Mona Lisa Overdrive

35 - The Factory War

Cherry found him with the Judge again, down there in the dark. He was sitting on one of the Investigators with a flashlight in his hand, shining it up the Judge's carapace of polished rust. He didn't remember coming here, but he couldn't feel the jerky edge of Korsakov's. He remembered the girl's eyes, in that room Bobby said was London.

"Gentry's got the Count and his box jacked into a cyberspace deck," Cherry said. "You know that?"

Slick nodded, still looking up at the Judge. "Bobby said we better."

"So what's going on? What happened when you both jacked?"

"Gentry and Bobby, they kind of hit it off. Both crazy the same way. When we jacked, we came out somewhere in orbit, but Bobby wasn't there ... Then Mexico, I think. Who's Tally Isham?"

"Stim queen when I was little. Like Angie Mitchell is now."

"Mitchell, she was his squeeze ... "

"Who?"

"Bobby. He was telling Gentry about it, in London."

"London?"

"Yeah. We went there, after Mexico."

"And he said he was Angie Mitchell's old man? Sounds crazy."

"Yeah, but he said that's how he got on to it, that aleph thing." He swung the light down and directed it into the skeletal steel maw of the Corpsegrinder. "He was hanging out with rich people and heard about it. Called it a soul-catcher. The people who had it would rent time on it to these rich people. Bobby tried it once, then he went back and stole it. Took it down to Mexico City and started spending all his time in there. But they came after him ... "

"Sounds like you're remembering things, anyway."

"So he got out of there. Went up to Cleveland and made a deal with Afrika, gave Afrika money to hide him, take care of him while he was under the wire, because he was getting real close ... "

"Close to what?"

"Don't know. Something weird. Like when Gentry talks about the Shape."

"Well," she said, "I think it might kill him, being jacked that way. His signs are starting to screw up. He's been on those drips too long. Why I came to find you."

The Corpsegrinder's steel-fanged guts glinted in the flashlight's beam. "It's what he wants. Anyway, if he paid the Kid, it's like you're working for him. But those guys Bird saw today, they're working for the people from L.A., the ones Bobby stole the thing from ... "

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"What are these things you build? Afrika said you were this crazy white guy built robots out of junk. Said in the summer you take 'em out there on the rust and stage big fights -- "

"They aren't robots," he interrupted, swinging the flash to the low, scythe-tipped arms of the spider-legged Witch. "They're mainly radio-controlled."

"You just build 'em to wreck 'em?"

"No. But I have to test them. See if I got them right ... " He clicked off the light.

"Crazy white guy," she said. "You gotta girl out here?"

"No."

"Get a shower. Maybe shave ... " Suddenly she was very close to him, her breath on his face.

"Okay people listen up -"

"What the fuck -- "

" 'Cause I 'm not gonna say this twice. "

Slick had his hand over Cherry's mouth now.

"We want your guest and all his gear. That 's all, repeat, all the gear." The amplified voice clanged through Factory's iron hollow. "Now you can give him to us, that 's easy, or we can just kill all your asses. And we 're real easy with that too. Five minutes to think about it."

Cherry bit his hand. "Shit, I gotta breathe, okay?"

Then he was running through Factory's dark, and he heard her call his name.

A single 100-watt bulb burned above Factory's south gate, a pair of twisted steel doors frozen open with rust. Bird must've left it on. From where he crouched by an empty window, Slick could just make out the hover, out beyond the weak fringe of light. The man with the bullhorn came strolling out of the dark with a calculated looseness meant to indicate that he was on top of things. He wore insulated camo overalls with a thin nylon hood drawn up tight around his head, goggles. He raised the bullhorn. "Three minutes." He reminded Slick of the guards at the holding pen, the second time he'd been done for stealing cars.

Gentry would be watching from upstairs, where a narrow vertical panel of Plexiglas was glued into the wall, high up over Factory's gates.

Something rattled in the dark, off to Slick's right. He turned in time to see Bird in the faint glow from another window gap, maybe eight meters along the wall, and the glint on the bare alloy silencer as the boy brought up the.22 rifle. "Bird! Don't -- " A ruby firefly on Bird's cheek, telltale of a laser sight from out on the Solitude. Bird was thrown back into Factory as the sound of the shot broke through the empty windows and echoed off the walls. Then the only sound was the silencer, rolling across concrete.

"Fuck it," the big voice boomed cheerfully. "You had your chance." Slick glanced over the rim of the window and saw the man sprinting back to the hover.

How many of them would be out there? Bird hadn't said. Two hovers, the Honda. Ten? More? Unless Gentry had a pistol hidden somewhere, Bird's rifle had been their only gun.

The hover's turbines kicked in. He guessed they'd just drive right in. They had laser sights, probably infrared too.

Then he heard one of the Investigators, the sound it made with its stainless steel treads on the concrete floor. It came crawling out of the dark with its thermite-tipped scorpion sting cocked back low. The chassis had started out fifty years earlier as a remote-manipulator intended to handle toxic spills or nuke-plant cleanups. Slick had found three unassembled units in Newark and traded a Volkswagen for them.

Gentry. He'd left his control unit up in the loft.

The Investigator ground its way across the floor and came to a halt in the wide doorway, facing the Solitude and the advancing hover. It was roughly the size of a large motorcycle, its open-frame chassis a dense bundle of servos, compression tanks, exposed screw gears, hydraulic cylinders. A pair of vicious-looking claws extended from either side of its modest instrument package. Slick wasn't sure what the claws were from, maybe some kind of big farm machine.

The hover was a heavy industrial model. Sheets of thick gray plastic armor had been fastened over windshield and windows, narrow view slits centered in each sheet.

The Investigator moved, steel treads spraying ice and loose concrete as it drove straight for the hover, its claws at their widest extension. The hover's driver reversed, fighting momentum.

The Investigator's claws snapped furiously at the bulge of the forward apron bag, slid off, snapped again. The bag was reinforced with polycarbon mesh. Then Gentry remembered the thermite lance. It ignited in a tight ball of raw white light and whipped up over the useless claws, plunging through the apron bag like a knife through cardboard. The Investigator's treads spun as Gentry drove it against the deflating bag, the lance at full extension. Slick was suddenly aware that he'd been shouting, but didn't know what he'd said. He was on his feet now, as the claws finally found a purchase on the torn edge of the apron bag.

He went to the floor again as a hooded, goggled figure popped from a hatch on the hover's roof like an armed hand puppet, emptying a magazine of twelve-gauge slugs that struck sparks off the Investigator, which continued to chew its way through the apron bag, outlined against the white pulse of the lance. The Investigator froze, claws locked tight on the frayed bag; the shotgunner ducked back into his hatch.

Feed line? Servo pack? What had the guy hit? The white pulse was dying now, almost dead.

The hover began to reverse, slowly, back across the rust, dragging the Investigator with it.

It was well back, out of the light, visible only because it was moving, when Gentry discovered the combination of switches that activated the flamethrower, its nozzle mounted beneath the juncture of the claws. Slick watched, fascinated, as the Investigator ignited ten liters of detergent-laced gasoline, a sustained high-pressure spray. He'd gotten that nozzle, he remembered, off a pesticide tractor.

It worked okay.