The air outside was hazed with smoke. Eddie stuck his head out of the hatch, hauled it back and examined the image imprinted on his retinas. Nothing moving out there. Nothing alive.
Cautiously, he clambered down from the hatch, went into a crouch and scanned his surroundings through the haze. Now that he was through the hatch he became of a loud, low rumbling emanating from the Ship itself. Whatever provided its motive force was obviously on line.
The cavern was a mess. The servomechanisms that had been busily shucking human heads were a tangled, burning wreckage-the source of the smoke. There was the smell of charred flesh from the piles of discarded empty heads.
Somebody had dropped a quantity of hi-ex down the main elevator shaft and taken the various head-processing units out. Eddie wondered if the idea had been to disrupt the Ship’s replenishment, before remembering that part of the operation had been almost done in any case before he and Trix had entered to reconfigure the nodes. Whoever had done this would have known that, or simply didn’t care.
In any case, here and now, there didn’t seem to be any immediate threat. He turned back, intending to return to Trix Desoto and tell her as much, and found that the hatch had contracted shut.
Abruptly, the rumbling from the Ship changed in tone, and added several extra harmonics to the mix. Eddie had been around enough vehicles, of various types, in his life to recognise that several key systems had just cut in. The Ship was in the process of prepping for actual flight.
Eddie Kalish had not the slightest idea what might happen to him, should a starship from the future, or the past, or from some weird dimension of wherever the fuck it was, decided to take off in an enclosed space with him standing right beside it-and it was the considered opinion of one Eddie Kalish that he was fucked if he was gonna wait to find out. He scrambled through the wreckage and sloshed and crunched his way through the detritus of shelled and emptied heads to the alcoves leading to the emergency maintenance shafts-only to find them filled with quick-drying concrete.
The concrete was still vaguely sludgy, but not so much that there would be any possible way through it. When the US Army Engineering Corps start throwing construction materials around, they don’t dick about.
Behind him, the rumbling of the Ship cranked up another notch and became a positive roar.
One chance left, then.
The pylons and the cogwheel rack that had respectively stabilised and given purchase for the main elevator platform were a scorched and buckled, collapsed mess, but he was able to haul himself up on them to gain some height.
Hanging from the elevator shaft itself, in the roof of the cavern, was a length of gear-chain that remained from the mechanism that had lowered the canisters of the Brain Train’s cargo.
Eddie Kalish launched himself for it desperately, brushed the chain with his outflung fingers and fell back-flat-foot boosted himself against the remains of a crumpled stanchion, managed somehow to get his hand round the chain and then clung on for dear life.
(And it was only later, yet again, that he would work out the various distances and dynamics, and realise that what he had done was physically impossible. He was really going to have to get a handle on that, he thought later-work out the limits of what his Loup-informed body was really able to do, if only to stop all this waking up in a cold sweat the night after he did stuff.)
Eddie hauled himself up to get a purchase with his other hand, wondering if he really had it in him to make it up the shaft by way of a gear chain that was already slicing into him.
Below him, the roar from the Ship ramped up yet again.
Problem solved. Eddie climbed.
24.
Colonel Roland Grist sat on the floor in Arbitrary Base Tactical Command, looking down numbly at the liquid seeping numbly out across the carpet from between his legs.
The liquid, it must be said, was actually the better part of a bottle of Wild Turkey, his fourth in the space of twenty-four hours, which had slipped from his fingers, with which he was currently and unaccountably having some degree of trouble.
Oh, well. He had probably had enough by this point anyway. He still had other bottles salted away in his quarters. And the smell of it helped to counteract the smell of the piss.
One step leading to another. Step by logical step. How could things have gotten so far out of hand so fast? How had it all turned into shit?
The Desoto girl humiliating him the day before had been nothing new to Grist; he had, after all spent the best part of a decade in a state of humiliation.
Jealousy amongst the powers that be in the Pentagon, that’s what it was. Following his successes in Madagascar back in ’09, including the depersonalization and deforestation of the entire island, the powers that be spotted his rising star and decided to slap it down out of hand. Dishonourable discharge they’d called it, not that Grist could see anything dishonourable in using a little napalm to sort out a problem with local insurgents. How can you make an omelette if you can’t break a few eggs?
Following his court martial, the CNG had welcomed him with open arms and allowed him to carry over his army rank of colonel. He had been appointed in Command of Arbitrary Base (Fort Dix, as it was) and its complement of intercontinental ballistic missiles, each capable of wiping out a major city, halfway around the globe in any direction you might like. Half a century before, with actual superpowers standing off under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, that might have been a big deal.
The fact was, however, that by the turn of the twenty-first century, the dynamic of global conflict was shifting irrevocably to the smaller scale. Police actions and surgical incursions were the way to go-and in none of these was there any sensible scenario involving the annihilation of entire major cities.
Grist had become, as the Desoto girl had reminded him, nothing more than a glorified caretaker, taking care of stuff until such a time as there might be a need for it again-and when that time came, of course, the stuff would be taken from him. He wouldn’t even get a go with the button.
Then again, as if in response to their general insignificance to the world, advances in technology had refined the stopping-power of an ICBM into something that could be carried on the back of a roller skate. And while people are forever saying that it’s not the size, it’s what you do with it that counts, that’s a fucking lie and they know it. When Colonel Grist had contemplated the relative size of his arsenal, it couldn’t but have him feeling like a dickless fuck.
And as if to add insult to injury, the jokers had informed him that he was responsible for a subterranean chamber containing what they called the Artefact. Extraterrestrial in origin, they said. Most important thing in the world they said. Second only to the… thing that the Roswell Incident was invented to deflect attention from, they said.
And Grist had believed them. They had seemed so serious about it. Grist had taken up his new post almost bursting with pride… and then gone down the Shed Seven shaft to find nothing but a disused weapons repository. Nothing inside whatsoever. His superiors had been ripping the piss out of him. Laughing at him behind his back.
They were doing that little twirly thing with a finger to the ear, too, in his mind.
Grist had decided, then and there, looking at nothing whatsoever, that he’d be jiggered if he was going to be the one to crack first. For a decade he had played along, each status report on this so-called Artefact adding another little drop of acid to his soul. The only thing that had kept him going was the knowledge that the bastards in the Pentagon knew he knew, and was playing them at their own game, and that it must be driving them completely bugshit.
Evidently, it was working. Now they had stepped up the ante-sending in a bunch of GenTech civilians to rub it in and mock him. Acting as if the so-called Artefact existed and was of supreme importance. Doing it all to mock him and watch him squirm.