.

“Run,” she had told him, face deadly serious and positively demonic in the
light from the slit she had made. A talon had jabbed in the direction of the
pale form of the comatose old guy. “Take him and
run
.”

All reasonable thoughts about armed NeoGen troops waiting out there in the
junk years had vanished—indeed, it was as if all reasonable thought had
shut down. The monster snarls and you just run for the tree line or the cave.
He had leapt from the van without question and headed for the junk piles.

It was only after the explosion had washed over him, miraculously failing to
spear him with flying debris, that he realised that he had unthinkingly
followed Trix Desoto’s order and taken the body of the old guy with him. It
must have been her tone of voice.

Now, Eddie Kalish decided, the old guy was just dead weight. He left the inert
form sprawled by a pile of rotting tyres, gently seeping from the punctures
left from being unceremoniously hauled from the med-units.

Off to one side, through the junk, there was a single muzzle-flash and the
complete lack of sound from an expertly silenced gun—though any sound of
gunfire would have probably been drowned out, in any case, by the high-pitched
scream and the sounds of tearing flesh. Whatever it was that Trix Desoto had
turned into, it was having a ball.

Or possibly two, Eddie thought, and then really wished that he hadn’t.

Eddie moved on, crept around a vaguely familiar heap of panel-sections—and
ran straight into one of the surviving NeoGen troops.

Eddie Kalish would never know how lucky he was, in that instant—luck that
had been brought about by the confluence of three main factors. The first
being that the trooper was currently packing hi-explosive shells into his big
MultiFunction Gun.

This would have been singularly unlucky, of course, had not one Commander
Thomas Marlon Drexler ordered that minimum necessary force be used until the
object of their operation be secure. A single hi-ex round fired into the van
would have exploded it in much the way that it just had, so the MFG was
currently slung over the trooper’s shoulder and out of instant reach.

The second factor was that, unlike that produced by conventional explosives,
the detonation of the van had released a variety of localized electromagnetic
pulse that had knocked out the trooper’s infrared night-sight. He was in the
midst of tearing it angrily from his face and blinking his eyes to acclimatise
to the sudden darkness when he caught the moving silhouette of Eddie.