VIII
Stack couldn't figure it. Leona had just shot Ken Kling. The cruiser was on automatic and killing people. The gas station was burning, and due to go up like the Fourth of July in moments. This wasn't a routine patrol anymore. The peace was over.
He drew his gun, not liking where this was leading.
"Leona," he said. "Drop your weapon. Maybe we can sort this out."
She fell to one knee, wounded somehow, and looked at him. He saw hurt in her eyes, not at the physical pain, but at his instinctive assumption she was behind all this.
But, damnit, she had control of the cruiser! She had just shot a T-H-R man!
She had dropped her gun, and was holding her leg with both hands.
"Leona?"
She opened her mouth to speak; and the cruiser lurched forwards. It must have hit a stone as it started, because it lifted up off the ground. The front bumper struck Leona in the chest, forcing her backwards, and the ve-hickle drove clear over her.
Stack screamed, and automatically fired his pistol, emptying it in the air. It got hot in his hand, and he threw it away.
The cruiser drove off, leaving Leona sprawled in the sand, half-buried already, leaking black blood. Stack ran to her, and took her in his arms. There was a fresh tyre track across her chest. Her hair was loose, and thick with blood, grit and oil.
She was still breathing, but he knew there was no hope. He took a squeezer of morph-plus from his belt-slung medkit and shot it into her arm. As he depressed the syringe, an eye snapped open in her soot-blacked face.
He had something to tell her, but he couldn't get it out.
She gripped him with one hand, clutching a fistful of his shirt, scraping skin off his chest. She was shaking as the drug killed her nervous system. There wouldn't be any more pain, at least.
"Leona?"
Blood came out of her nostrils and mouth.
"Le…oh…"
The cruiser was coming back. Stack disentangled himself from the corpse, and ran. He ran towards the burning house, the cruiser swallowing the ground between them in instants.
There was a voice coming from the car. "Cum-a-kay-aye-yippie," it shouted, "yippie-yippie-yippie-aye, cum-a-kay-aye-yippie-yippie-ay!"
He felt flames as he ran past the house, through the already burning rubble. He was surrounded by heat. Behind him, the cruiser's engines gunned. The gas tanks exploded, and he was at the centre of a fireball.
IX
Duroc's chest was as good as new. Better, even. Thanks to the Zarathustra treatment, designed by GenTech's finest and available only to the very wealthy, Duroc's body became more durable, more healthy, with each hurt overcome. "Every day, in every way," he muttered, "I am getting better and better."
The woman at the desk was plastic. She could have been a sexclone with a voice-activated set of automatic responses. She smiled at him, and buzzed him through. There weren't many people who could be admitted as easily to the Central Lodge in Salt Lake City.
The two tall, bearded, barrel-chested men stood aside, and Duroc went through the double doors into Elder Seth's personal office.
The Elder sat with his back to the door, looking up at nine inset television screens on the wall, each showing a different channel. There was a soundtrack babel. Lola Stechkin read the news on ZeeBeeCee. A bionic bobby doffed his nipplehead helmet and beat up a scruffy French terrorist in a black and white British police series. President North emphatically made a point. A Spanish-speaking lady aristocrat with remarkable cheekbones struggled on a soap to come to terms with her daughter's romantic attachment to a dobermann pinscher. A cartoon Op chased Mohawk-headed renegades on a kiddie show with more violence to the minute than Hitler's home movies. Petya Tcherkassoff, in an open-fronted white shirt and unpleasantly tight culottes, seduced a teenage girl with a song called "My Heart Bleeds Love for You" in a Russian musickie video. And the Josephite Tabernacle Choir raised money on Salt Lake's own network.
Seth swivelled around on his chair, and smiled. Duroc was reminded vaguely of a piranha. It was a smile designed purely to show off sharp teeth. It wouldn't extend to the eyes currently concealed behind dark glasses. The office was bare apart from the screens. Everywhere else in the City, there were crosses and portraits of Elder Seth and the original Elder Shatner. Here, no trimmings were needed.
The Elder stood up, and extended a hand. He wore a conservative black suit, anonymously tailored in a style that hadn't changed for two hundred years.
They shook hands. As always, Duroc was surprised the Elder's skin was warm, normal. Such a great man should have ice-cold flesh and a grip like a vise.
"It is done?"
Duroc nodded.
"It is as well."
The Elder was the titular head of the Josephite Church, a protestant sect founded in 1843 by the American visionary Joseph Shatner. By the sheer force of his will, Nguyen Seth had rallied many followers, and persuaded the United States to turn over sovereignty of the wilderness of Utah to him. He had renamed it Deseret, he had brought the first motorwagons of resettlers to the region, he had supervised the irrigation and fertilization projects that had made crops grow where science said none could, and he had built a power base unmatched in the mid-west. Now, having unified and fortified the Josephites, he was actively seeking gentile resettlers to bulk out the population.
It was not a bad roll-call of achievements for someone who barely qualified as a human being.
Seth flipped his desk intercom. "Saskia, would you bring in a kid and the ceremonial knife?"
He looked at Duroc. "Blood must be spilled, Roger. There must be a seal on the mission."
The Frenchman was unable to hide his distaste.
"You will understand, Roger. When the time comes, you will understand."
The doors opened, and the plastic woman led in a young goat.
Part Two: Who Was That Masked Woman?
I
The US Cavalry had no idea how to treat her, and so she had spent the morning being given a tour of Fort Apache and its environs. Captain Lauderdale, the spare officer Colonel Younger had ordered to keep her out of trouble, had taken her outside the perimeter walls and shown her London Bridge, the red British telephone boxes, and what was left of The Old Dog and Duck Pub. Lake Havasu had sold itself as a tourist attraction before the Colorado River dried up. Chantal understood it was a typical ghost town, its residential area turning gradually to desert as the sand drifted in and the houses collapsed. In a thousand years, you would never know there had been a community here.
The bridge, transported stone by stone from England, was really falling down now. Lauderdale attempted a joke about it, and called her "my fair lady," but she didn't respond. She thought there was something creepy about the captain, and her training had taught her to trust her intuitions. She didn't have any measurable psi abilities, but she had spent so much time swapping synapses with the datanets that she had her moments, her occasional flashes of extranormal insight.
Spanning a channel of rancid mud and cracked, dry earth, the bridge did not look special. It was rather a bland design, with nothing distinctively British about it. There were wrought-iron lamp-posts, mostly twisted into half-pretzel shapes.
"The story goes that the people who bought it got the wrong bridge." Lauderdale said. "They wanted the one that goes up and down…"
"Tower Bridge."
"That's right. Tower Bridge."
Chantal examined shared heart graffiti etched into the stone, and looked towards the remains of the town.
"Does anybody live down there?"
Lauderdale looked both ways, as if afraid his superiors were listening. "Not officially, but there's a large detachment of men and women at the Fort, with no way to spend their pay and not much to do in their off hours…"