crawled towards Shiba's left eye. Elvis grabbed the wrist, and bent it back. Shiba, through a mouthful, said thanks.
A Josephite with his hands up shouted, 'I surrender, I surrender,' his hat falling from his head. He was a young kid; one of the clear-eyed idealists who wanted a miracle, Elvis suppposed. A Donny Walton twisted the boy's head around on his shoulders, and was torn apart by gunfire. He staggered forwards, his face still a smiling blank, and collapsed like a marionette.
Krokodil had said the Waltons were clones, but Elvis wasn't sure. All the sex- and labourclones Elvis had met revealed a total lack of personality. While the Waltons were walking stereotypes, there was a tenaciousness and cunning about them that suggested a nasty intelligence. He was reminded of soldier ants, those insects who move in a huge, hungry mass, seemingly governed by one guiding group mind.
A half-Marie advanced rapidly on its hands, and was hosed down with fire by an indentee humping a flamethrower. The thing screeched and burned, the lacquered hair crumpling in an instant. Elvis shot into the fireball until it wasn't moving any more.
Raimundo was howling with victory, his huge throat open wide enough to swallow a sheep whole. An iguana- faced soldier gave him a high-five slap, and they bumped asses in a little dance. The dinosaur's steps made the ground shake.
'Yo, homes,' Raimundo shouted, 'we don' real gooooood!'
Shiba was bipedal again. The smoke cleared. There were dead Josephites all over the compound, and not a few indentees and Suitcase People.
A tear leaked from Shiba's 'gator eye.
'A waste,' he said. 'Regrettable. The next time, we shall not be so unprepared. I shall see to it.'
A lizardman in fatigues walked across, limping slightly, a bloodied pad pressed to a neck wound. He saluted. Elvis recognized Captain Tip Marcus, the security chief he had met earlier.
'I accept full responsibility, Mr Shiba. I should have posted more people in the swamp. You may have my bars…'
Shiba shook his snout. 'No. You did what you could with your resources. I am the one who should have foreseen all this.'
They could have continued their polite argument, each trying to grab the lion's share of the blame, but there was a distraction.
A Donny crawled out of the transport, broken by Raimundo's random fire, but still in one piece. He hissed, hands turned to claws, and fell off the ve-hickle. Raimundo stomped on him, and he stopped moving. The mess stamped into the dirt spilled recognizable organs, but there wasn't much blood. Krokodil had been right. The combat fatigues were torn enough to disclose a featureless tailor's dummy of a body, without nipples or genitalia.
'Frankie, skin me op, maaan!' the dinosaur shouted.
The iguana soldier pulled a reefer the size of a man's arm out of a haversack and gave it to Raimundo.
'Yow, incredibly gen'rous, homes!'
Raimundo stuck the spliff into his maw, and leaned towards a patch of burning wall that had been spattered by a phosphor grenade. The dinosaur sucked in marijuana smoke, and his eyeballs rolled.
'This ees great shit, maaaan!'
The dinosaur's chest inflated, stretching his ragged T-shirt to its seams. Then, Raimundo shot ten-foot spurts of smoke from his nostrils.
The whole compound was going to wind up stinking of whoopee weed at this rate.
'Ramirez,' snapped Marcus. 'Remember…discipline!'
Raimundo waved a claw, and took another prehistoric toke. 'Yo, homes. Discipline an' shit, maaan! We don' stomped os some righteous Black Hat bad-ass! Call os the kiiings of the jongle!'
A petite, veiled woman with green arms came up. It was Marielle, Shiba's assistant-cum-secretary. She had a provisional damage and casualty report.
'This is unfortunate,' Shiba said, looking at the figures. 'We shall have to work hard.'
The woman scuttled away, head down.
'We should hit them, maaan! Hit them hard so they don' never forget. The Suitcase People rule the swamp. This is our territory, and don't no one gonna freak with us!'
Raimundo wiped his enormous head with his hands, as if slicking back the hair he didn't have any more. Marcus was nodding.
'He's right, Mr Shiba. We should go on the offensive. I've got some intelligence reports from the Cape. They're up to something. This assault force was below strength because they need all their personnel. We should strike now, while they're preoccupied.'
Shiba hung his snout thoughtfully.
'How many people can we put in the field?'
Marcus was eager. 'Enough. If we make a strike, we can call in all the non-aligneds out in the swamp. The Josephites haven't been discriminating between factions.'
Elvis understood that some of the Suitcase People were living ferally in the swamp. They were the ones who could barely remember their human lives. The bastard who had stolen the Cadillac was probably one of those, although no one he had questioned could think of a mutant matching his description.
'Rolling stock?'
'Visser left us a couple of half-track amphibians. And we've got a stockpile of Good Ole Boy guns 'n' ammo. If Raimundo hasn't shot up the armoured car the Josephites came in too badly, we could requisition and re-equip it.'
'Mr Presley,' Shiba said to him, 'your opinion?'
Elvis thought it through. 'Well, it's not my place to make suggestions, but I
Shiba was pondering.
'Very well,' he said. 'Captain Marcus, you have twenty-four hours. Ready a strike unit. We'll hit them tomorrow.'
Raimundo expressed his approval with a tail-lashing frenzy.
V
Since Needlepoint came on line, Fonvielle had been seeing the tall, spear-shape take form out on the main pad. It was a rocket made of immobile smoke. He stood out on the firing grounds, remembering the long-ago times when golf-carts loaded down with generals and politicians and journalists scurried across the empty expanse for every launch. There had been stands like at Yankee Stadium for the spectators. Being wood, they had rotted into the water and now existed only as streaks of colour in the mud. The streaks were ghosts of a sort too, the Commander supposed. He put his hands into his flightsuit pockets and scratched his thighs.
The bent and rusted gantry didn't prop the rocketshape up, but he could see phantom lines running between them. He recognized the craft. It was the next-to-last of the Titan 7 series, the one that had exploded,under Circe IV, killing Mikko Griffith, Lester Mihailoff and Mildred Kuhn. That had been in 1976. Debris had rained all over the peninsula after the firework display, and there had been now-nameless ground casualties. Fonvielle wondered if those smitten-from-the-sky technicians and swamp-rats qualified for the elite ghost cadre, the sacrifices of outer space.
Fonvielle searched his arm for the patch, and found it. The three names were written around the circumference of the circle. A siren pouted against a starscape, posed like Marilyn Monroe in her nude calendar, the Roman numerals modestly concealing her body.
The Indians claimed that even inanimate objects had souls. They were called
