Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys (3 page)

The power levers were in front of him. The grips were polished copper, lubed for a nearly perfect contact. He grasped them, and his nervous system performed a tiny sashay as it was accepted into the biode's intelligence cushion. His vision changed. The walls of the cavern and the sea tunnel glowed with a soft phosphor, as did the underwater contours, all clearly visible through the craft's now seemingly transparent hull. He leaned into the levers, and the craft moved forward. Speed, attitude, power consumption — all the figures were in his head. He willed the boat to go where he wanted, and it went. He willed quite sedately at first, submerging as soon as the bottom dropped away from the dock and then easing the nose into the mouth of the sea tunnel. The first narrow tube, however, quickly opened out into a network of interconnecting undersea chambers. He could guide the submarine and still take in the view. Giant stone arrows carved in the rock wall indicated the way to the open sea. The Minstrel Boy could not shake the feeling that he was passing through a vast aquarium. The sea tunnels of the Presence teemed with marine life that was as bizarre and exotic as the human life up in the Caverns, and in his biode-enhanced vision each creature glowed with its own eerie light. Fat, well-fed sharks glided with lazy menace. Strange life-forms with trailing fronds and eyes that protruded on stalks peered into the bubble canopy. The Minstrel Boy realized that Renatta de Luxe, without the biode-enhanced vision, could not see any of it.

He flicked on the external lights. 'Take a look through the porthole.'

'What are these things?'

'Who the hell knows.'

'Can I talk to you again?'

'Not yet.'

The submarine moved silently on with its lights blazing. The walls of the cavern outside continued to open out until they were no longer there. The Minstrel Boy took his hands off the power levers.

'We're in the open sea.'

'What happens next?'

'We'll drift into the nothings.'

'Will we feel the transition?'

The Minstrel Boy shook his head. 'I doubt it. Not unless the stasis generator goes down. I doubt we'd feel anything even then.'

As if to emphasize his point, lights on the control panel flashed and a warning appeared in the air:

IT IS TIME TO MANUALLY ACTIVATE THE STASIS GENERATOR.

It was a tradition: Human beings activated the stasis generator. One did not leave it to biodes or hard control systems or anything else. Of course, those things could provide backup if the human screwed up, but a man was the master of his own means of survival. The Minstrel Boy hit the twin toggles. The warning changed to a status display:

STASIS FIELD UP.

The nothings came at them like a wall of fog beneath the sea. They glittered with a bright and very alien light. They seemed to swirl with a thousand colors, but it was impossible to focus on an individual color or a single movement. There was something about them that resisted the grasp of the human senses. The gold submarine slid into them. The nonmatter closed over the bubble canopy and the portholes. There was a sheen on the outside of the craft from the thin layer of water that the stasis generator maintained around the craft. The lights continued to blaze, but the beams went nowhere.

— Pressdra Vishnaria

The Human Comedy, Volume 14:

The Damaged Perception

CHAPTERTWO

T
HEY HAD THEIR BACKS TO THE NOTHINGS, AND THE CAPTAIN
had taken away their stasis generators. There was no point turning back. Reave Mekonta leaned forward in his high-pommeled saddle and patted the green scales of his charger. The heavy lizard snuffled and grunted. The animal behind blew through its nostrils, and all down the line other animals made the soft sounds of big reptile discontent; their pungent smell tainted the clear air. Harnesses jingled, and up ahead there was the hum of the armored car's drive and the crunch of its roller treads. The small army of Vlad Baptiste, who liked to be referred to as "the Torch," moved cautiously along the road that led down into the small town.

The charger fluttered its wattles. The beasts were uncomfortable. The fully mature male marma lizard was so aggressively stupid that it would charge headlong into anything, but it did not take kindly to a slow pace and a short rein. The army of Vlad Baptiste boasted twenty marma chargers, plus the same number of horsemen, and five scouts riding the cognizant female lizards — although the scouts stayed out of the bulk of the fighting. There was also the armored car of
Baptiste himself and the attendant foot soldiers and baggage train.

They had come out of the nothings onto high ground. They were in an alpine pass looking down at a long narrow valley with a small fast-flowing river running through it. The small valley town that was situated about halfway down its length was not much more than a collection of domes and flat-topped adobes. It was neoprimitive from the look of the surrounding cultivated fields, and the small, gray stone ziggurat beside the river at the far end of the town seemed to indicate that religion played a major part in the inhabitants' lives. They would most likely be pushovers, which was just as well — for this attack, the army had no air support. The air pirates who had been running with them for the past two months had decided that the valley was too narrow for them to operate in safely and had taken their dirigible and four small monoplanes and headed out for Elsewhere. Whether they would ever return was debatable. Baptiste had fumed, but he had no real control over the miniature air force.

The army of Vlad Baptiste had emerged from the nothings into a subjective early morning. A pseudosun was coming up from behind the blue mountains. The upper slopes were hidden by clouds; Reave, who had seen a hundred variations of that kind of insular stasis town, suspected that the clouds were probably a permanent fixture, hiding the fact that the mountains had no real peaks but simply faded into the upper extreme nothings. There was undoubtedly a spread feed generator buried somewhere under the town, maintaining the valley's cozy normality.

Baptiste had briefly halted the column at the head of the pass. For some minutes he had sat on the turret of the armored car, a hunched figure in a leather field coat with his white aviator scarf flying in the breeze. He had stared down at the town long and hard, as though savoring the carnage to come. Finally he had pulled down his goggles and waved the army forward. There was little doubt among his soldiers that their leader was mad. His taste for random and wanton destruction seemed to grow by the month. There was no reason to sack and burn the little mountain community beyond the simple fact that it was there and Baptiste had found it. Reave was becoming heartily sick of the whole bloody business. He would have liked just to leave and ride away on his own, but that was a good deal more difficult than it sounded. Lately Baptiste had started hanging deserters.

There had once been a time when the word "deserter" would have been quite meaningless. They had been a loose company of freebooters then. Admittedly, they had been a little wild and some of their number had definitely been psychopaths, but they had largely confined their activities to the Lanfranc Margins, where everything was pretty wild and woolly, and, if they messed with anyone, the victims were more than likely to give as good as they got. The normal thing was to ride into town, get drunk, raise a little hell, and move on. It was simple, and those who got hurt probably deserved it. At first the change was so gradual that nobody really noticed. The gang became larger, growing from a dozen to twenty and then to thirty. Baptiste seemed to be making most of the decisions. He even organized a kind of uniform. He somehow acquired a load of short, frogged hussar's jackets in federal gray, and everyone got to wear one. Each man made his own modifications. Not even Baptiste could expect regimentation among his motley, walleyed bunch. Reave wore his with a plumed hat and black thighboots. Menlo Welker, who rode beside him, had his hair in braids and sported a steel pot helmet with a bayonet blade welded to it, pointing straight up.

The turning point had come when they had burned Lovelock Springs after a protracted firefight with angry townspeople who did not particularly relish their rough brand of tourism. After that, Baptiste seemed to have had the taste in his mouth. They stopped being mere hell-raisers and became destroyers. Baptiste started talking about "his army," and instead of having fun, they went on "raids." The Margin towns began arming against them, hiring shootists from other nomad gangs as mercenaries to defend them against Baptiste and his constantly growing band of cutthroats. Their raids took them farther and farther afield, and soon they were regularly leaving their old stomping grounds in the Margins and making sweeps through the nothings, preying on unsuspecting and usually undefended stasis settlements like the one in front of them.

The town seemed to be slowly waking to the new day. Thin ribbons of smoke drifted up from a number of the buildings. They really did have to be neoprimitive if they insisted on using fires for cooking. At first nobody in the town seemed to notice the body of men coming down the road from the pass. A few figures came and went among the buildings, but their movements had the calm normalcy of any daily routine. Nobody seemed to have looked up at the mountain. Then the routine was abruptly shattered. It took only one to give the alarm. The one was walking across the small square in front of the ziggurat. He or she stopped dead in his or her tracks. It was impossible to see the face or even determine the sex, but the reaction was unmistakable. First the shock and then the response. The figure ran to the nearest building and quickly returned with four others. They were pointing.

Menlo grunted. 'Looks like we've been spotted.'

'We're kinda hard to miss.' Reave's mouth twisted.

Figures were spilling out of buildings all over. Some were running toward the far end of town, but one large group, emerging from a big, barnlike building near the ziggurat, was forming into orderly ranks. They wore what looked like green sleeveless tunics and were carrying weapons.

'They've got themselves some sort of militia, damn it.' The figures in green were reinforced by a number of regular townspeople.

'And they're planning to make a fight of it.'

'I don't think they know who they're dealing with.'

There was a dry stone wall, three or four feet high, around the perimeter. The defenders were running toward it, obviously planning to use it as cover from which to hold off the attackers. Reave knew that his own bunch was going to take casualties and that Baptiste's response would probably be the massacre of everyone in the town. He drew one of his two pistols from the holster on his saddle. It was a long-barreled flintlock, lavishly ornamented, a reproduction of an ancient Moorish design. The antiquity, however, was only on the outside. The weapon's operation was deadly state of the art. A subatomic pellet discharged a stream of lethal accelerated ions each time the trigger was pulled. He checked the pistol's charge, then replaced it and ran a check on its twin.

The pitch of the armored car's drive changed. It was revving and picking up speed. Its siren cut in. The captain shouted 'Charge!' and Reave put long roweled spurs to his charger. The advance was a practiced maneuver. The lead riders moved sideways until the whole mounted force was strung out, yelling like banshees, running line abreast while the foot soldiers sprinted behind them.