Demon Download df-3

by Jack Yeovil

  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 shear blades met, and the rope parted. Quincannon fell back, dropping the tool on the floor.

  "Done, Sister," he said.

  "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.lt was just a way of getting the demon's attention, but it ought to give a litle 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, bu
t 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!"

  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!"

  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. Fattier 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 fromthe ground again within nanoseconds. The pictures the creature was playing inside her head stretched out of shape, slowed down, crumpled, fragmented. The races 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 lace 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 apendages 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. Cmon, done do nothin' you'll re-gret tomorrow."

  "The Power of Christ compels you…"

  "Pope's whore, roundheels sexclone, freaking ratskag, hagwitch, slut-nun, sumpsucker, rathergrabber, 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 vehicle 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.