Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys dc-4 Page 2

  The shaft opened on the smell of salt air and ozone. In a cathedral of a rough-hewn cavern, granite quays jutted into a dark tossing swell that lapped over their worn sides. Saint Elmo's fire glowed on the walls as if to suggest that somewhere deep in the bowels of the volcano there was a major interface of opposing forces. Six submarines rode at their mooring lines. There was one large, sleek passenger shuttle and five much smaller five-seaters with their much more ornate custom designs. There were no people in evidence. There was little traffic to and from the domain of the Presence, and the docks of the sea tunnels were not a place where lovers cared to linger. Technically, he was about to steal a submarine, but theft had little meaning in a culture where people were so apathetic about property concepts.

  Thus it came as something of a surprise when, while he was standing on the dock inspecting a gold five-seater with a satyr figurehead and a fish-scale design on its ceramic hull, he heard a voice calling out to him.

  'Hey, you!'

  After his brush with the Society of Hunters, he was wary of people yelling after him. He swung around to see a woman running toward him, moving awkwardly on high-heeled sandals. Her skin was very white, and her hair was a very black and tangled mane. The black lace shift that was her only garment scarcely qualified her as dressed.

  'Will you take me with you?'

  'I'm not going on any joyride.'

  Up close, he could see that she had a narrow, pretty face with very large, bright green eyes and otherwise small even features. Her expression was determined.

  She gave him an impatient look. 'I can see that. You're getting out of here, right?'

  The Minstrel Boy was cautious. His old instinct of self-preservation, which had slept all through the wine and roses, was coming awake again. 'I'm leaving, yes.'

  'I want to leave, too. I'd take a sub myself, but I don't know how to navigate to somewhere else. You know how to navigate?'

  The Minstrel Boy nodded. 'Yeah, I can navigate.'

  'So let me come along for the ride.'

  The Minstrel Boy looked her up and down. 'You're hardly dressed for traveling.'

  She planted her hands on her hips. Her body was full and magnificent. 'Hey, boy, as you well know, the Hunters are running around up above designating Victims for the upcomingfestivities and handing out the crystal tickets. I didn't bother to pack. I figure that I can take care of a wardrobe when we get wherever you're going.'

  'There's no way of knowing what we might run into out there. The shit changes all the time.'

  The woman sniffed. 'I know my way around.'

  The Minstrel Boy looked a little sad at her display of machismo. 'Lady, nobody knows their way around these days.'

  She faced him with the defiance of one who was truly desperate. 'So I'll fake it and be just like everybody else.'

  The Minstrel Boy grinned. She sure as hell had the glands. He could not see any valid reason why he should not have a traveling companion. She was certainly very attractive, and she might even develop a sense of gratitude along the way. He made a mock-defeated gesture. 'It'd be a pleasure to ride with you. Which boat do you fancy? I was thinking about taking this gold one.'

  The woman shrugged. 'It doesn't make any difference to me.'

  He hand-cranked the hatch and climbed into the well of the submarine. He offered his hand to the woman. 'Welcome aboard, milady. Do you have a name?'

  'Renatta de Luxe.'

  He winced. 'Really?'

  'Of course not, but it'll do for the duration. I mean, what kind of name is the Minstrel Boy?'

  'You know me?'

  'I've seen you around. I even saw you play once, back when you still bothered to play.'

  The vessel rolled with the swell, and for a moment they were thrown against each other. Then it rolled the other way, and they were apart again. The Minstrel Boy smiled and indicated that she should precede him into the cabin. The interior of the craft was cramped but comfortable. It was finished in walnut paneling, and the passenger seats were swivel armchairs covered in deep plush. On one wall there was a small compact bar and supply locker that he intended to investigate once the vessel was on autopilot. He eased into the transparent bow blister and settled into the pilot chair. The submarine was powered down, and he started the preembarkation by stroking his hand over the plasma control sphere to bring the ship to life. Lights softlyglowed, and there was a comforting hum from the engine compartment in the stern. A ready image from the boatmind rose to his eye level. He ran a fast cockpit check. The five-seat submarine was not a particularly complicated piece of machinery. The most important thing was to locate the lizardbrain navigator. To his relief, he spotted the silicate cube that contained the microscopic sliver of tissue from the primary brain of the female marma lizard.

  'We're in business. We have lizardbrain.'

  Renatta de Luxe had settled into a passenger chair directly behind him and strapped in, her manner indicating that she wanted him to be aware that she knew what she was doing.

  'How does that work?' she asked.

  'Don't even think about it.'

  The marma lizard was the only creature that had the natural power to sense routes through the nothings from one point of stability to the next. In the early days of travel through the nothings, in the time of the great arks, numbers of the large lizards had had to be taken on any voyage. Travel through nonmatter had been greatly facilitated by the discovery that cognizance could be achieved by any vessel's basic biode if a few cells of one of the lizards' brains were grafted into its code.

  The Minstrel Boy had a secret that he tried never to reveal to anyone. He could achieve cognizance himself — he, too, knew his way through the nothings. Years ago he had received the now largely outlawed lizardbrain implant. But using it was not an experience he had ever relished. The sense of knowing where he was or where he was headed came only after massive doses of the drug cyclatrol and was accompanied by agonizing pain. Although there had been incidents when ruthless individuals had forced the secret out of him and compelled him to navigate for them at gunpoint or worse, he tried to limit its use to the most dire emergencies only.

  'So where are we going?'

  He glanced back at Renatta de Luxe as he brought down the periscope and slipped the moorings. 'I don't know yet. I have to get beyond the stasis wash of this place and then see what I can tune to. This little boat doesn't have unlimited range. It'd be good if you didn't talk to me for a bit. I'm going to go into the biode until we're out of the sea tunnels.'

  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.

  It was unfortunate timing, to say the least. Just as the news of the Great Metaphysical Breakthrough was bringing a strange hope to the beleaguered Thirteenth Empire, the nothings appeared and swiftly devoured reality as the humans had known it, except what little could be saved by the hastily developed stasis generators. Human reasoning, being what it was, found it impossible to separate cause from juxtaposition and to dismiss the idea that the two events were related. The enemies of the metaphysicians made great play of this, openly accusing them of unleashing the demon.

  A survivor of the destruction of Climnestra described one of the first appearances of the nothings thus: 'It started on Philo Boulevard right outside the Harbingers. It was a glittering patch of air, like dancing dust motes, that hung some four feet above the street. Very slowly it grew into a dazzling, pulsing sphere some six feet across. It remained like that for maybe ten minutes, and then, without warning, it expanded at an amazing speed. Everything it touched smoked and became nothing. Even those of us who were lucky enough to be inside the field of the stasis generator feared that we would parish as the terrible miasma engulfed us, but the ground beneath our feet and the air around us remained, and we alone were spared.'

  The theories regarding the origins of the nothings are many, and the debate continues among historians to this day. Initially they were blamed on some alien superweapon, a product of the conflict with the Draan. Later more fanciful and complex explanations were evolved. The nothings were the first phase of a cataclysmic matter/nonmatter evolution. They were a uniquely disastrous residue from the process of stuff synthesis. One particular favorite of metaphysicians, trying to divert attention from the accusations of their political foes, was that humanity itself, fleeing the potential created by the Great Metaphysical Breakthrough, had willed The nothings into existence as a form of perverse self-protection. They were the physical (or maybe counterphysical) manifestation of collective fear and depression. There was also the matter of their extent. For those who survived the destruction, it was impossible to tell whether the nothings had engulfed just their home planet or half the galaxy.

  — Pressdra Vishnaria

  CHAPTERTWO

  Theyhad 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, fr
ogged 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.