It had taken Duroc at least three quarters of an hour to get through the Holderness-Manolo security system. They had X-Rayed, palm-printed and eyeball-photographed him, then handed him over to a pair of clean-cut young men, name-tagged Lawrence and Skipper, for a friendly cross-interrogation. While waiting for his stats to be confirmed, he was offered the services of a barbie doll "recreational secretary." He politely turned the girl down and waited to be admitted to Bronson Manolo's office. They had never met before, but as soon as Duroc was inside the Agency's inner sanctum, the Chief Op looked up from his blondwood desk, flashed a monied piranha grin, and acted as if his visitor were an old college buddy who had happened to have walked in off the street.
"Rog-babe, hi, can I have Kandi fix you some coffee?" The Op produced a Mickey Mouse snuffbox full of white powder. "You want some toot-sweet?"
Duroc was dressed in the black conservative suit and pilgrim hat of a Josephite Elder.
"No thank you, Mr Manolo. I have abjured stimulants."
Manolo showed the even, white teeth again.
"Take me out and shoot me down like a dog, old buddy, I was forgetting. Grab some chairleather. I hope you don't mind us weaker souls indulging the vices?"
"No, of course not."
"Cosmic." He pressed a button on his desk-console, absent-mindedly dipping his pinkie in the cocaine and running it across his gums. "Kandi-cutie, decant me some Nicaraguan and pump it through. Oh, I'll be brainstorming with Rog for a couple of tick-tocks, so hold all calls up to and including state government. And have a nice day."
In his business, Manolo was the coolest of the snazz. He hadn't said "real coffee," but he made damn sure you got the message. This office was expensive in a subtly ostentatious way, minimalist but designed to impress the discerning. The undiscerning probably never got further than Lawrence and Skipper. One wall was a picture window affording a pastoral view of Lower Los Angeles right down to the beach. On the wall behind Manolo was a David Hockney original. Mounted above the painting was a six-foot narwhal horn. On the desk was an incomprehensible executive toy that buzzed and flashed occasionally, displaying chrome tubes, jewels and crystal lumps. In the corner there was a discreet datalink terminal got up to look like a '30s radiogram.
Manolo leaned back in his chair, and patted his thousand-dollar blow-waved haircut. His hairstyle consultant must throw in a Tom Selleck moustache twirl for free. He was wearing a silvery Italian suit over a T-shirt which read HONK IF YOU LIKE HUNKS.
Duroc remembered why he tried, wherever possible, to avoid Californians.
A bust-enhanced beauty queen in a goldthread string bikini wandered in with Manolo's Nicaraguan, which steamed in an authentic 1919 World Series Commemorative Mug, and wandered out again. Manolo's eyes followed her jiggle from the door to the desk and back. Kandi took the time to flash a smile at Duroc; he supposed the company must have a charge account with the same high-flying Beverly Hills dentist. Or maybe it was all the fluoride in the water.
"Great ass, huh?" said Manolo, licking his moustache. "Oh, I'm sorry, reverend, I was forgetting."
"Elder. My title is Elder."
"Cheezus, what a maroon I am. Elder. I'll get it. Say, are you French?"
"Originally, yes. I have been with the church for ten years now."
"Heyy, cosmic, man, cosmic. I'm very spiritual myself. I attend the Pyramid down at the Surfside Mall. Gari—that's my Guru—says it's important to get in touch with your inner being. I always take the time to meditate between my squishball practice and the tanning parlour."
Sunshine three hundred and fifty days a year, and Californians fry themselves under microwaves. There was a sign up at the airport—John Wayne Airport, naturally—that read CALIFORNIA: WE'VE HAD THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HERE FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. Duroc had had to smile at that. As a succession of paycops, stewardesses, diplomatics, immigration officials, armourcabbies, narcotics relay expeditors, hotel functionaries, arms dealers and hookers told him to "have a snazz day" and shoved his credit card through their machines, he wondered whether they would like the real 21st century when Nguyen Seth rained it down on them.
"Your agency comes highly recommended," he said.
"Yeah. Me and Bob Holderness are the most on the coast. At least, Bob was until the Surf Nazis got him. You don't see that gangcult much these days, because we genocided them. It got personal. Nasty work, but the karma was right for it. City cops looked the other way, and the Cal State Angels loaned us hardware. Bob was a great buddy, and a great guy. He had a lot of friends, no matter what you read in the trades."
There was a framed picture on the desk. Duroc had assumed it was a father and son shot. There was the younger Manolo, plus an older man with the same teeth, hair and moustache. They were standing either side of a surfboard, and there were some Kandi clones in the picture.
"Back in the '70s, he worked with all the topster Ops—Matt Houston, Cannon, Banacek, Mannix, Lance White. Those were the great days of the business in La-La Land, before we closed the state borders and tossed the immigrant filthos back into the desert."
"An impressive record, indeed."
"And could he surf! We're talking radical in a tubular way!"
Manolo took a couple of hits of coffee, and picked up a wrist-exerciser that probably doubled as some kind of sex aid.
Squeezing away so that his biceps shifted in his sleeve, he asked "So, Rog, what's going down the chute?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"What's the beef? The case?"
"Ah yes, the case."
He put his briefcase on the desk.
"Not that kind of case, pilgrim."
"I know what you mean. I have some documentation for you."
"Zero-degree cool."
Duroc took out the file on Jessamyn Bonney, and slipped off the electronic seal.
"We want this woman."
Manolo showed his dazzling choppers again, and took the file. He flipped it to the photographs, and werewolf-whistled.
"Okay if you like the type. I'm a 3-B man myself, blonde bimbos with boobs. Kid must want to be a Disney cartoon villainess when she grows up. Look at that black eye make-up and the suspenders. Is that hair for real?"
"She's killed perhaps forty or fifty people."
"Ouch. Antisocial lady."
"Among them, several Elders of the Josephite Church. She attacked a wagon train two years ago. We have been compiling this dossier ever since."
"The church don't forget, huh?" A beady glint appeared in Manolo's clear blue eyes as he got his first scent of blood money and began to turn into a shark.
"Something like that. We are prepared to meet your regular fee. On top of that, you will note that there are seventeen outstanding warrants filed by various state and federal authorities against her. Should you be successful, you will be able to pick up a bounty on each of them."
"How much is this kid worth?" He licked his moustache again. Duroc wondered whether it was an implant.
"It's in the file."
Manolo flipped the pages until he came to the accounts. He ran his eyes down the column of figures as if he were taking a good look at Voluptua Whoopee in a no-piece swimsuit and whistled "Dixie."
"A prize package. You have us on the case, padrone. And we never give up. We'll have this…uh…Jessamyn Bonney…behind electro-bars at Tehachapi just as soon as the schedule allows."
He continued to page through the file absent-mindedly, fiddling as he did so with the snuffbox, making sure that the gold inlay buttons on Mickey's rompers caught the light.
"No, you misunderstand."
"Run that round the block again, Rog, and see if you can sneak it by under the limbo-line this time."
"We in the church are not interested in the apprehension of Ms Bonney. In Deseret, we adhere to a Biblical code rather than to the laws and statutes of the United States."
"Heyy, the Bible, man. Heavy book. I keep it right here in my desk with the I Ching, Illuminatus and my Castenadas."
"Then you are familiar with the saying 'an eye for an eye.'"
"Absolutamente, Rog."
"Then, you will work it out. Jessamyn Bonney has killed members of the Church. In turn, we would like you…"
A real smile crept onto Manolo's face. It didn't show off his teeth, but it told Duroc a lot more about the Op's character.
"…to shut down the ratskag's terminal with massive overinvestment? "
Duroc nodded. He knew Manolo would be taping this meeting, and he didn't want to say it out loud in words.
"So, it's liquidation not incarceration that's your bag. Fine. We can handle that consignment. Mucho extra dinero, of course, but if that's what you want…"
"The Tabernacle of Joseph is not poor."
"I can tell where you're coming from, Rog."
"You accept the commission."
Manolo stuck out a hairy hand, and Duroc shook it. Gold bracelets rattled.
"She's somewhere in Arizona, we believe. You might try to look up a Dr Simon Threadneedle in a township called Dead Rat."
"Dead Rat? Downer of a handle. Those vibes are negatory, Rog."
"I'm sure you can get on top of it."
"That's a charlie A-One breeze-from-the-freeze affirmative-to-the-max topside positive situation in the black column roger, Roger," Manolo chirruped.
"You mean yes?"
Manolo looked hurt. "Yes."
This is ZeeBeeCee, the Station That's Got It All, and here with The Bathroom Break Bulletin is luscious Lola Stechkin…
"Hi, America. It's November the 9th, 1996, only 47 shopping days to Christmas, and this is Lola, inviting you to share a shower. Here it is, folks, all the news you can handle…
"Sunnydales, Iowa. Dr Ottokar Proctor, "The Tasmanian-Devil,' today took up residence in the high-security wing of this semi-private mental hospital. Experts remain divided on the question of Dr Proctor's state of mind during the period when he is confirmed to have been responsible for seven hundred and fifty-three homicides, but the Supreme Court has ruled him insane and irresponsible. It has been suggested that President North intervened in the judicial progress with a plea for clemency on the grounds that Dr Proctor is too essential to the shaky economy of the United States to be executed. Dr Proctor, already a wealthy man, has received an eight figure sum for the movie rights to his forthcoming autobiography What's Cookin, Doc?, and director Kim Newman has already announced his intention to cast either Jeremy Irons or Steve Martin in the leading role.
"The Sea of Okhotsk. The sinking last week of the GenTech exploratory submersible Yukio Mishima remains a source of controversy. The craft, designed to scan the seabed for mineral deposits, was raised today by a joint Soviet-GenTech team and brought ashore at Kitashiretoko.
Misaki, Sakhalin. Premier Yeltsin himself has announced that he intends to cooperate fully with the GenTech experts in an effort 'to get to the bottom of this tragedy.' Kentaru 'Barracuda' Ishii, GenTech's deepsea disaster specialist, has not as yet ruled out the possibility that the Mishima went down due to 'hostile action.' The Blood Banner Society, the shadowy Japanese ultra-nationalist group, have issued a declaration to the effect that the Mishima, coincidentally named after one of the heroes of the movement, was lost through an unprovoked sneak attack, and that it would be avenged. The 102nd Russian submarine fleet at Petropavlovsk has been alert ever since the international courts overruled the Soviet appeals and gave GenTech the right to conduct its surveys in the area.
"Cloudbase, Earth Orbit. Daniel Digby, provost of the G-Mek Orbital, has issued a formal denial to allegations by Ayatollah Bakhtiar that fugitive graphic novelist Neil Gaiman has been in hiding in the facility, and has requested that the Pan-Islamic congress stand down the Inter-Satellite Ballistic Missiles currently targeted on them. 'You can come up and look around,' Digby has said in a personal message to the Ayatollah, 'he's not here. I don't even like comic books.'
"On a lighter note, the Battle of the Bands in Fairport, Rhode Island, during which heavy metal groups Deathtongue and the Mothers of Violence played simultaneous sets in the same auditorium for thirty-eight straight hours has been resolved in single combat between the rival lead singers. Fuh-Q Charlie of Deathtongue and Sonny Pigg of the Mothers are expected to be out of the Reconstruction Wing of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in time for their big Christmas 'Freak the World' concert at the Hollywood Bowl next month.
"This has been Lola Stechkin at ZeeBeeCee, soaping my back and signing off. If it's all right with you, it's all right with us…"
Next, we go live to the Nikita Kruschev Ballrooms in Moscow for the semi-finals of The 1996 Warrior Chess Tourney, with a special guest appearance by the Samovar Seven. But first, here's a message from GenTech…
Jessamyn lay flat on the contoured table as the Doc sliced away the facial bandages, still relaxed from the morph-plus shots she had been taking every day. Doc Threadneedle was humming "The Girl in Gorki Park" as he wielded his scalpel. He was an artist with the knife, she had heard, and had apprenticed with the great Zarathustra at GenTech BioDiv before his "suspension." His field was bio-improvements engineering, and he had been placed in charge of some hush-hush military project that had racked him up a rep as the Frankenstein of his generation. She had never heard the whole story, but apparently some of his ideas were considered a little too daring for the traditionalists in Tokyo, and he found the rug pulled from under him. A few years ago, he had replaced her squished left eye with her first optic implant. At that time, he had offered to give her more extensive treatments—apparently, he found her a promising subject—but she hadn't had the cold kish to lay out. Now, after some shrewd scavving and a touch of inventive accountancy, she had more than the price of the pudding.
She had been undergoing treatment for over six months now. She wondered how much of what she had been bom with was left. She probably wasn't even legally the same person any more. A few weeks ago, she had spent her eighteenth birthday in a drug-induced coma, with her back opened up as durium shieldlinks were laid around her spine. She had even let Doc Threadneedle into her greymass to plug a few loops, although she didn't want too much done in there. She didn't hear voices much anymore, but Seth was still whispering dangerously, and sometimes she would dream his memories, vividly recalling some trivial incident from the remote past.
In a mud hut on an endless plain, she sorted through the bones of unrecognizable animals. Shackled to an oar, she strained in a galley as an oiled mountain of flesh beat a huge drum. In the depths of a monastery, she toiled by candlelight, laboriously copying out a crumbling manuscript, translating from one unrecognizable language to another. In a jungle whose oppressive steam-heat made sweat run inside her steel breastplate, she cut the throats of three befeathered priests. On a battlefield, she robbed a dead general of a leatherbound book grasped so tightly in his frozen fingers that two of them came away with it. In a shelter under London, while bombs exploded overhead, she coupled in a frenzy with a dead-faced young woman.
But that wasn't her. That was him. Nguyen Seth, the Summoner. Elder Seth, the Unspeakable. The more she picked up about his past, the more she realized how inadequate her vision of the world had been. She had been born to a life of violence, desperation and death, but she had never believed corpses could walk, manshaped creatures could endure for thousands of years, or that another person's mind could leak into your own.
"Don't open your eye yet," said the Doc. "I have the lights on."
The bandages were lifted from her face. Free at last, she wriggled her nose.
The Doc whistled through his teeth.
"Hmmnn, even if I do say so myself, that is quite some job. You could pass for a musickie model."
Jessamyn raised her hand, and felt her face. The dents in her forehead were gone, and her nose was reset. There was some flesh over her cheekbones again. Her chin was straight. And the improved optic was a solid lump under her left eyelid.
"It's not just a burner," Doc Threadneedle had told her as he unwrapped it from its tissue like a sugared almond. "GenTech have upgraded the product to include a kind of bat-sonar, and a heat sensor. You won't be able to see through it, but it will increase your field of perception. One model contains a micro-camera for surveillance, and the DeLuxe Tripball can filter light patterns and transmit them to the brain as psychoactive impulses. At last, a high with no side-effects. You can trip on Christmas Tree Lights."
She had picked out the combat model. Psychedelics didn't interest her these days. She had long since grown out of her disco dingbat phase.
"'Kay, I've dimmed the lights. Ready."
She opened her eye, and blinked in the gloom. She saw the Doc hovering by the table, and sat up. Her spinesheath buzzed slightly as the bioservos went along with her nerve impulses. Eventually, she wouldn't be aware of the hum, Doc told her. She would accept it just as she accepted her heartbeat and her pulses.
"Try the optic."
She closed her real eye, and opened the other. Her image of the room was clearer, now, like a line drawing. Doc Threadneedle was a man-sized conglomeration of hotspots. The blobs went from deep orange to bright yellow. The radiator elements shone like the bars of an electric fire. She could even see the faint heat pattern of the cat in the next room.
"Interesting, huh?"
"Snazz,Doc."
Doc Threadneedle laughed.
"What is it?"
"Snazz. You haven't talked like that since you got here."
"I suppose not. You have to grow up sometime."
"Not if you can afford the Zarathustra Treatment."
She eased her legs off the table. Her blastic-augmented kneejoints were smooth.
She touched the floor, and pushed herself away from the table. She was a little unsteady. A touch of dizziness. The Doc supported her with an arm around her waist.
"Wait a moment. The optic cyberfeed will kick in. Your brain's been told what to expect. It's just warming up."
He walked her to the centre of the room, and let her go. She tottered, and put her arms out. The Doc pushed the wheeled table back against the wall, giving her some space.
It was like a click inside her. The dizziness went away.
"Try it," the Doc encouraged her. "The flamingo position."
She tucked one foot into her crotch, sticking out her knee, and lifted her heel from the floor. Finally, she was balanced in perfect comfort on the ball of her big toe.
"How does it feel?"
"Wonderful. There's no strain."
"You should be able to stand like that for a week before the nerve implants get tired. Here, catch…"
He tossed a book at her. She reached out and caught it without so much as wobbling.
"You could take up ballet."
She balanced the book on her head, and laughed, turning in a slow pirouette on her toe.
Doc Threadneedle slowly turned up the lights. The line drawing faded, and she saw the colours as well as the warmths.
She looked down at herself. Below her hospital gown, her legs were still as she remembered—although her reinforced thigh and shin bones made them two and a half inches longer. She still had the faint white scar on her ankle, although the cross-hatch of scratches on her right knee was gone.
She dropped her other foot to the floor, and turned around. She felt good. The Doc's patented micro-organisms were beavering away inside, keeping her at the peak of perfection. She was hungry, not with a need for food but with a desire for tastes.
"Makes you feel kinda sexy, doesn't it?"
She smiled. "Well…yes."
"Everything will be better, Jessamyn. Food, sex, exercise. You should develop an ear for good music. Forget sovrock and get into Mozart and Bach. You've got the grey mass for it now."
"Doc, have you…?"
He grinned. She realized she didn't know, couldn't imagine, how old he really was.
"Yes, of course. You don't think I'd do anything to a patient I wouldn't have done to myself?"
He put his hands out and fell to the floor, as if to do fingertip push-ups. Tipping himself forwards, he touched his forehead to the tile and kicked into the air. He straightened out, feet extended towards the ceiling, and rose into a handstand. Then, balanced on the fingers of his left hand, he put his right into the pocket of his labcoat and brought out a packet of sweets. He poured one into his mouth and offered the pack to her.
"Showoff," she said.
He pushed the floor, and flipped over in the air, landing on his feet. Straightening up, he was a middle-aged, rangy black guy again.
"Yes, of course. I don't get much chance to, you know, out here in the sand."
"Couldn't you…?"
"Go back?" Wrinkles appeared on his forehead. The fun sapped out of him. "No. GenTech doesn't forget. Zarathustra won't forget. One day, he'll try to take me out, you know. That's the real reason for all these 'improvements.' One slip, and you're excommunicated. He's not like he seems on the talkshows. They called me a Frankenstein, but his ambitions go further. He's a Faust, a Prometheus…and, in the end, I'm afraid he's a Pandora."
"You've lost me. Frankenstein I know from the videoshockers, but who are the others?"
"It doesn't matter, Jessamyn. I'm not like him. I've changed your body, and I tried to rewire a few of your neurons, but I've left you alone where it counts."
"And Zarathustra?"
"He doesn't want to improve the quality of an individual life. He wants to recreate the human race in the image of his ideal. Zarathustra isn't his real name, you know. It's something German, really."
"He's a…what was that old gangcult called…Nazti?"
"Nazi. Maybe. There are still a few left. The Mayor of Berlin, for instance, Rudolf Hess. Zarathustra has certainly dosed himself on some of his own miracle rejuvenators."
They left the surgery, and Doc Threadneedle locked up that part of the house. He had a large place, with as many modern conveniences as a sandhole like Dead Rat could offer, but it wasn't what someone with his skills could rate in a PZ.
He didn't seem to miss the gadgets and gizmos, though. His house was full of things she had only ever seen in old films with Rock Hudson and Doris Day: a vacuum cleaner, which did the work of a suckerdrone; a gramophone, which played unwieldy round black musidiscs with added scratch and hiss as part of the music; an electric kettle that took ages, maybe two minutes, to heat up enough water for a cup of recaff, and didn't do anything about the impurities and pollutants.
Buzzsaw, the cat, curled around Jessamyn's legs.
"I've got you some clothes," said the Doc. "Your desert gear was more holes than hide. Magda ze Schluderpacheru had something surplus down at the Silver Shuriken."
He indicated a neat pile of drab-coloured garments.
"The Silver Shuriken?"
"It's the local saloon. A yakuza operation, naturally.
They're the only people who can keep anything open out in the sand, and not be closed down by the gangcults. Magda is a honey. You should meet her."
"I'd like to. It's been so long since,.."
The Doc grinned. "…since you saw anything but my ugly mug, I understand. It's time you got out of the house. You must be stir crazy."
She wandered over to the chicken-wired window, and looked out. It was a clear night. The constellations twinkled.
"You should be with young people your own age, get yourself back into the swing of society."
"Uhh?" She had been distracted, looking out the chicken-wired windows at the half-disc of the moon. "I'm sorry. You're right. I need to…to do something."
She felt funny, as if things were happening inside her.
"I meant to tell you about that. Your body is like an engine. If you don't turn it over regularly, it will complain. With all the alterations you've had. you'll need to take vigorous exercise for several hours a day. I'd prescribe running, dancing, fighting, healthy eating and athletic sex."
"You could get to be very popular back in the city-states, Doc."
Doc Threadneedle smiled sadly. "Yes, but not with the right people."
Jessamyn picked up Buzzsaw, and felt the tingle of static from the cat's fur. It was like a mini-rush in itself. She realized she was down from the morph-plus, and that her senses were sharper than they had ever been before.
"Suck your finger and stick it in a light-socket sometime," the Doc said. "You'll be surprised."
She stroked the cat. It squealed and struggled from her grip. It disappeared upstairs.
"You don't know your own strength yet. You'll have to be careful. Here, try one of these."
He tossed her a thick yellow-covered book. She held it between her forefingers and thumbs and neatly tore it in half.
"I lose more telephone directories that way."
Dead Rat, Arizona. What a place for an Englishman to end up, don't ch'know? Bloody buggering ha-ha-ha, eh what? Of course, Sarn't Major James Graham Biggleswade couldn't exactly go back to Blighty and expect them to hang out the welcome mat in Fulham, not after that tricky bit of bloody buggering business down in the Falklands—oh, excuuuuse meeee, the Mal-bloody-buggering-vinas—back in '81. Bit of a blooming sodding disgrace really, in actual fact, eh? These fakenham days, nobody hupped, frupped and trupped when the older Mastsarge yelled. Fact was, nobody knew who James Graham Buggered-to-bejaizus Biggleswade was. The sandrats just called him Jitters. His hands sometimes stopped shaking long enough for him to light a fag or give his teeth the once-over with Pepsodent, but that was every other Scumday in a month with a zed in it.
He sat in the corner of the Silver Shuriken, as far away from the bleeding video jukebox and bleeping zapper games as possible, sipping the foul antifreeze that passed for beer in the U.S. of Bloody A. He would have cut off his left doughnut and sold it to Johnny Galtieri for a pint of Six X Wadsworth, two bacon-and-cheddar sarnies and a packet of crisps with a blue twist of salt in them.
Mrs ze Schluderpacheru had taken pity on him, and gave him some sweeping-up chores in return for room and board and the occasional session with Fat Juanita. The old lady was like that, big-bloody-hearted. Jitters knew she was doing two people a favour, because Fat Juanita got depressed when the johnny-passing-throughs left her downstairs in the parlour with her knitting and gave all the custom to Gretchen, Connie Calzone, Margaret Running Deer and the Games Mistress. Fat Juanita was too bloody old, fat and stinky for the Game really. Not exactly prime camp-follower material. Bloody buggering lovely personality, though. If Jitters didn't have a wife and kids back in the old country—which, come to think of it, he probably didn't these days—he might just have dragged Fat Old Stinky Juanita up before the padre and tied the old knot. A soldier should be married, gave him a sense of what he was fighting for. Difficult to get the old fire up for the Greater Glory of flag, Empire and Prime Minister Ian Paisley, but hearth, home and humping still meant something in this godrotten hellhole khazipit of a world.
Just now, the Silver Shuriken was pretty quiet. Mrs ze Schluderpacheru was doing the accounts on her musical wrist-calculator, working how out much of her take would have to go to the yaks this quarter. Gretchen, the new girl, was putting up the Christmas decorations, replacing the black crepe around the crush velvet portrait of Wally the Whale with sparkly tinsel. The rest of the professional ladies were slumped around the telly in see-through armchairs, watching some kids' show called Cyclopaths, about a bunch of motorsickle chappies who went around slaughtering people they didn't think much of. That was one thing about America, the telly was crap.
Jitters missed the good old BBC, with the Light Programme and the Home Service. It might not be in strain-on-your-meat-pies Trideocolor or go on all night like America's bloody buggering 119 channels, but at least some nice bint like his old French teacher came on at ten-thirty and said good night as you drank your bloody buggering Ovaltine and waited for the shipping forecast. He missed the classic serials, with Great British actors in adaptations of the works of Great British writers like G. A. Henty, Dornford Yates, Sapper, Dennis Wheatley and John Buchan. They were on the Home Service, along with all the programmes about how to make do in the kitchen what with the rationing, and the fireside chats from the Prime Minister. That had been old Ian Paisley last time he was in the old country, but he had popped his clogs of apoplexy while explaining the Fall of Port Stanley to Robin Day on Nationwide and it was that upstart Jeffrey Archer now. And on the Light Programme there was The Black and White Minstrel Show, where Benny Elton and Ricky Mayall had got their big break; The Archers, with Richard Burton and Joan Collins as Dan and Doris, saving the Ambridge enclave from gypsies and travellers; Doctor Who, with Barry Humphries visiting Great Moments of British History; The Muffin the Mule Hour… Most of all, he missed Jack Warner as the old-fashioned robocopper in Dixon of Dock Green, zapping the Frenchies with his bio-implant bazookas.
Should have had PC George Dixon at Port Stanley back in '81, Jitters thought. Johnny Argie wouldn't have seen off the task force so bloody buggering easy if the old "evenin' all" had been on the South Atlantic beat.
Gretchen was up a ladder now, sticking Bethlehem stars over the bulletholes on the ceiling. She was wearing a meshfoil microskirt, a Miss Piggy wig and strawberry pasties, her usual uniform.
The swing-doors swung open, and Curtius Kenne ambled in, chewing tobacco. He looked up at Gretchen, and spanged the spittoon with a jet of brown film.
"Nice view," he drawled. "Haw haw haw!"
Curtius was a cowboy builder. His van was painted up with pictures of Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, and he called his firm the Boot Hill and Laredo Double Glazing Company. He guaranteed his windows against everything up to a BlastMaster minimissile, but you were usually too dead to complain if he supplied you with defective merch. He loped across the bar, swinging his hips to show off his twin Colts, and got his polished pseudoleather boot up on the bar.
"Any chance of a belt of Shochaiku Double-Blend, Magda?" he asked Mrs ze Schluderpacheru.
The owner looked up from her calculations and raised an eyebrow. Her feathered hat bobbed.
"Now, Curtius, honey, you know I keep that stuff only for my special customers."
Magda ze Schluderpacheru was Romanian, originally. Like Jitters, she had knocked around the world a bit and wound up in Dead Rat. Bloody buggering shame if you asked him. Nice people ending up clogging this plughole when the PZs were full of undeserving wankers, wallies, wasters and wooftahs.
"Ain't I one of your special customers?"
"Hell, not since you gave Hot Pants Hannah that dose of the Cincinatti Pox you ain't."
"That weren't me."
"You goddam prove it, and then maybe I'll dig out that bottle."
"Any time, Magda, any time." Curtius started unbuckling his gunbelt.
"Hold on there, cowpoke. I don't mean like that. I mean with a medical certificate."
"Ah shee-it, I ain't going to no mad doctor and gettin' mah pecker all X-rayed. Probably shrivel up like a cactus in a microwave. Haw haw haw."
Curtius Kenne thought he was funny.
"Then, cowpoke, you better get used to having nothing but cows to poke for a while."
"Whisky, straight."
Mrs ze Schluderpacheru poured Curtius a shot. Even her sumpstuff was okay by Big Empty standards. If you poured it on the table, it probably wouldn't even eat half-way through.
"Thank you kindly ma'am. That's a real nice dead bird you got on your hat. You kiss it to death yerself? Haw haw haw."
Curtius Kenne was a bloody nuisance, and sooner or later someone would put a ScumStopper under his heart and get himself free drinks on the house for a month.
The cowboy turned around, and surveyed the bar. He looked at Connie and licked his nose. She ignored him, and turned up the sound on the telly. Disappointed, Curtius looked for amusement elsewhere.
"Has anybody heard the one about the Maniak Chieftain and the six-weeks-dead camel corpse?"
"You told us yesterday," said Margaret Running Deer.
"Yeah, and the day before that," said Connie, touching up her lipstick with a finger to cover the razorscar under her nose.
"And it wasn't funny then," said the Indian Girl, picking her nails with her scalping stiletto.
Having had no luck with the girls, Curtius finally noticed Jitters in the corner. A mean look crept into his eyes.
"Hey Jitters, you limey bastid, last Thursday I saw me some Argentinian fellers marching down Main Street with GenTech weapons. You still runnin' away from that there South Atlantic battle?"
Jitters hadn't run away. He had been ordered to make a tactical withdrawal. It had been a rout, but that hadn't been his fault. Nobody had known how well equipped the bloody buggering Argies would be.
He didn't say anything. Curtius took his drink and carried it over to the corner. He sat down.
"Hell, you limeys are yellower'n a cat's pee on a canary. We've bailed you out of two freakin' world wars, and you're still whinin' about it. You oughtta get yourselves some backbone. Get yourselves some real men, you know, maybe you could buy some of John Wayne's frozen sperm and impregnate some of your frigid women with it. Get yourselves a generation with cojones the size of key limes, eh?"
Jitters just smiled, and sipped his drink.
"Leave him alone, zeroid," shouted Mrs ze Schluderpacheru. "Jitters is all right. He never gave nobody no venereable diseases."
Curtius grinned, showing off the diamond inset into his front tooth.
"Me and old Jitters is just having a sociable little drink, Magda. Chatting over old times. He was like a war hero, y'know. Got his ass peppered at Goose Green."
Jitters had been wounded in the first landing, in the shoulder. It hadn't been what they'd been told to expect by the Daily Mail. They didn't know that the Argies had GenTech and G-Mek hardware. They'd all gone over the side, singing Johnny Lydon's hit 'Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Galtieri,' and 98% of them hadn't made it to the beaches. In five minutes, everyone he had been with on the long voyage over from Pompey was dead. Jitters had been wounded early, and washed back to the landing craft. They'd piled him in with the dead, and it was only later a naval ensign noticed him twitching. That was when they started calling him Jitters. He still twitched.
"You're a blister on the behind, Curtius," Mrs ze Schluderpacheru shouted, "leave him alone or you're barred for life."
Curtius took his drink, smiled slowly, and backed away.
"So long, hero. Hey, I heard me a new one. What's red, white and blue and got piss all over it? A British flag in Buenos Aires, haw haw haw! Good 'un, ain't it?"
Jitters drank his drink.
She ran the five miles from Doc Threadneedle's place in twenty minutes. Not a world record, but acceptable. She wasn't sweating, but there was a pleasurable sense of exertion. Some time, she would have to push herself, to find out exactly how improved she was. For a real workout, she'd need an opponent. She experimented with her new optic, shifting her patch to her right eye and perceiving the world through heat patterns. She saw the sands cooling as the temperature fell.
She was wearing a black karate suit It was loose, but felt good. She ran on bare feet.
Her heightened senses were working overtime. She would have to get used to that. She was sensing far more people and ve-hickles in the area than could possibly be there. For a while, she would have to downscale her first impressions. Doc Threadneedle had warned her about it.
He bicycled alongside her, keeping level, occasionally asking questions and nodding to himself.
"No prob here," he kept saying.
He set her tasks, and she accomplished them. "That rock, vault over it," or "the old fence, run through it." It was easy.
"When do I get to squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond?"
Doc Threadneedle laughed. "When I can stop a speeding locomotive with one bound."
"It's a deal."
The town was just coming alive, as she got to the Silver Shuriken. Sandrats were pouring in to fence their weekly scav. A Maniak chapter had been through last week, and one or two of them were still around, enjoying the yakuza hospitality at the ze Schluderpacheru place. The gaudy girls were being kept busy.
Doc Threadneedle parked his bike next to two Maniak sickles, and chained it to the hitching post, setting the boobycharges in the padlock to blow if anybody tried to tamper with it.
They went into the saloon.
"Doc, honey," said a large woman behind the bar. Doc Threadneedle leaned over and kissed her. Her mainly exposed bosoms wobbled over the top of her black corset. Looking at her heat patterns, Jessamyn saw the cold outlines of the wavy dagger and the pepperpot charge-gun stashed in her garterbelt stark against the warmth.
"Jessamyn, this is Magda. She's a friend."
"Ohayu, sweetheart," said the woman. "Welcome to the Shuriken. First drink is on the house. Sake?"
Jessamyn thought a moment. "Scotch and Canada."
Doc Threadneedle was startled. "Not yet, Jessamyn. You'll burn out your greymass. Try a perrier."
"Okay, mineral water."
Magda took a green bottle from the cooler and poured a tall glass of sparkling liquid. Jessamyn took a swallow. Her altered tastebuds tingled, and she felt a spasm of pleasure in her stomach.
"Whew! That's a kick!"
"Get used to it."
Magda fished out a bottle of Shochaiku, and gave Doc Threadneedle a shot. He sipped it.
Jessamyn thought it out. "I get it. It wasn't the alcohol you thought would hit me…"
"Of course not, your greymass could shrug off a concentrated squirt of pure smacksynth."
"…it was the taste."
"Right. You've got a touch of extrasensitivity. Work up to the extremes."
She drank some more water. It was beyond anything she had ever experienced. "I feel like a new girl."
"Jessamyn, you are a new girl."
She began to relax. This was fun. She hadn't expected to have fun ever again. (In the back of her mind, the moonface tick-tocked, tugging her towards her responsibilities.) She looked around the bar. It was typical of the places she had been in during her Psychopomp days. Half Oldstyle-Western, half Scavsurplus-High Tech. The customers drank and drugged peacefully, trying not to make contact with each other, and the gaudy girls plied their trade quietly.
There was a cowboy song on the juke, "I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven," and the two Maniax were practicing their fast draws against a GenTech Amusements Machine that zapped you insensible with a light voltage if the computer-generated gunslinger cleared leather faster than you did. One of them lost a showdown, and slumped on the shockplate, dropping the gamegun. His gangbuddy pulled out a real gun, and cocked it.
"Whoa there, big fella," said Magda. "Them things are expensive."
Jessamyn thought the Maniak might start a fight—she needed some action just now, her muscles tingled—but the heavy-set panzerboy backed down, and hauled his pal off.
"Just natural high spirits," Magda said. "Them boys skinned a solo Op out in the sand last week, fenced his hide to the yakmen. Well off his trail, this feller was. Some fancy-pants search-and-destroy customer from Los Angeles, California."
"Which agency?" Doc asked. "Holderness-Manolo."
"I've heard of them. Glamour boys. Industrial warfare, mostly. The occasional movie star divorce. High flyers. They don't come in-country often."
Jessamyn sipped her drink. There must still be warrants out on her. But it didn't mean anything. There would be paper out on nine-tenths of the people in the room, including the gaudy girls and the town drunk. This was a townload of fugitives. Buzzsaw the cat was probably high on the FBI's Most Wanted Felines list.
"Any idea who the solo was gunning for?"
"Nahh, could've been anybody? The Red Baron was through a month or two back, racking up his score. And an esperado by the name of Al Amogordo took Buck Standish out on Main Street Wednesday last. Crossed his eyes and exploded Old Buck's head in some quarrel over a high yaller lady, then hit the trail in Buck's G-Mek convertible."
"There'd be a price on him."
"Yeah. The solo was probably after Al."
Doc Threadneedle ordered another drink, and tipped a few drops into Jessamyn's water. “Try that."
It was astonishing. "This is better than sex."
"Have sex, and then see what you think."
Jessamyn cooled out her mouth.
A cowboy sauntered over to the bar, and sidled up next to them.
"Hey, beaut, you in the market for some home-baked Western-style lovin'?"
She looked him over. "Come on, Wyatt Earp" she said, "do I look like a hog-tied sheep to you?"
The cowboy pushed his stetson back onto the crown of his head. He had thick-oiled hair, and old acne scars.
"Well, hell, lady, if that's your attitude, perhaps you'd better just sew it up, sister, cause there ain't no better stud bull than Curtius Kenne in the whole territory."
Magda laughed. "Ignore him, Jessamyn. He just won the election. The town hasn't had an Official Asshole for too long."
Curtius smiled, and a gem sparkled. "Jessamyn? That's a real purty name. Is that for real?"
"Yes. Excuse me."
She grabbed him by the back of his neck, and scraped her empty glass across his smile. He screeched, and she let him go. He was bleeding from the mouth. She looked at her glass. It was not scratched.
"Paste, huh? I thought synthetic stones were getting better these days."
"Why you…"
He drew his hand back, and she reached out to stop the punch. It was as simple as catching a falling cup. She pushed a little too hard, and Curtius shouted.
"My shoulder."
Doc Threadneedle stepped in, and gave the cowboy's arm a wrench, setting the joint back in true.
"Sorry. Don't know my own strength."
Kenne was mad now. Everyone in the bar was looking.
"You're…you're one of them things, ain't you?"
There was fear and hatred in his voice. "What do you mean?"
"One of the Doc's monsters. You ain't human. Hell, Doc, your packagin' gets better and better, but what you put inside stinks to high heaven, you know. It's gettin' so a fella don't know where he's dippin' it. I take it all back, sister. You're just a sexclone with steel teeth, and I ain't interested."
The drunk in the corner, who wore what was left of some kind of camouflage outfit, came over, pulling a revolver out of his britches pocket. Jessamyn tensed, ready to shear his head off his neck with a karate move.
Magda shook her head, and Jessamyn relaxed. The drunk plonked his gun down on the bar.
"You've got a quarrel, settle it this way. Best of seven."
"This is Jitters," Magda said. "He's British."
The drunk saluted smartly. His hand vibrated. She didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to know how he had picked up his nick-name. Jessamyn hefted his gun. It was a seven-shot model, a Webley and Scott .38 Bulldog, standard British Army Issue. A toy next to a ScumStopper Magnum, but it could do the job. She broke it, and slid five slugs out, leaving two consecutive bullets chambered. She sighted down the barrel. It was off, but it would do for a round of roulette.
"You game, cowboy?"
Kenne gulped, and looked around for a way out. "Guess I am, Mizz Frankenstein, guess I am."
"Ladies first?" She pointed the gun to her temple.
"Toss you for it."
Magda dropped a one-armed bandit token on the bar. Kenne guessed lemon, and won the first pull.
Click.
He sighed with relief, and passed the gun over. Then, he took a shot of whisky. Magda refilled his glass. It vanished down his throat, by-passed his stomach and stood out on his forehead as droplets of 90% proof sweat.
"The good stuff, huh?"
"Fella deserves Shochaiku if it's gonna be his last drink."
Jessamyn slipped the barrel into her mouth, and sucked it like a lollipop, fluttering her eyelashes at Kenne. His eyes popped.
Click.
"Your move."
"Good thing it's Curtius," Magda said, "if'n he blows his brains out, at least we won't be all day scraping them off the floor. Just my dainty little hankie will be enough to clean up that kind of a smeared speck."
Kenne's adam's apple was bobbing up and down. Jessamyn looked him in the face, smiling pleasantly. Shutting his eyes tight, he jammed the gun against his skull, and…
Click.
"Give it here."
He was reluctant to let it go. She raised the gun, and pulled the trigger.
Click. "Bang," she said. Everybody jumped. Kenne spilled his drink. "No, really, just joking."
Kenne took the gun.
"Have you worked it out, cowboy? Three chambers, two bullets. Short odds."
They'd turned the music off now. Jitters was sucking at a bottle. Only Doc Threadneedle was apparently uninterested in the game.
Kenne looked at the saloon door. The Maniax were standing between him and it. That was his bad luck. The gangboys were in the entertainment mood tonight, and nothing appealed to them more than watching some asshole respray the ceiling with greymass. He looked down at the gun, which must be feeling pretty heavy.
"Two chances out of three, cowboy."
He did it quickly. Up to his head. Pull. Click.
He let out a whoop, and slammed the gun down onto the bar, breaking glasses.
"Whooo-eee, I thought I was gonna fill my britches fer sure, sister. Looks like I win, eh? Unless you want to play on, Mizz Frankie Stein?"
Jessamyn picked up the gun.
"You can go home now, sister. It's all over. Buy us all drinks, and it'll be forgotten. Ain't nobody gonna hold it against you."
She put the barrel to her temple.
"You don't have to do it," said Magda. "That would be crazy. Even Curtius ain't that big an asshole."
Her finger tightened.
"Hold on there," Kenne pleaded. "Two out of two, remember. Them's crazy person's odds."
"Jessamyn…" said the Doc. "Stop it."
Everyone in the saloon was looking at her. Their heat-patterns flared, as if they were blushing all over.
She pulled the trigger.
Cocooned inside the air-cooled cockpit of his DeLorean "Snowbird" SandMaster, Bronson Manolo checked the dispositions of the Holderness-Manolo forces surrounding Dead Rat. Within five minutes, they should all be in place.
Once the spotman reported back that Jessamyn Amanda Bonney was in Dead Rat, Manolo had called in Holm Rodriguez from Denver and Susie Terhune from Phoenix. Terhune was an assault specialist solo who had subcontracted for H-M on several occasions, and Rodriguez was their top Colorado Op, further qualified because he came from the quarry's home turf. When he was with the Denver paycops, he had busted little Jessamyn on some juvie beefs. Truancy, stealing lollipops, pulling PZ brats' pigtails, whistling commie songs in church, assault with a deadly weapon: kidstuff like that.
"One good thing about this action," Terhune claimed, "at least nobody in Dead Rat could possibly be classed as an 'innocent bystander'."
H-M had enough field Ops to handle the sanction, but Manolo recognized his limitations, and had had Rodriguez and Terhune augment his forces with some local soldiers who knew the sand. Most of his full-scale skirmishes had been in NoGos or Urban Blight areas. Out here in the Big Empty, the situation was quite different. Less cover, more miles. This was sandrat heaven. He was quite willing to delegate field command to Terhune until the objective was obtained.
He checked his GenTech digital chronometer against the dashdial. He was synchronized with the machine.
"Ommm," he said to himself, shifting his level of psychic awareness, "ommm."
Gari the Guru had given his blessing on this sanction down at the Pyramid. "You can't destroy, Bronson, you can only convert a thing's form." That was true, converting forms was Manolo's business. He took nasty live people, and turned them into nice dead ones. Bob Holderness would have been proud of him.
When this take-out was over, he was looking forward to a session in the hot-tub with Kandi, maybe a few snorts of cocoa, and some radical waves to ride out in the bay. The pollution didn't kill the ripple, and couldn't get through to you in a skin-tight SCE unit.
Manolo didn't groove to the Big Empty. He was a cityguy. He didn't like to breathe anything he couldn't see.
"In place, Bronson," said Terhune. Her light blinked green on the mapscreen. "Mortars ready to ride. Let's nuke the spook."
"Rodriguez?"
Manolo tapped the screen, and Rodriguez's light flared. "Okay for sound, chief. We're in place."
"The quarry?"
"We tracked her from the Threadneedle site. She's in the Silver Shuriken now. We've given her enough time to get blasted out of her skull."
"Excellent. Judicious. Righteous."
"Thanks, bro."
Manolo pulled his seatbelt across his lap, and plugged it in. The console lit up, and he flicked some buttons. The inboard computer flashed stats at him. The weapons systems gave him some readiness read-outs.
"Okay José; let's spread some karma…"
The bullet flattened against her temple. She felt as if someone had taken a swing at her with a sledgehammer, but didn't fall off her stool. Her arm flew out, wrenching her shoulder, but she kept a grip on the gun. She shook her head, and the spent slug fell to the saloon floor.
"Let's look at that," said the Doc, prodding her sore spot with his fingers. "Hmmnn, more bruising than there ought to be. Your steel-mesh underflesh hasn't quite knitted properly. The durium platelocks are fine, though. You might have done something less drastic to test my handiwork, but everything seems to be holding up properly."
Curtius Kenne was staring at Jessamyn as if Jesus H. Christ himself had ridden into town on a donkey, walked into the bar looking for trouble, and kicked him in the gazebos with steel-spiked sandals.
"Freakin' hell," he said, almost in reverential tones.
Jessamyn handed him the still-smoking gun. "Didn't I mention that I had a bullet-proof skull?"
He took the weapon and looked at it. The barrel was blackened at the end.
"Silly me."
One bullet, one chamber.
"Your turn," she said.
He held the gun as if he didn't know what it was, and looked at her.
She smiled pleasantly. "You heard me, cowboy. It's your shot."
Jitters laughed and clapped his hands, then slapped Kenne on the back. "Yessir, now it's time to see some bloody buggering Yankee guts and glory spread out all over this pub, eh what? That do-or-die Davy Blooming Crockett spirit. Come on, Ragtime Cowboy Joe, take your medicine. The bint did her bit, now it's up to you to show us what you're made of."
Kenne swallowed his spit. Tears leaked out of his eyes.
Jessamyn knew what the cowboy was made of. Flesh and blood and bone, just like everyone else. No blastic, no durium, no implants, no steel, no diamond-chips. Just chemicals and 78% water.
They weren't even the same species, Kenne and her. She couldn't feel anything for him. But she helped him.
She took the gun, and put it into his hand properly, wrapping his fingers around the butt, shoving his forefinger through the trigger-guard, and held the barrel to his ear. She thumb-cocked the piece, and stood back, admiring her handiwork. Kenne stood like a statue, Rodin's Old Cowhand Blowing Brains Out.
"The game ain't over 'til the whistle's blown."
The cowboy was sobbing now, the gunbarrel shaking against his flesh.
"That cracker-ass pussy ain't gonna do it," said one of the Maniax, turning away in disgust. "Never no good entertainment out in the sand."
Kenne was shaking all over. He lowered the gun, and it hung limp in his hand, barrel to the floor.
"Just a bloody buggering knee-trembler, eh what?" Jitters jumped up and down, face red with excitement.
Jessamyn picked up her perrier and finished it. The moment was over. Magda poured her another drink. Later, she would pick up the misshapen bullet from the floor. It would make a nice souvenir for her charm bracelet.
Kenne turned, and staggered towards the door, his chest heaving as he cried. A dark stain was spreading from the crotch of his Levis.
"Got your arses whipped in Nicaragua, and now you've lost it all in bloody buggering Arizona," Jitters shouted, keeping up with the broken American.
"Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's bleeding light, what so proudly we turn into spineless gibbering jellyfish with no dickybirds at the twilight's last gleaming…"
Kenne struck out at the drunk, but Jitters stepped back.
"Whose broad bums and shite cars through the perilous night, as on the ramparts we cowered in abject and pathetic fear was so chicken-livered streaming…"
The cowboy was nearly out of the door now. People were back to their drinking, drugging and whoring.
Tcherkassoff was on the video-juke, with "Siberian Sayonara."
"Oh the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in the air made us manufacture chocolate in our underpants through the night though our god-rotted yellowstain rag was still there…"
Kenne sagged against the doors.
"Oh, say does that star-strangled banner yet flap…"
Jitters leaned close and spat at the cowboy.
"O'er the land of the Yanks, with their heads full of…"
Then, the explosions started.
As the mortar-flashes lit up Dead Rat, Holm Rodriguez signalled to his soldiers to move in. They were all people he could trust, unlike that Angelino pendejo Manolo. This wasn't a surgical strike, this was a massacre. All well and good, and he had no real objection to anything that rid the world of a townful of sandrat trash, but it was a pretty inelegant manoeuvre.
He sent Mostyn out on point, giving him Lucy Cheadle as back-up. Mostyn's M-29 spat, and somebody rolled down the dunes. The soldier gave Rodriguez the thumbs-up. First kill. That gave him dibs on the scav, not that there would be much worth looting in this sandhole.
Susie Terhune's crew laid down some heavy fire. Buildings started burning. The incendiary charges Manolo's experts had set up earlier in the day went up on schedule. By the time they got to town, most of the heavy stuff should be over.
Despite his bulky Kevlar Hell-and-Back suit, Rodriguez moved fast. He jogged every morning with lead weights slung on his chest, back and thighs to get him used to the extra poundage of the armour. The IR visor of his helmet showed him the desert as if by the light of an overcast day.
His team looked like a gang of astronauts in desert-camouflage kit.
"Ve-hickle coming," Lucy Cheadle's voice crackled in his earchip. "Cyke, two riders. Can't be our girl. The reading's wrong."
"Take them."
"Done, sir."
The cyke came up over a dune, and Mostyn and Cheadle caught it in a crossfire. It exploded in mid-air, and the two riders somersaulted to the sand. Haggett got in there with his bayonet, and speared the two as if they were straw figures.
"Down and out," Haggett shouted.
That had lost them precious moments.
"Come on, team," Rodriguez ordered, "let's move it. We're expected at the Silver Shuriken in 78 seconds. Manolo will ream our butts if we're off-schedule."
The soldiers jogged at full speed, M-29s jiggling in their arms. Rodriguez thought they must all look like big, hairless teddy-bears romping over the dunes.
They tore in formation down the main street, firing at anyone in sight. The gas station was an inferno. Someone dashed out of an alleyway, pumping a shotgun. Haggett's sandy expanse of chest was splattered red. "I'm hit, I'm hit," he said, sinking to his knees, his communicator crackling as he faded. Mostyn reacted, and brought the sumpsucker with the shotgun down with a burst of fire. It had been an old-timer, with a long white beard and a Gabby Hayes hat.
They jogged round a corner, and found themselves in what passed for the town square of Dead Rat, Arizona. There was a disused town hall, an abandoned Sheriff's office, and a still-operational five-customer gallows. And the saloon.
"Make the play," Rodriguez shouted. "Now!"
Mostyn and Cheadle humped themselves up the stairs, and crashed into the Silver Shuriken, guns discharging.
She would have to learn to trust her new senses. There had been people out in the desert. And now they were in town, and she had to assume they were after her. It was just like the good old days. Cops and Ops and Soce Workers, all after her pretty little head.
Part of the ceiling had come down, and everyone was panicking.
"Magda," she said, "give me a gun."
"Sure thing, honey, take your pick."
The older woman pulled out a tray of handguns, and used it to push the glasses and drinks off the bar. Jessamyn picked a Smith-and-Wesson semi-automatic pistol, and jammed a couple of extra clips into her waistband.
"Good choice," said Magda, taking a Colt Python police special.
Some of the sandrats were milling around. Some of them weren't, because they were dead.
"Guns on the house," Magda shouted. "Come and get 'em."
Jitters and Curtius Kenne had been knocked flat by the first blast. They stumbled to their feet. Kenne had a proper grip on Jitters's gun now. One chamber, one bullet.
Doc Threadneedle tugged her sleeve. "Remember, don't be too confident. Jitters' revolver was just a pop-gun. Your underflesh won't stand up to depleted uranium or armour-piercing rockets, and you still burn and bleed like the rest of us."
Magda ze Schluderpacheru was unslinging a rocket-launcher from under the bar, and passing it across to the Maniax. Jitters was trying to wrestle his gun out of Kenne's grip.
"You got your Colts, yankee bloody doodle. Give me my gun back."
Two hefty figures in combat suits thundered through the doors, spraying the saloon with fire. The pointman steadied and looked around.
He saw Jessamyn and took aim. She was right. This was all for her benefit.
The pointman pulled the trigger, but his shot went wide. The Maniax had the launcher readied, and put an anti-tank missile into his stomach.
He was torn backwards, his hands flailing, and he got a grip on the doorjamb. He was completely impaled, his combat suit stoved in, the trefoils of the missile sticking out of his gut. The rocket fizzled, and shot through him, exploding against the gallows on the other side of the square.
Jessamyn could see right through the hole in the dead man. His sidekick froze, and was cut down by fire from all quarters.
A phosphorus grenade rolled in through the door, and everyone dived for cover.
She could see the explosion through closed eyelids. Her heat sensor sent pain signals to her greymass.
"Freak," she swore. "You realize, of course, that this means WAR!"
Manolo was pleased. It was all according to the plan. Casualties so far were acceptable. As far as he was concerned, the loss of all personnel in the field with the exception of Bronson Manolo could be classed as an acceptable casualty rate if it got the job done. Not that he was callous. H-M had a hefty policy with General Disaster to provide for the dependents of those lost or handicapped in the service of the Agency.
His mapscreen was lighting up all over. Terhune had laid down all the fire diey needed, and Rodriguez's team was in town, cutting loose.
"Gas station, saloon, hotel, town hall…" He checked off the targets as they flared.
He flicked the counter. 0347. Within a five mile radius of the town square of Dead Rat, there were 0347 warm people, excluding the H-M personnel in their combat gear.
Ooops, 0345. No, 0341. The number fell, as the people cooled.
He dug a brew out from the cooler under his chair, and flipped the ringtop.
This was proving to be a stroll.
As balls of fire filled the interior of the Silver Shuriken, Jessamyn dived for a window. She crashed through a tinsel and spray-snow Christmas decoration and, curled up tight, turned head over end through the air, landing neatly on her feet in the street.
One of the soldiers stood in front of her, presumably awestruck behind his or her faceplate. She shot through the helmet, and the soldier sagged to the dirt.
Two more of the space invaders skidded around the building, bringing up their guns. She got them both with a single burst, and sprinted away, zig-zagging down a side-street.
It was a clear night. The half-moon shone down placidly.
0326.
Jitters had his gun back, with just one bloody buggering round left in it, so he would jolly well have to put it to freaking good use, wouldn't he, by jove.
Curtius Kenne was cut in half by a falling beam, worse luck, so he couldn't use his one shot to spread the cowboy's greymass on the wall. There was no place like the thick of battle for settling an old score. So many people were dying that no one would notice a few more.
Jitters had been splashed with some of the liquid fire from the grenade, but he was lucky enough to have been blown through a hole in the wall by the blast. He rolled in the sand, until most of the flames were out.
There were troops yomping down the main street of Dead Rat. It was like being back at Goose Green. But he wasn't going to withdraw tactically this bloody buggering time, no sir, not with brass knobs on…
He held his gun up in readiness. His hands weren't shaking now.
0318.
Gretchen Turner knew she should never have left Des Moines with Barry, the electrofence salesman. Her mama had said as much, but D-M was such a zeroville. Barry had been a rat, all right. He'd left her in a town just like Dead Rat. Since then, those had been all the places she'd known. But Magda ze Schluderpacheru was better than the other madams, the Silver Shuriken could have been a nice place with a little work. The girls were nice. They had a nice team. Gretchen couldn't feel anything below her chin, and she knew that wasn't good. She couldn't see either. There was fire all around. As she blacked out, she thought it was a pity she hadn't gotten round to finishing the Christmas decorations.
0317.
An armoured ve-hickle trundled slowly through the town, searchlights revolving on the roof. That would be some kind of command module, Jessamyn knew. That gave it a high spot on her list of things to put out of commission.
0314.
Simon Threadneedle, late of GenTech, switched off his pain with the circuitbreaker he had inserted into his own greymass. The combat unit had sprayed napalm or some napalm analogue into the Silver Shuriken, and he was clothed in fire. Nothing would get the stuff off him until it burned itself out. This was the sort of juice that burned even underwater.
It was amazing what modern technology could accomplish. The GenTech labs couldn't do anything about the common cold and no government had been able to develop a workable public transport system, but when it came to deathware, why, there were wonderful new toys on the market every fall, just in time for Christmas.
His blastic-laced flesh melted away, and the durium bonesheaths heated up. He didn't know how high a temperature they could take before they went into shutdown, and he supposed he wouldn't get a chance to record his findings if he did pursue the experiment to the end. His clothes had burned away instantly, as had all his bodily hair and most of his skin. Tarnished metal shone through his musculature as he walked through the fire. He stepped out of the wall of flame onto the steps of the saloon, and strode, still burning, into the street.
A soldier tried to shove a bayonet into his throat, but the steel buckled against his adam's apple superconductor. With fiery hands, he lifted the besuited killer off the ground, and bent his back until it snapped. Gunfire rattled against his pectoral shields, and he staggered backwards from the blast. He was holding up even better than he had hoped.
0307.
"Large concentration of bodies coming our way," said Danny Riegert from the monitor. "Looks like a lynch mob."
"Get ready to rock and roll," Susie Terhune snapped, taking the controls of the chainguns. The command unit was in its strategic position in the town square. The roofguns swivelled.
"Forty or fifty, armed and angry."
"Wait till you can distinguish their heartbeats on the sensor."
"Yes, ma'am."
Her husband had left her the year before for some Tex-Mex bitch, claiming that she was too boring to live with. Chuck and Benny, her kids, whined that she was never home. She had just had painful surgery to remove an ovarian cyst that had turned out to be benign. And she had never seen the Pacific Ocean.
She tapped keys, and flicked switches.
"A hundred yards, and closing…"
"Tell me when they get to Fifty."
"Yes, ma'am."
The computers hummed, as the smart bullets picked their targets. Once locked on to a heartbeat pattern, they would whizz around like fireflies until they found the precise biosignal that would allow them to explode. What do you know, these babies really did have your name written on them.
"Fifty."
She turned on the maxiscreamers, and the riot-control noise boomed through the town, shaking teeth loose, bursting eardrums, bringing rickety buildings down.
"Spot on. They're running around like chickens at a geek convention."
The smartguns locked, and flashed READY at her.
When she was out of this, she'd check out a sexclone with a moustache like Bronson Manolo and a body like Stallone, rent herself some clean water and a whirlpool bath, and have herself a party and a half.
She initiated the firing sequence.
"They're about to scatter, ma'am."
"So much the better."
The guns started spitting intelligent death into the night.
0235.
Jessamyn saw a crowd going down, those damned smugslugs spinning through the air like midges.
GenTech had developed the little bastards. But once they were on the market, the corp had spent a lot of R and D money coming up with a way to beat them. And Doc Threadneedle had access to that technology.
She took a deep breath, and a tiny sponge inside her heart—a bioengine—inflated, changing her heart's signature. It was peculiarly like having the hiccoughs. Thanks to the little organism, her life signal would change every twenty seconds for anything up to half an hour.
People she didn't know died around her, but she was untouched.
0199.
Bronson Manolo hummed a Butthole Surfers number to himself, and touched up his hair, using the rearview mirror as he patted his coiffeur. He wanted another beer, but Gari had him on one-a-day for as long as his organic rice diet was holding up. Dammit, he deserved another brew. He was working hard. Let the Pyramid Pooper take a hike just this once, eh?
0196.
What the hell, people in Africa were gasping for a beer, and he had a whole case stashed here. He reached for a can.
0188.
"You can be a success," he chanted to himself, "your mind is a chisel, your will is a hammer, and life is a rock."
He focused on the miniature plastic pyramid on the dashboard, and willed this mission to succeed.
0179.
Rodriguez took up a command position in the old jailhouse. It must have closed down when the state police pulled out, abandoning these backwaters to the gangcults.
His crew were in pairs, going on a house-to-house, and he was ticking off the cleared locations on his streetmap. He had taken off his helmet and gloves for the job, and was stabbing with a stub of lightpencil at the screenmap Manolo had given him. Half the town was down by now.
But still no Jessamyn.
He remembered their girl as she had been when he first had her through the system in Denver. She could have been hardly eleven then. But with a clown-white face and fetish-chains, she looked older than sin.
"Livery stable clear," Baldrey barked in his ear. He checked the building off.
He also remembered Jessamyn's Old Man. Now, there was a seriously disturbed individual. No wonder his precious had ripped his throat out.
"Any sightings of Jessamyn?" he asked on the open channel.
"Don't worry," Terhune said. "She hasn't got a chance."
She had had big, sad, green eyes. Two of them, then.
"No, Susie. You're right. She's never had a chance."
0156.
The Argies were coming for him, bloody buggering bastards of dagoes that they were. He could hear the grease on their hair frying from ten miles away.
Sarn't Major Biggleswade signalled for his troops to follow, and made a dash across the burning street.
"Forever England," he shouted, "the Falklands are Forever England."
Teddy-bear shaped Argies rushed at him, firing ineptly. He was over the top like PC Dixon taking out a French terrorist cell.
"Come on lads, we can whip 'em. Corned beefeaters! Pansy Sanchos! Gaucho gauleiters!"
He was hit in the legs, but he backed out of the line of fire. Where was the Union Jack? Someone was supposed to be carrying it.
"For England, God and St George!"
0134.
Jessamyn fell to a crouch, and clambered across the square on all fours, recalling her sandrat days. She was a good animal again.
A soldier loomed over her, and she rolled, firing upwards in an arc. The suit punctured and bled, the faceplate cracking.
Wriggling her shoulders and pushing with her feet, she covered the last ten yards. Her karate jacket ripped, but the skin of her back was unabraded.
She got to the command ve-hickle, and spread herself against its treads, firing across the square at some stray killers.
0086.
Simon Threadneedle was almost burned out now. His eyes had popped, but the sensors inside his skull fed him heat patterns that were clearer than any visual input. Most of the tissue was gone, but the bio-implants still functioned. And he still had his greymass.
Magda ze Schluderpacheru was dead, had died near the beginning of it. That was a shame. She had been soft and warm, the last of his meatform's attachments.
Curtius Kenne was dead too, and most of the other citizens. He hadn't kept track, but he thought he had sensed Jitters going down.
Where was Jessamyn? She should survive. She had been a walking ruin when she came to him, and he had made her better.
Better than anyone. Better, even, than he had made himself.
Should he have told her, he wondered? Should he have mentioned the strange symptoms and side-effects he had been observing in his own case?
The detachment. The languor. His feelings were heightened, but his drives had been running down. He could barely relate to people. Before Jessamyn had come to him, he had sometimes spent days at a time sitting in front of the windows in his bedroom, looking at the unchanging, unmoving desert as the sun and the moon did their daily dance.
The moon…
0050. Manolo belched, and excused himself. 0049. 0048. 0047. 0045. 0043. 0039.
"Ma'am," said Danny Riegert, "we've got a weird reading, close to the ve-hickle."
Susie Terhune slipped the lase to automatic, and let it continue slicing up the rooftops.
"Specify."
"Down low, by the treads, in actual contact with the module."
"Our girl?"
"Hard to say. The heartbeat doesn't match, but it also keeps changing. I think it's some kind of systems error."
"Idiot, don't you read Guns and Killing? She's had a heartsponge implant. Let me think, let me think…"
Terhune's fingers flew over the keyboard, pulling a close-range weapons menu out of the memory.
1:MINISCREAMER
2: CLOSE-RANGE SMARTGUN
3: ELECTROCHARGE
4: GAS GRENADE
She punched in a Code 3, and a Confirm.
The ve-hickle buzzed, as it discharged.
"See how you like that, hag witch!"
0036.
Jessamyn felt her body arch as the electricity hit. She sucked in a double-lungful of air and screamed, but not in pain. It was her predator's howl of triumph.
She remembered Doc Threadneedle suggesting she try sucking her finger and sticking it in an electric socket.
Every nerve in her body came alive. She had never felt stronger. How long would this last?
She scrambled up onto the top of the ve-hickle, still feeling the hyperbuzz.
Sex could not be better than this.
She came to the smartgun mounting, and ripped the multi-barrelled weapon out at the roots. It came away as easily as a dead treebranch. Metal tore. Wires shorted out.
The screamers started again, and she let the durium shields up inside her ears.
There was a battened hatch on top of the ve-hickle. This was going to be like opening a can.
0029.
Biggleswade saw the British heroine climb up onto the Argie tank, and cheered. He dragged his dead legs behind him, and pulled himself towards the battle. The girl was bloody buggering Victoria Cross material, and he wanted to be there to see her run the Union Jack up the flagpole at Port Stanley. Puerto bloody buggering Galtieri in-bloody-buggering-deed! The girl got a good grip on the hatch, and pulled it away, tossing it across the square like a dustbin lid.
0027.
The girl-thing was in the command centre. Susie Terhune scrabbled under her seat for the handgun stashed there.
Riegert was gone, out the hatch, screaming. He had made a dash when the quarry had dropped through.
Terhune got a shot off, but the quarry leaned to one side and the slug missed. It ricocheted off a bulkhead, impossibly loud in the confined space, and buried itself in the fleshy part of Terhune's thigh.
Blood filled her lap. She was strapped into her seat.
She tried to raise her hands, tried to surrender, but she couldn't move, words wouldn't shake loose of her mouth.
The quarry came for her. Jessamyn Bonney looked so young.
The screen flashed up a weapons menu, requesting operator input.
The quarry took her by the scruff of her neck, and shoved her face into the screen.
The glass cracked, and Terhune felt something go inside her skull. Sparks showered out of the ruptured system.
The quarry rammed her into the screen again. Terhune's face pushed through the window into the workings of the command module. Currents crackled around her, and she smelled her hair burning.
She continued to twitch like a headless chicken long after she was dead.
0019.
Manolo pulled another tab, and sucked the beertube. He sensed the pyramid vibrating.
The Argie came flying out of the tank, running from the British heroine. Jitters took careful aim, and got him with a headshot. The foreigner stumbled on a few steps, his brains leaking out around his earphones, and collapsed in a heap.
Bloody buggering serve him right!
He tried to sing "God Save the Queen," but blood came up from his chest. He realized he was due for shipping home to Blighty. With these scratches, he was out of the rest of the war. Bloody shame. He hoped the rest of the lads would do him proud.
There'd be free drinks for him for years in the Wise Serpent in Micklethwaite Road, Fulham.
The burning building behind him settled, and a triangular slice of wall slid out of place. Bricks rained around him, crushing him into the street.
"God Save…"
0018.
Manolo flicked a switch and brought up the other figure. 0012. There had been 75 Holderness-Manolo personnel at the outset of this engagement. Now there were 12.
He thought about that. He had expected losses, but this was above even his guestimate.
Terhune wasn't answering. "Rodriguez, do you copy?"
"Yes, sir."
"Your position?"
"The jailhouse. It's pretty hairy down here."
"Have you terminated the quarry?"
"I cannot confirm or deny that."
0017-0012.
"There are seventeen hostiles left alive. Do you have reason to suspect that Jessamyn Bonney is among their number?"
There was a pause. "No reason, sir. But she is. I know she is. She'll be the last."
0017-0011.
H-M had just lost another man. The reparations on this were going to be cosmic. General Disaster would be upping the Agency's premiums next year for sure. The accountants would bum out on that one.
"Don't pull out until you've taken her down, Rodriguez."
"I don't intend to."
"Good man."
0016-0011.
Manolo decided to ride the vibes for the moment.
Jessamyn left the dead woman with her face in her terminal, and climbed onto the top of the command module. There was less gunfire now, but the whole town was on fire. The streets were littered with the dead. It was like Spanish Fork all over again. Like too many towns. A crazy man, someone she had never seen before, took a shot at her from a rooftop. The slug rang against the armourplate of the ve-hickle. She took aim at the sniper, but his roof collapsed under him, dropping him into the fire.
The only thing still standing in town was the gallows. There wouldn't be much use for that in the morning.
0011-0010.
They nearly had parity.
0010-0010.
That was a comfort. One H-M combat Op in full kit should equal four or five sandrats.
0010-0008.
Maybe desperation brought out survival instincts in the gangscum.
Rodriguez was still in place.
Nevertheless, it was time to take a little precautionary measure. Manolo pulled the security systems keyboard out of the dash, and entered the lock-down programs.
Durium shields slid down the windows, blanking out the moonlight. The interior lights flickered, and came on.
The wheels retracted, and the shutters closed their apertures. The DeLorean settled on the sand like a beached powerboat. Multiple locks slid into place, sealing the ve-hickle tighter than the Bank of Tokyo.
Explosive bolts sealed shut the cardkeyholes in the doorhandles. The only way in now was through the computer palm-recognition slab, and that was programmed only to reverse the lock-down upon the authority of executive-level Holderness-Manolo personnel.
0007-0004.
It was quiet in the DeLorean now. The LED figures blinked in silence. Manolo heard his own breathing.
0006-0003.
Simon Threadneedle walked down the main street. He knew he must look barely human, a robotic skeleton with a few charred scarecrow tatters hanging from the steel.
"Jessamyn," he called.
She looked round. She did not register any shock.
"Doc?"
"Yes. I'm in here somewhere."
"Doc…"
"I know."
They stood, looking at each other. She was bearing up well, a few bruises but nothing serious. Her clothes were torn, and her hair was a mess, but there was no damage. He could feel proud of himself.
"Is this over?" he asked.
"Nearly. No one's shot at me for a minute."
"So, we won?"
She made a gesture, indicating the scatter of bodies. "If you call this winning."
"You're here. That's what's important."
"It doesn't feel important."
0002-0002.
Manolo had the cast of characters worked out. H-M still had Rodriguez, and himself. The others would be Jessamyn Bonney and the doctor, Threadneedle. That would be the last of it. They were the improved humans.
0002-0002.
The Doc was in bad shape. Only now did Jessamyn realize just how completely he had transformed himself. His face was a melted-tar smear, with durium highlights. She saw the wires threaded through his limbs.
"Jessamyn, there are things you have to know about the treatment."
His voice was still the same, although she could see the silver ball in his throat where it was generated.
"Zarathustra closed down the project for good reasons, by his lights. There are…side-effects. Psychological, I think."
A cold hand caressed Jessamyn's metal-sheathed spine.
"You'll have to work at it, work at remaining human inside…I'm not sure that I've managed it all that well, myself. Sometimes, I just sit and stare, forgetting…for weeks, Jessamyn, for weeks. I can do almost anything with this improved body, but my mind has got blasé about it. When you're superhuman, so little seems worth the bother. You must resist that. You must…"
"Doc?" She was almost pleading with him. Don't die, don't die!
The servos in his cheeks made a smile, although there was no flesh to pull. His teeth grinned perpetually.
"You're crying. That's good."
Jessamyn put a hand to her face. There was moisture around her optic.
"Biofluid."
"No, I gave you back some tearducts when I inserted the new model. I had some to spare."
The town hall collapsed, sending a cloud of ash and sparks across the square.
0002-0002.
Rodriguez watched from the jailhouse. Jessamyn was talking to the tall thing. He hadn't been able to raise Manolo for minutes. It was down to him. The house-to-house had been called off. He didn't think he had any soldiers left, but himself.
He pulled on his gauntlets, and picked up his helmet. It locked into place.
He picked up his M-29, and silently slipped a new clip into the magazine.
0002-0002.
His left arm hadn't moved since he walked out of the Silver Shuriken. He detached it, and dropped it in the street.
"Let this be a lesson to you, Jesse Frankenstein's-Daughter. You are not invincible."
He didn't know how long he could live like this. His skullplates were leaking biofluid. That meant his greymass would be affected.
There was always the Donovan Treatment, but he didn't think much of the idea of being a disembodied brain in a jar.
"Jessamyn, you have things to do. You'll know, when the time comes, what they are."
He looked up at the half-moon.
"I don't understand myself, but I've been dreaming again. We don't dream, you know. Us improved humans. We use up all that brain capacity that's left dark in normals, and there isn't any room for dreaming. But I've dreamed since you came here, since I began work on you. I've dreamed of the moon, and of a plain of salt. I don't know what that means, but it's important."
There was dismay on her face, now. For the first time, she looked her age.
"Doc?"
"Goodbye, Jessamyn."
He had built a suicide switch into his brain. Blinking in a pattern initiated the shut-down sequence. A vial opened, and a biospunge filled with mercury, then burst…
0001-0002.
Hooray for our side. Rodriguez must have scragged one of the things!
Jessamyn looked down at the smoking remains. The Doc was gone. She hadn't understood everything he had tried to tell her. Again, she was all alone, as she had been after her father's death, and after Spanish Fork. Alone with the dead. He had called her Jesse Frankenstein's-Daughter.
She was not alone. A soldier came out of the old jailhouse, rifle held lightly in one hand, barrel pointed down.
"Jessamyn," his voice was amplified by something inside his helmet. "Do you remember me?"
She laughed. "In that get-up, I wouldn't know you if you were my father."
"I'm sorry. It's Rodriguez. Holm Rodriguez. From Denver."
She did remember him. He was with the Bruyce-Hoare Agency. After she had killed her father, he had been one of the interrogating officers. And before that, she had seen him several times. He had raided the downtown warehouse arena the night she defeated Melanie Squid in the Kumite. As cops go, he had been okay. She tried to recall his face, but got it mixed up with the actor, Edward James Olmos. Swarthy, Hispanic, sharp eyes.
"I know you, Rodriguez. You're a Juvie Op. In case you hadn't heard, I turned eighteen last month. I'm grown-up now."
"I'm not with Bruyce-Hoare any more. I accepted a position in the private sector. Holderness-Manolo."
"Fancy."
He was edging towards her, slowly.
"Look," she said, stopping him in his tracks. "You gave me a break over Daddy. I'll return the favour. Just turn around and walk out of here. You don't have to die."
She wished she could see his face.
"No, really. You can live to an old age, have kids, rent a house on the beach, get into politics."
The rifle wavered. She knew he wasn't going to bite on it.
"Rodriguez, you don't have to be an asshole. It's not a contractual obligation."
The gun jumped, but she wasn't in front of it when it went off.
She extended the forefingers of her right hand in a V, and jabbed at Rodriguez's faceplate. The reinforced darkglass shattered, and she felt warmth around her hand as her durium-laced fingerbones stabbed through the man's skull.
Wiping her fingers off on her trousers, she told him, "You didn't have to die. You didn't have to."
0001-0001.
She knew the procedure. There would be some top cat out there in the desert, sealed up tight in his High Performance Auto, sitting out the slaughter and counting the expenses. Mr Holderness or Mr Manolo, she expected.
There was supposed to be no way to get at the bastard. But she felt she had to try. She needed some leverage to help her attack the Op's ve-hickle. She looked around for a tool, and found a soldier's dropped bayonet. It still had a good edge.
It would have to do.
0001-0001.
Manolo stabbed the dashbuttons, intending to blank the reading. Only one figure disappeared.
0001.
It was 0001 in blue. His own reading. As long as the number was there on the dashscreen, he was alive.
He would have to sit it out, but he would live. He'd spend hours down at the Pyramid talking through his emotions on this one. There would be untold anguish to purge in the group sessions. But Gari would help him cope with it. Guilt was no good, he knew. He had to quash that, and learn to feel good about himself again. That was the main thing, to feel good about yourself.
He wished he hadn't blasted so many beers. His bladder was full to straining, and there was no catheter-tube in the DeLorean. He would have to piss in the backseat, and that was imported Argentine leather hand-tooled by a specialist flown in from Tijuana.
He should never have taken on this penny-ante bounty hunt. Bob Holderness wouldn't have touched it. He had wanted the Agency to specialize in political cases. That was probably why he wasn't around any more. Manolo had always known there were men in suits behind the Surf Nazis, but he'd never carried the vendetta to them.
When he got out of here, he would make that up. He would track down the boardroom where the orders were issued, and he would declare all-out war on whichever Japcorp or state authority had been behind the singe.
The car shifted, and something clanged. She was out there. Jessamyn Bonney.
She couldn't get in, but she was out there. The ve-hickle rang with her blows. She would get frustrated soon, and go away. Bronson Manolo could wait her out.
He had chewed his moustache ragged. His teeth were clogged with hair. That wasn't supposed to happen. His barber-surgeon had guaranteed the attachments against all eventualities.
The banging continued.
0001.
Manolo muttered to himself. "Home freeee, you can't get meee…"
She would have to be an H-M exec to get through the DeLorean's brain, and unseal the system.
The banging stopped, and there was peace for a moment. She must be giving up, walking away. Manolo had pressed his bleep-alert The Insurance people would be here within minutes.
There was a hum of machinery, and a hiss of expelling air.
It wasn't possible. The car was rolling over and kicking its legs for her. The doorseals receded, the shutters vanished.
Manolo squirmed, pushing himself back against the seat. He didn't even have a gun.
A breeze passed through, as the doors raised like beetle-wings.
"Ommmmm," Manolo said, trying to attune his thoughts. Positive thinking could make this go away. "Ommmmm."
She was a dark silhouette outside. She threw something onto the seat beside him.
It was a human hand, raggedly severed at the wrist.
"Open sesame," she said, slipping into the car.
0001.
0000.
0000.
0000.