Such tactical control-processes had worked perfectly in the matter of setting some local jackgang on a GenTech road-train, manipulating the various factors in such a matter that the forces neutralized each other. Then Drexler and his squad had moved in to pick up the pieces… and hit that gap in expectations.
There was another factor on the board. And that factor, simply, was just some guy that nobody gave a flying fuck about.
There was not a single person who particularly knew or cared if he lived and died-and that was the problem right there. It was like some idiotic squit of a kid going up against a Grand Master in chess; the kid does things so flatly idiotic that it leaves the Grand Master momentarily flummoxed.
The kid and the package, together with the package’s medical support, had fled the site of the road-train ambush just before Drexler and his NeoGen forces had arrived. Tracksat systems had pinpointed the little RV almost instantly, but the forces on the ground found themselves with a problem. NeoGen had come armed and ready to deal with GenTech or jackganger survivors; they were perfectly capable of leaving some escaping piece-of-crap van a smoking hole in the road that not even micro-engineered algaeic heal-sealant would be able to fill.
What they did not have, however, was the capacity to intercept and stop it without damaging the package irreparably.
Tracksat extrapolation had showed that the van was heading for Las Vitas, and military-spec four-wheel drive had made it in half the time, even over rough terrain. Drexler had looked around the shithole and not reckoned much to it. Too many holes and corners. Street-fighting could get messy.
So Drexler and his boys had broken out their heavy-duty armament and removed the town from the equation.
He didn’t feel particularly good about that, but then again he didn’t feel bad either. It was just what you had to do, sometimes.
The only other place, within practical distance and with communications, had been the junker’s yard here. Strategic modelling of all available factors placed the probability of containing the target here in the upper ninetieth percentile.
That, at least, was what MIRA had assured Commander Drexler. Drexler, on the other hand, was rapidly coming to the conclusion that MIRA was at this point just making it up off the top of her cybernetic head and winging it.
“What was that shit about calling the guy a spic?” he asked MIRA. “Plus all that, you know, religious stuff?”
Ordinarily, the Mobile Intrusion and Recon Application was capable of pumping all kinds of psychological disruption to a target: insults based on their specific gangcult, dark intimations of what the subject really felt about some family member and the so forth. This had just seemed unnecessarily basic and crude.
“Yeah, well, I just don’t have the hard info,” MIRA said cheerfully. For all that the voice issuing from the exterior bullhorn-attachment had been deepened, roughened and masculinized, MIRA “herself” tended to adopt a female persona. That is, a lighter, higher and feminine voice, while still in some subliminal way failing to be human in any way whatsoever.
“Filesearch on the girl throws up nothing, just like all these total blanks, yeah?” MIRA said. “Like someone went through the files and wiped her footprints out. And the guy never left no footprints in the first place-he’s just some kid, you know? I’m just playing the law of averages and throwing out some generic insults. I’m having to improvise.”
Drexler ran his glance across the display-monitors bolted to the dash of the NeoGen-modified Humvee-or HumGee-parked under mimetic camouflage-netting outside the junker’s yard and which was serving as a scratch C amp;C for the guys inside.
Wireframe topographies of the yard itself, thermograph readouts of the targets in the van overlaid with extrapolated bio-data. Outputs from the microcams of the three wet-operatives inside.
“Don’t try to improvise when you don’t have the data,” he told MIRA. “It just sounds wrong. It doesn’t sound like anything a real human would say.”
MIRA gave what sounded like a contemptuous little snort-possibly a sound-sample designed to convey that precise effect.
“I’m a sentient-grade AI, chum, even if I occupy the lower end of the scale. You just follow the orders and do the job and come it like a frigging robot. I sound more human and alive than you do, most of the time.”
“That’s my prerogative, MIRA. You don’t have the option.”
“Yeah, whatever you say, boss,” MIRA said with marked cybernetic sarcasm. “And speaking of time, boss, we’re well over that deadline I gave the targets. You wanna give the go-word to take ‘em out?”
“Do it,” Drexler said. “Remember that the package is our top priority. They can do what they like, but only after the package is secure.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all know that,” said MIRA. “I’m relaying the order to… hang on. Something’s up…
“Check the bio-readouts on the girl. Something freaky’s going on with the girl and it’s-oh my God…”
There was a blinding flash from outside, washing out the Klieg-illumination in the intensity of its glare, and human-sounding or not, that was the last thing MIRA ever said.
Shafts of magnesium light blasted from the windows and roof-ports of the van, from the rust holes eaten in its sides. Tendrils of electrical discharge arced to the junkyard-compound’s generator unit, travelling the leads to which it had been hooked to NeoGen’s Kliegs and exploding them in a shower of sparks.
Vestigial petrochems left in tanks out in the junk piles spontaneously ignited; the tanks detonated. The junk began to burn. The van itself exploded-torn apart by forces within it that were not entirely physical.
And something dark burst from it. Something dark in a wholly different sense than a mere absence of cast light.
Something big. Something shrieking. Something coming now.
5.
In a place that has no name, a place indefinable in spatial or temporal terms-or for that matter, any terms that might apply to organic matter, let alone life-something vast and inimical and unknowable stirred.
Something was calling to it. Something had made a small fracture in the world. A tiny imperfection, to be sure, but one that could be worked upon. Something that could be forced further apart, with time. If time had any meaning, of course, for this vast and inimical and unknowable thing, which it didn’t. It had an eternity in which to operate, after all.
It would be a mistake to believe that the subsumation and destruction of all we know would be anything more than a light snack to this vast and inimical and unknowable thing. The equivalent of a quick pack of potato chips between real meals.
Then again, potato chips come in a variety of interesting flavours, and a pack of them is just the thing to hit the spot. When you’re feeling peckish-as the vast and inimical and unknowable thing decidedly was.
For the moment, though, it was in the position of having worked the pack open just enough to insert a finger. Just enough, if it inserted the smallest extremity of itself into the world of men, for a small taste. And this it had proceeded to do…
Half-blinded and gibbering with terror, Eddie Kalish scrambled through the junk piles, trying to catch his bearings. Things had shifted around, of course, during the time he had spent away, but Little Deke’s had never been what you might call a roaring concern. Things, for the most part, had tended to stay where they were put; Eddie still had some idea of the layout. That was an advantage.
That was, in fact, the only advantage he might have over the people out here in the dark. People and, of course, the… thing out here in the dark.
“Oh yes, there’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto had said, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted light, “and I’m going to do it now.”