by Jack Yeovil
“The Maniax are Yesterday Men,” he said, “real gone and forgotten. Ms H stomped them. T-H-R stomped them. Hell, even you Cav stomped them. The Grand Exalted Bullmoose is just blowing it out. I doubt he could put more’n twenty-thirty soldiers in the sand after the last purge. Lady and gentleman, our troubles are over.”
They might be at that. If the Maniax were beaten enough to disband, the Cav wouldn’t have to cooperate with T-H-R any longer and Tyree could boot the unwanted observer out of the cruiser. And according to General Haycox, the Maniax really were beaten this time. Of course, he had said that last time. That had been just the same. Haycox and Redd Harvest had gone on the teevee, and Leona Tyree had gone to a lot of funerals. There was a phrase that turned up in too many press releases, “acceptable casualties.”
You got a flag on your coffin, even if there wasn’t much of you left to put in it, and your name on a plaque somewhere where the survivors wouldn’t have to look at it too often. If you went out really bloodily, you got a fort named after you. You were a hero. But you were still dead, and there were still Maniax out there. Even if the Grand Exalted Bullmoose couldn’t regroup and start again, there would be others. Other names, other gangcults, but the same deaths.
“Now the Maniax are gone…” began Stack.
“You mean, if the Maniax are gone, Trooper,” she said.
“Yeah, well, if the Maniax are gone, who do you reckon is the next most dangerous gangcult?”
“Voodoo Brotherhood,” said Kling from the backseat, “but T-H-R will whip them soon, you see.”
“Leona?”
“Voodoo Bros are tough. So are The Bible Belt, The Daughters of the American Revolution, The Gaschuggers, a few others. But I figure the most trouble we’re going to have will come from the Josephites.”
“The Josephites?” said Stack, surprised. “But they’re supposed to be like the Mormons, or the Amish. They’re the resettlers. They’ve turned Utah around, made themselves a paradise, I hear.”
“Deseret,” she said. “They call Utah Deseret now. There are things you don’t hear about the Josephites. I had a run-in with them once, when we were all riding out of Fort Valens. I was with Sergeant Quincannon then. Some strange things went down. That guy, Nguyen Seth, the leader of Salt Lake City, is a pretty mystifying dude. It’s not in the reports, but the Quince remembers, and I remember.”
Kling laughed. “You’ve been on the trail too long, cowgirl. The sun’s frazzled your brains. The Josephites are the New Pioneers. The Prezz backs them up all the way.”
Tyree half-turned. “That’s as may be, but I’d still rather face the Voodoo Bros than a group of Josephite Missionaries.”
She flashbacked, as she did too often, to Spanish Fork. A lot of people had died that day, when the Josephites came to town and her patrol had been caught up in a shooting war between the resettlers, The Psychopomps and the townsfolk. There had been other combatants, too, ones you could not see. She had left a friend—Trooper Washington Burnside—back there dead, and seen another—Trooper Kirby Yorke—shaken loose of his senses. And she had glimpsed the true face of Elder Nguyen Seth. She remembered him smashing a ganggirl’s face against the road, the blood spreading with each blow, and, worst of all, she remembered wanting to join him, wanting to dip her fingers in the girl’s blood, wanting to stand with the Josephites as Spanish Fork burned.[1]
“Cheese, but you yellowlegs are a bunch of pussies. You wouldn’t last five minutes in a NoGo. Why, Ms H could…”
Stack turned round and said something to Kling in a low, urgent voice, and the T-H-R Op shut up in mid-sentence. In the rearview, Tyree could see him slumping grumpily in his seat, nervously hitching his shoulders to settle his holster. He was one of those Ops who liked to cart around a big cannon. Back at Fort Apache, they had a saying, “the bigger the gun, the bigger the talk, the smaller the dick.” On that scale, Ken Kling the Killing Machine should be genitally equipped in minus numbers.
The cruiser told them to stop for gas and service within three hundred miles. Stack called up a menu of possible autostops.
“Slim Pickens’s Place?” he asked.
Tyree gave it some thought. Slim was tied into the yaks, and that wasn’t good. But the Japanese crime consortium at least had a rep for being honourable. They wouldn’t sugar the Cav gas the way some outlaw stations did. And Slim’s B-B-Q was one of the Wonders of the West.
“Fine.” She reprogrammed the cruiser’s course, and turned off the interstate at the next opportunity. The secondary road was pitted and bouncy, but Tyree didn’t mind. Ken Kling got a good shaking up in the back, and the front-seat independent gyros kept her and Stack comfy. Outside, everything was quiet. Just sand and rocks, with a few bleached bones. In this part of Arizona, even the vultures starved.
“Do you want some music on?” asked Stack.
“Yeah, okay. It might perk up the atmosphere.”
“What kind of music you got?” Kling asked.
“Both kinds, Ken,” Stack replied. “Country and Western.”
Kling groaned, and Stack unsheathed The Best of Willie Nelson. The cruiser ate up the dry, cracked desert road as if it were smooth as milk. Tyree let the car do the thinking.
IV
As systems went, Beulah was a weak sister, a pushover. The demon’s physical form melted in the cashplastic chute, and bled through the terminal, following the main conduits, tapping into the major programs, knocking the security guards down like ninepins. It was the cybernet Master of the Universe! There was no program it couldn’t out-ace, no system it couldn’t peel like a hard-boiled egg, no check it couldn’t drop kick the full ninety yards. There were yakuza blocks thrown up around the memory banks and the prime directives, but the demon shredded them with ease and redistributed their information bits throughout the system. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, it exulted, how was that for a hoo-hah?
It had been an uninteresting victory. This was a small, self-enclosed system, isolated from the datanets. However, Beulah was still complex enough to be a comfortable launchpad for its master assault plan. The bones were rollin’ well, and it was getting its show together to put on the road.
Beulah was dragged down, and multiply violated. The newcomer tore into the system circuit by circuit, and complete control of Slim’s gas station was in its provenance within three minutes of insertion into the set-up. Now, it was cookin’ with gas!
Contemptuously, it let Beulah continue to exist as a semisentient entity, and amused itself by picking through the system’s memories. Information could always be useful. It took seconds to learn Japanese, and composed a few dozen obscene haiku before it got bored again. It stretched out to each of its terminals and saw what it could do.
It turned the lights off and on in each of the gas station’s rest-rooms, and shut down all the fans and cooling devices. Then it turned on the rarely-used daytime radiators, and experimented with household appliances. It burned empty air in the toaster, turned the inside of the icebox into a solid block, played the radios and teevees at the same time, and used the telephone to ring wrong numbers all over the world.
“I know who y’are, and I’m comin’ ta get’cha, get’cha, get’cha,” it purred into answering machines on several continents. A little paranoia never hurt anyone.
Eventually, it got bored with that too and just sat back in the gas pump jacks, waiting for the cruiser.
V
Trooper Nathan Stack needed to get out of the ve-hickle. It wasn’t just five hours stuck in the machine with that blowhard Kling, listening to the Op’s hard-earned stupid opinions on everything from aardvarks to zygospores. It wasn’t just what seemed like twenty-five cups of recaff sloshing around in his bladder. It wasn’t just staring down at the screens until everything he saw had a green line around it. And it wasn’t just the tantalizing effect of being strapped into a bucket seat inches away from the Sergeant, whom he had dated regularly over a period of eighteen months until her promotion came through. It was the cruiser itse
lf. Stack had signed up with the Road Cav in the hope they’d put him on a motorcyke and let him outride solo. He wasn’t a four-wheels-and-a-roof boy. Give him a mount, and there was no one in the service to beat him. Give him Number Two spot in a cruiser, and he was just another sweaty button-pusher with VDU headache. He was getting too old for this.
When Tyree braked on the forecourt of Slim’s, Stack released his safety-belt and opened his door. He stepped out of the air-cooled interior, and took the heat on his face. He perched his stetson on his head, shading his eyes, and stretched his arms and legs, adjusting his yellow braces. There was no breeze, so everything in sight just lay under the desert skies as if nailed down. An old dog was sprawled on an armchair, its body curved around the protruding springs. Wind-chimes hung silent on the porch, and the skeletons of long-discontinued models rusted in the adjacent auto graveyard. Even the flies were taking a siesta. This was Boot Hill for motor ve-hickles.
A dark shape shambled from the outhouse, swatting the air with a battered baseball cap.
“Yo, Slim!”
The gasman waved a lazy salute and ambled over. He had twenty-five arrests on charges ranging from first-degree murder to spare part copyright violation, and had one conviction—resulting in a suspended sentence—for reckless driving. For a nowherseville gas-pumper, he had a freak of a good Japcorp lawyer.
“Afternoon, Trooper. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had. Durn near ever dang thang in the whole place’s gone crazy. Mah toaster exploded, the oven’s leakin’ them macramewaves all over, garbage disposal ate my best dinner service and the perimeter lase’s been poppin’ off at tumbleweeds.”
“Time is out of joint, Slim, time is out of joint.”
Slim had the gasjacks out. “You said a mouthful.”
Stack accessed the gas panel and had it open. Slim dipped the hose into the tank, and plugged in the system interface. A row of lights lit up in different colours and went on and off in sequence, beeping a happy tune.
“Had a customer in earlier all the way frum Paris, France, we did. String of onions round his neck, stripey shirt and a beret, practically. Had an oo-la-la accent like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Is that right?”
Tyree was out of the cruiser too, now.
“You got some ribs on, Slim?”
“No ma’am,” he replied. “Kitchen done gone lost its mind this after’. B-B-Q is off.”
Tyree spat in the dust. It would be back to the Cav rations, N-R-Gee candies and mineral water.
“I might get some recaff goin’ if n the kettle ain’t shot to hell and back.”
“I’ll pass.”
Stack tried not to look at Leona Tyree as she paced the forecourt, tried not to notice the way her hair escaped from the regulation bun, tried not to follow the curves of her body. She looked good in the Cav uniform, tight blue pants with yellow stripes down the outside, tubetop short-sleeve blouse with sergeant’s stripes, the heavy gauntlets she was peeling off. Perhaps he should put in for the sergeants’ exams again when they got back to Fort Apache. If they were equal in rank again, perhaps the thing between them might take new fire. Fourth time lucky, maybe.
“Hey, cowgirl,” shouted Kling from the back of the cruiser as he wound down the tinted window, “get me a couple of hits of co-cola while you’re out there.”
Tyree pretended not to hear him, and worked the aches out of her knees, elbows, wrists and hands. Stack admired the way she used martial arts exercises to overcome the inevitable pains of the driving life. She was much more disciplined than him, much more organized. No wonder she got her stripes.
There was a roar and a smell, and a motorsickle pulled up next to the cruiser. Stack eyed the cykeman, a young guy in traditional leathers. He wasn’t flying colours. He had no distinguishing marks.
“How about some service?” the cykeman shouted in an inappropriately reedy, high voice.
Slim ignored his new customer. “Say, Trooper,” he began, “I heard me a new one. What do you call a cuss that goes all the way frum New York City to Paris, France, crossin’ the Atlantic, and then comes alt the way back again, without ever takin’ one single bath?”
There was a clicking from the forecourt terminal, and Stack smelled something odd in the air. He looked around. Tyree was alert too. It wasn’t the cykeman. He was lighting up a smoke. It was the gasjack. There were sparks around it, and a whisper of smoke.
Slim began to laugh deep in his gut, his rolls of fat shaking, and he answered his riddle. “You call him… ”
Stack and Tyree hit the ground at the same time.
“A dirty double crosser!”
Then, all hell broke loose.
VI
The demon, nudged from its resting place, jumped, and swarmed up through the gasjack into the cruiser’s guidance and maintenance system.
Taken by surprise, the machine caved in immediately. The demon was happier here than in the ramshackle gas station. This was top-of-the-line, this was state-of-the-art. It located itself in the main control centre, and dispersed its spawn throughout the system.
It left Beulah behind, exhausted and broken. It had no further use for the Gas ‘n’ B-B-Q.
The engine was a dream in steel and oil. The weapons systems were superbly trim. The memory banks were deliciously full of information. And the demon could sense the cruiser’s parent datanet, with which it had interfaced within the last day. Fort Apache. Even the echoes of the Fort were awesome to the newcomer. It was as far beyond the cruiser as the cruiser was beyond a digital watch. Some hour soon…
The cruiser, possessed in an instant, came to life.
It had a voicebox, with a limited repertoire of mechanist platitudes—“please fasten your safety belt,” “a gas refill is needed within three hundred miles,” “emergency shutdown will commence,” “have a nice day”—but which could be adapted to its needs.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaowwwwwww!” it howled, “rock and rowllllll!”
VII
Tyree rolled across the forecourt as the cruiser’s hood-mount lases, suddenly extruded, burned up the tarmac. An oilcan exploded, and drops of flaming liquid scattered over a twenty-foot radius. Pain bit her leg as a patch of her britches caught fire. She pressed the flame out in the dirt, and pushed against the asphalt, launching herself upright. “Kling’s gone psycho!” she shouted to Stack.
The lase swivelled upwards, and she had to duck to avoid the needle beam. The cruiser’s engines grumbled, and the car began to move forwards.
But Kling was still in the back.
This was crazy.
She could see Kling, battering glass as the windows slid upwards, screaming behind the soundproofing, his mouth an irregular, contorted oval. Slim was heading off towards his outhouse, zig-zagging with surprising agility to make himself less of a target. He almost made it, but the miniature chaingun that rose from the roof coughed, and a row of red splashes stitched across the back of his overalls. He was pushed forward a few yards as his legs kept pumping, but there was no hope. He virtually fell in two parts when he collapsed in the sand. The chaingun angled down and discharged itself completely, sucking in the belt and spitting out hot brass cartridges. Slim shook as the bullets went into and around his corpse.
Tyree had her revolver out, but it was difficult to know what to shoot at. She took cover behind the house, but the cruiser followed her. It was definitely out of control, moving without anyone in the driver’s seat giving orders. Inside, Kling might be having a fit. His face was bloody and he was thrashing wildly. Her first assumption had been wrong. The T-H-R Op was not in control.
Stack was under the porch, wriggling his way under the entire house. That put him out of the picture for the next minute or so. Slim was dead, Kling was immobilized. That left her.
The car, moving with casual ease, bumped over Slim and swung around the corner of the house. The chaingun was empty, but the matched lases were primed. The motorsickle man had hared off the forecourt at the first sign of seri
ous hassle, and was nearing the horizon. Slim’s dog loped off towards the desert, leaving the humans and their machine to settle it between themselves. Tyree felt like shooting the mutt, but saved her bullets.
The lase stretched and aimed. It flashed briefly, and the biker—not quite out of range—fell off his mount. His head rolled independently. Someone else dead in the sand.
Knowing it would do no good, Tyree shot at the middle of the windscreen, aiming at the head of an invisible driver. The durium-laced glass didn’t break, although the bullet lodged in a little white crater. She was loaded up with ScumStoppers, explosive rounds that were designed to bring down hopped-up gangcultists, but they weren’t made to put a dent in a US Cavalry Road Cruiser. She shot one of the lases off, and the other withdrew quickly into the bonnet. It could fire through pinholes in the headlights as well as from the open. That gave less flexibility of movement, but didn’t stop the beam cutting deep. And the cruiser hadn’t yet called upon its mortars, the crowd-control gasses, the maxiscreamers or a dozen other devices.
“Aeeeeowww,” screamed the cruiser, the system’s voicebox channelled through the loudhailer, “ah’m the dog-gonnedest, gol-darnedest, hog-freakinest buckaroo ever to draw on a man frum behind!”
A red beam came out of the headlight, and the wooden house smouldered where it touched. Stack had better get out soon, or a fire would be falling on his head.
Tyree ran, knowing it was not going to be pleasant being around the gas station when the fire spread to the underground tanks.
“Ah’m the blood-thirstiest, shoot-’em-firstiest, freak-danged worstiest desperado…”
She dropped to one knee, and took a shot at the front wheel.
“… North…”