Ghost Dancers

Dark Future.

Ghost Dancers.

Brian Craig.

Prologue: A Boy and His Snake.

As soon as he saw the dust on the horizon, the Kid ran for his binoculars. It was the kind of cloud kicked up by a fair-sized automobile, but it was way off the road, where no vehicle ought to be. Not that you could really tell the difference between the road and the desert any morea"the land hereabouts was pretty flat, and baked so hard it was more like the concrete plazas in San Antone than real dirt.

When he first got the cheaters focused the limo was still a black dot, but the Kid knew it was a slug; he could feel it in his bones. Tourists never came out here, and he could think of only one reason why anyone would be heading straight as an arrow for his ace-in-the-hole hideaway.

They were coming after him.

He didn"t pause to consider the logical implications of that conclusion; in the Kid"s world, paranoia had survival value because anyone who stopped to consider alternative possibilities often ended up dead before reaching a confident conclusion.

Nor did he pause to wonder how the opposition had managed to discover the location of one of his best hideaways. He naturally made it a point of principle never to give his addresses to anyone, so that his dearest friends need not suffer the pangs of temptation every time GenTech raised the price on his head. While they couldn"t rat on him he wouldn"t ever have to blow them away; it was the only way that a guy could hang on to his friends once he was into the five-figure bracket. But the Kid was too canny to think that keeping his mouth shut was adequate protection against being located. He had heard some very hairy rumours about what the skyball snoopers could do nowadays, and he had always known that if and when the day came when GenTech wanted him badly enough to spend the money, they could find him.

He hadn"t expected that day to come so soon, but he was ready for it. He ran to stock his bike with as much as he could carry, and made a half-hearted attempt to stash some of his spare supplies in holes that wouldn"t be easy to locate. Then he gave his thoughts entirely to the matter of arms and armour.

Being found was by no means the end of the linea"it was just the beginning of the hunt. The enemy still had to take him, and he had done his best to make sure that they couldn"t do it with their first strike. The Kid"s hideaways were not without their defencesa"both natural and technological.

The mesa was the only piece of high ground for twenty miles, and it took a lot of skill to get a bike up the long gully. There was no way up for four-wheelersa"none at all. Pedestrians could climb up, of course, but the tabletop was craggy and strewn with boulders. The Kid knew every nook and cranny.

He considered himself lucky because the slug was heading out from the direction of San Antone. He"d always figured that as the most likely approach, and he"d set up his pride and joy to point that way. The missiles it launched weren"t very big, but they were top-notch target seekersa"once aimed, they didn"t miss, and it took a clever counterstriker to get in their way. Whatever the slug was carrying, it wasn"t likely to have a counterstriker.

The weapon had its downside too; once he"d used it, his cover was blown and he"d have to find a new ace-in-the-holea"but there was a lot of desert between here and the Sierra Madre, and the Kid had been forced to move house before. When he judged that his spare time had run out he ran to the launcher and started lining it up.

It took half a minute to get the slug in the crosshairs of the sightscope, by which time the dot was large enough to be identified. It was a corporation car, but not exactly a war-wagon. It was defensively armoured, but its machine-guns were deterrent-quality rather than real heavy metal; nor was it big enough to carry more than four mercy boys. It had big wheels with very heavy tyresa"which was why it didn"t give a d.a.m.n whether it had a road to ride on or nota"but it sure as h.e.l.l wasn"t the kind of hardware which the Kid would have sent out to chase down an outlaw sharpshooter.

Then he saw the bird.

He would have seen it earlier but for the dust which the car was kicking up, and for a second or two the crazy idea came into his head that the slug was only there to make a smokescreen for the coptera"but there was no time for turning the notion over in his mind, because he had to realign the launcher and realign fast. The bird had launchers of its own, and the Kid certainly didn"t have a counterstriker.

Things weren"t happening any faster than they had been before, but the presence of the copter made everything twice as urgent, and his healthy paranoia stirred up his nerves as hard as it could. But by the time he had the sightscope rejigged the monster was looming very large indeed, and no sooner were the crosshairs set than the b.a.s.t.a.r.d let loose one of its homers.

The Kid didn"t even have time to curse before firing one of his own.

His instinct commanded him to dive into a crevice and try to hide himself in the bosom of the rocky plateau, but lie knew how futile that would be. If the missile had a sight of him, it would do its level best to come right down his throata"there was no way he could shield himself from the blast. Because he knew that, the Kid suppressed the urge to dive awaya"and because he hesitated, it suddenly occurred to him that there was no way on earth the copter had got a sight of him. The copter had looked big in the sightscope because it was big. The Kid was too tiny to be picked out at the same kind of range.

By the time this logical a.n.a.lysis had told him that there was something not quite right, though, the conclusion was redundant. Both missiles had already found their targets.

First the slug exploded, then the bird.

"Holy s.h.i.t," murmured the Kid, realizing that the copter"s gunner hadn"t fired at him at all. The copter had been hunting the car.

Which probably meant, the Kid belatedly concluded, that his paranoia had misread things from the start. The car had not been coming at him h.e.l.l-for-leather with any hostile intent; what it had really been doing was running away from the bird. Neither the driver nor the pilot had had the least idea that the mesa was Kid Zero"s ace-in-the-hole.

Unfortunately, the Kid also realized, he had brought about exactly that situation which he had a.s.sumed to be the case. Within two hours, there"d be a whole d.a.m.n army of GenTech vehicles pounding across the plain to find out what had happened. His ace-in-the-hole wasn"t in the hole any morea"he"d put it well and truly on the map.

The Kid"s heart sank as he understood that he had blown it, and given himself away for no reason at all. Then he shrugged, figuring that the neighbourhood would have become too hot anyhow, with this thing happening on his doorstep, and he ran for his bike. There was only one thing to do nowa"get out to the wrecks in case there was anything left in them worth picking up, and then get the h.e.l.l out of it.

Lady Venom was still dozing in her cradle behind the saddle; she hadn"t stirred. Maybe that was because she hadn"t heard the two explosionsa"the Kid had been told once that snakes were deaf, though he didn"t know whether to believe it. Lady Venom was a h.e.l.l of a lot smarter than the average snake, and seemed to understand every word that he saida"but sometimes she seemed to understand even when he never said a word, so maybe she had some other hotline to his meanings and intentions.

He didn"t need to check his panniers or his handguns; the bike was already loaded, and it was always ready for action. He just leapt aboard and punched the starter. It was a smart sensor and it didn"t need to interrogate him before making up its mind who he was; the engine roared into life and he was away.

Going down the gully was no less hairy than coming up, but it was a good deal faster when the Kid was in a reckless mood. Today, he was at his most recklessa"but bike, snake and biker all came down in one piece, fighting fit.

It was a risk, of course, going to the wrecks before lighting out for the far horizon. The probability of finding anything to salvage didn"t really justify it. But Kid Zero had a powerful curiosity about strange thingsa"otherwise, he"d never in a million years have discovered and befriended Lady Venoma"and he was more than somewhat intrigued by the idea of GenTech sending out a spitting eagle to take out one of their own slugs. Maybe the slug had been hijacked by some sky-high-crazy joyridera"but even that would be something remarkable; GenTech was pretty careful with its equipment.

The copter was scattered all over the place, and every little piece of it had been comprehensively fried. The car was nearly as bad, but the bird"s fire-arrow hadn"t packed as much power as the Kid"s skybolt and it was mostly in one piece. If the driver had been in it when the bolt hit he"d still have been visible in the front seat, as a long stick of stinking charcoal. But he wasn"t visible, because he wasn"t there. He"d jumped before the missile had hit.

The Kid found him a couple of hundred yards back.

The jump hadn"t done him much good. He"d been going too fast, and he had been thoroughly messed up by the impact. He looked as bad as he would have if he"d hit the concrete-hard clay face first, and apart from the sc.r.a.ping he"d broken at least a dozen a.s.sorted bones. Although he was still alive, it was obvious that he wasn"t going to last much longer. But when the Kid dismounted and went to take a look, the guy stared up at him from his one good eye for a few seconds before fixing his gaze on Lady Venom, who was still in the cradle but craning her long neck over the side and giving out a low rattle with her h.o.r.n.y tail.

The guy probably didn"t recognize the Kid"s face, and maybe he wasn"t even a fan of the Homer Hegarty Show, but he sure as h.e.l.l knew that there was only one biker in the entire Disunited States who rode around with only a giant-sized rattlesnake for company.

"K-k-ka" he saida"but that was about all he could manage.

The Kid bent down to take a closer look, and then he reached into the guy"s jacket to take out his wallet. He glanced at the folding money in the kish compartment, but looked more closely at the guy"s plastic, searching for ID. There was plenty of it, all of it holding to the opinion that the guy"s name was Blay, and that he was a tech in GenTech"s BioDiv, based at a facility cast of Dallas. He couldn"t have come from there today, though.

The Kid didn"t like GenTech personnel, and he particularly didn"t like BioDiv. He had a kind of vendetta going, on account of something unpleasant which had happened to a girl he had once known. He gave Mr Blay a very stony stare, and Mr Blay must have known why, because he tried to shake his head.

Unfortunately, Blay"s head-shaking muscles didn"t work much better than his voicea"but his right hand was still capable of movement, and there was a big rip in his trousers, high on the thigh. The thigh was torn and b.l.o.o.d.y, and the Kid would have been prepared to swear that the flesh was one hundred per cent kosher, but there must have been some kind of smart sensor buried deep in the muscles, because the guy only had to touch it with his fingers to make it divide, revealing a deep pocket close to the bone.

The Kid had never seen anything like ita"as hidey-holes went it was real state-of-the-art. No matter how much he hated the BioDiv people, he had to admit that they came up with some neat ideas, and that not everything they did misfired as badly as what they had tried to do to his late lamented lady-friend.

Inside the pocket were two things. One was an ID made out of some limp material which presumably wouldn"t show up on X-rays. The other was a microdisc for a portable PC. It was a perfectly ordinary microdisc, and it didn"t take a genius to work out that it couldn"t be part of the standard equipment kept in the hidey-hole. The dying man indicated that the Kid should take out these objects, and the Kid obliged.

The ID had a fancy hologram on it, and there was just enough flesh left on the guy"s face to enable the Kid to see the likeness. But this ID disagreed with the other, holding obstinately to the theory that the guy who was carrying it was called Hayhurst, and that he was a US Government Agent.

The Kid was vaguely surprised to learn that the US Government still had agents. He had supposed that once the decline in the tax-collecting business had become terminal, forcing the state to sell off all its spyb.a.l.l.s to private enterprise, the government had to buy all their information from the websters, like everyone else. It was well known that Ollie the Prezz still had delusions of power and influence, but his regular protestations of independence from the corps were universally considered to be a bad joke. The idea of the government planting spies inside GenTech was intriguing, but it was difficult to take it wholly seriously.

At least, it would have been difficult, had the Kid not seen a GenTech bird trying with all its might to turn Hayhurst into a cinder.

The Kid looked down at the disc, thoughtfully. If it was worth killing for, it might also be worth money. Even better than thata"if BioDiv wanted to destroy it, it was probably something that could make trouble for them, and making trouble for BioDiv was one of Kid Zero"s favourite hobbies. Unfortunately, he didn"t have a PCa"and he suspected that it wasn"t going to be easy to get access to the kind of PC which could unload this kind of disc. The data on it was probably protected by all kinds of software locks and b.o.o.by-traps.

"G-g-ga" said the dying man.

"Get it to the President," said Kid Zeroa"and saw from the one eye"s flickering response that he was guessing along the right lines. He didn"t watch much TV, though he always made an effort to catch the Homer Hegarty Show, but he was a smart boy and he knew the ground rules for this kind of melodrama.

"Sure, Mr Hayhurst," he drawled. "You can depend on me. Always wanted to see Washington."

Hayhurst probably realized that he was having the p.i.s.s taken out of him. The embarra.s.sment seemed to be too much for him, because his one eye slowly closed. He was very red in the face.

The Kid repented of his unkindness.

"s.h.i.t," he said. He knelt down beside the body, and touched the ruined face with his fingers. The eye opened again, but the expression in it suggested that it wouldn"t be capable of seeing much for very long.

"There"s no way I could get this to your people, even if I knew who they are," said the Kid swiftly. "But you can bet your life I ain"t aiming to give it back to GenTech. If this is dynamite, Mr Hayhurst, I"ll do my level best to find a way to make it explode. You can bet your life on that."

But Government Agent Hayhurst had already bet his life, and the dice had come down snake-eyes, the way they always do in the end.

This could be red hot, said Kid Zero to himself speculatively. Too hot for a loner like me to handle. But a boy has to do what a boy has to do.

He had no time for rational calculation; his paranoia was in the driving scat and his paranoia was telling him that he had to get away as far and as fast as he possibly could. The fact that his paranoia had recently made a mistake was not enough to destroy his trust in it, and so he went. Not until he was on the road, thirty miles and more from the mesa, did he begin to ask himself exactly where he ought to go, and what he ought to try to do with Hayhurst"s disc.

Part One.

Out of the Horrorshow, Into the Fire.

1.

You"re moving through the streets at dead of night. There"s a light foga"just enough to blur the middle-distances and scatter the coloured light from the neons. You don"t know where you area"could be the ghetto-pit area of any one of half a hundred NoGos. The streets are narrow, pavements heaped up with reeking garbage so that you have to walk in the road. The other people about are thin and hollow-eyed, and they look at you with loathing as you pa.s.s. There are murky alleyways to either side, and pits of darkness where the doors have been torn away from derelict buildings.

The night is full of soft sounds: s.n.a.t.c.hes of music, and broken conversations, the distant mutter of bikes, the sound of footfalls. Every now and again you look rounda"quickly, furtively, anxiously. You know you"re being followed, but you don"t know who it is, or what they want; you only know that they mean you no good.

Sometimes you catch the eye of someone behind youa"someone who sees you looking over your shoulder. They always look right back at you, expressions full of hate, and sometimes they smile as if to say that they"re glad you"re scared, glad you"re in danger, glad that you"re going to get what"s coming to you.

An old junkie, jangling and jerking for lack of a fix, stumbles towards you, pleading inarticulately for a handout. When you move away from him reflexively, hurrying to get around him, his eyes flare up with the light of detestation and he spits at you, snarling curses.

A raddled wh.o.r.e, whose paint can"t begin to conceal the fact that she"s far too old for the game, slips out of a doorway and tries to catch you with her unsteady hand, rapidly murmuring her menu of possible obscenitiesa"and when you flinch from the groping hand her sharpened fingernails glisten like crimson claws, striking at your eyes.

Somewhere behind you, the footfalls begin to get loudera"loud enough for you to pick them out, and identify their malevolent intenta"but when you turn around, there"s no one to be seen but the smirking faces who know what you"re about to get and love the gory thought of it.

(The scene is seta"but you mustn"t think of it as a scene, because that"s not the way to play. You mustn"t make comparisons; you mustn"t draw back; you mustn"t take yourself in hand in order to remind yourself that it"s only a game. You mustn"t make yourself aware of the fact that you can"t feel the movement of your legs as you "walk". You have to suspend disbelief, or the experience will be worthless. If you"re to be properly tested, you have to submit to the delusion. Nowa"submit!) You make a right, which takes you into a dirtier and dingier street where the tall buildings loom over you on either side. The streetlights are mostly out and there"s no neon here. You can hear dogs and rats foraging in the garbage, and you can see half a dozen pairs of feral eyes catching what light there is and throwing it back at you as if it were some kind of accusation.

You"re moving faster now, and there"s a regular thumping sound at the threshold of perceptiona"much fainter than the shuffling footfallsa"which is supposed to be the beating of your frightened heart. You know that beating will accelerate and get louder, and you know what power suggestion has.

(Let it be the beating of your heart, thena"it would be cheating to deny it, and you"re no cheat. Submit!).

You can hear your own footfalls now, accelerating as you move faster and faster. You"re running, but it isn"t doing you any good because your unseen pursuer is running too, and you know full well that you can"t shake him. He"s invisible, indomitable, inescapable. There"s nothing, nothing, nothing you can do.

(In a way, that"s the worst of it, because your real self is a man of action, and the character isn"t. You"re the kind of person who wouldn"t do thisa"who would refuse to run. You"d stop and turn and make your stand in the middle of the street, meeting violence with violence even though the thing which is coming to get you can"t yet be seen. You just have to ignore that; try to forget it; go along with the gag.

You know you"ll see it eventually. You always get to see it, just before the end. But you"re not allowed to turn and make your stand. You have to be a coward because you"re not in control. You have to be the kind of person who runsa"the kind of person who is stupid enough to run into streets that get darker and darker, moronic enough to get cornered by a blind end.

What sort of person is that? you wondera"cursing yourself, meanwhile, for being forced to wonder. Exactly who are you supposed to be?

Forget it. Submit!) You can hear the sound of your own breathing now, and that audible heartbeat is becoming more insistent. You look round again, and see nothing, though there"s certainly something there. You run and you run, but it"s still behind you.

There are still other people about, but their faces only loom up now and again like bizarre gargoyles, illuminated for half a second, then gone. They"re all leering at you, laughing at you, licking their lips in antic.i.p.ation of the carve-up.

(How many get this far? you wonder. How many even get this far?) But you don"t have time for that, because you"re making the next turna"the last turna"into the narrowest, filthiest, most stink-filled alley of them all, and you know there"s no way on and no way out, that you"re all alone and that whatever is on your tail is going to catch you now, whether it be a face without flesh or a rabid beast or some nightmare creature straight from the pit of h.e.l.l.

So you turn, all the way around, and you back up against the wall, and you spread your arms out, exposing your breast and your belly and your b.a.l.l.s, like n.o.body woulda"only you don"t have any choice.

(Except for telling yourself the truth.) Out of the darkness it comes, taking on the solidity of flesh at lasta"and though the footfalls are gone the noises which fill your head are very loud indeed: a cacophony of slithering and sc.r.a.ping, a confusion of terrified heartbeats and whispered obscenities.

It doesn"t have talons or a chainsaw; it doesn"t have teeth or shears it doesn"t have hooks to pluck out your eyes or broken razor blades to shred your face.

All it has is a bottle; all it has is vitriol.

(You always see it coming; you always have time to antic.i.p.ate; you always have time toa) Don"t!

You shock yourself with the force of your silent exclamation, which bursts out of you as though you had no control over your own voice and your own thought.

You feel it, pure and intense and wholly irrational. You feel the fear, the panic, the horror.

You feel it! And you feel a paradoxical disappointment, that at last you"ve found a script which can get to you.

(A script? Is it a script?) Its face, just for a moment or two, is astonishingly pretty: female, blue-eyed, and innocent. Its face is filled with fear, as though you"re the attacker, the monster, the horror from the shadowsa.

But when it throws the acid, its own face begins to dissolve and burn, its own features sizzle and smoke, its own eyes collapse like crushed grapes, its own mouth opens in a hopeless attempt to let out a screama.

Then the air around it seems to solidify, and you see that you"re looking in a minora.

Anda"just for an instanta"you forget that you"re not a blue-eyed girl, fresh and uncorrupteda.that you"re not such a sweet and pretty and spoilable creaturea.

Just for an instant, you believe the mirror instead of your own memory, instead of your own self-knowledgea.

Seeing, after all, is believing, and that"s what you seea.

And you can"t help it at all, because it"s her fear which rises up inside you, her terror which seizes and consumes you, and only because you are her, just for an instant, do you chicken out.

You find what you were searching for, determined not to find.

The lights come on. The canopy is already rolling back, as though you"re being newly-hatched from an egg. You step out, cursing. You feel that you"ve been tricked, and of course you havea"but that"s all part of the game, isn"t it? Horror comes from shock, fear from surprise, and the only true test of courage is the utterly unexpected.

Pasco couldn"t believe it. In all the time he"d been playing the booths he"d never been panicked before. Despite all his determination to put himself into the scenarios, to experience the illusion as if it were for real, none of the scripts had ever got to him that way. He had been proud of thata"proud of his own invulnerability. He hadn"t believed that the horrorshows could ever really test his nerve to destruction. And nowa How had the b.a.s.t.a.r.d booth known?

He took hold of himself. The booth couldn"t have known, and didn"t know. It was just one more scripta"a script which just happened to have particular significance for him. Maybe everyone had one particular script which got to them. Maybe those creaky old plane-crash scenarios the Mark Is had started out with had really scared the s.h.i.t out of people who were afraid of flying. Maybe the sword-fight scenarios and the battle-tank scripts had claimed their fair share of victims. Maybe he"d allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security by his a.s.sumption that the Mark XIII was just like the X, the XI and the XIIa"just one more streetstalker scenario. Which of course, it wasa except that this streetstalker was his own particular bete noire.