Elder Seth looked down upon the gently revolving globe, the Needlepoint satellites sharply outlined against the clouds and the oceans. Lights winked on their years-dead exterior surfaces as they communicated with Sister Addams in Cape Canaveral. The ring of satellite weapons felt comfortable. The Elder slipped into them, and took them as a body. He allowed the IFF transmissions to continue, feeling a tingle as each of the links in the Needlepoint Ring came on line.
Down there, humans swarmed towards their predestined End. Seth thought of his favoured followers: Dune in Florida, serving as his family always had done; Priapus in Berlin, the anarchic satyr ejaculating hate with each thrust; the Waiting Snake in Rome, preparing to strike fatally at the heart of the Vatican. He considered the hordes pouring into Salt Lake City, making it a Paradise on Earth, and of their gradual transformation into Waltons, as their hair blonded and stiffened, their features melted and reformed as handsome masks, and their bodies turned to mannequins. How few of them would be among the Elect, the favoured of the Dark Ones.
For his part, Nguyen Seth hungered for oblivion. His centuries weighted him like chains. With the world's end, and the achievement of the Dark Purpose, his ordeals would be over.
"Old man?"
It was Krokodil, still inside his mind like a nestling parasite, trying to eat away at him.
"It's nearly over, old man."
If he was still capable of it, Seth loved Krokodil for her wrong-headed persistence. She contained in her the seeds of the defeat of the Dark Ones, but she would never unleash them so long as she were questing solely for revenge against him. She was so typically human, so limited in her vision. With literally half a view of the world, she was obsessed with him, and that obsession was the key to her failure. How unworthy she was of her ennoblement. She was the only being on the planet who could face down one of the Dark Ones, and yet she frittered her power away on selfish concerns.
"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…"
She was mocking him. Foolish girl.
Soon, Dune would feed Krokodil's heat pattern into the Needlepoint computer at Cape Canaveral, and a beam from the sky would end her.
Seth wondered how much he would miss the girl.
IX
PERSEUS: SOURMASH.
KINGMAKER: ADAGGIO.
PICADILLY: YELLOWSTONE.
TIN LIZZY: COPPICE.
PETREL: CLAW HAMMER.
CURLY JOE: VIGILANCE.
Stealth was not one of Raimundo Rex's strong points. They switched off the motors of their swamp-skimmers once they hit the Indian River, which put them within earshot of the Cape, and fell back on paddles. Raimundo kept bumping his head on low cypresses, and his bulk made the skimmer sit dangerously low in the water. Elvis was sure the saurian had been doping before the mission. It was hard to tell what with his independently-floating reptile eyes, but the Op thought Raimundo had hopped himself up on some zooper-blast.
A lot of other Ops used drugs to get them through the combats, but Elvis thought they were stone crazy. Back in the music days, he had popped his share of pills to keep him going eight gigs a week, and in the army he had been shot full of morph-plus several times, when he was badly wounded, and he had found the dissociation from his body deeply disturbing. Since then, he had been down hard on recreational or professional drugs. He had first earned the enmity of the Good Ole Boys by turning over to the cops a couple of Memphis dealers who had paid off plenty to stay in business. The smacksynth salesmen had gone in one side of the revolving door and come out the other, protected by a court order and the word of Judgement Q. Harbottle. Drugs were a poison, seeping through the cities of America, turning everything sour…
In Cuba, when he had been shot in the chest and had been in surgery for twelve hours, they had given him enough morph-plus to deaden the pain of torture by flaying. He had had bad dreams, and never really been able to shake them off. He would find himself standing alone in a beam of bright white light like police interrogators use, uncomfortably strapped into a white, fringed, spangled clown outfit. He was sweating like a pig, and his clothes were sticky, and he was mumbling his way through a song he could barely remember, trying to do his old act despite the pains shooting through his legs and arms. The lyric of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" hovered just beyond his mental grasp, and he was repeating the title over and over again like a mantra, gabbling "are you lonesome tonight, are you lonesome toniiiiight, are you lonesome toniiiiiiiight?" The worst of it was that he was weighed down by heavy pads on his stomach, his buttocks, his thighs, his arms, his legs and under his chin. No matter how he fought, he couldn't get free of the weights. They weren't just fixed to him by tape or wire, they were growing out of him as if he had spent twenty years guzzling brews and downing cheeseburgers by the faceful. There were drugs in him too, not just the medical anaesthetics, but a potent mixture of everything illegal that could be injected, snorted, inhaled, infused, swallowed, skin-popped or poured into his ears. Since Cuba, that nightmare had come back to him too often.
Raimundo was weaving about on his skimmer, paddling with his huge foot like a kid on a push-bike. Elvis hoped the dinosaur would be okay in the fight. He'd seen too many gung-ho junkies get death rather than glory.
The dawn was breaking over the Cape. Working with Captain Marcus, Elvis had formulated a plan of attack, trusting that the Josephites were too stretched to maintain a proper defence perimeter around the Cape. The base was too large to be kept secure by anything less than a regiment, and the NASA fences were in a state of severe disrepair. Marcus's intelligence showed that most of the old observation posts weren't even manned most of the time.
The Captain was leading the bulk of their forces, using the captured armoured transport as a Wooden Horse-cum-command centre. They would attack the main gates. Those Suitcase People best adapted to swimming were circling around to come at the Cape from out of the sea, striking up at the sea wall from the almost unpatrolled beach. And Elvis was to lead a spearhead force up the Indian River whose main task was to draw fire away from Marcus's column.
There were docks on Merritt Island and the instep of the Cape, and the river ran between them. Actually, the river had swollen to such an extent that the narrow causeway separating it from the sea was more or less permanently underwater, a swirling mass of long grass just breaking the surface, and Merritt Island was just another lump in the swamp, but the docks still rose out of the salt marsh. They would provide good cover, and a fine fall-back point.
Aside from Raimundo and a few of his Suitcase People, most of Elvis's team were indentees from the compound, transplanted blacks and Cajuns, rallying behind Shiba. Some bore the marks of the change, but they were less far along than Raimundo, Marcus or the bestial swamp creatures that had responded to their call.
Raimundo was still fidgeting, eager to get into the scrap. The saurian had crossed bullet bandoliers on his chest, and was packing a rocketlauncher and a chaingun, both specially adapted so he could work them with his thick, clawed fingers. Stoned or not, he wasn't what Elvis would have most liked to have come angrily after him.
The indentees were another matter. Elvis couldn't work them out. He wondered why they hadn't scattered into the swamps when Marcus overran the compound. He wondered why they were so quietly acquiescent to the mutations that were overtaking them. He also noticed that they looked at him much as Ti-Mouche had done, with a strange combination of awe, reverence and fear.