Ken Kling, the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez Op, was a total and complete pain in the ass. He treated all US Cavalry personnel like labourclones, and never stopped bragging about his Agency's record against the Maniax. It seemed to Sergeant Leona Tyree that it was easier to rack up a reputation zapping everybody in sight with hood-mounted lases than by keeping the peace. Everybody knew how many panzerboys Redd Harvest had dropped in the dust, but you never saw stuff on the teevee about the interstates kept open, the disputes settled, the wildernesses pacified by the Road Cav. Boobs and bullets, that was all the newsies were into.
She shifted in her seat, and pressed the accelerator. On the long flat, you could afford to open the cruiser up. The patrol had taken them up into the barren mountains, and now they were back in the Big Empty, the desert that stretched across most of these United States. This was the kind of detail that made you thankful for air-conditioned ve-hickles. Outside, the unclouded sun shone mercilessly down on the endless sands. Co-cola bottles left on the roadside eventually melted into glass pools. The life expectency of a casual daytime stroller without a decent hat was five hours.
"Of course," said Kling, "me and Ms H are on a personal basis, if you know what I mean. I don't like letting her work solo, but that's the way she wants it. Usually, I'm there to cover her. Ken Kling the Killing Machine, they call me."
Tyree looked at Trooper Nathan Stack, her co-driver, and he looked at her. They understood each other's opinion of Ken Kling the Killing Machine. Stack looked down at the screens. Nothing potentially hostile in range. The patrol was proving uneventful. Things are always quiet in the aftermath of a war. Kling was comfortable in the back, wiping N-R-Gee Candy crumbs off the knife-edge creases of his striped pants. He wore a dandy suit, the jacket loose to hang well over the shoulder holster, rainbow shades and a haircut that looked like a sugarloaf mountain. His taste in music was lousy too. He expected them to put up with W.A.S.P. and Mothers of Violence on the CD.
"The Maniax are Yesterday Men," he said, "real gone and forgotten. Ms H stomped them. T-H-R stomped them. Hell, even you Cav stomped them. The Grand Exalted Bullmoose is just blowing it out. I doubt he could put more'n twenty-thirty soldiers in the sand after the last purge. Lady and gentleman, our troubles are over."
They might be at that. If the Maniax were beaten enough to disband, the Cav wouldn't have to cooperate with T-H-R any longer and Tyree could boot the unwanted observer out of the cruiser. And according to General Haycox, the Maniax really were beaten this time. Of course, he had said that last time. That had been just the same. Haycox and Redd Harvest had gone on the teevee, and Leona Tyree had gone to a lot of funerals. There was a phrase that turned up in too many press releases, "acceptable casualties."
You got a flag on your coffin, even if there wasn't much of you left to put in it, and your name on a plaque somewhere where the survivors wouldn't have to look at it too often. If you went out really bloodily, you got a fort named after you. You were a hero. But you were still dead, and there were still Maniax out there. Even if the Grand Exalted Bullmoose couldn't regroup and start again, there would be others. Other names, other gangcults, but the same deaths.
"Now the Maniax are gone…" began Stack.
"You mean, if the Maniax are gone, Trooper," she said.
"Yeah, well, if the Maniax are gone, who do you reckon is the next most dangerous gangcult?"
"Voodoo Brotherhood," said Kling from the backseat, "but T-H-R will whip them soon, you see."
"Leona?"
"Voodoo Bros are tough. So are The Bible Belt, The Daughters of the American Revolution, The Gaschuggers, a few others. But I figure the most trouble we're going to have will come from the Josephites."
"The Josephites?" said Stack, surprised. "But they're supposed to be like the Mormons, or the Amish. They're the resettlers. They've turned Utah around, made themselves a paradise, I hear."
"Deseret," she said. "They call Utah Deseret now. There are things you don't hear about the Josephites. I had a run-in with them once, when we were all riding out of Fort Valens. I was with Sergeant Quincannon men. Some strange things went down. That guy, Nguyen Seth, the leader of Salt Lake City, is a pretty mystifying dude. It's not in the reports, but the Quince remembers, and I remember."
Kling laughed. "You've been on the trail too long, cowgirl. The sun's frazzled your brains. The Josephites are the New Pioneers. The Prezz backs them up all the way."
Tyree half-turned. "That's as may be, but I'd still rather face the Voodoo Bros than a group of Josephite Missionaries."
She flashbacked, as she did too often, to Spanish Fork. A lot of people had died that day, when the Josephites came to town and her patrol had been caught up in a shooting war between the resetders, The Psychopomps and the townsfolk. There had been other combatants, too, ones you could not see. She had left a friend—Trooper Washington Burnside—back there dead, and seen another—Trooper Kirby Yorke—shaken loose of his senses. And she had glimpsed the true face of Elder Nguyen Seth. She remembered him smashing a ganggirl's face against the road, the blood spreading with each blow, and, worst of all, she remembered wanting to join him, wanting to dip her fingers in the girl's blood, wanting to stand with the Josephites as Spanish Fork burned.*
*See the Dark Future anthology Route 666.
"Cheese, but you yellowlegs are a bunch of pussies. You wouldn't last five minutes in a NoGo. Why, Ms H could…"
Stack turned round and said something to Kling in a low, urgent voice, and the T-H-R Op shut up in mid-sentence. In the rearview, Tyree could see him slumping grumpily in his seat, nervously hitching his shoulders to settle his holster. He was one of those Ops who liked to cart around a big cannon. Back at Fort Apache, they had a saying, "the bigger the gun, the bigger the talk, the smaller the dick." On that scale, Ken Kling the Killing Machine should be genitally equipped in minus numbers.
The cruiser told them to stop for gas and service within three hundred miles. Stack called up a menu of possible autostops.
"Slim Pickens's Place?" he asked.
Tyree gave it some thought. Slim was tied into the yaks, and that wasn't good. But the Japanese crime consortium at least had a rep for being honourable. They wouldn't sugar the Cav gas the way some outlaw stations did. And Slim's B-B-Q was one of the Wonders of the West.
“Fine." She reprogrammed the cruiser's course, and turned off the interstate at the next opportunity. The secondary road was pitted and bouncy, but Tyree didn't mind. Ken Kling got a good shaking up in the back, and the front-seat independent gyros kept her and Stack comfy. Outside, everything was quiet. Just sand and rocks, with a few bleached bones. In this part of Arizona, even the vultures starved.
"Do you want some music on?" asked Stack.
"Yeah, okay. It might perk up the atmosphere."
"What kind of music you got?" Kling asked.
"Both kinds, Ken," Stack replied. "Country and Western."
Kling groaned, and Stack unsheathed The Best of Willie Nelson. The cruiser ate up the dry, cracked desert road as if it were smooth as milk. Tyree let the car do the thinking.
IV
As systems went, Beulah was a weak sister, a pushover. The demon's physical form melted in the cashplastic chute, and bled through the terminal, following the main conduits, tapping into the major programs, knocking the security guards down like ninepins. It was the cybernet Master of the Universe! There was no program it couldn't out-ace, no system it couldn't peel like a hard-boiled egg, no check it couldn't drop kick the full ninety yards. There were yakuza blocks thrown up around the memory banks and the prime directives, but the demon shredded them with ease and redistributed their information bits throughout the system. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, it exulted, how was that for a hoo-hah?