Golgotha Run (2 page)

The procedure had started out well. They had parked the Welcome Wagon in a
dedicated slot and deployed; located the precise position of the client in his
apartment by way the ultrasonics, knocked a hole in the wall by way of
clamp-mines and burst inside, Artie diving in low and doing it all totally by the
book.

It had to be quick and sudden or you lost half of the point of it. Artie had
smack-shackled the target’s ankles to the floor, the electromagnetic
concussion-bolts biting solidly into old, cured wood, and then gotten out of
the way in a hurry so that Mico could shove the target over like the
schoolyard bully that Mico once, presumably, at some point, had been. Mico’s
aptitude for this part of the procedure, and his general demeanour, strongly
suggested this.

Mico and Alex held then the client—he was a
client
rather than a target,
now—while while Artie used the buzzsaw, then hauled the upper body back,
fighting against the phenomic homing-mechanisms that were even now, not to put
too fine a point upon it, cutting in.

More smack-shackles on the arms and then back to the lower body to nailgun in
the spikes and crampons that would secure it while they dealt with the tricky
business of the head.

Using the buzzsaw, though, was always a risky business. It was quick but
imprecise. Artie found that he had cut right through a vertebra, the smaller
part of which chose that moment to detach and physically
shoot
for the
larger part still attached to the pelvis… blasting through Artie’s shoulder
in the manner of the sort of pistol round that, in the old days, left people’s
arms hanging off.

And for just an instant, it had.

It had been a messy, complicated wound. It had taken almost a full minute for
Artie’s arm to reattach itself and for the gross physical damage to heal. The
subtleties of trauma-healing had taken a few minutes more, and Artie’s
clumsiness had slowed them down in completing the first-stage vivisection.

It had not, to cut it short, been a clean kill. They had lost points on the
timing. Credit-points they’d never see in their Accounts.

They were back in the Wagon again, the client safely packed away in the
GenTech containment cells, heading for the depot, the multiple airlock
access-hatches in the side of the Dome.

Sometimes, Artie thought, he could hear the head and hands and feet and
jointed sections of arm rattling around and hammering inside the cells, but
that of course was nonsense. A failure of containment to the point where even
sound waves could escape would probably result in a fusion-cell blowout that
would level buildings (though not of course, ultimately, the people in them)
for half a mile around.

At the depot, by way of classified and carefully-controlled procedures, the
various bodily components would be obliterated on the subatomic level and the
lucky client at last given respite. An end to a life turned utterly
meaningless and which, ordinarily, so far as humans reckon time, would have
simply never stopped.

The procedures were extraordinarily expensive and complex, thus explaining the
comparative rarity of their use, and why the likes of Artie, Alex, Mico—and
for that matter every other living soul under the Des Moines
Quarantine-and-Containment Dome—worked like dogs in the hope of one day being able to
afford those procedures for themselves.

It had never occurred to them to wonder just what GenTech itself got out of
the arrangement—and even if it had, it was doubtful that they would have
cared.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. They had seen the future and what the
future held… and it held nothing but an endless, sleepless night of small,
unwanted resurrections.

The Severcy Sisters hit them as they went through Checkpoint 9.

The gangcult had been stalking them for maybe ten miles, segueing in on one or
other of the outriders to have an exploratory crack then peeling off, weighing
up the defence-response. Now the core mass of them piled it on, coming in from
both sides.

“The Sisters are small fry,” Eddie Kalish said, quick-scanning the
pattern-recognition specs and stats streaming across his Testostorossa’s HUD. “They’re
just little girls with a grudge. No real kill power to speak. They don’t care
about the Brain Train—they’re just coming in pincer-wise to knock off the
front-runner.”

“
Yeah, well,
” the Testostorossa said, diodes rippling on its voice-display, “
that would be
us.
What’s the matter, faggot? Too much of a fag to wanna screw some girlies?
”

“I just think it’s a waste.” Inwardly some large part of Eddie groaned. He
didn’t mean any of this macho bullshit, but the Testostorossa was getting to
him. He was starting to get the idea that killing people with an asinine quip
on your lips was just flat-out murder.

Through the shotgun window a girl in torn leather and spikes leant from her
quad-bike and swung what appeared to be an exact copy of a medieval
morningstar. It looked pretty lethal, but the business end of it rebounded
from the monatomic carbon shell of the Testostorossa to no effect whatsoever.

The Sister snarled in pique. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen years
old.

“Anyhow,” Eddie said. “The kids just aren’t tooled-up enough to hurt us.”

“
Yeah, but they’re drawing attention to us,
” the Testostorossa said. “
Lots of other fuckers out there, waiting to sit up and take notice—and they’re packing enough heavy stuff to make us go bang-splat.
”

Seemingly of their own accord, multidirectional scatterguns extended, locked
and loaded.

“
I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now,
” the Testostorossa said.”
You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me.
”

Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever
gotten himself into this?

From the doorway a roscoe said “Kachow!“ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank… She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose… I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.

“This is WWAXZY News, every hour, on the hour—sponsored by Big Easy Gumbo,
steaming bowls of fishy goodness just like your big fat Momma used to make.
Big Easy Gumbo is a property-division of Eidolon Industries SA. Big Easy Gumbo
and Your Big Fat Momma are registered trademarks. All rights reserved.

“And our top story, of course, are the rumours that chart-topping B-girl
Freak-E has split with her longtime manager and boyfriend, Slee-Z. Freak-E,
who is currently topping every corporate datanet download chart with her
international superhit ‘Be My Pimp’, is said to be distraught and was
unavailable for comment. Slee-Z, on the other hand, couldn’t
say enough to our waiting reporters. ‘Yo, b___h, wheres my
f__king money, ho? Think I’m gonna make you a star and
then let you start s__king the next n___a’s d__k, think again,
b___h. Watch yo back yo.’

“Latest reports suggest that Freak-E is currently in talks with king of the New
York hip-hop scene, Big Master X, about representing her. You can bet we’ll be
bringing you more news on this one as is happens, folks.

“Other news: across the pond in Merrie Olde England, the Leader of His
Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has criticised PM Peter Mandelson’s support for the
US carpet-bombing of the Confederated Republics of the Congo as, quote, ’The
act of a simpering and cowardly little freak, so far up the US President’s
crack you’d need a pickaxe to get him out, and the world would be a cleaner
place if he’d ran down his mother’s leg.’

“The President was unavailable for comment. The PM himself is currently out of
reach of our reporters. The Grand Old man of British politics, however, Sir
John Lennon, has issued the statement that, ‘This outburst is simply not how we
did politics in my day, and it shames me deeply that this man might be seen,
by way of party membership, to have any connection with me in the slightest. I
wish to disassociate myself from this execrable little s__t and his statements entirely.’

“You go tell ’em, Johnny! Rock the House.

“Closer to home, the mysterious outbreak of mass hallucination down in Los
Bolivaros has now been explained by declassified footage showing seconded DEA
agents burning genetically-modified coca fields as part of a joint operation
with
Securidad Internationale
. The hallucinogenic effects of the toxins
released, from a crop destined to become a major component in a whole new
breed of Designer Crack, convinced befuddled locals that the very gaping Maw
of Hell had opened up to spew creatures born of neither man nor woman, spawn
of the Ever and Eternal Screaming Night.

“Uncontrolled bleeding from the eyes and ears of these locals was purely
psychosomatic—to believe that creatures spawning from the ever and eternal
screaming night truly existed, in any way, shape of form, would be just plain
loco.

“‘Besides,’ sez Drugs Czar Karenna Gore Schiff, ‘anyone around to actually
witness these hallucinations was drug-running scum, and shooting them in the
head to put them out of their misery was better than they deserved.’

“That’s the main news on this hour. Now here’s Freak-E with ‘Be My Pimp’…”

Eddie Kalish crawled on his belly and squinted through the good lens of his
goggles. He’d picked them up maybe a year ago, from the crushed remains of a
lone motorsickle package-runner who hadn’t needed them anymore.

The mutated coyote that had killed the runner hadn’t wanted them either,
leaving them on the corpse after it had fed.

Coyote didn’t have the smarts, or the manipulation, to deal with truly human
technology. They just set up these crude and dumb but incredibly complicated
apparatuses for dropping rocks on people, without ever quite understanding
why.

The bad lens of the goggles was crazed and crusted with liquid-crystal
chemicals leaking from the multiple lead-glass sandwich. The good lens,
though, could still track and target, zoom in on images and enhance them with
some degree of clarity.

Eddie zoomed in, somewhat ineptly, down the
mesa
to the plain beyond, where
steel and polypropylene and meat were being systematically taken apart.

The big Behemoth tankers of a GenTech Corp road-train had fallen foul of a
jackgang—a variety of gangcult that, through a tortuous network of fronts
and double-blinds, had a connection to some actual Incorporate patron. The
patron supplied funding and a market for loot. This meant that large-scale
hijacking was practicable, as opposed to pulling down the smalltime shit for
the pure hell of it.

The jackgang had actively planned this, maybe over months. Whoever might be
funding them had seriously tooled them up.

The road-train front runner, in his zippy little Toledo, had run straight over
undetectable carbon fibre tyre-slashers, and smack into crash-barriers that
sprang up under one-shot servos. The outriders were taken out by
shoulder-mounted STS projectiles, closing off the turning-circle, and the mobile
Command and Control unit by mortar, effectively boxing the road-train in.

The jackgangers had then moved in for the kill… only to find that they had
walked into a trap of their own. With the concussion of detonation-bolts,
three of the Behemoths had split open along pre-stressed fracture lines to
reveal GenTech shock-troops armed with heavy-duty weaponry of their own.

In the world of physics, equally matched forces tend towards an equilibrium.
In the world of humans possessed of heavy-duty armament, equally matched
forces result in sheer bloody chaos.

Eddie decided to leave them to it. Only when the last bodies—or their
component parts—were still, did he climb to his feet and head for the
battered little Kraut Karrier RV that counted for everything he owned in the
world, and thence down the dirt track leading down from the
mesa
to the
plain.

A misdirected mortar shell had totalled the hauling rig—even if a jackganger
or a trooper had survived in a state to drive it, the road-train wasn’t going
anywhere soon.

One of the refrigerated Behemoths, one of those that had been carrying the
payload rather than troopers, was breached and spilling packaged human organs. Many of the packages were split and already spoiling in the New Mexico heat. The smell was already attracting scouts from the feral dog packs that roamed the wasteland.

Eddie hefted an automatic rifle and sighted on one of the canine scouts,
preparing to empty whatever was in the clip into it, but the dog caught his
attention on it and backed off sullenly. Things would be different when the
pack arrived, but for the moment a single dog was no match for an armed human.

Eddie was relieved. He was unsure how to operate the somewhat overcomplicated
control mechanisms of the rifle anyway. Besides, the gun was still chained to
the surprisingly heavy mass of a severed forearm, and he didn’t feel up to
trying to detach it.

He dropped the arm and gun to the blood-washed dirt and looked down on their
previous owner. The guy was mangled and paralysed but still just barely alive.
One of the jackgangers.

Eddie had always been confused by the way in which some people could take a
look at some gangcult, read the crawling mass of insignia and tattoos and go,
“Aha! These are obviously the Clan of the Leaping Viper, operating out of the
Los Palamos barrios and the scourge of the area between InterStat checkpoints
703 and 709 inclusive!” and the like.

He strongly suspected, since the only way you could walk away from a gangcult
was to leave them dead, you could say what you like about them after you
did—and so these people who had walked away just made all the tough-sounding
names up.