“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “So what really happened?”
“Don’t ask,” said Trix. “Just remember, some shit goes down and you hear that things called greys are involved, be very, very afraid. Little bastards aren’t nearly so harmless as they try to make out. This isn’t about that.”
Eddie wasn’t entirely sure that Trix was joking. She gestured to take in the prefabricated barracks huts and storage units of the Base.
“Arbitrary Base,” she said, “is basically a moveable feast; the facilities that make it what it is, that allow it to deal with what it deals with, move between the existing installations, patching into their command structures…”
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Eddie said. “GenTech’s really running Arnie’s Freedom Commandos? Is that how it is?”
“We wish,” said Trix Desoto. “It’s a hangover from the whole Military-Industrial Complex thing. That whole self-perpetuating thing of selling a bunch of arms to guys, then sending in our guys to sort out the situation where you’ve got a bunch of armed guys, you know?
“Anyhow. The Pentagon is split up into as many factions as there are Multicorps, these days. GenTech just happened to end up connected with the faction running Arbitrary Base.” She smiled sardonically. “Lucky for us.”
“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “How so?”
“How so because certain of our… associates have a serious interest in the materials falling under the remit of Arbitrary Base. Or maybe it was the other way around: GenTech had access to those materials, which is why our… associates made contact with us in the first place.”
It might have been all the new knowledge downloaded into him as a part of his induction into the Loup, but Eddie was learning to recognise an ellipse at twenty paces.
“And so just who, exactly, are these dot, dot, dot associates?” he asked.
“You’ll find out,” said Trix Desoto. “For the moment, though, initially, it’s gonna be better to show than tell. And here we are. Shed Seven.”
A squad of Deltas were waiting for them outside of an unprepossessing galvanised steel hut.
Eddie had occasionally come across off-duty military out in Las Vitas, and so some large part of him expected to be greeted with, at best, outright hostility. A supercharged Testostorossa had nothing on off-duty military when it came to assuming that people with more brains than muscle were fags.
Not that he’d had any brains to speak of in the first place, he recalled, which had left him doubly screwed.
He assumed that Trix Desoto herself might be made, well, welcome, for a certain number of reasons, but not in an entirely salutary manner.
Now he came to appreciate the difference between highly trained and not, and off-duty and on. The soldiers snapped to instant attention as he and Trix approached, and the lieutenant in charge of them saluted.
“Butcher,” he said, matching the name tag on his greens.
Eddie thought of several replies to that, but then discounted them more or less instantly as either heavy handed or asinine. A guy in the CNG with the name of Butcher would have heard them all in any case.
“You requested a close-order escort,” said Butcher. It came out as a kind of completely neutral statement, requiring neither confirmation not comment.
“Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, confirming it anyway. “Don’t sweat it, There’s no rush; we just want to check it out at this point. You’ll have time to get into your gear.”
“Ma’m,” Butcher said.
It might have been Eddie’s imagination, but there seemed to be a sense of relief, both in Butcher and his squad, though they gave absolutely no external sign.
The escort took them into Shed Seven. Eddie had not been quite sure what to expect-but he certainly hadn’t expected it to be bare-walled and completely empty.
“What is this-“ he began, when the floor lurched under him and dropped with the whine of heavy-duty servos.
Eddie wasn’t entirely stupid-at least, since undergoing the processes of the Loup it seemed to him that he was increasingly less so-so by the time the servos whined down to a stop he had more or less convinced himself that his underwear was safe.
They were in an underground chamber slightly larger than the galvanised hut of Shed Seven had been. Along one wall were racked the bulky and somewhat ape-like forms of heavy-radiation armour.
At an order from Butcher, the squad broke formation and began climbing into the suits double-time. Eddie noted that, for all their speed in doing so, they were extremely careful about checking the on-board systems and seals.
Trix Desoto, meanwhile, had wandered over to a storage unit, from which she now returned with a pair of paper-thin polyceramic coveralls.
“There you go,” she said, giving one of them to Eddie.
Eddie looked down at it. The cuffs at the wrists and ankles seemed to be elasticated.
“The fuck?” he said.
“What do you think?” said Trix Desoto. “You want Mommy’s help putting it on the right way round or something?”
“Yeah, but…” Eddie gestured in the direction of soldiers busily girding themselves up for any and all manner of radioactive nastiness.
“Oh, right,” said Trix Desoto. “The coverall isn’t to protect you . Nobody cares what happens to you, frankly. We’re going into a clean environment. I’d advise you to look up the term, along with the word ‘soap’.”
The Shed Seven-sized elevator floor lurched again. Eddie decided that this was probably because it was built to military specifications as opposed to faulty design. It was built to do the job, and do it reliably, rather than indulge in the niceties of giving a smooth ride.
“This is gonna have to be refitted,” said Trix Desoto. “Some of the components we’re going to be bringing down here are a little too… delicate for all this lurching around.”
“That was a polite way of putting it,” said Eddie.
He was not in a particularly good temper. The elasticated band around the polyfabricated hair-cap he was wearing seemed to be increasingly cutting into his head.
“I was trying for elliptical, myself,” said Trix Desoto.
Like Eddie, she was now in cap and coveralls-though the latter were a strategic half a size too small for her, to noticeable aesthetic effect. An effect periodically enhanced by the blasts of air that washed over them as the butterfly wing hatches of airlock stations slammed shut above.
“So, Eddie,” said Trix Desoto in a loud, clear voice. “You ever seriously think about getting it on with me?”
The question, coming completely out of left field, left Eddie momentarily dumbfounded, as though several areas of his brain had simply and physically shorted out.
“I mean, I know what I come off like in my… with my usual look.” Trix Desoto glanced sidelong at a collectively and absolutely stone-faced squad of Deltas, what could be seen of their faces behind their visors.
“Couple of guys here,” she continued, “are having a little bit of difficulty keeping their fingers on their numbers. And you’re, what, seventeen years old? You should be getting a little chubby on over the thought of dry wall. Thinking up things to try and talk to me about. Looking for excuses to touch me and cop a feel.” She turned to look at him meaningfully. “And I just don’t get any of that from you, Eddie. I wonder why.”
Of any possible scenario while being stuck in an elevator with a squad of Delta-trained Marines this was absolutely, in the considered opinion of Eddie Kalish, the very worst.
“My age?” he managed, latching on to one desperate detail in an attempt to head the conversation off. “You’re maybe two years older than I am…”
“Yeah, well girls notoriously mature faster than boys,” said Trix Desoto. “So you’re shafted twice, and not in a good way, believe you me. Don’t you like girls, Eddie? Is that it? Do you prefer boys?”
Not absolutely the very worst thing he could have imagined, then.
“Could I borrow your gun, please,” he said to Lieutenant Butcher. “I think I’d like to shoot myself in the head.”