“There’s your help,” said Trix Desoto.
The red skin of the Testostorossa gleamed in the pristine, liquid way that spoke of either fresh wet paint or a well-nigh impervious monomolecular shell. Eddie Kalish had lived around vehicles for most of his life, in any number of states of repair. He had thought he knew from vehicles of any kind.
He had never known an automobile, in and of itself, could be so beautiful. Wonderingly, disbelievingly, he reached out a hand to stroke the liquid-seeming shell.
Smoothly, ramping on an exponential curve, the engine came to life. There was a kind of throaty roar to it, which Eddie would later learn to be due to integral booster-units-the hydrofusion equivalent of turbo-charging.
“ Get your fuckin’ hand off me, ” the Testostorossa growled, in the voice of a New York cabbie. “ You a fuckin’ fag or what? ”
The doors of the warehouse rolled up, and the security-system plasma ejectors racked themselves back on their servos.
The front-runner sped out like a red streak, hi-impact suspension taking care of the worst of what had might once been a street but was not little more than a debris-strewn track.
It put some distance between itself and the warehouse complex, then slowed to match that of the Brain Train tankers which were now emerging, the motorsickle outriders fanning out to bracket them to far as was possible in the current urban conditions.
Over to one side, in the wreckscape of the No-Go there was the rattle of automatic fire, the flash and smoke of frag-detonations. This was a common occurrence at the beginning of any transport-operation: each of the various multicorps had arrangements with one or another of the various tribes that infested the No-Go. NeoGen, or MegaStel, or any number of other concerns, bribed guys to disrupt GenTech traffic as a matter of principle-and GenTech had guys on the ground to take out any source of disruption.
The Brain Train convoy headed up on the somewhat tortuous route that would take it northwards through the San Angeles Sprawl and at last onto the pristine blacktop of the Interways… and an entirely other kind and degree of danger.
The sheer size of the operation made any attempt to run covertly not even worth thinking about. Lights blazing, loaded up for mutant bear, the Brain Train was a sight to see.
Masterton wasn’t watching it. He wasn’t even tracking the Brain Train’s progress via the tracksat readouts in the Factory communications suite. All the same, he knew precisely where it was.
“ Sama slektli,” he was saying, prostrate before his totems in the spare and austere cell that served as his working space and living space combined. “ Tara oorsi sa mamda lami se tarakogla me so sani ta deloka de somata so se hakara de sao soma…”
The words, had there been anyone here to listen to them, would have struck this nonexistent listener as pure nonsense, without basis in any known human language-structure, even to the point of having the glossolaic quality of speaking in tongues.
Indeed, that was rather the point.
Likewise, the collection of artefacts and totems on the floor before him appeared to have no real sense of significance: nothing but a random collection of garbage and junk, the detailing of which would serve no actual or useful purpose.
And, again, this was the point.
The words and totems had, in fact, no more significance than the static and distortion coming from a radio receiver when hunting between stations-save that, at some specific point on the dial, one can learn to recognise a particular blend and texture in the static, and know that one is coming close to whatever station one is actually searching for.
The words and totems merely directed the mind towards… a place for which there are no ordinary terms of human reference.
Masterton looked up.
The air before him shimmered as though with heat-haze-then split open as cleanly and neatly as a razor slits a polythene sheet. A matched pair of barbs, each trailing a thing fleshy line, shot from the slit and speared Masterton, punching through his shades and burying themselves deep into the eye sockets beneath.
The lines connecting Masterton to the rip in the fabric of the world twitched and pulsed; some kind of exchange was taking place. Masterton drooled.
“ Salekmi tekla,” he said through his slack mouth. “ Samo de talekli sama… Food for you,” he continued in more or less distinguishable tones, as though some synchronisation had been reached with whatever it was behind the slit in the world. “Sending food for you. Food for you now. Food for your mouth.”
Reprise: Reset Settings to Start
The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.
The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, now, segueing in on one or other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off, weighing up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on, coming in from both sides.
“The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care about the Brain Train-they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off the front-runner.”
“ Yeah, well,” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “ that would be us. What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a queer to wanna fuck some girlies? ”
“I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip on your lips was just flat-out murder.
Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.
The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old.
“Anyhow,” Eddie said, “These kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”
“ Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us, ” the Testostorossa said. “ Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice-and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat. ”
Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked and loaded.
“ I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now, ” the Testostorossa said. “ You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me. ”
Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this..?
Third Quadrant: Impactor Road
From a bedroom a roscoe said: “Whr-r-rang!” and a lead pill split the ozone past my noggin… Kane Frewster was on the floor. There was a bullet-hole through his think-tank. He was as dead as a fried oyster.
“Dark Star of Death” Spicy Detective January 1938
Supplementary Data: A Common Childhood
The light fell in actinic, dust-laden shafts through holes eaten in the rusting corrugated sides of the shed; inched across the ragged forms huddled on the dirt floor. A number of rats slunk through the hut, with a silent inconspicuousness and an utter lack of scurrying that might have seemed, to some observer, slightly overplayed and unnatural. Something the rats had learnt consciously rather than by instinct.
This demeanour had developed in response to the fact that should a rat be detected, here and now, it would last about as long as it took to be torn apart and the pieces squabbled over and eaten. Such useful protein-supplements were beyond price-if anyone had even had sufficient resources to know what a price was-here in the camp.