Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys (26 page)

'This is not right.' The Minstrel Boy crawled hand over hand until he reached a window. The R1009 was bucking and barreling though a mountain range of implausibly sharp rock spires with a blizzard shrieking through its steep passes and deep ravines. The ship all but grazed one of the spindly peaks,
missing it by a fraction. 'I think we've run head-on into some random reality.'

'How does it look?'

'It doesn't look good.'

As abruptly as they had come, the mountains were gone again. The still shuddering airship banked drunkenly, and the Minstrel Boy found that he was looking out over a landscape that was as flat as a billiard table and was divided into huge, geometric black and white squares. Here and there sharp outcroppings of rock appeared to have pushed their way up through the level surface, forcing deep cracks in the monster mosaic.

The R1009 was sinking lower and lower over the scarcely credible plain. The vibration went on rattling their nerves. For a minute or more the ship stopped rolling and managed to hold a relatively steady course.

The Minstrel Boy took a few quick steps toward the ballroom's nearest exit. 'I'm going to get the portable SGs from our gear. I don't trust this ship not to start breaking up. There's something really wrong here.'

Reave worked his way toward him. 'We might as well all go. If something does come unglued, we'd do well to grab as much of our gear as we can.' He peered out of an observation window.

The Minstrel Boy joined him.

'It doesn't even look like an inhabitable reality,' the Minstrel Boy commented.

'What's that over there?'

Reave was pointing to something, little more than a smudge on the horizon but growing bigger as they watched it. The Minstrel Boy shaded his eyes. The sky was a bright white glare that was reflected back from the white geometric squares as the shadow of the airship raced over them.

'It looks like a dust cloud; could be being thrown up by some kind of vehicle.'

'Hell of a big vehicle. That cloud's a long way away.'

There was one problem. Although whatever was creating the dust cloud was traveling over the black and white squares, the dust being thrown up was gaudy and multicolored; it hung in the air, spiraling and twisting. The closer the thing came — and it seemed to be traveling at a speed well in excess of those normally achieved by land vehicles — the more the Minstrel Boy and Reave came to realize that it was very big indeed. It also
seemed to be partially buried in the ground, plowing through the flat, smooth surface.

'What the hell is that thing?'

The Minstrel Boy shook his head. 'I don't know, but I don't like it.'

Billy had come up beside him. His eyes were wide with horror. 'I know what that is.'

Reave and the Minstrel Boy both looked at him. 'What is it?'

'It's a disrupter.'

The word rolled like a toll of doom. It was one of the most feared words in the whole Damaged World.

'Are you sure?'

'Did you ever see one?'

Billy took a deep breath. 'No, I never saw one, but there was this guy living at the Sanctuary who told me all about it in one of his lucid moments. This is exactly as he described. One tore into his settlement and just chewed up reality. If that wasn't bad enough, it left behind this wake like a walking nightmare. It drove the ones that were left quite mad. This guy was one of the few survivors.'

'What do you mean, one of his lucid moments?'

'He giggled uncontrollably most of the time.'

The fear of the disrupter was partially the fear of the unknown. They were rarely seen; most people had only heard the lurid tales of their capacity for destruction. So little was known about them that there was no way to predict where and when they might burst through from whatever dimension or nether-place they normally occupied and tear into the world of mortals to create chaos and damage beyond belief. More than one culture had a nighttime prayer that started 'Deliver us from the fury of the disrupter.'

The airship was still descending, although the vibration had greatly subsided. It actually seemed to be slowing to a stop right in the path of the oncoming disrupter. The Minstrel Boy stared at the thing as though he were mesmerized. The shock seemed to have robbed him of the will to do anything to save himself. It was not that he had led what could remotely be described as a sheltered life. He had seen more than most men, but the monster in front of him was something out of legend. There was no certainty that the death that it was undoubtedly bringing was a
natural one rather than some hideous transfer to an unknowable discorporation beyond the nothings. For the first time in his life he felt totally helpless. He suddenly became aware that Reave was tugging at his arm.

'Come on, let's get going.'

'What's the point? You can't run away from a disrupter.'

'We can get the SGs. We'll need them if we get through this.'

The Minstrel Boy tore his eyes away from the disrupter and followed Reave, even though he truly believed that it was a futile exercise. If a disrupter came after a person, there was nothing he could do except kiss his ass good-bye.

It was now possible to see something of the disrupter itself. It was a dark shape in the center of the garish residue that was fountaining up on either side of it as it sliced through the surface of reality. It appeared to be roughly cylindrical with an open, gaping maw that seemed to be sucking in the living rock. There was what looked like a line of jutting extensions along the top side of the thing, like spines or a kind of composite dorsal fin, but it was hard to make out any real physical details because the disrupter apparently had the capacity actually to absorb light. At the same time, however, it glittered from within, as though tiny stars were trapped inside its dark bulk.

The airship had come to a full stop, hanging in the air a mere thirty feet above the ground. The disrupter was coming straight at it. The DNA Cowboys, Clay Blaisdell, and Renatta stood in the observation gallery. Billy checked his SG; Reave had put a protective arm around Renatta. Blaisdell gripped the guardrail in front of the window with white-knuckled hands. The Minstrel Boy just stared. There was no sign of the crew, the metaphysicians, or the two metal men. The disrupter had come close enough for the five of them to see deep into the thing's open maw. In front of it, solid matter seemed to flare and become unstable, and then, with the consistency of liquid, it was effortlessly swallowed. There seemed to be some dark energy inside that glittered in a way that no darkness ever glittered in the real world. The Minstrel Boy could almost feel it calling to him, beckoning him to be part of it.

The disrupter was only a matter of a couple of hundred yards away. To everyone's complete surprise, the airship began to lift,
as if it were being pushed upward and out of the way by some invisible bow wave that preceded the disrupter.

'We're going up. I thought for sure that we were going to be sucked into it.'

The disrupter was directly underneath them. The R1009 suddenly rolled and staggered. The last thing the Minstrel Boy remembered was Reave bellowing.

'Hang on! Here we go!'

They were inside something else. What a second before had been normality was now so totally twisted out of shape that the Minstrel Boy had difficulty believing that he was still alive or even that he was the same being he had been before. Sound, vision, touch, and temperature, even the familiar comfort of up and down — none of it was remotely like anything he had previously experienced. Perspective twisted, coiled, and undulated. Shards of color with razor-sharp edges rushed at him and threatened to slice his flesh to ribbons, except that he no longer had flesh. His body was being stretched and distorted all the way to infinity. His whole environment had become an alien place where only fragments of his personality crawled and cowered. It was as if there were other entities all around him, but isolated, separated, unable to communicate anything but a common pain and a common loss. Were they other victims of the disrupter? At the heart of it all there was a being that was beyond alien. Even the word "alien" had a form and a recognizable perimeter. This thing had nothing except the unmistakable will to consume. All that translated was its hunger, a cosmic hunger from a cosmos that was so far removed that the Minstrel Boy was unable to conceive of it even though he could feel the pain of that relentless now-and-forever need. The other entities — and he had no reason to believe that he was not one of them — swirled around it in unhappy orbit, reflecting the need. Strange voices that spoke in tongues that he could not even begin to understand forced their way into his head. He was falling and flying and floating; he was drowning in a molasses-thick sea of vibrating noncolor. He was being scorched and frozen in a dark place that was on the other side of blinding white light. He was disintegrating, and it would go on until eternity. He heard a voice screaming, and it sounded like his own.

'For God's sake, stop!'

And, miraculously, it did. He was back in the airship hanging
on to a guardrail for dear life. The R1009 was in a great deal of trouble. As far as he could tell, it was standing on its nose while dark madness roiled past the windows. There was an explosion somewhere in the bow, and then a second one above them. They were falling, spinning. His arms felt as if they were being wrenched out of their sockets as he clung on.

'We're going down!'

The airship was wallowing, a sign that someone was trying to regain control. It yawed sideways, and although it was still dropping, it no longer fell like a stone.

'Ground's coming up!'

'Where's the disrupter?'

'It's passed. We're going through its wake.'

'Hang on!'

The R1009 impacted, bounced, and hit again. It slid for about fifty yards in a single shriek of protesting metal and finally slewed to a stop. Reave was the first one to get to his feet. Smoke drifted through the seriously canting observation deck, but there was no fire.

'Is everyone okay?'

There were groans of acknowledgment. No one had suffered more than cuts and bruises.

Billy was nursing a sprained wrist. 'An old-fashioned Flash Gordon airship crash where everyone dusts themselves off and walks away.'

'An old-fashioned what?'

Billy shook his head and helped Blaisdell to his feet. 'Nothing.'

Reave cut through the cross talk. Billy could go on all night dragging weird stuff out of his memory. It was something he did in the aftermath of stress. 'Let's get out of here. The damn thing could still blow up.'

Power was out, so the Minstrel Boy threw the lock onto manual mode and wrestled with the wheel that swung the door open. The five of them hurried through it and then kept up a fast walk until they were some fifty yards from the grounded ship. It was only when they were what Reave considered to be a safe distance away that they turned to look back at it. Considering what the R1009 had been through, it was in comparatively good shape. The framework was twisted in a couple of places, and parts of the outer skin had been blown away, but it had not broken up.

The worst damage was up by the nose, where a blackened hole had been blown in the fuselage.

Renatta sighed. 'I guess it lost its luxury status.'

Billy glanced at Reave. 'You think there's any chance of it flying again?'

Reave scratched his head. 'I'm damned if I know. These things are supposed to be able to fly when they're half falling apart, but this baby's taken a lot of punishment'

At that moment a smaller lock nearer the nose popped open. The metaphysicians began carefully climbing out. They seemed hardly touched by the crash. Not even their bodysuits were dirty. Reave went back to meet them, but before he could reach the main group, Showcross Gee detached himself from the other twenty-six and headed him off.

'This is a bad business,' the metaphysician said.

Reave nodded. 'Have you seen anything of the crew? Did they survive?'

Showcross Gee shook his head. 'We simply got ourselves; out of the aircraft, just as you did.' Showcross Gee was nor going to brook any reproach from the help.

Reave looked back at the ship. 'I guess we ought to go back inside and see if there's anyone left alive in there. It doesn't look as though the ship's going to blow.'

He started to round up the others, but Showcross Gee called him back. 'Do you have any idea what this place might be?'

Reave looked across the strange checkerboard plain. 'I don't have a clue, except that it doesn't look like an area of generated stasis. I think this is something random, and I'd like to get out of here as soon as we possibly can.'

Showcross Gee was thoughtful. 'That's interesting. I think I tend to agree with you.'

He knelt down and placed a hand flat on the ground. 'Strange.'

'I think I ought to go and look for survivors.'

Showcross Gee ignored Reave. 'It hardly feels like any normal mineral at all.'

Reave was getting a little tired of Showcross Gee's detached indifference. 'What does it feel like?'

'I hesitate to guess.'

'I'm going to look for survivors.'

Showcross Gee straightened up, dusting off his hands. 'At least we saw a disrupter close up.'

Reave scowled. 'That's a treat I could have missed.'

He walked over to where the others were waiting and beckoned to the Minstrel Boy. 'You come with me. We're going to the control room to see if any of the crew made it through the crash. Billy and Renatta, you two go aft and check the cabins. See what happened to Jet Ace and Stent.'

Clay Blaisdell glanced around. 'What do I do?'

Reave nodded toward the metaphysicians. 'Keep an eye on them. See that they don't pull anything.'

'What could they pull?'

'I don't know, but I don't trust them.'

Showcross Gee had rejoined the other twenty-six. They had walked over to the deep trench left by the disrupter that ran like a long straight scar in the geometric landscape, clear to the horizon. They were peering into it. Strange shards of color still lingered in the trench, gradually fading.

Reave and the Minstrel Boy made their way through the ship, walking with great care on the tilted deck. The door to the control room was jammed, and they had to force it. Inside they found that a bulkhead had been blown out, and although one control console remained just about intact, the rest of the control surfaces were a spaghetti of tangled metal, shattered tubes, and slimy ropes of leaking biogel. Two from the crew of six were bending over a third who had a bad head wound. A fourth was sprawled on a contour chair with her head at an angle that left no doubt that she was dead. The remaining two were rigging bridging lines to the control console that was still intact. They all turned in alarm as Reave came through the door, shoulder first.

'I'm sorry to burst in like this; it was jammed.'

'Don't worry about it. We couldn't get it open from the inside. We feared we were trapped in here.'

Reave noted that no matter what their fears, the crew members were still calmly going about their business. There was something robotlike about the hexads that ran airships.

'Do you need any help?' he asked.

'I think we can manage now that the door's open.'

'How bad is the damage?'

'We should be able to lift the ship in a couple of hours.
Control will have to be largely manual, but we will be able to fly.'

'What about the stasis field?'

'We'll be ready to test that in a few minutes.'

'So we have no insurmountable problems?'

'There is one.'

'What's that?'

The crewman indicated a section of tangled wreckage that Reave had been trying not to look at. Something pale and bloody was crushed in the middle of it.

'The brain host is dead.'

That was something that turned even Reave's stomach. The lizardbrain core of the guidance system had been grafted onto a tailored human host — if, indeed, something could be called human that had no arms, legs, nose, or mouth, that breathed through a vent in its chest like a gill and stared unblinkingly out of huge, mad saucer eyes.

'So we have no guidance?'

'None.'

'What would be our chances of finding a settlement if we just went in blind?'

'In a reality this size, it could be years before a chance stasisfall. Maybe hundreds of years.'

'Suppose we stay here and wait for help?'

'It's our estimation that here may not be here for very much longer. It has the feel of something random and very unstable. It may have only developed at the coming of the disrupter, and, now that it's gone, all this could simply vanish.'

Reave slowly turned and faced the Minstrel Boy. He did not have to voice what he was thinking.

The Minstrel Boy sagged. 'I really don't want to do this.'

The crewman looked at the two of them inquiringly. 'Is there something I should know?'

'The Minstrel Boy has a lizardbrain implant.'

The crewman beamed. 'Then we have no insurmountable problems.'

'He has to use cyclatrol to achieve cognizance.'

The crewman's face fell. 'Oh.'

The Minstrel Boy regarded him with an expression that was almost sad. 'You know what that means?'

'I understand it involves extreme stress.'

'You can say that again, Jack.'

Reave put a hand on the Minstrel Boy's shoulder. They both knew that in the end he was going to do it. They also knew that by doing it he was putting his sanity at considerable risk.

Reave faced the crewman. 'You have cyclatrol?'

'Plenty. It was fed constantly to the brain host.'

The Minstrel Boy sighed. 'Poor bastard.'

While Reave and the Minstrel Boy were engaged with the crew and the problem of navigation, Billy and Renatta moved from cabin to cabin in search of Stent and Jet Ace. They were almost to the stern when Renatta pushed open a door, let out a startled gasp, then quickly beckoned to Billy.

'This you gotta see.'

It was one of the smallest caibins. Stent and Jet Ace were both on the floor, pressed together in the narrow space between the bunk and the floor, where they must have been thrown by the first violent bucking of the ship. Each man had removed about half his metal exterior. What was revealed was not a pretty sight. Jet Ace was normal from the neck up but Stent had doughy, lopsided features, as though being encased in armor
all his life had never allowed real features to develop. Clumps of sparse white hair that appeared never to have seen the sun stuck out on patches from his otherwise bald skull. Ugly polyp growth patched discolored skin. One of the creepiest parts was the way the hard polished metal of their prosthetics buried itself in their living bodies. The flesh around those points was red and raw, as though it still rebelled against foreign incursions. Stranger still, though, was the way the two of them were joined together by an elaborate network of jumper cables.

'So this is what they do when they're alone,' Billy said.

'And that's what they look like with their clothes off.'

'They must have been so busy fucking that the first time the ship bounced, they were thrown off the bed.'

'You think fucking is the right word?'

Renatta started to giggle uncontrollably. She was still giggling when Jet Ace opened his eyes.

'You've seen us.'

Billy was having trouble stopping himself from laughing. 'Most people start off with 'Where am I?'

'What happened?'

'We crashed. We were almost eaten by a disrupter.'

'A disrupter? Is it still around?'

Billy shook his head. 'No, it's gone.'

Jet Ace was struggling to sit up. He was hampered by Stent, who was also coming around, thrashing about and entangling himself in the jumper cables. Renatta had another attack of giggles. Jet Ace looked at her resentfully.

'You shouldn't judge, you know.'

Renatta had trouble talking through her fresh fit of giggling. 'I'm sorry . . . I'm not . . . it's just . . .'

Jet Ace became very stiff. 'Would you mind leaving while we dress?'

There was no more laughter when they all gathered in the control room. It was time to be deadly serious. Jet Ace and Stent were back in their armor, inscrutable again. Billy and Reave looked worried, and the Minstrel Boy had the face of a man going to his execution.

'Is it really going to hurt him that much?' Renatta whispered to Blaisdell.

'Could kill him.'

'God.'

Showcross Gee was the only metaphysician present. The others had taken themselves off to their staterooms. He watched the Minstrel Boy impassively. 'There are certain metaphysical techniques — '

The Minstrel Boy turned and snarled at him. 'And you're going to teach them to me in the time we have left?'

Showcross Gee made a slight bow of submission. 'You're right. There wouldn't be time.'

'So don't even talk about it, all right? Let's just get on with this.' He faced the crewman who did all the talking. 'Are you ready?'

The crewman nodded. 'We are ready to raise the airship. If you would all find handholds. There may be a certain amount of vibration.'