seat. Outlined in the moonglow, the apparition was awe-inspiring. Stack felt tears stand out in the corners of his eyes, and his spine tingled with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.
A lase beamed by from the Oscars, cutting empty air.
The horseman pulled his kerchief away from his face. It was lined and leathery, but his blue eyes were sharp and strong. He had a shaggy moustache and a strong jaw, hawk's cheekbones and white-blonde hair.
'Son,' he said to Stack, 'you look like you need a friendly gun.'
VIII
'I think we're in time,' Chantal said, squeezing into the confined space. 'It's just here. It hasn't seeded into the communications channels.'
'What does that mean?' Finney asked.
'It's trapped. In the fort. If we're lucky, we can slam the door on it. Can we seal all the electronic egresses?'
Finney looked at the monitors. 'Most of them are down anyway. The datanets pulled out. We're just on the straight Cav line.'
'Can that be shut off?'
'Well…there are back-ups, and Standing Orders are that the line should never be terminated under any circumstances.'
'Can it be done?'
Finney nearly smiled. 'Not officially. Not from the Ops Centre.' She thumbed towards the low ceiling. 'Everything is shut up behind durium panels, but down here there are wires. Sergeant, pass me the clippers.'
Quincannon handed Finney the pair of rubber-handled shears from the toolkit they'd scavved. The Captain snapped at the air. Outside, alarms were still sounding, and voices were coming from all the public address speakers. There were many voices, all taunting, all vicious, all evil…
There were curtains of wires, and circuit-breakers hung in them. The place was the seamy side of the fort, with all the works crammed into a small space and left to gather dust until there was a malfunction. With Chantal at the terminal, it was impossible for either of the others to do more than get their heads and arms into the hole-sized room. One tangled skein of multi-coloured wires combined into a rope and fed into a hole in the concrete. Finney tapped it.
'All the outside channels are here. It's a weakness, actually. I've been trying to get the design changed. Any saboteur could cut the whole place off from the outside world by striking here…'
'Do it.'
Finney opened the shears, and crunched them into the rope. Sparks flew, and meters burst. Chantal covered her face. Finney flinched, and cut again. She wrestled with the rope, which was kicking, and fell back, her hands smoking. The shears hung, embedded in the wires.
Finney waved her hands and shoved them into her armpits. The shears jerked, and arcs danced on the blades.
Quincannon pushed forwards and grabbed the handles, forcing them together. His face showed the strain, but he persisted. The access room was thick with smoke, and Chantal was coughing, her eyes streaming.
The shear blades met, and the rope parted. Quincannon fell back, dropping the tool on the floor.
'Done, Sister,' he said.
'Fine. We've got the genie in its bottle…'
She pulled the vials of Holy Water—refilled at Welcome— from her belt, and set them on top of the terminal.
She said a brief prayer, and crossed herself. Quincannon and Finney had done their bit. Now it was her turn.
She started tapping the Latin words into the database.lt was just a way of getting the demon's attention, but it ought to give a litle pain to the creature.
She tried to think in sync with the system, projecting herself through her fingers into the machine's space.
Finally, the thing inside turned round and roared its hatred at her.
IX
With a leather-gloved hand, the stranger swept his slicker back from his hip. A pearl-inlay on the stock of his revolver caught the moonlight. In one smooth, easy movement, he drew a six-gun, a long-barreled beauty with a filed-away sight.
The Oscars halted, and stood as still as the monoliths of Stonehenge.
Stack turned, and looked at the machines who had come to kill him. The stranger pointed his gun without seeming to take aim, pulled back the trigger, and fanned the hammer.
Six shots went into the first Oscar in a vertical line from the centre of its visor to its metal crotch. The black holes looked like buttons.
Stack's breath was held. There weren't supposed to be bullets that could pierce durium plate like that.
The Oscar leaked fluid from its lower holes, and toppled backwards. Stack felt its impact in his ankles as the ground shook.
The stranger spun his gun on his trigger-finger and holstered it. Then, his hands moving too fast for human eyes, he pulled a repeating rifle from a sling on his saddle.
The Oscars' visors raised.
Nothing is faster than a lase. It is an instantaneous weapon. It strikes its target simultaneously with its ignition. The beam doesn't travel through space, it appears in the air and anything in its way is cut through as if a red-hot wire had materialised out of another dimension and the object of the attack happened to be occupying the same space in this world.
The stranger outdrew and outshot three lases.
His hand was a blur as he pulled down the trigger guard lever three times. There were three sharp flames, and three shots.
He put each bullet into the hole in an Oscar's head.
The night air was sharp with the aftertang of honest gunsmoke. The Oscars collapsed like broken statues.
The stranger's horse was a little spooked. It shifted, and he gently tugged his reins, calming the beast.
He swung his rifle back into its sheath with an easy motion.
'What is that?' Stack gasped.
'It's a Henry, son. The 1873, manufactured by old Oliver Winchester himself, to the design of Benjamin Tyler Henry. Best rifle there ever was.'
'A
'Yup.'
Out in the Big Empty, something howled at the full moon. Stack shivered again.
'That thing must be a hundred and twenty-five years old.'
The stranger grinned. His teeth were white and even.
'How can you do that? How can you bring down an armoured android with an…with an
'You do what you have to, son…'
Stack knew he had gone crazy, and was hallucinating. This was where his brain checked out on him, and he
