TWELVE

The Bunkers on Centauri VII

Two hours after dawn in Egerton's Port. At four a.m., the bottom had dropped out of the thermometer, and the street details were still pulling the night's crop of defunct and hypothermia losers off the sidewalks. There were plastic syringes frozen into the gutters and skeins of rime on the windows when John Truck stumbled over the threshold of the place he shared with Tiny Skeffern and fell on his face, making instinctive running motions and trying to brandish his guns.

He was covered in blood and soot. The Paraphythium was wearing off — and with it, mercifully, the accurate memory of that horrible night — leaving him with a runny nose and only the slightest notion of where he'd been, where he was, or how he'd managed to make it there. He heaved himself up as far as his knees, explored his raw, flayed face with one hand, and mumbled, 'Oh God, Tiny, I have to get out of here.' Nobody answered, so he slipped down again onto his belly and went to sleep, the room silent and unrelenting around him.

When he woke up it was getting dark, and still no sign of Tiny. His head ached ferociously. He propped himself up against a door frame and drank a pint of something he'd found in the fridge. Then he fumbled about, cooking eggs and eating them while he tried to read two messages that had come for him.

DERE BOSS (the first one went) I COM IN FRUM ERTH ON A FREYTER WURE THE UDE ENT GUDD WEN I SEEN TH OLD ELA SPID ON THE APRIN I DISIDED TO COM BAKC THERS NO HARD FEELINS

FXX.

That, hand printed in Fix the bos'n's mephitic script on the back of a crumpled, furry old spare-part invoice from a well-known Dynaflow subsidiary, caused him to grin. His face felt stiff and numb. With Fix's chopper back in its rightful corner of the hold, he could at least fly the old tub without fear of its engines falling out all over the sky. That was what he told himself: really, he just missed the little guy.

As for the other: 'The time is ripe, Captain,' it said, mad and plummy and familiar. 'Come with all haste. God speaks to us from the bunkers, you and I.' And it gave a fifteen-figure reference for a planetary touchdown. He didn't think he'd have to check the almanacs to locate the planet in question, either. It was signed 'Grishkin.' It appeared he'd been activated as the mad priest's agent.

He sat on the floor among the piles of sleazy bedclothes and Opener literature, trying to formulate some sort of policy. Angina Seng had finally convinced him that when the landed gentry cuts up a seedcake for tea it makes no difference to the cake which of them holds the knife; whoever 'won' Earth's war, it would be the same old crew who stepped up afterwards to hold out their plates: the squabble over Truck and the Device was nothing more than a polite difference between friends as to who should have the largest slice.

Ben Barka and Gaw would survive; Veronica would be replaced; Grishkin would come waddling on behind. Whole again, the triumvirate of Drugs Actual, Political, and Spiritual would dance and trample its way over the corpses of spacers in hopeless hinterland streets (blinked out like cooling suns, their precious fire gone); caper on the hulls of ships in cometary orbits, each one stuffed ripe and full with dead young men; and tread gleeful measures over the husks of planets circling two hundred suns.

The Ruled never suspect what is being done to them in their own name; how would they dare?

But Truck knew. He'd seen the eyepatch on the face of the ghoul, and the reptile's black quick tongue; he'd seen a burned-out dream of deserts, and shuddered at the entrails of madness. He'd witnessed the death of a sheep in a blasphemous cloister under the ground, and tried to understand the message of its holy breath.

Grishkin had found a way to break the Centauri blockade, confront the Device with the man who could operate it: but wherever Truck went, Gaw and ben Barka could never be very far behind. They were locked onto him and to each other in the excesses of their dance, compelled to lift their legs and laugh and sweat. He wouldn't have a hope if he answered the priest's summons, they'd be after him like dogs: yet he owed Grishkin for his humiliation on Stomach — he owed ben Barka for his scorched face — be owed someone for the deaths of Angina Seng and Sinclair Pater and every single spacer whose flesh had been frozen to the streets of Avernus.

He got up and paced about. It was completely dark, but he didn't dare put the lights on in case the place was being observed.

He shrugged.

He decided to go to Centauri anyway.

Perhaps the Device was calling subtly to its inheritor, perhaps he honestly wanted a confrontation. Certainly, as he slipped out onto the bitter streets of the port, black and ragged in his cloak like a wounded crow, he wanted revenge; by the time he'd passed the high wire fence of the landing field, he had convinced himself that his anger was more than personal; and he believed as he strode between the rocket pits under the white arc lights that the time for passive misery and acceptance was over.

It wasn't.

When he located the Ella Speed (he'd somehow forgotten the paint job and the new name), he found her loading ramp extended tike the tongue of an immense mechanical mouth.

Fix the bos'n was lying huddled up on it.

He was dead.

His lips peeled back from those sawmill teeth, he was curled foetally round a massive abdominal wound, as if his final horrified act had been an attempt to contain the several pints of fluid congealing on the diamond tread of the ramp beneath him. His eyes were narrowed, his fingers were all in a knot; under the port arcs, his features were composed of precise white planes and cold shadows, a brutal, quite alien morphology of emotion, memoir of a hard death.

Truck (down on his knees again, with his hands in the bos'n's blood and his mind on the corpse boats of Cor Caroli, where, under the same clinical illumination, there was at least a little peace, an order to the serried rows) heaved and retched. He wiped himself on Fix's yellow jerkin, coughing dismally. ('A pumpkin,' he explained, 'is what your head is. Don't forget, no vegetable seeds.') Since their government is semi-feudal, Chromians acquire early a deep familiarity with death, but: Oh, you poor sod, he thought, you poor little sod. This was nothing like the loss of Pater, whom he'd hardly known; or of Angina Seng, who hadn't died alone under bleak lights.

Images of Fix: mafeking across the Galaxy in search of freedom and dope and big Denebian whores, his grinning mouth hungry to eat it all down; shivering and blinking on the steps of courthouses in the morning, wondering where to go next after being busted and spending the night telling weird Chromian jokes (' — and were they tits? Not on your life. Intellectual melons!,' with nobody among the soreheaded jailed losers knowing quite how to laugh at this hick who found everything new they thought was old); Fix horrible in trashcan alley fights, the morals of a goat, vital, alive — dead.

'What can I do?' whispered Truck, cupping the back of the great round head in his hands. He couldn't even bring himself to close the eyelids. He got up. Someone was going to be killed. He gazed speculatively along the length of the boat toward the command bridge, then went inside.

My Ella Speed, a light haulage vehicle of the 'Transit' class, registered out of Carter's Snort, Earth, and licensed to transfer up to one thousand tons of freight over distances less than a thousand light years: she mounted three Dynaflow converters (each outputting about fifty/gigaton hours per every half ton of fuel consumed) and a 'Powerslide' rocket pile for sub-Dyne maneuvers such as planetfall; her cramped little hold had carried everything from neat nitromethane for the curious engines of Anywhere to five thousand live ferrets genetically modified to survive the curious atmosphere of Titus-Bode. Now, except for a few string-tied bundles of 'Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble,' it was empty and hollow, amplifying the scrape of John Truck's bootsoles as he rifled Fix the bos'n's belongings in search of a gun.