“Oh shit…” he muttered to himself. “NeoGen have Faction backing, too.”
As if in direct confirmation of his supposition, an amplified voice began to blare from the VTOL:
“HEY, LISTEN UP, YOU GUYS,” it blared. “WE REALLY, REALLY, WHEN IT GETS RIGHT DOWN TO IT, DON’T WANNA DO THIS THING WITH ALL THE FUSSIN’ AND THE FIGHTIN’. IT’S JUST SO BAD FOR THE KARMA AND IT ALL GETS SO SCREWED UP, YOU KNOW? TELL YOU WHAT, WHY NOT TAKE SOME MELLOW-TIME, GIVE US THE HAMMER OF GOD AND THEN WE… GUYS?”
There was the amplified sound of a hand being placed over a microphone and the subdued mumble of conversation. Then:
“HEY, LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE ALL DEAD. HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? AH WELL, FUCK ‘EM. GO AND GET THE THING SECURE, GUYS.”
This, presumably, directed at the power-armoured soldiers, who now changed course to head directly to the mouth of the Shed Seven elevator shaft. And, incidentally, almost exactly to the point where one Eddie Kalish was hiding.
Then things went from bad to worse.
Trix Desoto lurched through the tubes of the Ship, reconfiguring the final nodes.
Electrical activity thrashed and stuttered around her, racking up by increments with every Node she passed. The pulsing roar of the Ship around her acquired harmonic after harmonic, until in the end it seemed like nothing more nor less than white noise-every audible frequency was filled, in the same way that a cough can momentarily drown out every other voice in a crowded room.
She had long since lost the clean-room polymer coveralls, and for that matter all but a scrap of the clothing beneath. The Loup inside her was desperately attempting to compensate for the increased activity of the Ship. It constantly formed and reformed her, so that one second she might look like nothing more than a naked and extremely well-muscled girl, the next a twisted, hulking horror.
As she approached the Core, the frequency and severity of the transitions increased, to the point where the flesh of her body seemed to haze around her bones.
Now, at last, she stood before the Core.
Disappointingly enough, it was not exactly impressive. It was simply a hole in the world. An obloidular portal, hanging in the air, leading to… not blackness, but absolute nothingness. A void waiting to be filled.
A mouth waiting to be fed.
The malformed hazing mouth of Trix Desoto attempted to form words. “Brought you something,” she managed in a guttural slur. “Brought you something nice. Something nice for your mouth.”
She attempted to open the case she held. In her transforming and retransforming state, she had a bit of trouble with the catches, and ended up having to literally tear it open.
Inside was a customised and somewhat complicated piece of medical equipment: a number of articulated blades and hooks controlled by way of a pair of handles. It was, basically, a rib-spreader so contrived that the user could operate upon his or herself.
And this is what Trix Desoto proceeded to do.
Or, at least, this is what she attempted to do. The blades of the spreader hit her Loup-transforming chest and shattered.
“Shit,” said Trix Desoto.
Up in the Arbitrary Base compound, Eddie Kalish was sharing a similar sentiment, although the language was somewhat more extreme.
“Fuck me backwards…” he muttered as the armoured NeoGen troops advanced. It could only be a matter of seconds before one of them spotted him, racked out his big Multi-Function Gun and blew his head off.
Possibly, he should have thought to liberate a weapon from the GenTech team or a dead US trooper. Not that it would have done the slightest good, of course. It would just have been nice to have an actual prop when he went, “Look, I’m dropping my weapon, please don’t kill me!”
Eddie Kalish decided that, at this point, he had two choices:
1) He could stay exactly where he was and wait for some power-armoured NeoGen trooper to spot him, when he was almost certainly going to be automatically shot on sight.
Or:
2) He could make his presence known, and hope that a generally weaselly but inoffensive demeanour might keep him alive long enough to actually surrender. If they didn’t just automatically shoot him on sight.
While the first option had the advantage that he didn’t have to do anything about it, Eddie decided that, on the whole, the second might be the safer option. Moving as slowly and unthreateningly as he could, he clambered out from behind the latrine pot and stuck his empty hands in the air.
“Hey guys?” he called. “I’m… uh… a non-combatant, here! Is there, like any way we can-“
Automatic fire stitched into the ground before him, and Eddie dived back behind the latrine pod. Oh, well. It had been a long shot at best. The only thing for it, he supposed, was to go about preparing himself for death.
He wondered how you were supposed to go about the business of doing something like that. The number of times he’d had to do that lately, in his life, he really should have gotten around to asking someone. Maybe there was a pamphlet or something.
In any case, judging by the radio-static garbled orders now being barked to the advancing NeoGen troops, it didn’t make any odds. Death was coming, and coming now, whether Eddie Kalish was prepared for it or not.
In the Core of the Ship, Trix Desoto dropped the surgical device and swore an oath so vile that it, if she were Catholic, would have her saying Hail Marys until the end of time.
She stood there for a moment, gazing into the hole of the Core with burning eyes, her transmutating flesh seething and sliding around her bones.
Then she took one clawlike hand, and plunged it into her chest. Clenched the talons around what it found there and wrenched it out.
There was surprisingly little blood. The explosion of fluid seemed to be more plasmic in nature-plasma such as you would find on the burning surface of a star.
The thing she now held, in what once had been her hand, might have once been, on the crude and merely physical level, her heart.
Transformed, now, folding into itself at some direction from a right-angle to reality and constantly changing form. Now an abstract representation, like the cartoon-love heart one might find on a particularly saccharine and sickly Valentines’ card.
Now a homunculus-a little thing not shaped precisely like a human being, but capturing in its form every abstract aspect of what a human being was.
Now a glowing sigil that would be meaningless to any and every other human being on the planet-the sign of the secret, sacred and unique name that is carved on the heart of every living and self-aware thing…
Trix Desoto held her burning heart up to the Core.
“For you,” she said, perfectly calm and lucid despite her Loup-transforming state. “For your mouth.”
With the last of her strength, she plunged the heart into the Core.
An explosion of energies and activity that made all those previous pale by comparison. The chamber of the Core lurched.
The Ship woke up.
26.
The Hammer of God had lain dormant for longer than humans could imagine. There had been no sense of time passing for her, however, not even in dreams. No activity inside her at all.
Then, very recently in the galactic-level scheme of things, something had changed. The dreams had started. Consciousnesses from the outside had started to impinge.
Secondary, autonomic systems within the Hammer of God had started themselves up, scanned the biological consciousnesses outside for a sense of comprehension as to the nature and function of the Hammer of God itself. Looking for the equivalent of activation codes.
They’d found nothing. Confused images in biological heads that the autonomic systems simply failed to understand.
And then, quite suddenly, biological consciousnesses had come along who recognised the Hammer of God for what it was.