She had ripped her hands from the hole in her stomach, trailing strings of some viscous substance that hadn’t quite seemed even organic, let alone something that a human body could produce. A mass of this stuff seemed to have clotted in her wound, tendrils of it forming and intertwining and pulsing of its own accord.
The hands had seemed bigger-impossibly bigger, like those anatomical models where the limbs and extremities are distorted to a size comparable to the area of the brain controlling them. The nails had elongated to the point of talons.
Trix Desoto had run one of these claws down her face-for an instant Eddie had thought that she was trying to claw her own eyes out in agony, but instead the tip of a talon had run gently down the side of her face, cutting a slit from the inside of which something glowed like embers in some long-banked fire.
“Run,” she had told him, face deadly serious and positively demonic in the light from the slit she had made. A talon had jabbed in the direction of the pale form of the comatose old guy. “Take him and run.”
All reasonable thoughts about armed NeoGen troops waiting out there in the junk years had vanished-indeed, it was as if all reasonable thought had shut down. The monster snarls and you just run for the tree line or the cave. He had leapt from the van without question and headed for the junk piles.
It was only after the explosion had washed over him, miraculously failing to spear him with flying debris, that he realised that he had unthinkingly followed Trix Desoto’s order and taken the body of the old guy with him. It must have been her tone of voice.
Now, Eddie Kalish decided, the old guy was just dead weight. He left the inert form sprawled by a pile of rotting tyres, gently seeping from the punctures left from being unceremoniously hauled from the med-units.
Off to one side, through the junk, there was a single muzzle-flash and the complete lack of sound from an expertly silenced gun-though any sound of gunfire would have probably been drowned out, in any case, by the high-pitched scream and the sounds of tearing flesh. Whatever it was that Trix Desoto had turned into, it was having a ball.
Or possibly two, Eddie thought, and then really wished that he hadn’t.
Eddie moved on, crept around a vaguely familiar heap of panel-sections-and ran straight into one of the surviving NeoGen troops.
Eddie Kalish would never know how lucky he was, in that instant-luck that had been brought about by the confluence of three main factors. The first being that the trooper was currently packing hi-explosive shells into his big MultiFunction Gun.
This would have been singularly unlucky, of course, had not one Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler ordered that minimum necessary force be used until the object of their operation be secure. A single hi-ex round fired into the van would have exploded it in much the way that it just had, so the MFG was currently slung over the trooper’s shoulder and out of instant reach.
The second factor was that, unlike that produced by conventional explosives, the detonation of the van had released a variety of localized electromagnetic pulse that had knocked out the trooper’s infrared night-sight. He was in the midst of tearing it angrily from his face and blinking his eyes to acclimatise to the sudden darkness when he caught the moving silhouette of Eddie.
This lag in reaction-time gave Eddie Kalish the bare second he needed to let out a yip of fear and lurch back-and this was when the third factor came into play, in the form of the heap of panel-sections that Eddie himself had somewhat inexpertly stacked some years before.
These had come, predominantly, from the hulking shells remaining from automobiles of the 1950s and 60s-from before oil embargos and the like had made sheer weight an issue. They were good, solid steel plate as opposed to membrane-thin aluminium that turned to lacework at the first breath of an oxyacetylene torch.
They were an incompetently stacked accident waiting to happen, basically-and now they came crashing down on the trooper.
The screams before, and as, they hit sounded a little odd to Eddie and it was a moment before he worked out why. For some reason, Eddie realised, he’d had trouble imagining a quasi-military stealth-killer as a girl, for all that there was no reason in the world why not.
From the image that terror had etched onto his eyes, though, he now recalled that the shape under the combat-fatigues had been undoubtedly female, and damn well-built at that.
Of course, any shape she might be in now would be decidedly unattractive and quite beside the point. This was the first person Eddie had actually killed in his life, whether by accident or design. He really didn’t know how he felt about that.
There was another explosion of sound and light. It seemed that it was coming from beyond the compound wire, and that was just like as to fine with Eddie Kalish. Too much had happened. His reflexes were shot.
All he wanted to do at this point was crawl away somewhere and hide and let the world go to Hell in any way that it liked.
Thomas Marlon Drexler slapped at the inert monitors bolted onto the dash and said: “Fuck you you piece of shit!”
This was, in actual fact, the longest single string of expletives he had ever used. He had simply, somehow, never seen the point or felt the need, even in the heat of combat. He was a little surprised that he even had it in him.
The EMP from the explosion within the targets’ RV had knocked out the HumGee’s electrical systems. MIRA “herself” was probably still alive-or, at least, sentient-grade self-aware-since her housing was rated as shielded for anything up to a pony-bomb nuclear blast.
The secondary systems that would make her being alive and aware of any actual use, however, were blown.
These included the door mechanisms. Drexler had remained here, trapped, while things had exploded outside. He had attempted to work out what was happening in the junkyard compound beyond the wire, but the loss of Klieg-illumination had left him with nothing useful to see.
It was the sense of disassociation from the world that was the worst thing, he vaguely realised. MIRA might have snidely called him a robot, but the fact was that a large proportion of Thomas Marlon Drexler’s self-image resided in the fact that he considered himself, basically, a tool.
He was a part of something larger and more important than himself. He was the strong right hand-no, rather the hammer in that strong right hand-when his NeoGen masters required the application of direct force.
This was his function, and he performed it without ego or self-congratulation, without compunction or remorse. Taking out the ringleaders of a labour-dispute, removing some intracorporate rival together with his wife and kids, it made no odds. It was his function. This was the core of his being and his life.
Now he was stuck here, sealed off from the world and unable to affect it in any way. He was about as much use as a spare dick-and the sensation was maddening.
This was not, quite simply, what the world was and how it worked. It was almost enough to make him take the ten-gauge from where it was stowed under the dash and use it to just switch the world off.
Something big and heavy thumped into the HumGee outside, rocking it on its suspension and flinging Drexler forward to smack his head against the padded crash-cage which-had the electrics been working-would have ordinarily racked itself down on servos to cushion the impact.
This direct evidence of a world outside galvanised Drexler and his basic impulses took over. Now he grabbed the ten-gauge, pulling it free from its snaplocks with no thought in his head save to aim it at the HumGee’s windshield and blast his way out.
The fact that the shot would have almost certainly rebounded from the impact-tempered glass and shredded him where he sat was beside the point-the mindless need to simply act, overwhelming as it was, had burned away any last vestige of rational thought.