Demon Download

access space under the Ops Centre. There's a terminal there.'

'Lead the way…'

VI

The demon was taking a time-out for gas and oil. It wanted to have total dominance of Fort Apache before it spawned again and made a push for the next node. It was hungry for the multiple inputs of El Paso, but it knew the triumph would be all the sweeter if it waited, nourished its own desires, its lusts, its needs…

Defer the gratification, and the blood tastes better.

Lauderdale was an annoying acolyte, a messed-up pissant in blue, pretending to be naughty, gingerly dipping a toe into the Dark but holding back. Deep down, he was just another chickenbelly scared sumpless of the monsters. He lacked the force of will of The Summoner. He was a zeroid waster even set beside the Frogman between whose ribs the demon had nestled. But Lauderdale was serving his masters adequately, and he was sure to be rewarded for his efforts.

Too bad; the demon would have got its rocks off teaching Lawdy-Lawdy-Lauderdale the true meaning of the word torture.

Before the Summoning, it had never been more than a servitor of the Dark Ones, fed with the cast-offs of the Great. The tongue-tentacles of his original ectoplasmic body were scraped raw from assaulting the Big Boys of the Outer Darkness. Here, on this Earthly Plane, it was a Giant, it had found a destiny.

'Destineeeee,' it sang, to the tune of Jealousy, 'I got me a destineee…'

The power was building up. It coursed through the channels of the Fort. It sealed off the underground garages, and sucked out all the oxygen in the air. Thirty-eight personnel tried to fill their lungs and collapsed, blue-faced. 'Suck on that, airheads,' it boomed over the tannoy as they asphyxiated. Score another bunch of notches for the killer. The demon was riding high, itchy souls wriggling in torment under its clawhomed feet.

And yet it sensed danger. There were still humans struggling against its will. They were trivial. They could be ignored until he was ready to stick it to them. He owed that Swiss Miss a thorough freaking-over for living through their rumble in Welcome, but that could wait. There was something else, something which carried within it the Light that was anathema to the Dark Ones, the burning, cleansing Light that had always banished the Night.

Outside, the Sun was setting. But there was Light blazing.

For an instant, the demon knew Fear. Then, it felt better within itself. The Light was a puny, paltry thing. The Light could be dispelled.

The sun was down. And night-time was the right-time for the rituals of blood and iron. Night was for the masters, not the slaves.

It launched all the fort's missiles, trusting them to find targets in the desert somewhere.

'Just gimme that rock and roll carnage!' it screeched, sending feedback throughout the fort.

'Two-four-six-eight, time to de-cap-it-ate!' An orderly halfway through a dumbwaiter hatch found the door slicing down.

'Three-five-seven-nine, killin' folks makes me feel fine…'

A chaingun above the courtyard opened up. Troopers scattered or fell.

'This is the life,' the demon thought to itself.

VII

The moon was up. In the desert, the temperature had plunged. Stack, in his shirtsleeves, was shivering as he darted from cover to cover. Lauderdale's androids were still tracking him. One of his knees had popped, and every step was like taking a bullet in the leg.

A while back there had been a mess of explosions. Fort Apache had fired its missiles. Even if there hadn't been any nukes in the parcel, a lot of damage must have been done in Havasu. Stack wondered if the bridge had got it. That would be a shame. It had come a long way to wind up in pieces in a dried-up river.

Sooner or later, he would drop from exhaustion, and the patient robots would bear down, lases slicing, electrodes primed. That would be it. Stack hoped Chantal was making some difference, because he was certainly out of the picture.

Thirty-eight wasn't so young to die these days. It was more years than Mozart had managed, than Keats, than Alexander the Great, than Billy the Kid, than Bruce Lee, than Jean Harlow, than James Dean, than Chuck Berry…And LeonaTyree, who had been thirty-three last month. And Miss Unleaded, who probably hadn't made fifteen.

He thought he couldn't hear out of his left ear, which was gummed up with blood. His knee was on the point of giving out completely.

The Oscars moved silently, without fatigue, without sustaining wounds. His sidearm was about as useful against them as a cap pistol, but he couldn't bring himself to throw it away.

He felt as if he was wading through a last-running stream. His shins were frozen. The cold was numbing, almost pleasantly so. His aches and pains faded.

Finally, his legs refused to work, and he pitched face-first into the fast-cooling sand.

He crawled a few yards, his bruised chest flaring up as he rubbed it against the ground..

He heaved himself onto his back, and looked up at the silver circle of the moon. As a kid, watching Star Wars, he had wanted to be part of the space program. He had tried out, but came along just too late, just after the moonbase fiasco and the final collapse of the Satellite Weapons Systems. Uncle Sam hadn't been in the market for spacemen. And so it had had to be the Cav. Obi-Wan wasn't being any help.

He called upon the Force. Nothing. He was still incapable. He thought he heard heavy, thumping footsteps. The Oscars were closing in.

He prayed. Chantal would have liked that, he thought. He still couldn't believe that the Op was a nun.

He heard something besides the marching androids. Out in the sand, somewhere. Something was coming, something that clumped, but jingled, almost subaudially, at the same time.

He rolled over, and looked across the desert. The dunes were silvered by the moonlight, and a figure was moving fast, coming at him out of the Great Empty.

Great. Someone else to try to kill him. It was open season on US Cav tonight.

At first, Stack thought the stranger was on a motorsickle. But the shape was too tall, and lurched too much.

It was someone on a horse. The jingling he heard was spurs. There was something magical about the sight, as if one of the ghosts of the West were galloping out of the Past to be in at the loll. Who was it? Wyatt Earp? The Lone Ranger? Shane? Sir Lancelot?

From the other direction strode the four remaining Oscars, the shining, soulless embodiment of the techno- fascist's Utopia of the future. They were the mechanist nightmare made metal and plastic and glass. One of them would have a nuclear heart, ready to burst with loving death at the touch of a button

Between the past and the future, crippled in the present, Stack pushed at the ground. His knee burned inside.

The horseman came onwards. In the still night, Stack could hear the horse breathing heavy, the slap of the rider's legs against his mount's flanks, the thump of his saddlebags.

The stranger got to him first. Stack forced himself to stand up, but the rider still towered over him. He wore a long slicker, a battered grey hat that seemed to sparkle in the moonlight, and had his neckerchief up over his mouth and nose. The horse was a grey, tall and well-muscled, steaming in the night. It reared up, and the rider kept his