by Jack Yeovil
In the dojo, she scooped out Mother Kazuko’s insides with her bare hands, plunging her knife-hard fingers again and again into the woman’s chest, finally the victor in their eternal pretend-battle.
“Very good, Chantal. More pain, more pain. Kill me, kill me, kill me…”
Back during her battle with the California Diabolists, she hesitated at a crucial moment, and saw Mother Kazuko collapse, the hellspawn crawling over her.
“You nearly got me killed then, Chantal. Now you can finissssh the job.”
She killed her enemies, and exulted in the hunt, the slaughter, the communion of blood. A fallen Gaschugger looked up at her, pleading for the last rites, and she poured napalm into his eyes.
“This is not me,” she told herself.
She jettisoned her mean flesh forever, and poured her consciousness into a datanet, copulating mentally with banks of information, forcing herself into forbidden files, spreading herself out through the world’s cobweb network of datalinks. Father O’Shaughnessy studied her, won Nobel prizes.
“You’re going to die, bitch!”
She pulled her mind out of the maelstrom, and concentrated.
“Die and be damned!”
Chantal fastened on the task at hand, and her fingers fed in the ritual.
“Ssssslut!”
She slipped once. The screen flashed ERROR IN LINE 10: EXURGO IS PAST IMPERFECT TENSE FIRST PERSON-PLEASE ENTER CORRECT TERM directly onto her cerebral cortex. She sped the cursor to the glitch, and made the correction. She pressed RUN, and the Exorcism loaded.
“Die…”
It was terrible. She tried to contain a miniature atomic explosion inside her skull. It was as if she were being broken down into bits of information and built up from the ground again within nanoseconds. The pictures the creature was playing inside her head stretched out of shape, slowed down, crumpled, fragmented. The faces of Mlle Fournier, Isabella, Marcello, Mother Kazuko, Thomas and Georgi collapsed in upon themselves and whirled together, coalescing into a grotesque composite. The many-eyed, many-mouthed face rippled and was surrounded by darkness.
“Bittttch!”
She beheld the true face of the fiend. It wasn’t anything, just a formless chaos, crawling and writhing. Briefly, it was what she had been taught to expect, a horned, cloven-footed, batwinged, beast. But then it was a tentacled blob, wormlike appendages wriggling around a glowing violet nucleus. Then, it wasn’t a body at all, just a foul smell, a dissonant chord, a vile taste.
She clamped her hands together in prayer, and fought the demons inside herself. Finally, all that was left was terror.
But in the terror, there was triumph. The demon was beaten. It could cling for a while, but it was being dislodged from the system.
“The Power of Christ compels you,” she said, sprinkling the Holy Water onto the keyboard. Circuits shorted out inside.
“Freak you, ratskag,” the demon shrieked at her, shrinking away as the water seeped into the wiring.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
She banished the memory of the vicious pictures from her mind, saw how false they were, dispelled the demon’s foul suggestions. Black death bloomed on the screen, the Latin standing out in letters of flame.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
“Gimme some soul, sissstuh. Done let no pore imp go down the tubes. We had some good times together, didn’t we? We boogied til dawn, tired out the band, then freaked till we were peaked, huh? You got the kind of sssugar Daddy lurves. C’mon, done do nothin’ you’ll regret tomorrow.”
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
“Pope’s whore, roundheels sexclone, freaking ratskag, hagwitch, slut-nun, sumpsucker, fathergrabber, deatheater, slagdriver, motherfreaker, scum, scum, scum, scum…”
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
She emptied another vial onto the screen. Where the blessed water—consecrated by the blood of that good man, Father Miguel O’Pray—dribbled, the blackness paled into dead static.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
There were no more conjuring tricks. There was a hint of the pathetic in the demon’s screams now. A wheedling tone was creeping in. Instead of threats, it was offering promises… wealth, position, pleasure, the papacy.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
She saw herself ascending to the Throne of St Peter, each step of the path marked by the mangled corpse of a cardinal. Georgi, eyeless, was the last step. She assumed the robes, and the crowds cheered. The illusion was ridiculous.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
Chantal knew she had the upper hand. The demon was flagging, its schemes becoming tacky, absurd.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
It whimpered and pleaded, retreating into the depths of the fort, withdrawing all its tentacles.
“The Power of Christ compels you…”
The demon begged for mercy.
“BEGONE!”
XII
The main gates were open, and people were pouring out. Stack grabbed a Trooper he knew—Lizzie Tuska—and screamed in her face, asking her what was going on. She cringed away from him, and broke his grasp.
Two months ago, he had seen Lizzie go alone into a cellar and take out five Maniax with seven shots. Now, she was crying in the dirt, her nerve gone.
“It’s Hell in there,” someone shouted. “Freaking Hell.”
A cruiser was coming. Stack picked up Lizzie, and pulled her out of the way just in time. The ve-hickle crashed towards London Bridge, and wedged against the balustrades. There were about six people crammed into it.
There was a fire in the courtyard, and a few half-dressed Troopers with extinguishers were trying to keep it at bay. People were still fighting back.
There were dead people all over the place. Someone had rigged up a makeshift gallows, and a corpse in a sergeant’s uniform was dangling from a broken neck.
Jesus Christ!
He fought against the tide towards the Ops Centre.
XIII
Lauderdale stood up, red and sticky from his face to his waist, and returned to his terminal.
He would recover his androids, and march on the Fort. With his infallible mechanical catspaws he would restore control. Everything had failed him. Every human agency. The demon had been a damp squib. The Path of Joseph had been betrayed. But his androids were not like the other resources. They would never let him down.
He touched his fingers to the keyboard, and a spark leaped from the terminal into him…
He was dead, but his body kept moving…
XIV
The demon was uncomfortable. To be reduced to such a lowly form after the glorious freedom of the datanets was humiliating, and confining. But the church’s hagwitch had driven him to it.
It ran its hands over the terminal, getting the feel of the flesh. It would not do. He smashed the plastic casing of the machine, and reached in, pulling out a fistful of transistors, wires and metal interstices. One by one, it stuck them to its face, latching them into his skin, feeling the machine parts meld with the blood and bone.
There was a battering at the door. Someone was trying to get in.
It tore its tunic and shirt open, and scored deep lines in its chest, then shoved in the innards of the machine. Electrical currents sparked in its brain, and sped through its new, mutating body. Its heart ceased to beat, but an accumulator pumped energy into his copper-laced veins.
There were shots, and the doors jerked open a crack. Fingers appeared in the slit, and the protesting metal shutters were forced apart.
The demon found what it was looking for in Colonel Rintoon’s chest.
“Come and get me, popish tart,” it shouted.
XV
Stack got the Ops Centre doors open, and strode in. He realized Chantal was with him. And Captain Finney and Sergeant Quincannon.
He held out his hand, and Chantal took it. They
didn’t need to say anything.
The thing standing over Rintoon’s butchered corpse turned, ropes of blood flying from its face, and raised a dripping, red sabre.
“Lauderdale,” Stack shouted.
“No,” it said. “He’s not in just now. If you’d care to leave a message at the tone, I’m sure he’ll kill you later.”
Chantal squeezed past, and stood face to face with the creature. Stack knew this would be a last stand for one of them.
The thing had torn itself apart and stuffed itself full of machine components. Lights winked in the ruptures in its flesh. On its shoulders, above its spindly human arms, were three-elbowed, claw-tipped waldoes, greasy with blood and oil. From its torso sprouted spikes like the one the cruiser had grown in St Werburgh’s.
Stack knew what he was looking at.
“This is it,” Chantal said to the demon. “You can’t retreat any further. Your back is against the wall. You have to defend that body until it drops. Then you’re lost. There’s no way back into the darkness.”
It lashed out at her with a new cyberlimb it had grown out of Lauderdale’s coccyx. It was like a six-foot scorpion’s tail. She dodged it, and landed three sharp kicks on its chest, toes sinking in between the deadly spikes. The creature was unsteady on its feet. It was changing so fast that it couldn’t adapt its centre of gravity.
Stack had his .45 out. Quincannon was slipping the safety off his automatic. The Cav men exchanged looks, and took aim.
“Come on in and get me, coppers,” it screamed.
Stack’s first shots went into the thing’s back near the tear through which the tail was protruding. Quincannon emptied his clip into its head. The thing swallowed the bullets and incorporated them into its body. The head was lumpy with lead now, the bullets visible under the skin like hard boils. It no longer resembled anything human.
It was laughing.
It reached down with its tail and took the sabre from its frail human hand. The blade whirled, and fastened to the limb.
The tail lashed at Chantal, and sliced across her hip. Her uniform was cut, and she bled.
She kicked again, aiming for the flesh between the metal.
Chantal closed with the creature, and hugged it. Rasping, artificial laughter sounded. A knifelike blade lunged out of Lauderdale’s body and scraped past Chantal’s cheek.
Stack leaped into the room, and joined the fight. He grabbed the creature’s leg, tugging at it, weighing it down. Finney and Quincannon had machine pistols which they didn’t use for fear of hitting Chantal or Stack. Finney picked up a wooden map-pointer, and thrust it into the creature’s body. Quincannon punched it in the head.
It staggered and fell.
“Freak you,” the thing said. Chantal grabbed its voicebox, and tore it out. The component came free with a sucking noise. A rattling hiss escaped through the new mouth in its neck. Up close, Stack could see plastic-coated wires and maggotlike muscles knitting inside the creature’s body. It was out of control
Quincannon kicked its head with a heavy boot.
Stack climbed along the twisting body, and got a two-handed grip on the tail. It was wired to shock, and he felt an electrical charge for a second before it went dead as he tore it from the body.
Finney swung a heavy chair at its head, and dented the plate over the forehead with a castor.
The chair bounced off the skull and out of Finney’s hands. One of the waldoes extended, claws pyramided together in a spear-point, and punched the captain in the belly. The waldo burrowed into her ribcage, ploughed up through her heart, and burst out between her neck and collarbone. The claw opened like a grapple, and the dying woman’s eyes clouded. Slowly, Finney brought her hands round, and took hold of the waldo running through her. Stack saw her fingers getting a good grip. Gritting her teeth, Finney pushed herself away from the wall. The claw shook impotently and bit into her shoulder.
The waldo tore free of the creature, pulling a long string of flesh and wire with it. A spray of biofluid exploded from the uneven, stringy hole in its flesh. Finney stiffened, slipped and fell.
Chantal, one hand pressing the head to the floor, held up a glass tube of clear liquid in the other, and muttered something in Latin.
The throatless thing screamed as she poured the contents of the tube into the hole in its forehead.
“The power of Christ…” she gasped.
The creature arched. Chantal rode it, and continued her ritual. As she spoke, she slapped its face, commanding its full attention.
Inside its head, the mechanics flared and burned out. It collapsed.
Chantal stood up.
“It’s gone,” she said. “It’ll never have a body again.”
“What now?”
“We pray for the souls of the dead.”
XVI
In Salt Lake City, Nguyen Seth floated in his isolation tank, seething at the small defeat that had been visited upon him. So, the datanets still linked the Continental Americas, and the temporal power of the Catholic Church ran unchecked. In the end, that would not matter. In the end, it was a simple question of the Inevitability of Nightfall, of the strength of the Dark Ones.
After all, the Catholic Church was not an impregnable body. The Path of Joseph had found more than a few converts even as high as the Inner Councils of the Vatican itself. But the setback was bitter. Under the energy-enriched fluid, Elder Seth’s lips curved into a smile. The Sister who performed the exorcism would have to be watched. Perhaps he would take her himself. He did not care to be inconvenienced, and he lusted after a chance to avenge himself.
The Dark Ones had given him longevity, had made him more than other men. He would not fail them. They would not fail.
In the End, there would be a War, fought in the Great Wastes of the New World, and all the powers of the world would be aligned against the Dark Ones.
His hands knotted into fists and his teeth ground.
They would fall. The Dark Ones would prevail. It would be as it had been prophesied.
Elder Seth put the recent irritation out of his mind, and concentrated on his new business. The Duroc, latest of his servitors, was in Europe, preparing a new course of action.
This time the Dark Ones would be rewarded.
XVII
Now the mission was over Chantal felt curiously flat. As always, she was drained. Mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Once the demon was banished and she had done what could be done for the dead and the dying, she turned off. Sergeant Quincannon had helped her to her room, and tucked her in bed. As if she needed one, she had found another father. Her wounds turned out to be a superficial cuts, so she told the medical orderlies to leave her alone and see to the needier cases.
Three days later, and things had not changed. She sat at her desk, and plumbed the emptiness inside herself. She felt the need to visit Mother Kazuko, and not only to give her teacher whatever comfort she could during her recuperation. Mother Gadzooks O’Hara had been her confessor before she was her martial arts master.
It was like this every time. She reached the accomplishment of her purpose, and found too many important questions still unanswered. It had been a gruelling assignment, and she felt she had much to confess. She knew the demon’s attempts to assail her faith, in God and in herself, had been base stratagems, but she needed to talk through the feelings that had been stirred. She could never be thoroughly rid of the pictures the fiend had planted in her mind, but Mother Kazuko would help her deal with them, would help her cleanse herself. Perhaps there would be time to stay at the retreat, to pursue her theoretical work. She could do with some cloistered tranquility and contemplation.
Recently, her missions had been getting closer together.
Someone knocked at her door.
“Come in.”
It was Nathan Stack. She looked up from her breviary—she hadn’t been focusing on the words for over a quarter of an hour—and smiled at him.
Stack was recovering well. He was
strong. He would survive. Many hadn’t. The US Cavalry had airlifted the mentally and physically wounded out to a facility in the Phoenix PZ, and buried the dead within sight of Fort Apache. There had been enough to fill a new graveyard. They hadn’t had individual funerals, just a mass ceremony conducted by the regimental chaplain. Chantal hadn’t felt able to speak, but she had vowed to light a candle for Cat Finney in St Peter’s. She hoped the woman had gone where the good sufis go.
“We’ve got Federico back. The Quince has run a systems check, and there doesn’t seem to be any damage. The sergeant and your car are getting along famously.”
Chantal got up, and went to the door. She accompanied Stack down to the courtyard. Newly-assigned personnel were supervising the repairs and reconstruction. Major General Hollingsworth Calder, the new commandant, had promised General Ernest Haycox, the overall c-i-c of the Cav, that the fort would be on line within the week. Haycox himself had flown in from Fort Comanche to take a look at the site of the disaster. There were rumours of resurgent Maniak chapters out in the desert. And the corps were complaining about the the roads left unpatrolled.
You could tell from their faces which of the Troopers had been just shipped in and which had lived through the demon download. It was in their eyes.
Quincannon saw her, and saluted.
An ops captain walked over. She was new, and didn’t look anything like Finney.
“Sister,” she said. “We’ve had a communication from Rome for you.”
The woman handed over a sealed print-out, and left.
Chantal broke the papal seal, and read her orders. They were countersigned by Cardinal DeAngelis, and didn’t tell her more than the basics.
“I’ve been recalled,” she told Stack.
“I thought you wanted to go to California?”
She sighed. “I do, but it will have to wait. It’s marked urgent. I have a mission. Somewhere in Europe.”
Stack didn’t look happy about it. Quietly, he had come to rely on her. There was something he hadn’t told her about, but which he wanted to. Something he found difficult to get straight in his own mind. She could tell. She had found she could catch his moods.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I know.”