by Jack Yeovil
“Nathan.”
“Thank you, Trooper Stack.”
Federico rolled forwards. This was a righteous piece of rolling stock. Its elegant curves made the typical US Cav cruiser look like a dray horse next to a she-panther.
“Do we get breakfast?”
“There are some N-R-G candies in the glove compartment. Oh, and some cherries.”
Stack pulled the bag of fruit out, and chain-popped cherries until his mouth was full of stones.
“You must be loaded, sister.”
She shifted her shoulders. “I’m on generous expenses. Fruit is essential to a balanced diet.”
“Essential it may be, but that doesn’t make it cheap.”
She shrugged again. That was a characteristic European gesture, Stack thought, the famous ca va shrug.
He spat the stones into his hand, and threw them out of the window. Maybe they would seed the desert.
“Now,” she said, “where’s the Church of St Werburgh’s?”
“You see that half-destroyed building over there?”
“Yes.”
“Well, like they told me, follow the trail of death and destruction through town and you can’t miss it.”
“This may be boring for you, I’m sorry. I shall take you back to the fort when I’ve finished.”
“I’ll come along for the ride. I don’t mind.”
“That’s good then.”
They drove slowly over the bumpy, wreckage-strewn ground.
“Federico,” she said to a voice-activated console.
“Buon giorno, sorella.”
“Good morning. Could you book me a satellite channel, please. I’m going to want to talk to Rome. If you can raise DeAngelis, I would be especially pleased. If not, Edwina will do.”
Federico beeped an affirmative, and got working on it. Stack realized he was flying in very high circles. He doubted if Brevet Major General Younger could as casually get airtime on a satellite link.
Chantal gasped, as if someone had slapped her across the face with a rope-end. Stack followed her eyeline.
She was looking at the raped ruin of the church.
V
Rintoon had doubled the guards, but that hadn’t stopped the murderer or murderers from striking nine more times during the night. Cat Finney had retired with an automatic pistol under her pillow, her cubicle lock scrambled and a desk against it. She hadn’t slept much. No one who had got a good look at Younger’s kitchen would sleep well for months.
At the morning briefing, Rintoon gave a report.
“Rexroth is an unconfirmed kill. It is possible, indeed probable, that we should count him as a suicide…”
“In that case, sir, where’s his gun?”
“Good question… er… Badalamenti. His weapon may have been… er… appropriated by personnel unknown prior to Captain Lauderdale’s discovery of the body.”
Finney was in yesterday’s uniform. It was still discoloured from her climb up the liftshaft. Slung over the back of a chair, it had been the easiest thing to find this morning. She didn’t want to admit to it, but her childhood fear of the closet might just have come creeping back. All through the night, she had been waking up and looking at the slats of the closet door, wondering absurdly if the killer might not be lurking within. Her clean uniforms were in the closet, and they would probably stay there until the crisis was over. Rintoon hadn’t slept at all, and was looking wilder by the minute. She found it difficult to connect the hypertense, unshaven, neon-eyed c-i-c of this morning with yesterday’s smug, complacent, new-pin-neat Number Two. There was something increasingly familiar about him, though, as if he were metamorphosing into a different, truer, more immediately recognizable shape.
“So, if we leave Rexroth out of the reckoning, and setting aside Brevet Major General Younger, we have eight more VUEs to log and deal with.”
VUE. That was a new one on her. Captain Badalamenti, obviously too smart for his own advancement, questioned the acronym.
“VUE, Badalamenti. Violent Unknown Event.”
Major Hendry Faulcon, next down the chain of command after Rintoon, was a five o’clock shadow man. He shaved two or three times a day. He had had late duties last night, and had tried to shave at about eleven-thirty. As far as anybody could tell, the electric razor in his quarters had slithered out of his grip and buzzed halfway down his gullet. He had died of a combination of suffocation and drowning in his own blood. A typical VUE.
Major R J. “Howling Paul” McAuley was dead in his shower, microneedles peppering his torso. Dr Wilma King, the fort’s senior medico, had rotted away from exposure to a source of intense radiation in her surgery. S. M. “Max the Bax” Baxter, a middle-management Op at T-H-R mopping up the paperwork after the joint action, had been put out of commission by everybody’s favourite murder weapon, the unidentified blunt instrument. Captains Garnett and Stableford had been napalmed in their bunks—and they’d taken the same precautions Finney had. Top Sergeant Alexander Stewart was crushed under the wheels of a cruiser whose transmission he was supposed to be fixing. And Trooper Charlie Stross, in the guardhouse for mouthing back to Sergeant Quincannon after a twenty-mile forced march through the desert in full pack and gear, was mysteriously gone from his cell leaving only a couple of severed fingers, some cabbalistic symbols traced in blood and a chunk of what had tentatively been identified as a pancreas.
Everybody around the table was looking ill. There were more than enough empty places in the briefing room. Badalamenti was nervously tearing a page of notepaper into animal shapes. Captain Lauderdale and Lieutenant Williford had turned out in combat gear, M–29s and all, obviously assuming that Fort Apache was on a war footing. Lieutenant Colosanto—who had been bunking with Rexroth—was chewing aspirin as if they were mints. Finney was on her third cup of recaff, and she usually couldn’t finish her first.
“I have come to a conclusion,” Rintoon began.
Everyone grudgingly paid attention.
“This post is under attack.”
The disappointment was palpable.
“And I am reasonably certain that I have isolated the culprits.”
Everyone perked up again. Lauderdale straightened his rifle on the table in front of him, ready for action.
“I believe…”
Rintoon took a gulp of cold recaff.
“Yes?” said Badalamenti.
Rintoon swallowed. “The Maniax are responsible.”
Badalamenti rolled his eyes upwards, and pointed to his head. Rintoon didn’t notice, and continued…
“The joint action has hurt them, and this is their last ditch attempt to break the US Cav.”
“But…” someone said before catching the glint in Rintoon’s red-rimmed eyes.
“It was Baxter’s death that tipped their hand. He was materially involved in planning the strategy of the joint action. He must be a prime target for the Grand Exalted Bullmoose and his remaining followers.
“Baxter was a pen-pusher, sir,” said Badalamenti. “He was just processing expenses and payments. He never went into the field in his life.”
Finney fought to keep her control. The recaff had done its damage. She felt as if she had been punched in the kidneys.
Rintoon smiled at Badalamenti, and Finney felt the ice seep through her veins. The smile widened to a grin, and the eyebrows flared.
Finney realized where she had seen a face like that before. Rintoon was looking more and more like Jack Nicholson in the last scenes of The Shining. The scenes where he goes after his wife and child with an axe.
“The Maniax are guilty, Badalamenti. Guilty, guilty, GUILTY!”
Badalamenti stood up. “The Maniax are finished, sir! We creamed ’em. We broke their central structure. We blew up their munitions dump. We rounded up the chapter heads.”
“There’s still the Bullmoose!”
“There’s no such animal! All the ringleaders, they were all the Bullmoose, sir. It was a floating office. They’ve admitted as much.”
> “Sit down and listen, Badalamenti, or I shall be forced to discipline you immediately. I will not tolerate these outbursts. I will not, not, NOT!”
Rintoon thumped the table. Polystyrene recaff cups jumped. Finney mopped the mess spilling towards her lap up with her sleeve. Badalamenti looked around for support, found none, and slumped back in his chair.
“The Maniax are clever,” continued Rintoon. “Yes, they are. They’ve sustained a killing blow. We can credit ourselves with that. But this is their last mission. They’re going kamikaze. They’ve infiltrated spies into the fort, and subversives and assassins and agents provocateurs. It’s the only feasable explanation.”
No one said anything. There was a dribble of saliva dangling from Rintoon’s mouth, tracking through his stubble.
“The supposed Swiss woman, Juillerat, was one of them. She was there at the original UE, when she influenced the instruments. It was monitor error, as I always insisted…”
All Rintoon needed to complete the picture was a pair of ball-bearings to clack together in his hand.
“And Rexroth was in it too. He was unable to live with the guilt, and shot himself. And Stross, who was killed by his confederates because he was about to talk. I have determined the existence of a conspiracy of treachery on a scale unheard-of since the 1950s.”
Colosanto bit down loudly on a pill. Badalamenti shoved his paper animals about on his blotter.
“And I shall not rest until I have rooted out this conspiracy and exterminated it down to its very last member.”
Lauderdale was easing his rifle off the table. Was he planning to scrag Rintoon? At this point, he would have won a vote of confidence if he did.
“I believe there are Maniax among us, even in this room.”
Everybody sat up and looked at each other. Then, they looked to Rintoon.
“By his words and his actions this morning, he has given himself away. They think they’re clever, these hophead damfool gangcultists, but the zeroids never reckoned they’d be coming up against Vladek W. Rintoon. No siree. Ole Vladek W. Rintoon has them outfoxed eight ways from sundown.”
Badalamenti was statue-still now.
“Yup, there’s a Maniak at this very table.”
Badalamenti very slowly spread his hands out before him. Rintoon looked at everyone in turn. Finney tried to look away from his shining, moist eyes, but couldn’t. He seemed to see clearly right through her, to sense every petty dereliction of duty, every resistance to command, every infraction of the rules, every sinful course carried through or merely considered. Then, his terrible gaze was gone, and it was Colosanto’s turn to sweat.
Finally, Rintoon grinned his feral sardonicus grin and almost whispered, “Williford.”
The officer sat bolt upright, rifle raised in the present-arms position in front of him.
“Williford,” Rintoon cajoled, “Simon says ‘take your rifle…’”
He had the gun to his shoulder now, and was standing up.
“… and execute Captain Badalamenti.”’
VI
Chantal spent a few minutes kneeling by the priest’s corpse. She seemed to be looking into his dead, open eyes, as if trying to get him to reveal something to her through telepathy. It made Stack feel uncomfortable. Flies were buzzing around the body. In this heat, they would have to get him in the ground quickly. Finally, the woman got up, and gently shut the corpse’s eyes. She muttered something and crossed herself. She walked around the cruiser, and the wreck of the altar.
“Careful,” he said. “It was quiet yesterday, too, but I got a nasty shock.”
“Yes, you would have. Don’t worry. It’s gone now.”
She was at the altar now. She had it working.
“It got into the system here, from your cruiser. But how did it get into the cruiser?”
“It?”
She waved him away. “I’m sorry. I was thinking aloud.”
Some of the altar’s functions were down. The screen flashed green at her. She experimented with several buttons, and finally it turned off. Stack nerved up the courage to approach the cruiser. He touched it. He felt the bullet-scars in the hood. Someone had used pretty major firepower against it.
Chantal was asking a question. “Before the… uh, change… before that, what exactly was happening to the automobile?”
That seemed like a long time ago. He remembered Leona walking around the car. Ken Kling—the poor obnoxious dead bastard—had called her “cowgirl” and asked her to get him something, a co-cola. She had hoped to have some of Slim’s B-B-Q.
“Gas. Slim was filling the gastank.”
“Hmmn,” Chantal was pensive. “No. It couldn’t be in the gas. Wrong medium. Was there any other kind of contact?”
“Just the usual systems check. Slim was on the yaks’ payroll. His place was well set-up. We always had him look at the cruiser’s whole works.”
Chantal snapped her fingers. “That would be the point of possession, then.”
“Possession?”
Chantal was bent down by the crushed front of the cruiser now, tapping at the spike linking it to the altar.
“Yes, possessed. Your car was under the influence of a demon.”
This was crazy.
“Like, Linda Blair or something?”
“Something like. A demon is a lot of things. You might like to think of it as a computer program that infects a given system and changes its function.”
“Like a virus, or a sleeper?”
“Yes, very good. Exactly like a virus. An engineered virus, of course. This was a deliberate act of aggression. Not a chance mutation.”
Stack was having difficulty keeping up. Chantal had raised the hood, and was poking around near the engine.
“Ingenious adaption. It leeched surplus metals from the body of the cruiser and melted them down to form the channeling spike. It must be a fast-breeder. It’ll be replicating like a plague out there.”
Stack’s head hurt. It usually did when he had to do any serious thinking. “Let me get this straight? There was something in the works at Slim’s?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“That makes sense. He said his hardware had gone crazy. And this… demon… downloaded into the cruiser, and made it run amok.”
Chantal raised a finger like a teacher correcting a point. “Not amok. It was very purposeful. It came straight here, to this church, and insinuated itself into the altar system. It did exactly what it was invoked to do. It’s deep in the datanet now, and it has to be stopped.”
“This demon? It’s just a computer virus, right? No spook stuff?”
Chantal looked at him. Her expression was serious.
“There is spook stuff.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid so. You’re not going to find any of this easy to cope with. Do you have any religious faith?”
“Daddy was a Baptist. I guess I’m not anything.”
“Well, in that case, a demon is a computer virus.”
“Come on, Chantal.”
Patiently, she sat on the ruined hood of the cruiser and explained it to him. “And it’s also a supernatural entity, an immortal creature, a servant of the Devil. It was summoned from Hell by a powerful diabolist, and it has been deployed in a deliberate attack on the Catholic Church and upon the information exchanges of the United States of America. It will remain in the channels until it has been exorcised.”
“Sister, who the freak are you?”
Chantal looked at him as his question echoed. Somewhere, water was gushing. Holy water, he remembered. Chantal sighed, and shook her head. She was having trouble putting the words together.
“Nathan,” she said, “I’m a nun.”
Part Six: Holy Orders
I
Lucerne, Switzerland, 1982
“Chantal,” snapped Mlle Fournier, her nanny, “Papa is busy. You mustn’t bother him.”
“No, no, that’s all right,” said her father. “Papa should never be too busy for his bon-
bon. How are your classes, darling? How’s the ballet coming?”
Chantal sucked her lips in, and wondered whether she should ask her questions. She was nearly eight. She shouldn’t need to keep asking grown-ups things. She could read. She could use the villa’s terminal and tap into the infonet. Her tutors said she was supposed to have an IQ in the upper 170s.
“Come here,” said Thomas Juillerat, turning away from his paper-strewn desk and beckoning. She ran to his arms. “Do you want a consultation?”
Chantal nodded, trying not to cringe as papa ran his stubby fingers through her long, dark hair. He wasn’t used to children, and he hurt her sometimes without meaning to.
“Do you know how much your Papa usually charges for a consultation?” asked Mlle Fournier, sternly, “fifty thousand Swiss francs. More in European Currency Units.”
Papa was embarrassed. He settled Chantal more comfortably in his lap.
“Mlle Fournier, could you get me some coffee, and lemonade for the little madame?”
Mlle Fournier’s eyes narrowed in that way only Chantal seemed to notice, nodded, and left the room. It was late, nearly her bed-time, but Papa didn’t know when she was supposed to go to bed. In the autumn, when she went back to Milan, Mama would be annoyed to find out how often she had been allowed to stay up late over the summer. When she was annoyed, Mama went into a huddle with Father Daguerre, her confessor, and sorted it out.
“Now, what is it you want to know, mon petit choux? Will I need my law books?”
Chantal wasn’t sure. This might not be a good idea. She remembered how Father Daguerre had reacted when she asked him why Marcello, the boy next door, kept putting his hand in his shorts and moving his penis around. But she had gone too far to back down. She took a deep breath.
“Papa, what is it you do?”
Papa seemed bemused by the question. Like most grownups, he wasn’t entirely comfortable around Chantal. The difference was that he was sorry for his feelings, and tried not to let them show.
“You know that, Chantal. I’m a lawyer. I work mainly for the Swiss Business Commission.”
“Yes, yes, yes. But what do you do?”
Papa shifted Chantal off his lap and sat her on the desk. Papers scrunched under her bottom. He took off his thick glasses.