out a pair of Doh-Bien wrist lasers in black steel with silver inlay. As they were walking back to the Victory Cafe, the Minstrel Boy questioned her choice.
'You know those things need weeks of practice before you stop being as much a menace to yourself as to the enemy?'
Renatta looked at him as though he were a total idiot and flexed her hands like a Balinese dancer.'You think I don't know how to play wrist lasers? You think I don't know anything?'
'Sometimes I wonder what you do know.'
'Well, pardon me for not being properly menued.'
The Minstrel Boy, after a lot of thought, had opted for a reproduction AK 5000 that had been converted to fire x-pando slugs in ultrarapid bursts. It was the model with the wooden stock, drum clip, and retractable twelve-inch bayonet. The way things were shaping up, the bayonet might prove useful.
The weapons were the last real diversion. They had spent a day practicing with them out by the nothings, but after that there was little to do but settle in and wait. The mercenaries were billeted in commandeered rooms in the Bluecat as close as possible to the Victory Cafe. Although Zill constantly attempted to create makework for the men and women under his command, the bulk of the waiting time was spent getting drunk, fighting, and engaging in last-ditch sexual encounters. Zill had, at least, managed to organize the fights into staged competitions rather than freestyle brawls. Reave and a giant yahoo called Gorshon Mass Goh held the house record for gambling receipts after a vicious fifteen rounds of contact wandweking, but by far the most memorable and crowd-pleasing bout was the no-limit, feral-feline hair-tearing confrontation between Su Wu Lu and Brawny Helda. That bout started some related but rather different confrontations. The sexual undertow was never below a dull roar, and the constant couplings and partings had a desperate quality that Billy had summed up the most aptly: 'We who are about to die tend to get horny.'
Although she still behaved like part of the team, Renatta had transferred her after-hours affections from the DNA Cowboys altogether, first to Goshon Mass Goh after he had narrowly beaten Reave at the wandweking and then to, of all people, Clay Blaisdell. After that Billy, Reave, and the Minstrel Boy felt more than entitled to pass the bottle and call her a whore when she was not around.
Tired of puzzling over Renatta's methods of operating, the Minstrel Boy had taken up with an exotic dancer called Mai Last Tango; in fact, she was stark naked and vigorously straddling his hips when the sirens sounded.
As they echoed eerily through the instantly silent city, the Minstrel Boy eased away from her. He was suddenly very frightened.
'The enemy's been detected. The bad guys are almost here.'
The bizarre attitudes toward death that were so in evidence during the Damaged Era all had their roots in the practice of template reproduction. At the most simple level it completely negated the normal process of bereavement. All too frequently, if an individual was accidentally killed or otherwise died before his time and had already been templated, friends, lovers, and loved ones would commission a reproduction and life would go on as before. It was not uncommon for a number of improvements to be made to the reproduction, making it more attractive or possibly more tractable than the original. There is a strong possibility that many of the characters in the legends may have died many times only to be duplicated by admirers, colleagues, or political allies. It was this treatment of the dead mat gave rise to the saying 'Life is other people.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
'Thirty minutes to estimated contact,' the voice from the PA announced.
The waiting had peaked. Along with five other mercenaries, Billy, Reave, the Minstrel Boy, and Renatta crouched in the H-quadrant access tunnel that led out to the nothings. In front of them, out on the open platform, the first-line defenders, militia and civilian volunteers alike, stood to in the shelter of hastily erected fortifications. Although the big stasis field that surrounded the raiders was being clearly and continuously tracked and plotted by the central biomass, there was still no clue as to where on the Krystaleit perimeter the first blow would fall. As the raiders had drawn nearer, other questions had been raised. The most pressing was what would happen when the large and powerful reality of the raiders actually touched and then merged with the city's bigger and even more powerful field. For some hours strange things had been happening. Certain kinds of electronic hardware had ceased to function for no detectable reason, domestic pets had started to show signs of extreme agitation, a large number of lights had simply winked out, and a power substation had spontaneously combusted. Now the nothings had started to flash with white fire as though the nonmatter were being overcharged with some form of alien nonenergy. The defenders and fortifications around the edges of the external platforms were thrown into stark, flickering silhouette, and an irrational terror of the unknown was laid on top of the very real fear of the enemy. Some groups of Krystaleit's philosophers were making dire predictions, and the word 'cataclysm' kept being tossed about. To make matters worse, Billy had started to hear muffled, indistinct voices inside his head. He did not know if that phenomenon was a brand-new symptom of stress orwhether it was a result of the physical conditions that were growing more weird by the minute.
'I wish to hell they'd get here — anything's got to be better than this,' he complained.
'Twenty minutes to estimated contact.'
The Minstrel Boy checked the AK 5000 for what had to be at least the twenty-eighth time since they had been deployed in the tunnel.
'What's the betting that they hit right in front of us?'
'The way our luck's been running?'
Renatta was unconsciously chewing on her lower lip. The Minstrel Boy had to admit that despite the way he had been bad-mouthing her over the last few days, she was standing up very well for someone who had never faced combat before. She sighed and flexed her wrists, easing the weight of the laser bracelets.
'This has got to be the worst.'
The Minstrel Boy nodded toward the nothings, where patches of the nonmatter fog had become an incandescent white. 'That's the worst. You could really believe that it was the end of the world.'
Reave, who was nearest to the mouth of the tunnel, glanced back. 'Will you all keep that down? You'll end up shooting each other.' He had dropped naturally into the role of squad leader.
The space became eerily bright as the section of the nothings they could see at the end of the tunnel pulsed blinding white and then faded slightly again.
'You think this is them?'
'If it is, they're early.'
The voices in Billy's head were louder, but he still could not make out what they were saying. 'I don't like this at all.'
'I told you to put a cover on the negative comments.'
The very next moment not even Reave could hold back a gasp of amazement.
'Holy shit!'
Pseudopods of brilliant purple plasma danced out of the nothings and played over defenders and defenses. They seemed particularly drawn to metal. A militiaman cut and ran in panic as the glowing plasma coursed over his bronze armor. He was trying to brush it off with his hands as though he were on fire.
As far as Reave could see, the plasma did not seem to be doing him any actual harm. His sobbing terror was purely a result of the man psyching himself out.
'Everyone sit tight. I think that stuffs harmless.'
In fact, he was certain that it was harmless. It looked exactly like the glowing purple energy he had seen
