by Mick Farren
'If she was so smart, how come she didn't see all this coming?'
The Minstrel Boy shrugged. 'Maybe she knows something that we don't know.'
'You really think so?'
The Minstrel Boy shook his head. 'No, not really.'
Armed men and women lounged around the entrance of the Victory Cafe. A few looked up as Renatta and the DNA Cowboys approached, but nobody challenged their right to be there. The interior of the saloon was crowded. Hard-faced men and women with cold eyes that were constantly on the move had every imaginable type of weapon hanging from belts and shoulder harnesses or stacked within easy reach. They were waiting for something to happen with the patience and economy of energy of experienced fighters. Reave would never have imagined that there were quite so many or such a variety of mercenaries and freebooters in the city. Neoprimitives leaned on their power spears and watched the comings and goings with unfathomable eyes. Others needed more solid diversions. Bandidos from the section, with oiled hair and drooping mustaches, compared weapons and bragged about past campaigns and conquests that probably had never happened, or at least not the way they were telling it. A knot of nomad yahoos, a long way from their normal stomping grounds in the Lanfranc Margins, were down on their knees shooting the bones, seven come eleven. Four farii sat on the edge of the deserted stage silently sharing a pipe. A half dozen Nulites with their veils in place were seated around a single table, fingering their prayer cylinders, while everyone else gave them a wide berth. The bar was closed, but there were bottles being passed around, and the air was filled with noise and smoke and a certain strange controlled anticipation. Reave knew from experience that if the waiting went on too long, fights would start breaking out among the defenders as the strain started to tell. A bunch like that would quickly become impossible to control.
There were a number of familiar faces among the mob in the Victory Cafe. One of the first the Minstrel Boy spotted was that of Clay Blaisdell. He was drinking whiskey with a group of cronies, and he was already close to staggering drunk. He spotted the DNA Cowboys at the same lime they spotted him.
'No shit, will you look who's here! The DNA Cowboys have come to save us all. I would have thought that you guys would have been long gone to the nothings by now.'
The Minstrel Boy, who was already pissed off enough at being stuck inside Krystaleit, stalked up to Blaisdell with dark anger flashing in his eyes. His voice was quiet and dangerous. 'You want to say that again, Clay?'
Clay Blaisdell laughed. 'Hell, no. I don't want to say that again. I wouldn't be here myself if the tunnels hadn't been sealed.'
Billy and Reave had come up behind the Minstrel Boy, who was thinking about how good it might feel to take out his frustration on the swaying Blaisdell. He still had not forgotten the needling that the other had put him through the last time he had been in the Victory Cafe.
Blaisdell was saved by a commotion over by the stage. Two militia officers and a short thickset man in a buffalo jacket and high, buckled boots had climbed up and were shouting for quiet.
'Okay, okay, let's all settle down. Shut up and listen up. My name is Reft Zill, and I've been put in charge of deploying this rabble. I'm your Master of Free-Lancers, and you follow my orders until somebody tells you otherwise.'
Reave let out a groan. 'I don't believe it.'
The Minstrel Boy glanced around. 'What's the problem?'
Reave pointed to the stage. 'That little fat bastard, that's the problem. Reft Zill is an overweight blowhard who shouldn't to put in command of a kids' picnic.'
Reave was not the only one complaining. There were boos and shouts and catcalls from all over the room, but Zill homed straight in on Reave.
'You got some objection to my command, Reave Mekonta?'
Suddenly Reave was the center of attention. Fully aware of that fact, he took his time answering. He allowed his face to split slowly into a wide, shit-eating grin. 'Hell, no, Reft, everything else around here is fucked up. Why should this be any different?'
There was a general roar of laughter.
Zill had small, resentful piggy eyes, which regarded the room with something close to loathing. 'You may all think that you're hotshots, but as far as I'm concerned you're nothing more than a flea-bitten rabble.'
'You can call us scum, Reft,' Reave retorted, 'but there are a few of us here who remember you at Menute Falls and your noble advance to the rear.'
There was more laughter. Zill became red in the face.
'Make the most of it, Reave Mekonta. Have your fun and get it over with. After this, I'm quite prepared to hang you if you get in my way.'
Reave did not respond to the threat, but others did. Shouts of 'Oh, yeah?' and 'Just try it!' clearly indicated that Zill's command was not going to be an easy one. Everyone in the room knew that despite Zill's bluster, a force of mercenaries like this had to be handled with kid gloves. They would fight like maniacs, but if authority pushed them too hard, they would simply up and mutiny. The rancor went on for a while longer, but bit by bit things settled down, and eventually they were all paying attention as Zill outlined how they would be used in the defense of the city. Everyone in the room also knew that their collective back was against the wall and that it was no time to be screwing around, even if they disliked the setup.
The plan was anything but deep. Hampered by the fact that nobody would know from which direction the raiders' attack might come until they actually emerged from the nothings, the mercenaries would play a flexible, mobile role. They would be held in first-line reserve, ready to reinforce the militia and the volunteers wherever necessary. That at least met with the room'sapproval. Any merc worth his or her salt bitterly resented being used as cannon fodder. They were specialists and expected to be treated as such. The citizens of Krystaleit could break the first fury of the raiders' assault with their own bodies.
Zill finally wound up his address by taking questions from the crowd. Billy Oblivion was one of the first to raise his hand. When Zill pointed to him, he did not mince words. He had as much cause to dislike Reft Zill as Reave did: He had also been at the fight at Menute Falls.
'If we're going to be so damn mobile, can we get our tank back?'
'What tank?'
'My partners and I arrived in an old Saab battlewagon. The city impounded it for the duration of our stay. It had a full weapons system, including a heat ray, and it would seem like a good idea if we got it back.'
Zill held a whispered conversation with the two militia officers. After a few seconds he turned back to Billy.
'The vehicle has already been requisitioned. It's deployed in another part of the city.'
'Is that legal?'
'Practically anything's legal under the state of emergency.'
'What about our heavy weapons? They were in the tank. I don't intend to go into combat with just a needler.'
Zill again consulted with the militia officers.
'The weapons from the vehicle have already been distributed. If you go to the militia armory, you will be issued bolt throwers.'
Billy was outraged. 'What am I supposed to do with a bolt thrower, goddamn it? I'm a technician. I work with sophisticated weapons. Bolt throwers are for bozos.'
'So go round to Churchill's and get what you want.'
'Will the city pay for it?'
Zill wearily glanced at one of the militiamen. The officer nodded. 'Yes, you can obtain suitable weapons on city credit.'
The Minstrel Boy turned and looked at Reave to see how he was reacting. Reave was quiet and thoughtful, in total contrast to his previous mood. The Minstrel Boy did not know that Reave had spotted another familiar face in the crowd. Menlo Welker was over in the shadows at the back of the bar. They had seen each other and exchanged brief, covert nods. The presence of Menlo in the Victory Cafe was a warning that when the attack came, any number of the mercs in the room could turn on the others, attacking them from behind in a deadly surprise as the raiders came over the barricades. Reave could onl
y hope that old times would prevail upon Menlo to tip him before the fifth column attacked.
The days that followed the excitement of the alert and the mobilization sank into a lull of anticlimactic waiting. Billy, the Minstrel Boy, and Renatta went to Churchill's and, after jumping the line with a display of swaggering, overbearing macho, selected weapons. Billy came out with a huge nine-function Questar multiplex, remarking that if he had to go into combat, he might as well have the most radical edge possible. Renatta picked out a pair of Doh-Bien wrist lasers in black steel with silver inlay. As they were walking back to the Victory Cafe, the Minstrel Boy questioned her choice.
'You know those things need weeks of practice before you stop being as much a menace to yourself as to the enemy?'
Renatta looked at him as though he were a total idiot and flexed her hands like a Balinese dancer.'You think I don't know how to play wrist lasers? You think I don't know anything?'
'Sometimes I wonder what you do know.'
'Well, pardon me for not being properly menued.'
The Minstrel Boy, after a lot of thought, had opted for a reproduction AK 5000 that had been converted to fire x-pando slugs in ultrarapid bursts. It was the model with the wooden stock, drum clip, and retractable twelve-inch bayonet. The way things were shaping up, the bayonet might prove useful.
The weapons were the last real diversion. They had spent a day practicing with them out by the nothings, but after that there was little to do but settle in and wait. The mercenaries were billeted in commandeered rooms in the Bluecat as close as possible to the Victory Cafe. Although Zill constantly attempted to create makework for the men and women under his command, the bulk of the waiting time was spent getting drunk, fighting, and engaging in last-ditch sexual encounters. Zill had, at least, managed to organize the fights into staged competitions rather than freestyle brawls. Reave and a giant yahoo called Gorshon Mass Goh held the house record for gambling receipts after a vicious fifteen rounds of contact wandweking, but by far the most memorable and crowd-pleasing bout was the no-limit, feral-feline hair-tearing confrontation between Su Wu Lu and Brawny Helda. That bout started some related but rather different confrontations. The sexual undertow was never below a dull roar, and the constant couplings and partings had a desperate quality that Billy had summed up the most aptly: 'We who are about to die tend to get horny.'
Although she still behaved like part of the team, Renatta had transferred her after-hours affections from the DNA Cowboys altogether, first to Goshon Mass Goh after he had narrowly beaten Reave at the wandweking and then to, of all people, Clay Blaisdell. After that Billy, Reave, and the Minstrel Boy felt more than entitled to pass the bottle and call her a whore when she was not around.
Tired of puzzling over Renatta's methods of operating, the Minstrel Boy had taken up with an exotic dancer called Mai Last Tango; in fact, she was stark naked and vigorously straddling his hips when the sirens sounded.
As they echoed eerily through the instantly silent city, the Minstrel Boy eased away from her. He was suddenly very frightened.
'The enemy's been detected. The bad guys are almost here.'
The bizarre attitudes toward death that were so in evidence during the Damaged Era all had their roots in the practice of template reproduction. At the most simple level it completely negated the normal process of bereavement. All too frequently, if an individual was accidentally killed or otherwise died before his time and had already been templated, friends, lovers, and loved ones would commission a reproduction and life would go on as before. It was not uncommon for a number of improvements to be made to the reproduction, making it more attractive or possibly more tractable than the original. There is a strong possibility that many of the characters in the legends may have died many times only to be duplicated by admirers, colleagues, or political allies. It was this treatment of the dead mat gave rise to the saying 'Life is other people.'
— Pressdra Vishnaria
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'Thirty minutes to estimated contact,' the voice from the PA announced.
The waiting had peaked. Along with five other mercenaries, Billy, Reave, the Minstrel Boy, and Renatta crouched in the H-quadrant access tunnel that led out to the nothings. In front of them, out on the open platform, the first-line defenders, militia and civilian volunteers alike, stood to in the shelter of hastily erected fortifications. Although the big stasis field that surrounded the raiders was being clearly and continuously tracked and plotted by the central biomass, there was still no clue as to where on the Krystaleit perimeter the first blow would fall. As the raiders had drawn nearer, other questions had been raised. The most pressing was what would happen when the large and powerful reality of the raiders actually touched and then merged with the city's bigger and even more powerful field. For some hours strange things had been happening. Certain kinds of electronic hardware had ceased to function for no detectable reason, domestic pets had started to show signs of extreme agitation, a large number of lights had simply winked out, and a power substation had spontaneously combusted. Now the nothings had started to flash with white fire as though the nonmatter were being overcharged with some form of alien nonenergy. The defenders and fortifications around the edges of the external platforms were thrown into stark, flickering silhouette, and an irrational terror of the unknown was laid on top of the very real fear of the enemy. Some groups of Krystaleit's philosophers were making dire predictions, and the word 'cataclysm' kept being tossed about. To make matters worse, Billy had started to hear muffled, indistinct voices inside his head. He did not know if that phenomenon was a brand-new symptom of stress orwhether it was a result of the physical conditions that were growing more weird by the minute.
'I wish to hell they'd get here — anything's got to be better than this,' he complained.
'Twenty minutes to estimated contact.'
The Minstrel Boy checked the AK 5000 for what had to be at least the twenty-eighth time since they had been deployed in the tunnel.
'What's the betting that they hit right in front of us?'
'The way our luck's been running?'
Renatta was unconsciously chewing on her lower lip. The Minstrel Boy had to admit that despite the way he had been bad-mouthing her over the last few days, she was standing up very well for someone who had never faced combat before. She sighed and flexed her wrists, easing the weight of the laser bracelets.
'This has got to be the worst.'
The Minstrel Boy nodded toward the nothings, where patches of the nonmatter fog had become an incandescent white. 'That's the worst. You could really believe that it was the end of the world.'
Reave, who was nearest to the mouth of the tunnel, glanced back. 'Will you all keep that down? You'll end up shooting each other.' He had dropped naturally into the role of squad leader.
The space became eerily bright as the section of the nothings they could see at the end of the tunnel pulsed blinding white and then faded slightly again.
'You think this is them?'
'If it is, they're early.'
The voices in Billy's head were louder, but he still could not make out what they were saying. 'I don't like this at all.'
'I told you to put a cover on the negative comments.'
The very next moment not even Reave could hold back a gasp of amazement.
'Holy shit!'
Pseudopods of brilliant purple plasma danced out of the nothings and played over defenders and defenses. They seemed particularly drawn to metal. A militiaman cut and ran in panic as the glowing plasma coursed over his bronze armor. He was trying to brush it off with his hands as though he were on fire.
As far as Reave could see, the plasma did not seem to be doing him any actual harm. His sobbing terror was purely a result of the man psyching himself out.
'Everyone sit tight. I think that stuffs harmless.'
In fact, he was certain that it was harmless. It looked exactly like the glowing purple energy he had seen attach itself to the Old M
etal Monster inside the ziggurat just before he had deserted from Baptiste's raiders.
The plasma was inside the tunnel, scooting toward them along the floor, walls, and ceiling. It shimmered over their weapons and even the metal fittings on their clothes. Everyone stiffened at its touch, but once they all found that it did not seem to be doing them any damage, they were able to relax slightly; still, none of them seemed to be exactly happy about having bright, cold witchfire dancing on their guns and belt buckles.
'Fifteen minutes to estimated contact.'
The plasma vanished as quickly as it had appeared: It just retreated into the nothings and was gone. Reave wiped the sweat off his face. He did not want to let the others see it, but the waiting and the uncanny special effects were also getting to him.
There was a rumble of thunder from back inside. Everyone stiffened, and heads whipped around. Had the enemy hit on the other side of the spherical city? Back down the tunnel sheets of static were arcing between the buildings. They flashed brightly, and there was another loud clap.
'Okay, okay, it's just an electrical storm inside the city.'
A mercenary called Rat Barstow, whom Reave did not particularly trust and did not particularly want in his squad, was staring back down the tunnel with wide, scared eyes. 'There are never electrical storms inside the city.'
Reave scowled. 'Well, there are now.'
'You think the enemy is doing this to soften us up?'
'Seems like it's working on you.'
Renatta looked at him sharply. 'You do think they're doing it?'
Reave angrily shook his head. 'No, I don't. They don't have the technology. It think it's what happens when two big stasis fields come together.'
'Ten minutes to estimated contact.'
There was something disturbing about the calm of the vaguely feminine electronic voice that was running off the countdown. Reave glanced back at the squad again.
'No more talking from now on. That means everyone.'