by Jack Yeovil
Outside, the Sun was setting. But there was Light blazing.
For an instant, the demon knew Fear. Then, it felt better within itself. The Light was a puny, paltry thing. The Light could be dispelled.
The sun was down. And night-time was the right-time for the rituals of blood and iron. Night was for the masters, not the slaves.
It launched all the fort’s missiles, trusting them to find targets in the desert somewhere.
“Just gimme that rock and roll carnage!” it screeched, sending feedback throughout the fort.
“Two-four-six-eight, time to de-cap-it-ate!” An orderly halfway through a dumbwaiter hatch found the door slicing down.
“Three-five-seven-nine, killin’ folks makes me feel fine…”
A chaingun above the courtyard opened up. Troopers scattered or fell.
“This is the life,” the demon thought to itself.
VII
The moon was up. In the desert, the temperature had plunged. Stack, in his shirtsleeves, was shivering as he darted from cover to cover. Lauderdale’s androids were still tracking him. One of his knees had popped, and every step was like taking a bullet in the leg.
A while back there had been a mess of explosions. Fort Apache had fired its missiles. Even if there hadn’t been any nukes in the parcel, a lot of damage must have been done in Havasu. Stack wondered if the bridge had got it. That would be a shame. It had come a long way to wind up in pieces in a dried-up river.
Sooner or later, he would drop from exhaustion, and the patient robots would bear down, lases slicing, electrodes primed. That would be it. Stack hoped Chantal was making some difference, because he was certainly out of the picture.
Thirty-eight wasn’t so young to die these days. It was more years than Mozart had managed, than Keats, than Alexander the Great, than Billy the Kid, than Bruce Lee, than Jean Harlow, than James Dean, than Chuck Berry… And Leona Tyree, who had been thirty-three last month. And Miss Unleaded, who probably hadn’t made fifteen.
He thought he couldn’t hear out of his left ear, which was gummed up with blood. His knee was on the point of giving out completely.
The Oscars moved silently, without fatigue, without sustaining wounds. His sidearm was about as useful against them as a cap pistol, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away.
He felt as if he was wading through a fast-running stream. His shins were frozen. The cold was numbing, almost pleasantly so. His aches and pains faded.
Finally, his legs refused to work, and he pitched face-first into the fast-cooling sand.
He crawled a few yards, his bruised chest flaring up as he rubbed it against the ground.
He heaved himself onto his back, and looked up at the silver circle of the moon. As a kid, watching Star Wars, he had wanted to be part of the space program. He had tried out, but came along just too late, just after the moonbase fiasco and the final collapse of the Satellite Weapons Systems. Uncle Sam hadn’t been in the market for spacemen. And so it had had to be the Cav. Obi-Wan wasn’t being any help.
He called upon the Force. Nothing. He was still incapable. He thought he heard heavy, thumping footsteps. The Oscars were closing in.
He prayed. Chantal would have liked that, he thought. He still couldn’t believe that the Op was a nun.
He heard something besides the marching androids. Out in the sand, somewhere. Something was coming, something that clumped, but jingled, almost subaudially, at the same time.
He rolled over, and looked across the desert. The dunes were silvered by the moonlight, and a figure was moving fast, coming at him out of the Great Empty.
Great. Someone else to try to kill him. It was open season on US Cav tonight.
At first, Stack thought the stranger was on a motorsickle. But the shape was too tall, and lurched too much.
It was someone on a horse. The jingling he heard was spurs. There was something magical about the sight, as if one of the ghosts of the West were galloping out of the Past to be in at the kill. Who was it? Wyatt Earp? The Lone Ranger? Shane? Sir Lancelot?
From the other direction strode the four remaining Oscars, the shining, soulless embodiment of the techno-fascist’s Utopia of the future. They were the mechanist nightmare made metal and plastic and glass. One of them would have a nuclear heart, ready to burst with loving death at the touch of a button
Between the past and the future, crippled in the present, Stack pushed at the ground. His knee burned inside.
The horseman came onwards. In the still night, Stack could hear the horse breathing heavy, the slap of the rider’s legs against his mount’s flanks, the thump of his saddlebags.
The stranger got to him first. Stack forced himself to stand up, but the rider still towered over him. He wore a long slicker, a battered grey hat that seemed to sparkle in the moonlight, and had his neckerchief up over his mouth and nose. The horse was a grey, tall and well-muscled, steaming in the night. It reared up, and the rider kept his seat. Outlined in the moonglow, the apparition was awe-inspiring. Stack felt tears stand out in the corners of his eyes, and his spine tingled with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.
A lase beamed by from the Oscars, cutting empty air.
The horseman pulled his kerchief away from his face. It was lined and leathery, but his blue eyes were sharp and strong. He had a shaggy moustache and a strong jaw, hawk’s cheekbones and white-blonde hair.
“Son,” he said to Stack, “you look like you need a friendly gun.”
VIII
“I think we’re in time,” Chantal said, squeezing into the confined space. “It’s just here. It hasn’t seeded into the communications channels.”
“What does that mean?” Finney asked.
“It’s trapped. In the fort. If we’re lucky, we can slam the door on it. Can we seal all the electronic egresses?”
Finney looked at the monitors. “Most of them are down anyway. The datanets pulled out. We’re just on the straight Cav line.”
“Can that be shut off?”
“Well… there are back-ups, and Standing Orders are that the line should never be terminated under any circumstances.”
“Can it be done?”
Finney nearly smiled. “Not officially. Not from the Ops Centre.” She thumbed towards the low ceiling. “Everything is shut up behind durium panels, but down here there are wires. Sergeant, pass me the clippers.”
Quincannon handed Finney the pair of rubber-handled shears from the toolkit they’d scavved. The Captain snapped at the air. Outside, alarms were still sounding, and voices were coming from all the public address speakers. There were many voices, all taunting, all vicious, all evil…
There were curtains of wires, and circuit-breakers hung in them. The place was the seamy side of the fort, with all the works crammed into a small space and left to gather dust until there was a malfunction. With Chantal at the terminal, it was impossible for either of the others to do more than get their heads and arms into the hole-sized room. One tangled skein of multi-coloured wires combined into a rope and fed into a hole in the concrete. Finney tapped it.
“All the outside channels are here. It’s a weakness, actually. I’ve been trying to get the design changed. Any saboteur could cut the whole place off from the outside world by striking here…”
“Do it.”
Finney opened the shears, and crunched them into the rope. Sparks flew, and meters burst. Chantal covered her face. Finney flinched, and cut again. She wrestled with the rope, which was kicking, and fell back, her hands smoking. The shears hung, embedded in the wires.
Finney waved her hands and shoved them into her armpits. The shears jerked, and arcs danced on the blades.
Quincannon pushed forwards and grabbed the handles, forcing them together. His face showed the strain, but he persisted. The access room was thick with smoke, and Chantal was coughing, her eyes streaming.
The shearblades met, and the rope parted. Quincannon fell back, dropping the tool on the floor.
“Fine. We’ve got the genie in its bottle…”
She pulled the vials of Holy Water—refilled at Welcome—from her belt, and set them on top of the terminal.
She said a brief prayer, and crossed herself. Quincannon and Finney had done their bit. Now it was her turn.
She started tapping the Latin words into the database. It was just a way of getting the demon’s attention, but it ought to give a little pain to the creature.
She tried to think in sync with the system, projecting herself through her fingers into the machine’s space.
Finally, the thing inside turned round and roared its hatred at her.
IX
With a leather-gloved hand, the stranger swept his slicker back from his hip. A pearl-inlay on the stock of his revolver caught the moonlight. In one smooth, easy movement, he drew a six-gun, a long-barreled beauty with a filed-away sight.
The Oscars halted, and stood as still as the monoliths of Stonehenge.
Stack turned, and looked at the machines who had come to kill him. The stranger pointed his gun without seeming to take aim, pulled back the trigger, and fanned the hammer.
Six shots went into the first Oscar in a vertical line from the centre of its visor to its metal crotch. The black holes looked like buttons.
Stack’s breath was held. There weren’t supposed to be bullets that could pierce durium plate like that.
The Oscar leaked fluid from its lower holes, and toppled backwards. Stack felt its impact in his ankles as the ground shook.
The stranger spun his gun on his trigger-finger and holstered it. Then, his hands moving too fast for human eyes, he pulled a repeating rifle from a sling on his saddle.
The Oscars’ visors raised.
Nothing is faster than a lase. It is an instantaneous weapon. It strikes its target simultaneously with its ignition. The beam doesn’t travel through space, it appears in the air and anything in its way is cut through as if a red-hot wire had materialised out of another dimension and the object of the attack happened to be occupying the same space in this world.
The stranger outdrew and outshot three lases.
His hand was a blur as he pulled down the trigger guard lever three times. There were three sharp flames, and three shots.
He put each bullet into the hole in an Oscar’s head.
The night air was sharp with the aftertang of honest gunsmoke. The Oscars collapsed like broken statues.
The stranger’s horse was a little spooked. It shifted, and he gently tugged his reins, calming the beast.
He swung his rifle back into its sheath with an easy motion.
“What is that?” Stack gasped.
“It’s a Henry, son. The 1873, manufactured by old Oliver Winchester himself, to the design of Benjamin Tyler Henry. Best rifle there ever was.”
“A Winchester ’73?”
“Yup.”
Out in the Big Empty, something howled at the full moon. Stack shivered again.
“That thing must be a hundred and twenty-five years old.”
The stranger grinned. His teeth were white and even.
“How can you do that? How can you bring down an armoured android with an… with an antique?”
“You do what you have to, son…”
Stack knew he had gone crazy, and was hallucinating. This was where his brain checked out on him, and he was left to flounder in the desert. All those wounds, all that ju-ju, all the strain. It had finally been too much for him. In retrospect, he was amazed that he had held out against madness so long.
But the stranger was here. There was no doubt about that. The man and his horse were massive, not in size but in substance. This was reality. The stranger pulled a pouch and paper from his waistcoat pocket and rolled himself a cigarette one-handed. He struck a match on the horn of his saddle and lit his smoke.
“Who are you?”
The cigarette burned. “Just a drifter.”
“Where did you come from?”
He threw the cigarette away, ash in the sand, and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“No place special, son,” he waved a hand at the desert, “out there somewhere, I guess.”
Stack’s head hurt. Sand drifted against the Oscars. A wind was rising, whipping the tops of the dunes.
“Why did you come?”
“You needed help. I always try to help.”
The stranger adjusted his hat, fixing it tight to his head. An unheard-of cloud drifted across the face of the moon. No, not a cloud, a shadow. The stranger looked up, a touch of concern in his expression.
“Looks like a sandstorm’s blowing up,” he said. “I’d best be on my way.”
Stack opened his mouth, but had nothing to say.
“So long, pilgrim,” said the stranger, pulling his kerchief up, and turning his horse away.
Stack finally got it out. “Thank you…”
The horse picked up speed, and the stranger’s slicker billowed around him like a white cloak. He raised his hand to clamp his hat to his head, half turned in the saddle, and waved a farewell.
“Thank you, thank you.”
The stranger rode off into the night. Darkness and the wind swallowed him. For a few moments after he was gone, Stack could hear hooves, then there was just the whistling of the wind and the shifting of the sands.
He turned, and walked past the dead Oscars, back towards Fort Apache.
X
Everything was going wrong. The androids weren’t responding. Lauderdale had had Stack in his sights, but a sandstorm had blown up and his viewpoint blanked out. He tried to activate the nuke, but hadn’t been rewarded by a big bang. There was someone in the desert with Stack, but there was no way of telling who. He didn’t like that.
Also, half the Ops Centre had shut down without warning.
Rintoon was still crying “mutiny.”
Lauderdale pushed angrily away from his console, and wheeled around, looking for a course of action.
The demon had stopped coming through the speakers. It was still in the works, Lauderdale knew, but it was busy with its own battle.
What would Elder Seth want him to do now? What was the Path of Joseph?
“I’ll have them all flogged within an inch of their lives!” screamed Rintoon. “Flogged, flogged, FLOGGED!”
The Colonel was making whipping motions with his arm, relishing in his imagination the thwack of leather against flesh.
At least, he was happy.
What to do, what to do?
Lauderdale’s hands were shaking, and his heartbeat was up. He loosened his tunic collar.
“Lay open their backs, and pour salt into the weals…”
Lauderdale was afraid. His mouth was dry and his tongue was swollen. He trembled with the fear that he had lost his way, had strayed from the Path of Joseph.
Elder, help me!
He had bitten his lips and his tongue. There was blood in his mouth.
Blood!
“… stripe ’em with the cat. Nobody defies the will of Colonel Vladek W. Rintoon, and gets away unmarked! Nobody, nobody, NOBODY!”
The Path was clear. Lauderdale would see the way ahead if only he performed one more blood sacrifice.
He looked at the ranting, mad old man and knew what he must do.
The sabre mounted above the map was from the Battle of Washita in 1868. Some people said it was Custer’s. That had been a massacre too. He hummed “Garry Owen,” the tune the 7th Cavalry Band had played that day when the long-haired general put Black Kettle and his sleeping Cheyenne men, women and children to the sword. Not feeling the pain, Lauderdale punched through the glass and gripped the weapon by the hilt. He pulled it free, and swung it in a neat arc towards Rintoon’s neck.
The Colonel paused in mid-rant as the sharp sabre bit deep.
Lauderdale drew the sword from its scabbard of flesh, and plunged it in again.
“Mutiny,” breathed Rintoon. “Mutiny!”
&
nbsp; Lauderdale’s mind went red, and he hacked until his arm was too aching to hold the heavy sword. It clattered on the floor.
Blood pooled around his boots. He dropped to his knees, and washed his face in it.
Blood!
XI
In the mind of the machine, Sister Chantal wrestled with the demon.
It tormented her as it had done before, but with its energies applied a thousandfold. It was like being caged with an angry lion.
“Suffer, sssissster!” It sang in Petya Tcherkassoff’s mainly synthesized voice, “ssssssuffer and burn!”
It wore the faces of her ghosts—her father, her mother, Marcello, Georgi—and screamed obscenities. It tried to force its way into her skull, and make her wallow in filth, rubbing her face into every discarded scrap of herself. Every unfulfilled, unnameable desire, every impulse, every vice was trotted out in brain-filling Technicolor and graphic three-dimensional detail, with stereophonic agony on the soundtrack.
Her fingers tapped the keyboard automatically as she regurgitated the text she had been taught.
The horror show played on.
Mlle Fournier discovered her in the nursery, carving chunks out of Marcello’s chest with a breadknife as she rode the boy to a bloody climax.
“Chantal, Chantal, you wicked child, wicked child, you should be punished, be punissssshed, you sssshould die, die, die…”
Marcello screamed, pain co-mingling with ecstasy.
“Chantal, Chantal, don’t you like me any more? Cut deeper, cut deeper. Cut where the blood runsssssss black…”
In a whore’s bed, while Isabella watched, she was sandwiched between Thomas Juillerat and the Pope, screeching.
“Oh, Chantal, Papa and il papa, how tiressssome of you. And that nightgown, it’s so… ssssssso… 1980s!”
“Mon petit choux…”
“Kissssss my ring, Sister!”