The extensive collection of antique porno (genuine paper magazines) which Little Deke had preferred to the girls available in Las Vitas-mylar bags ruptured and their contents shredded by automatic fire.
The telecommunications unit that plugged into the signals from the parabolic dishes outside, smashed to pieces by some blunt implement. Maybe the butt of an automatic rifle.
The breadboarded-together collection of personal computer circuitry that served as a maintenance-and-control deck for the compound’s security devices-like the cameras and the lock on the gate that had so recently let Eddie inside. The monitor screens had been punched in, but the deck had been left relatively intact. Someone had placed what looked like a big, black polypropylene-skinned slug on the keyboard. It rippled, operating the keys, and thus the compound-security, under remote control.
The headless body of Little Deke, the 450-pound bulk of it hanging from the articulated gimbal-harness he used to get around indoors. There was surprisingly little blood; the neck had either been cauterised by whatever had decapitated him, or Little Deke’s heart just hadn’t been up to producing a gusher from his sheer mass.
In any case, Eddie didn’t think about all this until later. At the time all he saw were the snapshots, the flash-flash-flash like you get in movies that tell you what the basic story is-and the story was, at this point, that one Eddie Kalish was now in the total shit and it was time to get out.
Forget about learning the details or any happy shit like that; just get the fuck out.
Eddie jackrabbited from the AmTrak and flung himself towards the van-just as big Kliegs clashed on, slamming the world into a monochromatic state of dead black and magnesium white. They weren’t the junkyard floods; they were coming from outside.
In the shock and dazzle, before his eyes were overwhelmed, Eddie caught sight of the shapes behind the chain-link and lights. Blocky trucks-not the lashed-together bikes and pods of a jackgang. They were military spec.
“GRABYA ANKLES, SWEETHEART!” an amplified voice barked, out beyond the wire. And the thump-thump-thump of an annoying and generic Boystown Disco Beat started up. Regulation issue psycho-warfare protocol.
“JUST YOU RELAX AND TAKE IT EAAASY!” the amplified voice came over the mix. “NEOGEN GONNA TAKE YA, JUST RELAX AND TAKE IT EASY!”
Detonation cutters sliced the fence on two sides. Through the flare and dazzle Eddie saw the dark figures hazing in.
4.
Up on the mesa, out past the burning remains of Las Vitas, a pollutant-mutated scorpion was in the process of laying its eggs in the still barely-living flesh of a hairless dog.
There was no one to see this, and therefore no one to remark on how the air around scorpion and dog now shimmered, how a sickly light hazed from their forms.
Instantly, as though some switch of unlife had been thrown, both arachnid and canine flesh crumbled into their component molecular parts, leaving nothing but skeletal remains and a perfectly intact chitionous husk.
“We got troubles,” Eddie said, slamming back into the van. “Looks like soldiers.”
“TWO MINUTES TO SURRENDER,” the bullhorn-voice boomed cheerfully, “THEN WE GET LETHAL. IT’S LIKE TOTALLY YOUR DECISION, GUY.”
“Mercenaries,” Trix Desoto said. “Delta-trained. NeoGen runs a cadre of them for hunting parties.”
Eddie strained his eyes on the dead black shadows outside, imagining the stealthy figures as they silently and invisibly took up position. He didn’t actually hear and see anything, of course, on account of the meaning of the words “silent” and “invisible”.
He wouldn’t hear or see a thing, he realised with a cold sick certainty, until they dropped the hammer.
“MINUTE AND A HALF…” the bullhorn boomed. “SAY, YOU A SPIC, BOY? YOU A CATHERLICK? TIME FOR A COUPLE OF HAIL MARYS IF YOU REALLY FEEL THE NEED FOR A QUICK RATTLE ON THE ROSARIES!”
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Eddie muttered to himself. There might or might not have been some Hispanic in his parentage-it was about as likely as anything else-but he couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.
“Destabilisation tactics,” Trix Desoto said. “Like the disco. Keeping us off-balance for when they come in to take the package.”
“Package?” Eddie said.
Trix Desoto indicated the supine form of the unconscious man.
“THAT’S THE BUNNY!” came the bullhorn. “NICE OF YOU TO GIVE US A GOOD LOOK AT THE MERCHANDISE!”
For a second, Eddie was unaware of what the bullhorn guy had meant. He sat there in a cold sweat, looking at the van’s interior light, trying to work it out.
Then he lurched towards it with a curse and shut the light off.
“CLEVER GUY!” came the bullhorn. “WE GOT NIGHT SIGHTS AND THERMAL-IMAGING SYSTEMS OUT THE ASS, MAN! YOU JUST LEFT YOURSELF BLIND AND IN THE DARK. THIRTY SECONDS!”
If there was one thing, absolutely one thing, that Eddie Kalish was not going to do it was turn the light back on again.
Besides, what with the spill-in from the big Kliegs outside, it didn’t make any real difference. The guy was just trying to find another way to rattle him and keep him from doing something all resourceful and heroic. Not that that made any difference, either. If the resourceful hero in Eddie Kalish was waiting to make itself known, it was taking its own sweet time about it.
“That’s it, then,” Eddie said. The choices had come down to sitting here and dying, or even pretending to believe in this “surrender” crap and dying in the open. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Oh there’s something we can do,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s something I can do.”
Looking at her in the in the glare of the Kliegs, it finally percolated through Eddie what had been odd about her since he had made it back to the van. Gone was the delirious swinging between lucidity and alien-sounding gibberish.
Now she seemed entirely and unnaturally sanguine-and not in any sense relating to the catastrophic blood-loss from the wound in her gut.
In fact, she was looking pale but strangely healthy. The body in the comedy-nurse uniform seemed somehow bulkier and stronger.
It might have simply been the light, but Eddie thought he could see weird muscle-masses moving under the skin. Half-thoughts of vampires, of zombies, flashed through Eddie’s mind. Walking corpses, monstrous after death.
“There’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto repeated, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted zebra-striping of light and shadow from the Kliegs. “And I’m going to do it now.”
In the burning ruins of Las Vitas, the flesh of any number of scavenging animals hazed instantly into molecular dust-along with the remaining flesh of that on which they were feeding.
Is was not as if something were sucking some actual life-force, if that word can be made to mean anything in the first place. It was more as if something were feeding on some product of life-coherence…
Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler, heading up the wet-squad out of NeoGen, was suffering from a small gap in basic expectations.
The fact was that, over the years, military-grade command technology had evolved to the point where with a single and suitably controlled squad of operatives one could subvert the infrastructure and take command of an entire city or country.
Schematic analysis of anything from the power and informational grids to the plumbing, plus detailed psychologistical profiling of the principle characters amongst the enemy, ensured that force could be applied to critical targets with a zero-tolerance of error: the equivalent of assassinating Franz Ferdinand because you really hate a bunch of limpid individuals banging on about the corner of some forgotten field, and want to see the lot of them end up dead.
Such seriously shit-hot Control and Command equipment didn’t come cheap, of course, but NeoGen supplied its Retrieval people with the best-especially if said people were going up against such an equally-matched rival as GenTech.