The Colonel paused in mid-rant as the sharp sabre bit deep.
Lauderdale drew the sword from its scabbard of flesh, and plunged it in again.
"Mutiny," breathed Rintoon. "Mutiny!"
Lauderdale's mind went red, and he hacked until his arm was too aching to hold the heavy sword. It clattered on the floor.
Blood pooled around his boots. He dropped to his knees, and washed his face in it.
Blood!
XI
In the mind of the machine, Sister Chantal wrestled with the demon.
It tormented her as it had done before, but with its energies applied a thousandfold. It was like being caged with an angry lion.
"Suffer, sssissster!" It sang in Petya Tcherkassoff s mainly synthesized voice, "ssssssuffer and burn!"
It wore the faces of her ghosts—her father, her mother, Marcello, Georgi—and screamed obscenities. It tried to force its way into her skull, and make her wallow in filth, rubbing her face into every discarded scrap of herself. Every unfulfilled, unnameable desire, every impulse, every vice was trotted out in brain-filling Technicolor and graphic three-dimensional detail, with stereophonic agony on the soundtrack.
Her fingers tapped the keyboard automatically as she regurgitated the text she had been taught.
The horror show played on.
Mlle Fournier discovered her in the nursery, carving chunks out of Marcello's chest with a breadknife as she rode the boy to a bloody climax.
"Chantal, Chantal, you wicked child, wicked child, you should be punished, be punissssshed, you sssshould die, die, die…"
Marcello screamed, pain co-mingling with ecstasy.
"Chantal, Chantal, don't you like me any more? Cut deeper, cut deeper. Cut where the blood runsssssss black…"
In a whore's bed, while Isabella watched, she was sandwiched between Thomas Juillerat and the Pope, screeching.
"Oh, Chantal, Papa and il papa, how tiressssome of you. And that nightgown, it's so…ssssssso…1980s!"
"Mon petit choux…"
"Kissssss my ring, Sister!"
In the dojo, she scooped out Mother Kazuko's insides with her bare hands, plunging her knife-hard fingers again and again into the woman's chest, finally the victor in their eternal pretend-battle.
"Very good, Chantal. More pain, more pain. Kill me, kill me, kill me…"
Back during her battle with the California Diabolists, she hesitated at a crucial moment, and saw Mother Kazuko collapse, the hellspawn crawling over her.
"You nearly got me killed then, Chantal. Now you can finissssh the job."
She killed her enemies, and exulted in the hunt, the slaughter, the communion of blood. A fallen Gaschugger looked up at her, pleading for the last rites, and she poured napalm into his eyes.
"This is not me," she told herself.
She jettisoned her mean flesh forever, and poured her consciousness into a datanet, copulating mentally with banks of information, forcing herself into forbidden files, spreading herself out through the world's cobweb network of datalinks. Fattier O'Shaughnessy studied her, won Nobel prizes.
"You're going to die, bitch!"
She pulled her mind out of the maelstrom, and concentrated.
"Die and be damned!"
Chantal fastened on the task at hand, and her fingers fed in the ritual.
"Ssssslut!"
She slipped once. The screen flashed ERROR IN LINE 10: EXURGO IS PAST IMPERFECT TENSE FIRST PERSON—PLEASE ENTER CORRECT TERM directly onto her cerebral cortex. She sped the cursor to the glitch, and made the correction. She pressed RUN, and the Exorcism loaded.
"Die…"
It was terrible. She tried to contain a miniature atomic explosion inside her skull. It was as if she were being broken down into bits of information and built up fromthe ground again within nanoseconds. The pictures the creature was playing inside her head stretched out of shape, slowed down, crumpled, fragmented. The races of Mlle Fournier, Isabella, Marcello, Mother Kazuko, Thomas and Georgi collapsed in upon themselves and whirled together, coalescing into a grotesque composite. The many-eyed, many-mouthed lace rippled and was surrounded by darkness.
"Bittttch!"
She beheld the true face of the fiend. It wasn't anything, just a formless chaos, crawling and writhing. Briefly, it was what she had been taught to expect, a horned, cloven-footed, batwinged, beast. But then it was a tentacled blob, wormlike apendages wriggling around a glowing violet nucleus. Then, it wasn't a body at all, just a foul smell, a dissonant chord, a vile taste.
She clamped her hands together in prayer, and fought the demons inside herself. Finally, all that was left was terror.
But in the terror, there was triumph. The demon was beaten. It could cling for a while, but it was being dislodged from the system.
"The Power of Christ compels you," she said, sprinkling the Holy Water onto the keyboard. Circuits shorted out inside.
"Freak you, ratskag," the demon shrieked at her, shrinking away as the water seeped into the wiring.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She banished the memory of the vicious pictures from her mind, saw how false they were, dispelled the demon's foul suggestions. Black death bloomed on the screen, the Latin standing out in letters of flame.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
"Gimme some soul, sissstuh. Done let no pore imp go down the tubes. We had some good times together, didn't we? We boogied til dawn, tired out the band, then freaked till we were peaked, huh? You got the kind of sssugar Daddy lurves. Cmon, done do nothin' you'll re-gret tomorrow."
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
"Pope's whore, roundheels sexclone, freaking ratskag, hagwitch, slut-nun, sumpsucker, rathergrabber, deatheater, slagdriver, motherfreaker, scum, scum, scum, scum…"
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She emptied another vial onto the screen. Where the blessed water—consecrated by the blood of that good man, Father Miguel O'Pray—dribbled, the blackness paled into dead static.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
There were no more conjuring tricks. There was a hint of the pathetic in the demon's screams now. A wheedling tone was creeping in. Instead of threats, it was offering promises…wealth, position, pleasure, the papacy.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
She saw herself ascending to the Throne of St Peter, each step of the path marked by the mangled corpse of a cardinal. Georgi, eyeless, was the last step. She assumed the robes, and the crowds cheered. The illusion was ridiculous.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
Chantal knew she had the upper hand. The demon was flagging, its schemes becoming tacky, absurd.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
It whimpered and pleaded, retreating into the depths of the fort, withdrawing all its tentacles.
"The Power of Christ compels you…"
The demon begged for mercy.
"BEGONE!"
XII
The main gates were open, and people were pouring out. Stack grabbed a Trooper he knew—Lizzie Tuska—and screamed in her face, asking her what was going on. She cringed away from him, and broke his grasp.
Two months ago, he had seen Lizzie go alone into a cellar and take out five Maniax with seven shots. Now, she was crying in the dirt, her nerve gone.
"It's Hell in there," someone shouted. "Freaking Hell."
A cruiser was coming. Stack picked up Lizzie, and pulled her out of the way just in time. The vehicle crashed towards London Bridge, and wedged against.the balustrades. There were about six people crammed into it.