“At the moment, apart from Trix Desoto, you’re the nearest thing we have to a viable option. And time’s getting tight.”
12.
On his attempt at escaping the Factory, Eddie Kalish had not bothered to check out the contents of the warehouse-space around it. On the whole, he realised, it was fortunate that he had not.
Had he stuck so much as his head through the doors, without clearance, then that head would have been burnt off by the plasma-ejectors of automated defences-whether the powers that be had wanted him kept alive and intact or not.
Now, in the company of Trix Desoto, he wandered through the big steel caverns. He somehow expected his footsteps to echo off the walls, for all that sound was as deadened in here as in any recording studio.
The inner walls of the warehouses crawled with polyceramic baffles and steel mesh designed to disrupt tracksat scanning that could ordinarily see right through the flat surfaces of buildings.
Possibly the hybrid processes of the Loup really had left him smarter, because something occurred to him that he was sure never would have, in what he was increasingly coming to think of as his previous life.
“Doesn’t that look suspicious in itself?” he asked. “You know, a NeoGen tracksat looks down and sees a bunch of totally disrupted forms?”
Trix Desoto snorted.
“Give us some credit,” she said. “The baffles are constructed to give the impression of old packing cases and the occasional scurrying rat.”
Indeed, looking up, Eddie could see a lump of vaguely rat-shaped thermal biogel being moved around by a clockwork-driven arm. The use of clockwork, presumably, prevented the mechanism from being identified as such.
It all seemed a bit Rube Goldberg to Eddie. If he could only work out what a Rube Goldberg was…
Most of the space under the baffles was taken up with the big hulks of Behemoth rigs, of a similar sort to those Eddie had seen when he had first encountered Trix.
As had been the case then, the tanker-like construction of most of them was simply camouflage. For all that they were plastered with Hazmat decals, suggesting that a breach would release the kind of chemical-waste sludge that would seriously bring down anybody’s day, the hatches were open to reveal simple compartment space.
Workers in sterile med-tech coveralls were busily filling the compartments with what appeared to be thermos canisters. There were thousands of these canisters. There was no indication as to what they might contain… but the size and squat proportions of them left Eddie decidedly uneasy.
“Couple of hours before they finish loading the Brain Train,” said Trix Desoto, instantly confirming Eddie’s unease.
“And what are we calling the Behemoths themselves?” asked Eddie. “Think Tankers?”
Trix Desoto snorted again, this time it seemed with suppressed laughter rather than contempt.
This little instant of human contact left Eddie feeling momentarily weird. He didn’t know what to think about it.
“So how did you get roped into all this..?” he ventured at last.
“None of your damn business,” Trix Desoto said, flatly. It was like a shutter coming down. “I might tell you the story of my life, someday, but it won’t be today. For the moment you can just keep your grubby fingers out of my head.”
“Suit yourself,” said Eddie Kalish.
Off to one side of the warehouse, a bunch of outriders in bulky leather-skinned body armour were checking the gyro-systems on their flywheel-driven motorsickles. A small group of them were doing the traditional thing of sharing a smoke directly under the sign on the wall that told them, in huge letters, not to do that very thing.
Eddie glanced from them back to Trix, in her skin-tight patent leather, and raised an eyebrow. “You’re gonna be coming it like the biker chick for this thing, yes?”
“I’m going to be riding in command-and-control this time out,” Trix said, her manner easing up again, just a little, now the conversation had returned to the job at hand. “Doing the Third Assistant to the Attache thing, you know? Anyone from the outside looking in, I’m a console-jockey. From the inside out I’m in Command.”
“Good for you,” said Eddie. “So where do I fit into your whole command-structure thing?”
“For the moment, till we get where we’re going, you’re a semi-autonomous unit. You’re gonna be running vanguard; our eyes and ears in front.”
“And when we get there, wherever it is?” Eddie asked, uneasily recalling what Masterton had said about only he and Trix being the only two who carried a viable strain of the Loup.
“That’s need-to-know,” said Trix Desoto. “And you don’t need to, yet. For now, your function is to help the Brain Train get through in the first place, and you should concentrate on that.”
Eddie concentrated on it-or at least, he thought about it.
“Front-runner just seems like one hell of a responsibility, is all,” he said. “I mean, you can pump my head full of all the new info and vocabulary you like; the fact remains that I’ve never done anything like it before. I just don’t have the experience. It’s a screw-up waiting to happen, is all I’m saying.”
“You’ve got experience,” said Trix Desoto. “You spent years out on the roads and you survived.”
“I spent years dicking around, never going anywhere much and rabbiting at the first scent of danger,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, well, those are the senses and instincts the front-runner needs,” said Trix. “Your job is to sense the danger, then rat out and cover your ass while the heavy-duty guys deal with the actual combat. I reckon we can trust to the Leash that you won’t rat out too far.”
Eddie nodded, feeling depressed. Trix would, of course, be supplying him with his twelve-hourly dose of the Leash for the duration of the run.
Come what may, the life of one Eddie Kalish would be inextricably linked to the fortunes of the Brain Train.
“Besides,” said Trix, “you’re really not going to be doing much more, in the end, than sit there on your ass. You’re going to have help.”
“If it isn’t a personal thing about the story of your life,” said Eddie, “what do you think of this thing about cracks in the world and stuff? The thing about how the Loup is supposed to actually work?”
They were working their way through the loading-activity around the Behemoths towards a partitioned-off area before the main doors of the warehouse.
Eddie had noted this when coming in, and had wondered what the partitions concealed. Only he hadn’t wondered enough to take a look, on account of the fact that a security-system plasma ejector had started tracking him, with a whirr of servos, when he had gotten too close.
“What?” said Trix, who seemed a little lost in her own thoughts. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, it just sounded like bullshit, you know? The sort of shit you dream up when you’ve been dancing with Mr Brownstone. But Masterton said that everyone has their own idea of what’s really going on, so I just wanted to hear what you think is really happening, is all.”
“I don’t think about it, much,” said Trix. “To the extent I do, I think it’s just another way that the world’s a sex-killer.”
“What?” said Eddie. “I mean, a what?”
“Sex-killer. Whoever you are, the world just screws you. It screws you up and screws you over, and when it’s had enough of screwing you it kills you. Simple as that. Last few years, it’s just stopped clicking around and decided to be up front about it.”
As a general philosophy of life, there was much in it that Eddie could get right behind. Something inside him, however, was saying that it was all too pat in its bleakness and resignation-and that some large part of Trix Desoto didn’t believe a word of it herself.
Just another front.
“So if that’s just what the world is,” he said, “if that’s all there is, why even bother to keep living?”
“What’s the alternative?” asked Trix. “Here we go.”
They had reached the partitioned-off area, and Trix slid one of the partitions back to reveal what-for one Eddie Kalish at least-was a reason to keep on living at least for a while.