"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.
II
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.
The girl shrugged and looked at Chantal. There were centuries of something in her eyes. "You and me," the girl said. "We're the same, aren't we?"
"I hope not," said Chantal, ignoring the little fishhook tearing at her heart. "I certainly hope not." The others picked up their dead and wounded. "Now, go home."
The Gaschuggers left the saloon. The girl was the last. She turned and waved to everybody. "G'night, all!"
Then the gang were gone, swallowed up by the darkness outside, saloon doors swinging behind them. Chantal holstered her pistol, and walked over to the bar. "Lady," said the Trooper, "can I buy you a drink?"
"Water."
"Even that. Nothing but the best. Pedro, you chickendirt, get us a couple of waters. Make them pure or I'll promote you from innocent bystanding coward to accomplice in my report."
The bartender shuffled along behind the bar, and produced two glasses and a bottle.
"The Gaschoggers are regular customers, Senor. I can't do notheeng that'd bee bad for beesneess."
"Yeah? Do you have many 'trials' in this place?"
Pedro grunted noncomittally.
Chantal sipped the water. It was pure-spring, uncut.
"Trooper Nathan Stack, at your service ma'am," said the Cav man. The name had been in the initial report.
"You were with Tyree?"
A look of pain came into his bruised nice. "Yes. How d'you know about Leona?"
"I'm from Fort Apache."
"You weren't there when I left. I'd have remembered."
"I got in just yesterday. My name is Chantal Juillerat."
"I beg your pardon."
She spelled it out for him. "Juillerat. It's Swiss. I'm working closely with your government and with Major General Younger. Here is my authorization."
She handed him the papers countersigned by the State Governor, General Haycox and the President's representative. He whistled through his teeth, then winced with pain. He must have taken quite a battering.
"What happened to you?"
Stack gulped his water, but didn't say anything.
"As you can see, I am authorized to take your report. What happened to you? Where's Tyree? Where's your vehicle?"
Stack took another drink, and signalled the bartender for the bottle. The man handed it over, and Stack poured.
"Leona Tyree is dead, Ms Julie-Rat. The cruiser is up at the church, stapling a dead priest to his altar…"
Chantal's eyes must have given her away. Stack dropped his precious glass of water and grabbed her shoulders. He started shaking her.
"This means something to you, doesn't it? What's happening? Why did the cruiser go psycho? Why is Leona dead?"
She took his wrists and forced his hands away from her.
"You're not cleared for that information," she said. "Besides, I don't really know myself. In the morning, well go to St Werburgh's and examine the site. Then maybe we can isolate the problem."
Stack obviously wasn't happy.
"Tomorrow, I'm getting out of here. I have to call in to Apache. I'm days overdue."