There was absolutely no other explanation, given that the so-called Artefact simply didn’t exist.
Grist had decided to let them get on with their little farce, and left them to it. Screw ‘em, frankly. He was just going to go off and get tanked.
After a day and light of miserable drinking in his quarters, however, something had snapped. He just wasn’t going to take it anymore. He could see the way before him clearly.
He had gathered together those of his men who he knew, so far as such things can be known, were not in on the so-called Artefact joke, and informed them that Special Forces Intelligence had reported that these GenTech guys were in fact impostors-here to secure the Arbitrary Base nuclear arsenal in the name of New Congolese Vengeance. He had ordered his men to take them down with all necessary force.
He’d always been good at making stuff up off the top of his head like that, and sending his guys in on the basis if it. It had reminded him of the good old days.
Of course, he could never have anticipated how the GenTech guys responded to an attack. How the hell would a bunch of play-actors and practical jokers be so well trained and armed? There was just no way it made sense.
And then, of course, there were the filthy traitors, who had refused to follow orders. Fortunately, before ordering those he trusted to attack the GenTech team, Grist had contrived to secure those he did not fully trust in their barracks huts, where a number of time-delayed cyanide capsules had taken care of the problem nicely, thank you very much. Problem solved.
Unfortunately, one could not be expected to think of everything.
With the GenTech team fighting back so unexpectedly against his troops, and the Arbitrary Base compound dissolving into chaos, Grist had decided that his proper place was to be here in Tactical Command. He had arrived here, though, to find it guarded by one of his lieutenants, a Lieutenant Butcher, who had promptly attempted to take him into custody. Him!
Then things had gotten just a little bit confused. It was probably the drink. The next thing Grist knew he was sitting here, the entire left side of his head throbbing with pain, and he was somehow holding Butcher’s sidearm.
The body of Butcher lay before him, as it did now, with its head quite comprehensively blown off.
Grist couldn’t remember firing the gun even once, let alone enough times as it would take to inflict the damage done to Butcher. He simply had no memory of it. The term “psychotic cleavage” surfaced through his sodden mind. Then he forgot it.
Now Grist staggered to his feet. Something detonated outside. The ground shook. It was time for action, and he was just the guy to take it.
The control panels in Tactical Command gave direct access to the SNARKs off in their silo-racks. That was the stuff to give ‘em. Make the damn Congolese pay.
Through a combination of drink, psychosis and concussion sustained during his struggle with Butcher, Colonel Grist had simply forgotten that his hastily-invented lie about the New Congolese Vengeance terrorists was a fabrication. There had been a terrorist attack on US soil and the bastards responsible were going to pay!
It occurred to Grist, though, that he might need command-code clearance before proceeding with the launch. Fortunately, Tactical Command had a satellite-hotline overriding any lockdown or communications-blackout procedure.
Grist grabbed the handset. “Get me c-in-c Special Services Operations now,” he barked.
“ This is Special Services Operations at the Pentagon. ” A chirpy recorded voice said. “ If you require our humanitarian intervention in a territorial, religious or political dispute, please press one. If you wish to report an alleged atrocity carried out in the name of Uncle Sam by our boys overseas, please press two. For all other services, please hold the line. ”
And then the handset, for some reason, began playing the Village People singing ‘In the Navy’. Colonel Roland Grist stood to attention, handset to his ear, and waited for it to stop.
Eddie Kalish hauled himself from the elevator shaft. The Shed that had enclosed it was gone, at least in terms of being a Shed, having been converted to twisted scraps of metal sheeting spread over quite some area.
The compound of Arbitrary Base, likewise, had been converted to a battlefield devastation of twisted, burning bodies and wreckage. Eddie was reminded of the attempted hijacking of the Road Train, back when he had first met Trix Desoto-but ramped up to the nth degree. Military-spec weaponry and tactics versus the enhanced defences and armaments GenTech had brought along for this operation.
The Mobile Command Centre was totalled. Everybody Eddie could see was dead. There were rather less soldiers than he remembered among the corpses-and this gave Eddie Kalish pause for thought. If there were less dead soldiers then that meant, of course, that there was a better chance of living ones still knocking about.
Eddie made his way through the wreckage, senses alive for any sight or sound of movement or life, ready to cut and run at any moment.
It was a bit depressing, now he came to thing of it, that his life contrived to place him in this precise situation over and over again. He wondered if there was somebody he could complain to about it.
In the end, as it happened, he found a sign of life-but from a different and unexpected direction, and far less welcome than even some surviving Delta Marine with an M37 and an attitude about how many of his friends had been killed would have been. There was a roar overhead and a VTOL descended like the wrath of God-if God had happened to have access to next-generation VTOL technology and was really, really pissed off.
The craft was of a somewhat different design to the GenTech flyer that Eddie had encountered in Little Deke’s junk yard, which had transported a squad of operatives who had ended shooting Eddie stone cold dead.
This was not exactly comforting in that it was built on the basis of several streamlined polycarbon helium-pontoons to give it positive lift, and multidirectional turbines that could move it in any direction it liked, and do it fast.
The upshot was that the thing was damn huge, and looked like it was the sort of thing that could carry tanks. Stencilled prominently on its underside-in accordance with the convention in what might be called the Corporate Wars that those involved in overt action must tell their immediate opponent just who the hell they are-was
the logo: NeoGen
“Oh great,” said Eddie, looking up at it. “What are the fucking odds?”
25.
The NeoGen VTOL banked in the air and, as a matter of first principles, took out Arbitrary Base Tactical Command with a couple of well-aimed Exocets. This was rather more fortunate than otherwise, in the general human scheme of things, since Colonel Roland Grist had at that precise moment grown tired of listening to the Village People singing “In the Navy” and was on the point of launching the SNARKs just for the hell of it.
The Confederated Republics of the Congo would never know how lucky they were-though due to their current problems with an entirely other arm of the US Military, it is doubtful that they would have even noticed.
Now the NeoGen VTOL descended, ejecting what at first sight appeared to be bulky, ape-like forms, each twice the size of an ordinary man. They hit the ground and advanced-not lumbering but at an incongruously brisk double-time pace.
Eddie Kalish, cowering behind the overturned remains of a portable latrine-pod, set up by GenTech the very instant they had seen the military-pristine but military-basic state of the sanitation in Arbitrary Base, stared at these advancing forms… and the Loup took the opportunity to drop yet another piece of useful information into his head.