Golgotha Run (15 page)

Something she simply did not recognise was water, for the simple reason that
it was not sludgy and stinking, dropped onto her eyes and lips. She opened her
eyes.

A man with a shaven head and a jet-black Suit loomed over her. Impossibly old,
even older than the guards in the Camp. Possibly even thirty, if such a thing
could be imagined.

Something cold and slim and tubular slid into her mouth. She tried to spit it
out.

The man slapped her. Not particularly hard, just hard enough to hurt.

“Drink it,” he said.

Trix drank what she would later learn to be fruit juice warmed to body-heat so
that the basic unfamiliarity of it would not be rejected by her body. All the
same, her blood-sugar rocketed too fast for an atrophied liver to even begin
to cope—and due to the clamped position of her head, she almost choked to
death before hands, off to one side that she couldn’t see, found an aspirator.

After she was more or less settled, the man looked down at her and smiled. It
was probably meant to be reassuring, but even Trix could see that it was just
a movement of his mouth; he’d trained his mouth to move in a certain precise
way and didn’t mean it at all. Even though she couldn’t see them for the
obloids of black glass that covered them, Trix knew that the smile never had
and never would touch his eyes.

“Sorry about that,” the man said. “We’ll have to dilute that for a while. At
least until we bulk you up a bit with glucotics.” He paused, looking at her
thoughtfully. “Do you know, you really are a lucky little girl indeed.”

Trix just looked up at him. She didn’t feel particularly lucky. Then again,
she didn’t have all that much to compare “luck” to.

“You’re a very lucky girl indeed because we’ve been looking out for you. We
here at GenTech. Looking out for people just like you.”

The man did the thing with his mouth again.

“You can call me Masterton,” he said. “We’re going to do great things. Would I
lie to you?”

Up through Pasadena and then they hit the Glendale Blockade. Eddie hauled
the Testostorossa back and let a modified Behemoth, the front end reinforced
and fitted with hydraulic rams, take them through under main force.

The good citizens of Glendale scattered and the barrier went to pieces; the Brain Train made it through encountering nothing heavier than disorganised small-arms fire.

That gave the Brain Train a straight run west to San Fernando, before hitting what had once been Route 14 and turning north.

“I feel like some music,” Eddie Kalish told the Testostorossa. “Switch on the
radio and find some tunes.”

“
What, are your hands tired?
” the Testostorossa asked him with heavy sarcasm. “
You poor thing. All that beating off guys’ cocks, I’ll bet. Fuckin’ do it yourself.
”

Eddie was wishing that whoever had programmed the Testostorossa’s AI had gone a
little easier on the virtual personality. Or given it a completely different
one, come to that. The relatively limited amount of processing power that a
car, supercharged or not, was able to lug around led to semi-sentient entities
with decidedly one-track character traits.

He was also, absolutely, not going to admit that while he had received a
thorough grounding in the Testostorossa’s systems and controls by way of the
Loup—in much the same way as it had allowed him to operate the data-systems back in the Factory—this had for some reason not extended to an
ability to operate the built-in entertainment set.

The fact was, with a large proportion of the US population turning to a life
on the move, the number of radio stations competing for bandwidth had
skyrocketed. It took insanely complicated receiver-controls to pull anything
at all out of this jumble of signals in the first place, let alone something
which one might enjoy listening to.

The radio receiver crawled with knobs and dials, and Eddie didn’t have the
first clue as to where to start.

“Just do it, okay?” he said. “It comes down to it, and it doesn’t go against
the Mission Directives Masterton loaded you up with, you have to do what I
say. So I’m fucking
ordering
you, okay? And if you dare put out ‘It’s
Raining Men’, ‘Boystown’ or anything at all by the goddamn Village People, I
shall personally open up your hood with a can-opener and see what your
artificial brains look like after being fucked over with a monkey wrench. Are
we clear?”

“
Suit your fucking self,
” said the Testostorossa. It squeal-blipped through the stations, most of which seemed to be playing the latest track by somebody called Freak-E and of whom Eddie had never heard, and settled finally on something with a pair of interminably duelling banjos.

Eddie decided that no music at all would be better than that, found the power
switch and shut the radio off.

“What’s the matter,” said the Testostorossa. “Didn’t like it? Seems to me,
you’d be a fan of Country with a big C. Something with a big C, anywise.”

Up around Mojave, they ran into a gangcult calling themselves the
Long Reds—not, the Testostorossa’s HUD explained rather snottily, on its targeting
profile, because of any perceived kinship with American Indians, but because’
of the long red stains they commonly left their victims in on the blacktop.

Eddie streamed the targeting data back to Trix in the Brain Train Command rig,
then bugged out. Dodged through the Long Red horde with Al-assisted efficiency
and put in some distance.

Some few minutes later, Trix Desoto broke in on the corn-sat link: “
Get your
ass back here, Eddie, we need a bit of an assist.
”

“What?” Eddie said. “I thought I was strictly recon. Sort of trouble you got,
what actual help could I possibly be?”

“
Get your fucking ass back here
now,
you little shit!
”

“Charming.”

Eddie slewed the Testostorossa round in a handbrake turn he would have never
believed he could do—and which, incidentally, had the Testostorossa
calling him a total fucking maniac—and headed south.

As the Brain Train hove into view, Eddie caught on to what the problem was. A
lucky shot from a shoulder-mounted launcher had breached a Behemoth tanker and
it was leaking the coolant that kept the cargo refrigerated—and more
importantly, kept the hydrogen-fusion processes of its power cell at an
optimum operating temperature for not leaving a huge hole in the ground.

What kind of idiot, Eddie wondered, as the Loup obligingly dropped a sense of
the mechanical schematics into his head, would tie the systems directly
together? In any event, harassed as it was by Long Red motorsickles, the
Behemoth was in no position to stop and effect repairs.

“
There’s a shutoff valve on the linkage assembly
,” Trix Desoto told him via the comsat link. “
You have to get up there and shut the flow down manually.
”

“Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “And wearing a fucking tit for a hat I am.”

“
What?
” Trix Desoto asked in what seemed like genuine puzzlement. “
What was that?
”

“Sorry,” said Eddie. “That came out wrong. I don’t quite know what I meant
myself. The point is, what do I know about acrobatics on top of a speeding
truck? Get one of the outriders to do it—they look like the sort who’ll do
any dumb thing for a laugh.”

“Their job is to keep these jokers off you while you do yours. Besides, ever
tried to stand up on a motorsickle while simultaneously pulling a lever that
throws your balance off? Just do the
job
, okay?”

“No,” said Eddie. “And you can’t make me.”

It occurred to him that was the wrong thing to say, to a woman who had control
of a Leash that was, currently, the only thing that was preventing him from
turning into a monster and exploding on a twelve-hourly basis.

Then again, so what? The important thing, here and now, was immediate survival
from being crushed under the wheels of a loudmouth Testostorossa with a
profound streak of homophobia and/or a Behemoth.

It was at this point that he felt the Testostorossa lurch. It slowed and
segued in, then gunned the acceleration to match speeds and drive in tandem
with the stricken Behemoth.

“The fuck?” Eddie exclaimed.

“
I’m taking control under Emergency Override,
” Trix said via the comsat link. “
It’s locked in. The car itself couldn’t change it, even if it meant going against the mission directives.
”

“And you’re, like, totally fine with that?” Eddie asked the Testostorossa.
“Totally surrendering all your individuality and volition and shit?”

“
Fine by me,
” the Testostorossa growled. “
The girl’s a total babe and I like her. You, I don’t care if you live or fucking die.
”

“I can just sit here,” he said. “I can sit here and just do nothing. In fact,
I think that’s what I’ll do. Or won’t, if you get what I mean, and I’m sure
that you do.”

“
Hey, well, fine,
” said Trix Desoto over the satellite link. “
I’ve got two words for you. Ejector and seat.
”

“Oh dear God,” said Eddie. “You wouldn’t. I mean, even GenTech wouldn’t do
something so cheesy and fucking stupid as fitting a car with an ejector seat,
right?”

“
You’ll never know,
” said Trix Desoto. “
Or at least—you’ll know for about two seconds before your head hits the blacktop. So are you gonna do the job or what?
”

Eddie slithered into the shotgun seat and racked open the door. Scrambled up
on to the roof of the Testostorossa and stood there in a semi-crouch.

It was easier, actually, than he had imagined. They were in the lee of the
slipstream generated by the Behemoth and the air seemed, for the moment,
still. And the Testostorossa’s suspension was a dream—albeit the kind of
dislocated and horrific dream from which you are desperate to wake up.

Willing himself into a the kind of terrified calm that has you moving very
slow and sure in the knowledge that any sudden move might break the spell,
Eddie turned to survey the tubes and cables of the Behemoth’s linkage system
that connected the cargo tanker to the cab. The shutoff lever for the coolant
was plainly marked and visible—just well out of reach for someone who didn’t
have springs in his heels.

Eddie leaned in. Maybe he could get some purchase on the rig and haul himself
over… and it was at this point that a Long Red zipped in around from the
blindside, on a four-wheeled arrangement that seemed to consist of a pair of
motorsickles lashed to either side of an aviation turbine, and levelled a
sawn-off twelve-gauge directly at his head.

Then a GenTech outrider slammed in to broadside the Long Red, spearing him and
his vehicle with the reinforced polycarbon blades that served both as impact-protection and offensive weapon—and which gave
motorsickles
their name as
opposed to the more literal and prosaic
motorcycles.

Presumably, the outrider had been counting in the impact-resistance aspect of
those blades to protect him from damage—but those same blades now caught
in the Long Red’s mechanics and hauled the outrider over, sending both of them
spinning off down the blacktop and on fire.

“Screw him,” Eddie muttered to himself. “That’s his job.”

Now he realised that, in his alarm, he had just flung himself desperately into
the Behemoth’s connecting rig. He was hanging from a tangle of data-transfer
cables, fortunately of the sort designed for rough and heavy duty treatment
and thus could bear his weight.

The shutoff lever for the coolant was directly before him. He reached for it
and yanked it.

The lever came off in his hand.

Eddie said a bad word.

Behind him, he heard a complicated, tearing crash as a number of vehicles
collided in any number of interesting configurations. Eddie had no idea what
had actually happened, and who might have died on either side, and quite
frankly he didn’t care.

The shutoff valve, despite the lack of a lever, still seemed more or less
functional. Oh, well. It was worth a try. He grasped it with his free hand and
attempted to twist it.

For a moment, it seemed that he was tearing the skin, and the meat for that
matter, off his hand. Then, somehow, it was as if the skin and flesh had just
hardened. The valve turned, then got a grip and lodged. Eddie Kalish had the
distinct thought that he might have twisted it still further and torn it out,
had he wanted.

In any case, he thought now, he’d done the job to any point of which he was
capable—and if anybody like Trix Desoto, for example, wanted any more then
they could just shove it.

Eddie let go of the cables, boosted himself off and dropped back into the
Testostorossa, doing a neat little flip around the sill of the door that he
would never know had looked incredibly impressive to anyone who might have
seen it.

“All right,” he said to the world in general. “I’ve fucking
done
it, okay?
Good enough? Can I go, now?”

“
Good enough,
” the voice of Trix Desoto admitted over the comsat-link. “
For long enough.
”

The Testostorossa lurched again on its suspension.

“
I’m back under your masterful control,
” it said. “
You know, incidentally, just so’s you know. So are you gonna drive me or what?
”

Eddie Kalish drove, running the last remaining Long Red off the road without
even particularly thinking about it.

And it would only be later, yet again, that he realised that he had just done
three separate things that it would have been impossible, for a human being,
to do.

After finishing off the Long Reds, the Brain Train hit nothing more than minor
skirmishing. It was simply too big a target for any but the largest, well-supported or clinically insane gangcult to think it worth having a shot.