Jack Yeovil - Demon Download

"The corps still don't want to mix with us," Lieutenant Rexroth told her. "ITT won't even talk to us on the telephone, and GenTech just barred us from the fax machine."

"Looks like we have a dose of the computer clap."

Rexroth didn't smile.

Finney went along with it. She was a good sufi. This shouldn't bother her. What was that phrase her counsellor kept using? "It's all part of life's rich pattern." In everything, there is a harmony.

Yeah, right.

"How are we at home?" she asked.

"Hanging even. No anomalies."

"And what does that tell you?"

The young man looked baffled. “Er…that we're running steady?"

"Let me put it this way, when was the last time you can remember that this place was running steady, with no anomalies?"

"Er…"

"Never, that's when. We're here to watch for trouble. And, as this blighted century draws to its blessed close, there is always trouble."

“I'll run the checks again."

"You do that."

Finney tried a few rear-entries of her own into the system, and got the same predigested answers. Even the spyholes she had put in place for her exclusive personal use weren't showing up anything out of whack. She was the best programmer and analyst in Apache, but just now she thought what was needed to deal with the machines was an exorcist.

"You know," she said to nobody in particular, "sometimes I think that maybe brown rice isn't enough."

Captain Lauderdale came over. "Cat, the post office just pulled out. It's just us and the RCs."

"Great. Have you talked to the cardinal or whoever?"

"It's hard to establish territoriality. I never knew the Catholic church was so complicated. St Columba's in Phoenix keeps trying to refer us to some spick bigwig in Managua."

"Archbishop Oscar Romero?"

"Yeah, that's the guy."

"So, get Romero."

"But he's the former head of state of a confederation hostile to the United States of America. We don't take our troubles to guys like that."

"Give me the strength, Lauderdale. This isn't something much affected by lines on a map."

Lauderdale was annoyed. "Tell it to Colonel Rintoon, Cat. He wants to keep this an Arizona thing. He'd bust us to latrine orderlies if he thought we were going to Texas for help, let alone the freakin' CAC!"

"I'm sorry, Lauderdale."

"Yeah. Everybody's sorry."

Finney had noticed how on edge Lauderdale had been since this thing started. It was getting to everyone. There had been more minor arguments in the Ops Centre than were usual. People were getting testy, locking horns, ruffling feathers. She hoped she was above and beyond that, but her nerves were fraying too.

It would be nice if she could see what was wrong, rather than just feel it.

"Maybe the place is haunted?"

Lauderdale raised a lip.

"No, really. We're slap next to a chunk of ancient history, Lauderdale."

"London bridge?"

"Yeah. Its stones must be soaked in blood. You know London. It's the most haunted city in the world, they say. Plagues, fires, the blitz, massacres, murders. Jack the Ripper, Christie, Dracula, Burke and Hare…"

"Edinburgh."

"Huh?"

"Burke and Hare killed in Edinburgh."

"Whatever. Maybe they imported the ghosts along with the bridge."

Lauderdale raised his hands and shook his head. "Cat…"

"Yes?"

"Have you been having enough sex recently? You've been getting some…pretty damfool ideas, you know."

Finney slapped him across the face. He smiled slowly.

"That's it, sufi. Get in touch with your emotions. Let a few of them out."

"Captains," shouted someone. Rintoon had come into the room. Finney and Lauderdale saluted in unison.

"I don't care what's going on here. I just don't want to see it again, okay?"

"Sir, yessir."

"Fine."

Rintoon's hair was uncombed, and his tie loose. Those were firsts. Finney knew the world was felling apart.

"Finney, we need you up in the shaft. We've cut through to the back-console, but it's flashing at us. You know all the codes."

"Yes sir."

"Any contact with Major General Younger, sir?" Lauderdale asked.

"Brevet Major General Younger, Lauderdale. And no, he's observed radio silence ever since the Unknown Event."

The Unknown Event. The UE. That was how Rintoon was dealing with it, slapping a military label on the thing, tying it up with jargon and filing it away with all the other UEs he didn't have to think about.

Finney ceded her console to Lenihan, and went with the Colonel. Lauderdale came along. Passing from the white-walled, immaculate and ordered corridors into the thickly-grimed liftshaft, with its dangling cables, unidentifiable accumulation of detritus and shower of sparks was a shocking lesson. This was what it was all like under the surface. Finney liked machines. They did what they were told. But even machines had a subconscious these days.

Climbing the access ladder to the stalled elevator was like trudging through the forgotten dreams of the fort. She wondered if she'd be able to get her hips through the open panel in the bottom of the cage, but didn't have any trouble. Two techies pulled her up with a minimum of scraping. She realized that these greasy-overalls power toolmen had been able to order Rintoon to go and fetch her. On some jobs, a colonel was surplus personnel.

Rintoon and Lauderdale joined them in the elevator. It was slightly uncomfortable. The techies had exposed all the workings of the door, and pulled out a spaghetti tangle of wires. An LED redstrip blinked a row of eight eights. The memory had been wiped.

"That shouldn't happen. The doors wouldn't open because the mechanism no longer recognized the c-i-c's code. But even if the central computer goes down there's a failsafe. The code is wiped but automatically replaced by the simplest possible combination. Eight zeroes. This won't even recognize that."

"So?" asked Rintoon.

"So," she replied, twiddling the master that, "we program in a code. One two three four five six seven eight."

The numbers appeared, and were held.

"Then, we punch the code." Finney pressed the buttons sequentially. "And, voila! The doors open."

The lift doors opened.

"Jesus Christ!" someone said. One of the techies vomited through the hatch in the floor.

Younger was scattered about the kitchen in pieces. His appliances were humming. There was a lot of smoke about, and a power point was sparking, but nothing had caught fire. A still vibrating electric knife was stuck through Younger's chest. His head was black and smoking in the microwave oven, lids shrunk away from dead white eyes like hardboiled eggs.

"The Major General's been…dismembered!" stuttered Lauderdale.

"Brevet Major General," corrected Rintoon.

No one got out of the elevator.

The Gaschugger girl primed the pumpgun, and found herself looking down the barrel of the SIG 7.62. "Don't," Chantal said, staring at the child's face. She had tattoos on both cheeks, and hair in rat-tails. The 'chugger dropped the gun. "Kick it over to the Trooper."

The girl followed orders. The Trooper picked up the weapon, and stopped looking frightened. He wiped blood off his face with the back of his hand, and stepped over the dead man.

Chantal had followed her training, and had made a snap judgement. But that didn't do anything about the guilt.

The man on the floor joined all the others in her collection of night horrors. Eventually, there would have to be a reckoning. A hyperactive little 'chugger pulled a sharpened screwdriver from his toolbelt and tried to stick it into the Trooper's ear. Chantal trusted the Cav man to take care of that. The Trooper ducked under the thrust, and jammed the butt of the shotgun into his assailant's chest. Then, when the 'chugger was doubled over, rapped him smartly on the back of the skull. He fell over his dead leader, insensible. "Seen enough?" she asked.