“My country? You motherfuckers, what I heard, serve UAC more than the country. You’re Privatized. You ain’t no real soldiers for the country.”
“Country uses us and UAC does, too — UAC’s interests are the same as the country’s. You want to go to jail?”
“I ain’t afraid of jail.”
“I didn’t ask you if you were afraid. I know you ain’t. That’s why we want you. I asked you if you wanted to go there, dumb-ass.”
“Fuck no. ’Course I don’t want to go.”
“Then get up out of bed. You sign these papers I got with me” — he waved a manila folder — “and you’re in my custody. We can tell that cop outside the door to go to hell. Then me and the MPs escort you to Training Center Thirty-two. Sign the paper, ‘Steppin’, and get up — you don’t let a little wound like that slow you down. Then you join my cadre.”
“Training center. Cadre. Yeah right. You mean boot camp. Pure hell, that’s what I heard.”
“You can’t take a little hell? No, that’s wrong — it’s a lotta hell. So what? It’s a challenge, boy.”
The challenge was there, in Canner’s eyes. But there was something more…
Understanding. This guy had grown up without a father, too — “Steppin’ Razor” knew it intuitively.
But he didn’t trust easily. “Why’s your ‘gang’ better than mine, man? ’Cause it’s all gangs. Some are big, and they got uniforms made in a factory. Some are small and they make their own uniforms. But it’s all gang soldiers. We call our country the ’hood, that’s all. I can be a ‘general’ in this army, man. I’d never make no general in yours. And I get myself killed in yours as easily as in mine — maybe more easy. Why I want to do that? For medals? I’d rather have a hot car. And bitches.”
He had the satisfaction of seeing some surprise in Canner’s eyes, then. Most of his recruits probably didn’t think much.
Finally Canner nodded. “Something in what you say. But there’s…levels of being a warrior, son. I can give you a kind of training you’ll never get down here. Achievement of a kind you’ll never get anywhere else. And I’ll be there for you. I’ll make it hell for you in boot camp — but afterward, we’ll go on a training mission together. I’ll be there, too. Anytime you want advice — you come to me. And that’s a guarantee, son.”
Ten long seconds. Then the young man who would one day become “Destroyer” said, “You got a pen?”
“A pen?”
“How else I going to sign?”
That was a long time ago…
He wondered where Canner was now. And what he’d think of this mission. Of Olduvai. Probably he’d shake his head, and say, “That’s a UAC mission for you. Just do it and get your black ass home.”
Only, home is a long way from here, Destroyer thought bitterly.
Destroyer looked at his watch, then at the door to the lab. Where the hell was Portman? He waited a few moments longer, then yelled into the semidarkness of the lab: “Portman!”
No response. He sighed, went into the lab, scanning the room as best he could with limited visibility. Found the bathroom door and knocked. Hammering on the door with his fist, shouting:
“Portman, how long does it take for a goddamn —”
He broke off, aware of a smell like rancid vinegar and something coming at him — he didn’t have time to level his gun before being jerked off his feet, yanked him violently into the darkness.
Destroyer found himself on his back, the wind knocked out of him, staring up at a gaping, salivating mouth big enough to swallow his whole head in one easy snap. Big the thing was, bipedal, every muscle outlined in unhealthy pink-and-blue tissue; bulky, without eyes — but with plenty of teeth and claws. A manacle on the thing’s leg with a broken chain trailing from it…
All these impressions came to Destroyer in the fraction of a second it took him to see his enemy and roll aside, trying to get his chaingun.
He tried for his knife, but the hulking mutant swatted it away — the blade skittered across the floor, fell with a clink into the holding pit.
The creature’s slashing claws just missed him as he rolled, leaving a row of gouge troughs in the floor, torn-up tiles flying like tossed playing cards as Destroyer slammed a kick into the creature’s inside right thigh, toppling the beast — even as it batted his chaingun from his hand, the heavy-duty machine gun crashing against the wall.
The monster scrambled to its feet as Destroyer sucked air into his tortured lungs.
…and kept the roll going, got his feet under him and at the same time grabbed the chain attached to its leg, putting his weight, his motion, and his muscle into it as he jerked the monster off its clawed feet. The chain wrapped around Destroyer’s wrist.
The chaingun was almost in reach — Destroyer grabbed for it, missed — then yelped as the beast leapt up and wrenched the chain on its leg with tremendous force. He felt himself being flung, pitched through the air, tumbling, skidding, rolling, feeling the beast bounding over him, the two of them falling…
Into the holding pit. Falling, he grabbed at the gurney hoist — it snapped in his hands as he fell but broke his fall so he was able to land on his feet. Winded, half-stunned, he straightened up, confirming he was in the pit with the steel sides that Goat and Portman had found. Dark in here, just a little light coming from above.
Something was in the pit with him.
He could hear it breathing liquidly, growling deep within itself. It shuffled forward, and he saw that the hulking creature had fallen in with him.
Destroyer looked at the walls. Twenty feet or more up to the rim. No way he was getting out of here anytime soon. Not alive.
So this was it. He was going to finish his life fighting in a steel pit with a thing that was pure aggression…
Kind of fitting, really. He was just sorry that Canner, that cold-blooded son of a bitch, wasn’t here to see how well one of his men could die, when the time came.
Anytime you want advice — you come to me. And that’s a guarantee, son.
He knew what advice Canner would give him now. Sell your life dearly, son. If you can, take the miserable bastard down with you…and the gods of war will be waiting to give you the gang handshake in the next world…
The beast came closer, an enormous, fever-colored scabrous presence in the gloom; almost magnificent, monstrously Herculean, snarling, raising its claws as it prepared to meet its enemy head-on. It growled again — and, intuitively, Destroyer understood that growclass="underline"
One of us will die now.
“I see we speak the same language,” Destroyer said.
Pinky, at the secondary comm. console in the wormhole chamber, was staring at the screen trying to work out where Destroyer was. But Destroyer had evidently dropped his gun — the guncam was sending only a nondescript wall. Was that a little blood on the wall? That could be anywhere in the facility.
“Destroyer?” came Sarge’s voice, filtered, over the comm from the corridor near the special weapons lab. “Portman? Come in…”
Pinky wanted to be able to give Sarge some sense of where his men were — but Destroyer’s tracking blip was going in and out. Maybe…Carmack’s lab?
But maybe not. Hard to say for sure. The transmitter had been damaged. Chances were, Destroyer was dead. And Portman, too.
“Lost Portman,” Pinky said, into the comm, “and all I’ve got from Destroyer is some kind of wall…”
In a steel-lined pit…
The big mutant charged and whipped out with a clawed fist, hammered Destroyer’s uplifted left arm hard — faster than he’d have thought so big a creature could be — and Destroyer staggered and fell, rolled, got his feet under him again, and lunged at his enemy, all his strength going into that assault, slamming his shoulder into the thing’s lower torso, making it stagger back into the wall.