Route 666

by Jack Yeovil

  “Come for it, switch-bitch,” Jazzbeaux hissed, “come for my knifey-knives!”

  The Daughter walked forward, as calm as you please, and with a samurai movement drew the needles out of her hair. They glinted in the torchlight. They were clearly not ornamental. She grinned. Her teeth had been filed and capped with steel. Expensive dental work.

  “Just you and me, babe,” Jazzbeaux said, “just you and me.”

  The rest of the DAR cadre stood back, humming “America the Beautiful”. The Psychopomps kept quiet. This was a formal combat to settle a territorial dispute and shouldn’t be queered by kibitzers. No matter what happened here, the ’pomps could gain something from a quick fight rather than a long war.

  This was not a funfight. This was Serious Business. Jazzbeaux heard they did much the same thing in Japcorp boardrooms.

  Valli Forge drew signs in the air with her needles. They were dripping something. Psychoactive venom of some sort, Jazzbeaux guessed. Her system had absorbed just about every juju the GenTech labs could leak illegally onto the market, and she was still kicking. And punching, and scratching, and biting.

  Still, she meant to keep straight. The shades-shadow in the back of her head was bad enough.

  The Daughter was obviously pumped up on something. Conservatives abhorred recreationals but they went in for short-term enhancements the way newstrivia anchors went after facelifts.

  “Steroid suestra, I hear they’re talkin’ about settlin’ the Miss America pageant like this next anno. You get to do evenin’ dress, and swimwear, and combat fatigues.”

  Valli Forge growled. Her shoulders bulged with boosted meat.

  “I wouldn’t give much for your chances of winning the crown, Valli Girl. You just plain ain’t got the personality.”

  Behind her eyepatch, the implant buzzed open, and circuitry lit up. She might need her optic’s burn function. It made for a grand fight-finisher.

  Jazzbeaux held up her ungloved hand, knuckles out, and shimmered the red metal stars implanted in her knucks. Kid-stuff. The sign of The Samovar Seven, her fave Russian musickies when she was a kid. She didn’t freak much to the Moscow Beat these days, but she knew Sove Stuff really got to the DAR.

  “You commie slit,” sneered Valli Forge.

  “Who preps your dialogue, sister? Neil Simon?”

  Jazzbeaux hummed in the back of her throat. “Unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics…” The ’pomps caught the tune and joined it. The Daughter’s eyes narrowed. She had stars on one cheek, and stripes on the other. The president of their chapter wore a Miss Liberty spiked hat, and carried a killing torch.

  “Take the witchin’ slag down, Jazz-babe,” shrilled Andrew Jean, always the encouraging soul.

  The DAR switched to “My Country ’tis of Thee”. The ’pomps segued to “Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad”, popularised by Vania Vanianova and the Kulture Kossacks.

  Valli Forge clicked her heels and made a pass, lunging forwards. Jazzbeaux bent to one side, letting the needle slice air over her shoulder, and slammed the Daughter’s midriff with her knee. The spiked pad ripped through Valli Forge’s blouse and grated on the armoured contour-girdle underneath. The Daughter grabbed Jazzbeaux’s neck and pulled her off her feet.

  Jazzbeaux recognised the move. Her daddy had tried it on her back in the Denver NoGo when nine-year-olds were worth a gallon on the streets. One thing she had to say about Dad, at least he had prepped her for the world she was going to have to live in. Other girls graduated from the Policed-Zone high schools, but she knew she was a woman the day she ripped her old man’s throat out. If she was lucky, she might live to see twenty-five. She didn’t believe she’d marry Petya Jerkussoff and move to a dacha on the steppes any more.

  She bunched her fingers into a sharp cone and stabbed above Valli Forge’s girdle-line, aiming for the throat, but the Daughter was too fast, and chopped her wrist, deflecting the blow.

  Just what her dad used to do—“Jessa-myn, cain’t you be sociable!?” The low-rent ratskag.

  She danced round the bigger fillette, getting a few scratches down the back of her suit, even drawing some blood. Valli Forge swung round and Jazzbeaux had to take a fall to avoid the needles.

  The ’pomps were chanting and shouting now, while the DAR had fallen silent. That didn’t mean anything.

  She was down in the dirt, rolling away from the sharp-toed kicks. The DAR had good intelligence contacts, obviously. The girlie had struck her three times on the right thigh, just where the once-broken bone was, and had taken care to stay out of the field of her optic burner. Of course, she’d also cut Jazzbeaux’s forehead below the hairline, making her bleed into her regular eye. Anyone would have done that.

  But Jazzbeaux was getting her licks in. Valli Forge’s left wrist was either broken or sprained and she couldn’t get a proper grip on her needle. There were spots of her own blood on her suit, so some of Jazzbeaux’s licks must have missed the armour plate. The hagwitch was tiring, breathing badly, sweating like a sow. That armour must be feeling mighty heavy and mighty confining. Her daintiness was gone, and she was flailing.

  Jazzbeaux used her feet, dancing away and flying back, anchoring herself to a broken lamp-post as she launched four rapid kicks to Valli Forge’s torso. The fillette was shaken. She had dropped both her needles. Jazzbeaux caught her behind the head with a steelheel, and dropped her to the ground. She reared up but Jazzbeaux was riding her now, knees pressed tight. She got a full nelson and sank claws into the back of her neck, pressing the Daughter’s face to the hard-beaten earth of the street. Blood welled up around her nails. Jazzbeaux touched it with her tongue and caught a thrill from whatever was circulating in Valli Forge’s system.

  For a wavering moment, she thought the girlie was going to throw her off. A shadow seemed to fall over them, a shadow with silvery mirror-eyes and a fringe of horns.

  This was no time for a delirium flash.

  Finally, Valli Forge stopped moving and lay still in the dirt, and Jazzbeaux stood up. Andrew Jean rushed out, and grabbed her wrist, holding her hand up in victory.

  “The winnnnerrrr!” Andrew Jean shouted, sloppily kissing. Sweetcheeks was crowding in, and the others. Only Varoomschka, sardonically impressed but certain she could have ended it in half the time, held back.

  None of the Daughters made an effort to fetch their champion. They stood before the bank like American Gothic statues.

  Jazzbeaux pulled her eyepatch away and scanned the DAR. They were impassive as the optic burner angled across them, glinting red but not yet activated.

  “Is it decided?” Jazzbeaux asked, wiping blood out of her eye.

  An older Daughter, with a pillbox hat and a grey-speckled veil, came forward and stood over her sister. The girlie on the ground moaned and tried to get up on her elbows. The veiled Daughter kicked Valli Forge in the side. The poison blade sank in. The fallen Daughter spasmed briefly and slumped again, foam leaking from her mouth.

  “It is decided,” said the veiled Daughter.

  The DAR picked up the deadmeat and faded away into the darkness.

  The Psychopomps pressed around her, kissing, hugging, groping, shouting.

  “Jazz-beaux! Jazz-beaux! Jazz-beaux!”

  The Psychopomps howled in the desert.

  “Come on, let’s hit somewhere with intelligent life,” Jazzbeaux shouted above the din. “I’m thirsty, and I could use some real party action tonight!”

  VI

  10 June 1995

  “Sergeant,” shouted Yorke. “Incoming from Fort Valens.”

  Quincannon jogged back to the cruiser, belly bobbing between his suspenders. His placket shirt was undone and his yellow bandana was unfolded into a lobster bib.

  Night had come down hard on the drive-in and the Josephites were at a trestle table, singing all 48 verses of “The Path of Joseph” before launching into supper. They offered to share their meal with the patrol. The invitation was not mandatory, which Yorke considered a mercy; he’d rathe
r eat K-rations than chow into the gray gruel the sisters were serving up. He could understand why a body would want to think up extra verses of the anthem to put off that first fateful mouthful. Maybe if you wore your mouth out on the hymn, you couldn’t taste the gunk.

  The sergeant squeezed himself into the cruiser and keyed in his reception sign. The two-way screen irised open and Yorke saw Captain Julie Brittles at her desk, fussing with her waves of hair and the two rows of buttons down the front of her tunic. Brittles was always fidgeting with something.

  “Quince,” she said, “we’ve got your report. Good work. Nice and concise. No words surplus to needs.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. It’s all cleared up here. Burnside has done his best with the Josephite mechanics and I reckon the motorwagons will roll out of here come tomorrow. Not much else we can do. Just add the charges to the warrants out on the identified Psychopomps, especially this Bonney fillette.”

  “Quite. Ms Redd Sainted Harvest has put a bee on our tail about that specific individual. She makes it clear that she doesn’t want a lacquered hair on her pointy head hurt in the arrest process.”

  Quincannon whistled. Brittles gave a captainly shrug.

  “My guess is that Ms H wants to do all the hurting in this instance. I understand there is personal business between them…”

  Yorke understood it was not a good idea to interfere in Redd Harvest’s personal business. The Op was almost as fond of violence as the sort of gangfilth she tracked.

  Brittles kind of smiled and said, “Also, Quince, we have polite E-mail from GenTech BioDiv, with regards to an incident in the vicinity of Canyon de Chelly.”

  “It’s in the report, Captain. I’ve made suggestions as to further investigation. Those ’bots had run into something strange we haven’t seen before. We should get a team out there.”

  Brittles’s smile got tight. “GenTech respectfully request we keep our noses out. They’ll do the follow-up. The remains of the Knock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots have been officially labelled property of BioDiv. We’re soldiers, not scientists. No side issues, Sergeant. Remember the Thin Blue Line.”

  Quincannon didn’t argue. He didn’t talk a streak about the boiling point of water either. Rule One of the Cav was to bitch down, not up; that wouldn’t be affected by alterations in the fundamental nature of the universe.

  “My suggestions are in the report already, Captain.”

  “We’ll handle the deletions, Quince. No need to bother yourself with keyboardwork. We need you in the field not at a console.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Brittles wasn’t saying something. Yorke saw the shifty look in her eyes. The captain was the kind of old girl who wasn’t happy unless she had a long-tongued trooper under her desk working up a shine on her boots. Yorke could tell when she was gearing up to dish out a zeroid assignment nobody in their right mind would accept. Like now.

  “Permission to circle back to Valens, ma’am? We’ve been out for five days now.”

  “Denied, Quincannon.”

  Her slight smile had a nasty twist in it. Yorke wondered if there had ever been anything romantic between the Sergeant and the Captain, and whether that had anything to do with the way Quincannon’s troop, of which he was a fully paid-up member, got all the scut details. Like checking out Sodom and Gomorrah, Ariz., or escorting the Dirty Protest Skunx chapter of the Maniax to the Alcatraz Express.

  “You have fresh orders coming in,” Brittles said. “The cruiser will print them out directly.”

  Captain Brittles cut out and Quincannon said “goodbye” to dead screen. The dashprinter gurgitated a strip of paper. The Quince and Yorke looked at it curling out of its slot. The orders ended and they both sat in the cruiser, putting off the moment. Finally, with a protracted sigh, Quincannon tore the paper free and scanned it, face falling.

  He swore, crushed the paper into a ball, dropped it on the floor, swore again, got out of the cruiser, kicked some sand, swore extensively—affrighting a pair of Sisters who happened to be passing—and walked off, muttering thunder and fire.

  When the Quince was gone, Yorke picked up the paper, uncrushed it, and got a sneak preview of the troop’s orders. He swore too.

  VII

  10 June 1995

  You could burn up by day and freeze to death at night in the desert. The Josephites built a cooking fire but let it go out. They kept warm by going to bed early, though Tyree was damned if she could see what for.

  “No carnal relations,” Yorke kept chuckling, “it hardly seems like living at all.”

  Back at Valens, Yorke had come on to her a couple of times when Nathan was out on patrol. She hadn’t let anything develop as long as they were in the same troop. She didn’t want to divide loyalties. Still, once she got her cruiser and had maybe a stripe or three on her shoulder, things might change, especially if Nathan dropped out of the running.

  She looked into the fire and thought about the future. Everybody seemed to think it was all used up. Even the Josephites were convinced these were the Last Days.

  Kirby Yorke was sort of appealing, with his fair hair and crooked smile. But he kept making remarks about the way she filled her Cav pants, and she was bored with that. Every woman in the service got fed up with cracks about her ass. Tight pants were about the only thing you could wear on a mount without risking a stray fold of cloth getting caught in the workings and causing a flip-up crash. Nobody ever passed remarks about the way sergeants and troopers of the male persuasion strained the seats of their uniforms with that species of elephantiasis of the butt so common in Americans of a certain age.

  Quincannon had detailed Burnside to requisition firewood and get a pot of recaff going. He’d nastily offered a cup to Brother Bailie, but the man virtuously resisted the temptation. Tyree could tell Bailie missed recaff and probably other things too. You didn’t yank out your taste buds and hack off your primary sexual characteristics when you converted to the Path of Joseph, though there were sects which went in for that sort of thing.

  And there was that creepy Wiggs weaselling around. From something Sister Maureen had said, she understood he had gone for a dick-ectomy. The snip explained a lot. She wouldn’t have liked to meet W. Bond Wiggs before he took the drastic surgical option. He must have been a pedigree hound.

  She wondered if it was a good idea to check warrants on the Brethren. Elder Seth quite likely specialised in recruiting former sinners. Poor souls might earn the forgiveness of the Lord before troubling themselves with earthly obligations like prison sentences.

  Wiggs would look mighty cute in stripes and she just bet his unusual genital arrangement would be boffo in the showers.

  “Are we really stuck with these damfools, Quince?” asked Burnside.

  Quincannon swilled the last of his recaff about his tin mug and threw it in the sand. “I’m afraid so, Wash. Orders from on high.”

  “General Haycox?”

  “Higher.” Quincannon stuck a Premier in his mouth and swivelled eyes to heaven. “The Prezz himself is behind Elder Seth. Hell, he practically gave away Utah. Can you imagine what’d happen if he tried that with New York? He thinks resettlement is a jim-dandy idea and is backing up the Brethren of Joseph in their scheme to rebuild Salt Lake City.”

  “Why didn’t he send the army out to guard this wagon train instead of letting ’em get cut down like dogs by every freakin’ stray comes by?”

  A match flared and the Quince sucked smoke. “I said North was backing the Josephites, Leona, not that he wanted to spend money on them…”

  Everybody laughed. The federal government was reputed to be bankrupt after the last round of trade incentives. Otto-kar Proctor, the famous free-market economist, had prodded President North into a policy, endlessly announced in TV ads, called the Big Bonus. Its planks seemed to be high public spending, high unemployment and massive tax cuts. Tyree wasn’t a genius-level economist, but it sounded like a Brink-of-Doom spree to her and she wasn’t surprised now that it had falle
n apart. There was something about Dr Ottokar Proctor that made her skin crawl; he had tiny eyes, like a mean cartoon character.

  The Cav were still being paid in scrip, redeemable only at the fort’s authorised stores. Valens scuttlebutt was that the government even planned withdrawal of its portion of the US Road Cavalry funding next season, and that private individuals and companies were invited to step in. The rumour mill suggested, the best tenders so far had come from Gen-Tech, Winter Corp and Walt Disney Enterprises. They could be wearing Mickey Mouse shoulder insignia next year.

  Tyree would be a lot less happy having to do or die for faceless corporate creeps than for John Taxpayer. The corps owned enough of the world as it was. Somebody had to be on the side of people.

  “Ollie made a snazz speech about the resettlement drive last week and swore to cash in on any good publicity there might be if Elder Seth doesn’t get himself killed. But he hasn’t got his neck stuck out so far he’ll look a bozo if the Brothers and Sisters disappear in the Des.”

  “Why are we along for the ride?”

  Quincannon exhaled a cloud of smoke. “We’re wagonmasters, Yorke. We’re protecting the wagon train from injuns and varmints and outlaws. Like in the first pioneer days, when the West was a virgin wilderness waiting for the farmers to cultivate it.”

  “But that was then…”

  “It wasn’t so long ago. I was born down in Wyoming. Pretty good country it was before it stopped raining and all the grasses dried up and blew away.”

  “There weren’t never no freakin’ grass in Wyoming, Quince. I been there. It’s worse than here. Just sand dunes.”

  “It wasn’t always like that, Yorke. The Midwest used to feed the world. We had enough for ourselves and some over to spare for other country’s needy folks. Not now, though.”