In those final seconds Joop reached forward, his teeth grit with panic, to grope by his feet for a portion of his peculiar cargo: An ugly, bulbous weapon the size of an assault rifle but thicker, rounder.
The pod struck the ground point first, the Rogallo wing pulling it forward like a sail of rags so that it stood almost vertically on its nose, leaning against the broken wing-mount arm. Joop gasped as he was thrown downward against the web holding him in place. He struggled to release the several straps, Magic Mikey's weapon tucked in his left armpit.
The smoke was accelerating the fall of night. Against the constant rattle of gunfire Joop heard the thudding vibration of heavy legs. He turned his head and saw it coming straight at him: A skeletal machine made of tubes and pipes, running on two legs, a stylized face with shark-like teeth painted on its forward end, and behind the face, a man crouched behind a transparent shield. It made a sound like the roar of strong wind overlaid upon a mechanical whine. Something like a turbine.
Turbines. Natural gas. A gas-turbine mechanical dinosaur.
The machine howled, and a jet of flame emerged from between its painted-on jaws. Flamethrower!
Joop brought up Magic Mikey's fluorine-powered whatchamacallit and with shaking hands sighted lamely on the dinosaur's human rider. Not a good shot, but…he squeezed the trigger. The weapon shrieked, and a crack like a lightning bolt made his ears ring. Searing blue-green light flashed from the weapon's blunt muzzle.
The dinosaur thundered past him on heaving legs, its flamethrower setting quick fire to the flapping shreds of the Rogallo wing.
Its rider's head was gone.
The machine stumbled on without its driver and vanished in the deepening gloom. Joop's hands shook even harder as he tore at the latches on the pod's straps. This wasn't on the program. These guys had been tossed back into the stone age, and he was a warrior serving a new, starfaring nation! Not fair!
More heavy footfalls, and the trumpeting of elephants. Joop screamed as something metallic thrust through the canvas-shrouded body of the pod and heaved it up high in the air.
In the last, blood-red light of the day, Joop looked down on a massive animal that was not quite an elephant. A mastodon! Its great side-curving tusks had been extended with polished steel blades, blades now piercing the pod, having somehow miraculously missed his legs. The animal was draped in a peculiar covering of dark charcoal-gray, knit together from large squares of something like thick felt. A glinting black helmet covered its skull, exposing only its eyes.
Behind the animal's helmeted skull was strapped a huge black saddle in which rode a tall man with a broad-brimmed hat. The man had an assault rifle aimed at Joop's chest.
"Who in Hell are you, boy?"
Joop pulled down his oxygen mask but otherwise didn't move. Something else exploded far away, and the machine gun chatter continued. A mastodon was trumpeting in agony. "Not…from Hell. From…offworld. I'm here to help you."
The man laughed. "Some help you'll be strapped into your own goddam coffin. Gimme that gun and don't try nuthin'. Hiyah, Chowder!"
The last command was evidently for the mastodon, which raised its head further. The pod slid back another half-meter on the animal's tusks, and the rider leaned forward, hand outstretched. Joop slowly gripped the chemical laser rifle by its muzzle and extended it handle-first to the man.
Joop spoke quickly. "You just aim and pull the trigger. It doesn't kick but it makes a piercing noise. And it stinks when it fires. This one has five shots left. I was sent here to…”
"Shut it, son. You got any more of these?"
"Seven more. In the pod. Look, we have to talk. My boss wants to cut a deal."
From off to the right, a chatter of rifle fire. Joop looked down and saw the bullets strike the drooping squares of feltlike material covering the mastodon's broad side. The mastodon trumpeted and began to run, its head still high in the air.
Joop saw no blood. The animal kept running. Cloth that stopped machine gun fire!
"Goddam saurs!" The mastodon's rider turned in the saddle and aimed the laser rifle across one thick, ruddy-skinned arm. Joop could hear the pounding legs of another of the mechanical dinosaurs. The laser weapon first shrieked, then fired with a single sharp crack! Blue-green light made the rider's face look demonic in the shadows.
The saur pursuing them exploded in a ball of fire and the choking reek of mercaptan. Chowder was thrown sideways and down by the concussion, its rider vanishing behind the mastodon's bulk. The final strap holding Joop into the pod broke and Joop fell free, shielding his face with his hands against the searing heat from the fireball.
He struck the mastodon's side and rolled down against the animal's legs, which were flailing against the ground. Joop darted away from the mastodon and hit the ground as live fire again raked the animal's side. He pulled his oxygen mask down again, reset the seals around his eyes, then rose and began to run in no particular direction, his oxygen tank slapping against his side. He stumbled over a corpse in the choking gloom but kept running.
More pounding mechanical footfalls. The deepening dusk had robbed the world of color, and in gray against darker gray Joop saw another stumbling iron monster emerge from the smoke and loom up behind him. He turned to one side and tried to evade it, but the saur's rider had seen him and turned the machine to pursue.
They had a clear shot but didn't take it. Joop realized he was wanted alive and ran more quickly, leaping over another motionless body in the smoldering grass, looking in the fading light for a stand of trees or anything else into which he might slip and lose the saur.
Nothing. He tried to feint and reverse direction, but for something so massive the machine was tremendously agile. The saur heaved up, its turbine screaming, to spin on one of its stiff metallic legs.
Joop ran. He had ceased wondering how a walking machine could be controlled without computers and simply wanted to flee. Two more of its stiff leaping steps brought the saur up beside him, and before Joop could change direction again something dropped over his head and shoulders and jerked him back.
The rope lasso pulled him off his feet and Joop fell hard to the ground. The saur was now immobile, leaning back on its steel-pipe tail, its turbine still whining, waves of exhaust heat pouring from vents atop its tail. The machine's rider hauled back on the rope and pulled Joop up the saur's side. Joop was hauled roughly into a small cockpit set into the back of the machine.
The man who looked down on him was smaller than the mastodon rider and naked to the waist, smeared with what looked like brown mud and streaked with the carbon black of smoke and charred vegetation. A small and peculiarly shaped sidearm was clamped behind his right wrist, his smallest finger positioned on the long, curved trigger, which nestled in a complex trigger guard. The weapon's barrel was pointed at Joop's nose.
The saur rider's voice was low without being deep, fast and precise without sounding frantic.
"What is in your vehicle?"
"Weapons."
"Where are you from?"
"Offworld. I…"
"Why are you here?"
"To create an alliance with your…"
Another of the small missiles Joop had seen arced over their heads. Joop's captor spun around in the cockpit and grasped controls with both hands. The whine of the saur's turbine increased in pitch and the machine tipped up, leaping forward immediately into its brain-jarring gait. The man spoke to Joop without turning.
"Weapons are useful. We'll need to consolidate them. Fire be."
Joop was thrown down to the cockpit's floor. It was just a platform; on all sides were pipes and hoses and straight rods that might have been levers or pushrods. Joop squirmed around to face forward, his arms still tangled in the tight loop of the rope lasso. Each time the machine took a step, he was slammed bodily against the cockpit's metal deck.
The saur was leaning into a series of shallow turns. Joop guessed that the rider was doubling back toward his pod.
Between the spr
ead legs of the rider Joop looked down into the heart of the machine, which was a mechanical nightmare. Dozens of hydraulic cylinders pushed and wheezed at linkages that drove the saur's legs. A spiderweb of thin, transparent tubes threaded all through the mechanism, singly and in woven bundles. Further forward Joop could make out by the machine's internal gas lamps (hissing like snakes and spilling more heat into the machine's sweltering interior) a system of two large spinning flywheels, each on an independent system of gimbals, constantly tugged and adjusted by a network of small hydraulic cylinders.
Gyroscopes! Each time the machine took a step, small gripping brake pads clamped down briefly on the sides of the flywheels. Joop shook his head in wonder. Put some drag on a flywheel and it kicked in the opposite direction. But how was it all controlled?
Just to one side of the rider's right foot was a large rectangular steel box into which hundreds of the transparent tubes vanished. Yellow fluid was coursing through them, making them twitch and pulse in response to the machine's gyrations.
Joop squinted to read the inscription on the box's side:
Fluidic Network Control Computer Model 4406-B
Manufactured Under Contract to Gamma Alpha Sigma
The saur's rider turned and pointed the arm-clamped weapon at him. "Don't move!" he commanded. Joop gulped and nodded.
The saur danced through another dizzying turn. A burst of automatic rifle fire clanged against the machine's side. Joop made an uncomfortable decision: Go with the primitives. The IAR needed warriors, the dumber the better. People who used fluidic computers (Fluidic? What was that, anyway?) were smart. Dangerously smart. Hell was not what it appeared to be.
But then again, what ever was?
Joop inhaled and exhaled deeply, quietly, repeatedly, gradually loosening the loop of rope that hindered his arms. He waited, seeing yet another missile pass far too close, and hearing the mastodons trumpeting in pursuit.
Without warning, the saur heaved up and began another of its spinning one-legged turns. Joop pretended to flop over and in doing so pushed the rope far enough upward on his arms to move his right arm free. His hand darted out and grasped one of the several bundles of transparent tubes connected to the fluidic computer.
He pulled. Hard.
Half the tubes in the bundle came free, spraying hot fluid in every direction. The saur's flywheels screamed as their pads closed home, and the saur flipped violently into the air on the force of their stored momentum. The half-naked rider was thrown clear. Joop hung on as the machine fell to the ground, then scrambled out of the cockpit and began to run. His pod, miraculously, was just ahead, lying on its side in the smoldering dirt. Its cloth covering, however, had been slit from top to bottom as though with a knife.
"Freeze, boy."
A man was lying on the ground, one leg bent grotesquely backward. He was leaning on one elbow, his hands holding the laser rifle Joop had handed him. Out of the gloom came other men, rough-looking men with long, sun-frizzled hair tied back in ponytails. Several were carrying the other fluorine chemical laser rifles Joop had brought in his pod.
Joop raised his hands.
"We ain't never seen anything like these," the wounded man said. If his leg was broken, he was exerting tremendous will against the pain. "We could use a few more. So what's the deal? You from Earth?"
"No. Not from Earth."
"The Numenor colony, then."
"No. Not Numenor. Another planet, an unknown planet."
"Don't screw with us, son. Soon's the boys get a splint together for my leg, we're takin' you back to see the Boss in person. He don't like skinny little twerps messin' with his mind, an' bein' his oldest kid I don't much either. Truth be told, I'm not real comfortable right now, and I reckon you got three sentences to spill the deal, or I'm gonna judge you some kind of fluke and take your head off for my collection."
Someone brought up a gas lantern, which showed bloody scratches on the man's forehead, and eyes bottomless blue against a soot-streaked face.
Joop gulped. He smelled rain, and somewhere in the distance heard rolling thunder. "We'll get you as many of these weapons as you want..."
"Weapons ain't a deal, boy. Maybe a bribe. That's one sentence."
"We're fighting a war and we need help." The thunder was getting louder. Odd thunder. Odd—and familiar.
"Ain't a deal neither. More like a piss-ant whine. And that's two sentences."
Joop looked from one of the gathered men to another. He took a deep breath. If he could win them over, they would be ideal. The Missus would be pleased.
"Help us win our war, and we'll get you off of Hell."
The men looked from one to the other. There was a long moment of silence, punctuated by whispers in the gloom. Their leader, prone on the ground, nodded. "That'll interest the Boss, fersure. But if you're lyin', boy, we'll cook you for supper a piece at a time." The man lowered the laser rifle. "Now behave yourself while we get ready. There'll be a gun on your back every second, and you do anything funny you'll never know what hit you."
That wasn't thunder. But how…
The men looked up in the air.
"Birk! Douse that lantern!"
One of the men pounced on the lamp and extinguished it. The thunder reached a crescendo and began to pass, its tone a falling Doppler roar.
Joop looked up with them. In the last faint light of the day he saw three delta-winged aircraft glinting in tight formation against the purple-blue sky. Jet aircraft. Joop's mouth fell open. "Those are impossible!"
The man on the ground chuckled. "No, boy. Those are the Ralpha Dogs. An' if you believe in God you better pray you never meet 'em in the flesh!"
Earth, August 27, 2374
"Kolitz holding on Line 1," the phone on the nightstand said. "Breathing suggests agitation."
A middle-aged man with disheveled blond hair sat up in bed and reached for the phone. The irritation in his voice was convincing but false. "Now what?"
The caller cleared his throat before replying. It was the key for the steganaural message that would follow. His audible speech seemed plodding and slow, but it carried a hidden burden. "Kolitz here. The Forfex Instruments shipment didn't get off on time. The port engine on CC-67 couldn't clear its Christmas tree, so we had to bring up CC-30 from dead cold and transfer cargo. Won't land in Rio until 0900 zulu. Forfex is pissed."
The leader of the Sangruse Society was only half-listening to his employee's clearsound report. Other words were streaming silently into his brain from his right ear, decoded by the distributed nanomachine in his bloodstream. The words had been hidden as calculated noise and irregularities in Kolitz's voice, and were now tapped out by the Sangruse Device as waveforms on the man's right stirrup bone:
|Nautonnier, the Governor General of America has confirmed that she is planning a "political action" against 1Earth. She's being close with details, but she wants to ensure that the Societies don't act against her. Her fear of nanotechnology indicates to me that whatever devices she may have under her control are old or weak. She won't explain her own interest in Hell, but she's willing to send our man and bring him back. She insists that he be sentenced for a real act. She can't—or won't—cook the books for us.|
The blond man was silent for a few seconds. The Sangruse Device watched his throat muscles as he rapidly subvocalized a reply, which would be hidden within the words he then spoke into the phone. "Forfex is always pissed. I'll deal with McConnell when he calls. We'll still get his crap down to Rio hours before anybody else could. I'm more interested in why you louts can't keep a practically new cargo jet alive for more than a week."
|Tell her she has a deal. We won't oppose her coup, and we'll provide a man to go down to Hell and scout it out for us—and try to determine what her interest in Hell is. 1Earth hasn't tried to pull anything off Hell's surface for over two hundred years. I would pay a lot to know how she intends to do it. Did she mention any of the other Societies by name? And her price?|
"Well, sh
it! You get what you pay for. Get me an engine mechanic who isn't some starving kid out of the slums and I'll keep your jets alive." Kolitz' angry response was pregnant with hidden meaning.
|She said we'll have to trust her on getting our man back. The price is what it's always been: She wants a free-range alternate of the Sangruse Device that will obey her alone. Won't trust it inside her body. She seems particularly afraid of Pequeño. She said she's cutting her own deals with Theometry and Pinhead. Didn't mention any other Societies. Who are we sending?|
"Crap. Let me quote you some numbers from your own record." The Nautonnier picked up a palmstone from the nightstand and tapped on its keyspots for a few breaths, while he framed his subvocal reply. "Your MTBF was eight months twelve days when you were younger and poorer than 'that kid,' and it was because I was managing you—if you get my drift."
|Tell her we'll keep Pequeno off her back—I like easy ones!—and suggest that the really nasty ones she hasn't heard of yet. Protea's the one that keeps me awake nights. Suggest that we'll do our best to deflect opposition from the Societies she isn't aware of. As for who we're sending, my choice is Peter Novilio. He's our junior initiate and doesn't know much, so he can't spill much. And every other week he makes me want to send him to Hell myself just to be rid of him. We can never trust him to act intelligently on Earth, but he'd be my choice to survive on Hell long enough to see what's there and whether we could found a chapter. The big puzzle is how to get him sentenced without risking a civilian or another operator.|
Kolitz said nothing aloud for several seconds. He let his breath go slowly as between lips pursed with withheld anger. "So you're saying it's my issue, not the kid's."
|The Governor General had a suggestion: She'll send an assassin to go up against our man. He'll attack Peter; if Peter kills him, he gets sentenced to Hell. If the assassin kills Peter, the assassin will sample the Device out of Peter's corpse, and she'll have it for free.|
"Bright boy! At this point I think the kid may be worth more to me than you. If you've got a plan to make sure we don't make a habit of this, I'll hear it." The blond man paused, waiting for an answer. The agent sputtered inarticulately for a moment, giving his leader the time to subvocalize a reply.
The Cunning Blood Page 2