The Zombie Ray From Outer Space And Other Pulp Tales

THE ZOMBIE RAY FROM OUTER SPACE

AND OTHER PULP TALES

D.A. Madigan

All contents copyright 2012 by the author

Published at Smashwords

EDITING NOTE: The Table of Contents should be 'live'; click on an entry, and you should be taken to that entry. Similarly, the story titles throughout this anthology also link back to the Table of Contents. Hopefully, this will allow quick and convenient navigation through the tales themselves.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Foreword: What is Pulp?

What Is Pulp?

Foreword: The Zombie Ray From Outer Space

The Zombie Ray From Outer Space

Foreword: The Eldritch Horror From Beyond The Nether Void

The Eldritch Horror From Beyond The Nether Void

Foreword: A Dish Best Served Cold

A Dish Best Served Cold

Foreword: The Last Trump

The Last Trump

Foreword: The Captain and the Queen

The Captain and the Queen

Foreword: The Drowned Scroll

The Drowned Scroll

Foreword: No Time Like The Present

No Time Like The Present

Foreword: The Pyramid of Skulls

The Pyramid of Skulls

Foreword: Return to Sender

Return To Sender

Foreword: Doc Nebula and The Great Magnetic Train Caper

Doc Nebula and The Great Magnetic Train Caper

Foreword: Blessed Event

Blessed Event

Foreword: River of Blood

River of Blood

Foreword: The Timelines

Addendum 1 Omniverse Timeline

Addendum 2 This Gathering Darkness Timeline

INTRODUCTION

I love pulp. I've loved it since I was a kid, and I love it still.

My first actual experience with raw, undistilled pulp came when I found a stack of Doc Savage paperbacks on an endtable at one of my many babysitter's houses. I asked her if I could read them and she shrugged and said I could have them if I wanted, her boyfriend read that trash and she was just going to throw them out. So I took them home, and fell head over heels in love with pulp.

Except, thinking about it, I'm sure I loved pulp well beforebefore I first shook hands with Clark Savage, Jr. I just didn't know it. The memes and tropes of pulp fiction had so thoroughly infiltrated popular TV by the 1960s that looking back on it, all my favorite shows... STAR TREK, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, MANNIX, THE SAINT, THE AVENGERS... they were all pure pulp. Even my favorite cartoon, SCOOBIE DOOBIE DOO, owed enormously to the pulp scenarios its storylines mostly parodied... while other cartoons I enjoyed, like SPACE GHOST and JONNY QUEST, were pretty much the distilled essence of pulp... lobotomized for eight year olds, of course, which can make such shows difficult to watch again as an adult.

When you enjoy pulp in whatever medium, you enjoy it fully. It is purely a pleasurable experience with no ulterior motives. You're not there to be educated, enlightened or illuminated, you're not supposed to learn anything from it. You're just there to be entertained.

Pulp is all about the story. Anything that doesn't service the story is extraneous and even if some house writer working under a pseudonym is foolish enough to try to stick some kind of moral subtext in, their editor will just chop it back out again.

Pulp is almost zen, very nearly pure stream of unconsciousness. Here's a good guy. There's a bad guy. They hit each other. Oh, the bad guy is unmasked and it's the greedy banker who was trying to foreclose on the old Beesby place! Wow. Next story, please.

Writing pulp is a joy on a level with reading or watching it, and for much the same reason... all you're doing is telling a story. It doesn't even have to be a particularly good story and it certainly doesn't have to be original (which is lucky for me, when it's my hands on the keyboard) as long as it's exciting. You don't need to try to raise your game; you're not out to impress anyone... you just want to grab your audience where they live and take them somewhere else for a while, where people who are better and worse than us do more thrilling things than we do in more exotic and dangerous places than we generally live in.

I didn't write any of these stories in my childhood. As an adult, however, I've tried to recapture as much of that childlike sense of wonder and amazement as I could while creating them. I think I succeeded with some of them better than with others... Eldritch Horror From Beyond The Nether Void tries much too hard to be clever, which is something good pulp never does... but in others (especially A Dish Best Served Cold and Captain and the Queen) I think I've managed to get down a pretty fun, thrilling, exciting tale full of larger than life people doing incredible stuff in settings far more sensational and awe inspiring than the world we all live in.

You'll have to make your own judgments, of course... but I hope you enjoy these stories.

That's pretty much the only justification for pulp's existence... well, that, and paying the bills, I suppose.

- D.A. Madigan, Louisville KY, 2012

FOREWORD: WHAT IS PULP?

This is a compilation of two different essays I wrote around the same time, trying to define for myself exactly what comprised ‘pulp’, as a literary (or, spectacularly non-literary, which is why I like it) sub-genre.

I wrote the essay because I perceived a real need for it at the time. ’Pulp’ has been in a constant state of near-revival since the 80s; there seems to be a genuine yen on a great many people’s part for these kind of stories, but no one out there seems to have found the right way to really revive it successfully, despite the fact that everyone from big name auteurs like Quentin Tarantino to publishers like Dynamite Comics have taken their shots at doing so.

But a lot of the problem seems to be that nobody really has any idea what ‘pulp’ actually is. Apparently, it’s one of those descriptors that essentially means ‘whatever the person using it is pointing to at the time’. I’ve heard a dozen different descriptions of pulp, and while most of them are very pulpy in how evocative their language is, none of them really define it. Probably the one that made me feel the most urgent need for a truly useful definition came from comedian/movie & TV writer John Rogers, who back in 2007 wrote the following:

"Any time the heroes resolve a complex situation by running down a corridor as shit explodes around them and completely over-the-top implacable enemies scream imprecations through rising flames and our guys pause just long enough to say something somehow simultaneously smart and corny and heart-achingly true, then start running again because the clock is ticking and nobody saw this twist coming and they're making it up as they go along -- pulp."

Which evokes many of the elements of pulp, but, you know, doesn’t really give you any kind of clue what it really is. Or, for that matter, what it isn’t, which can be just as important… because a lot of times, I think the label ‘pulp’ gets misused. A lot of people seem to think, for example, that ‘pulp’ is any kind of story that feels old fashioned and nostalgic to them, in any genre, and this is wrong. For example, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE is not pulp, and neither is CASABLANCA, although both contain elements of it.

One important note that I didn’t make in the following essay: while pulp’s only real literary/storytelling purpose is to thrill (and therefore, to entertain), pulp’s reason for existence was always much more prosaic: pulp was brought into creation, and set before its audience, for one reason and one reason only: because somebody had a rent check to write.

WHAT IS PULP?

To understand what pulp is, it’s important to understand what pulp isn’t. Superhero comics are not pulp. Yeah, they were printed on pulp paper to save costs, and yes, they certainly grew out of the pulp adventure tradition… but they took a subset of pulp’s elements, refined them, mutated them, and took them off in a completely different direction.

While there's is a lot of crossover between superhero and classic pulp, since the superhero genre has its roots in the pulp adventures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it could be argued that superhero comics were really just a subgenre of pulp... pulp with pictures, as it were... still, pulp is the father and grandfather of the superhero, and a broader, richer vein to mine.

Many classic pulp do gooders had classic superhero trappings... secret identities, melodramatic code names, garish costumes, parahuman powers... just as the earliest superheroes were, at that time, unabashedly pulpy. Superman and Batman were, in their earliest appearances, very hard to distinguish from characters like Doc Savage, the Spider, and the Shadow, and Batman hasn't changed all that much over the years. Superman, however, evolved away from his lurid origins and quickly became the archetype for a clearer, more distilled and crystallized presentation of The Eternal Conflict between darkness and light, good and evil, law and lawlessness, order and chaos.

Superheroes were a facet of pulp... the facet with the masks, the flashy costumes, the alter egos, the magic powers, the code names. Nearly all of the more melodramatic aspects of pulp went into the funny books. But pulp itself contained more than that; pulp heroes did not have to have capes or domino masks or skin tight bodysuits or goofy code names or hidden identities. They didn't have to have superhuman abilities, either. They could be deep sea divers, jungle explorers, frontiersmen, immortal soldiers cast by unlikely wizardry to the surface of distant alien spheres, mighty thewed barbarians, millionaire philanthopists, stage magicians, cowboys or Indians, archeologists or pilots.

What pulp heroes had to be, above all other things, was larger than life… and exciting. Because that is the essence of pulp fiction… its characters are bigger than we are, the world they live in is bigger and louder than our world, and the things they do are far more thrilling than the things we do.

There is no such thing as a boring pulp hero, no such thing as a boring pulp story. There are plenty of unoriginal pulp heroes and stories, pulp is packed to the brim with clichés and unbelievable plot twists and aw, come ON moments… but it can’t be boring. It can’t ever be boring. If it’s boring, it isn’t pulp.

Pulp was not limited to modern settings or the surface of the Earth, nor was pulp strictly limited to protagonists with altruistic motivations. Pulp heroes could simply be adventurers; men (and even women, although this was rare during the period) who simply got into trouble a lot, and then shot, punched, slashed, or whipcracked their way back out of it again, usually with a beautiful member of the opposite sex and a plucky young sidekick in tow, while hauling along some priceless treasure from a long forgotten city or buried tomb, and always with the minions of some calculating crimeboss, evil overlord, ancient undead emperor, or cackling mad scientist in hot pursuit.

To the jaded, post ironic modern eye, of course, any gee whiz pulp adventure seems like parody... you just can’t take that stuff seriously any more. Pulp isn’t at all a literary form and isn’t trying to accomplish anything particularly important, all pulp is trying to do is make the reader feel something... it’s extremely evocative. It’s meant to thrill, to set the pulses pounding and the senses spinning, to knock the wind out of you… to literally, be sensational. To that extent, it’s very much like pornography... all it’s trying to do is stimulate some kind of sensory response in the reader.

Now, to do that, classic pulp writers resort to extremely vivid purple prose, and will shamelessly use any whiz-bang plot or story element, no matter how hopelessly hackneyed or cliched, that accomplishes these goals. And that’s why these various plots and story elements are cliches... because no matter how many thousands of times you read about a sentient white gorilla or a Caucasian orphan raised in the strange, mystic ways of the some ancient Himalayan order who uses his occult powers to battle the forces of evil, or a secret cult of devil worshippers who control the government of New York City, or bodiless intelligences that will brook no disrespect to the timelost Himalayan valley where the dust of their bones yet rests, these remain story elements that widen your eyes, that raise your hackles, that dilate your capillaries and get your pulses pounding.

Pulp is big-picture story telling. It’s vivid, it’s garish, it’s painted in extremely broad strokes. It’s larger than life, and concerns itself with archetypes and tropes. The characters of pulp simultaneously transcend reality and embody it; the characterizations are two-dimensional at best, because everything is secondary to the story, and the story is always built around some enormous existential conflict, some vast thematic fulcrum.

Pulp isn’t just about Good vs. Evil, it’s also centered on Old vs. New, and all the endless nuances of that eternal battle: Tradition vs. Innovation, Superstition vs Reason, Science vs. Magic, the Individual against the Collective, Mind vs. Body, Law vs. Crime. Nearly all of Robert E. Howard’s work, for example, works around the last two, with Conan, Kull, or Solomon Kane always embodying a single, healthy, primitive, physical individual taking on either a Collective of somewhat lesser sorts, or an intellectually superior ‘egghead’ sorcerer who is physically much punier than the brawny, brawling hero.

Doc Savage’s stories, on the other hand, are all about Law vs. Crime and Science vs. Superstition, with Doc, the ultra-athletic super-scientist always or at least often battling some apparently supernatural menace which, in the end, turns out to be just a gangster of some sort using some kind of unorthodox science to simulate evil magic. (To this extent, the more modern characters Scooby Doobie Doo and his gang are cartoon incarnations of Doc and his crew.)

Every pulp story has at its heart a heroic protagonist who stands as a larger than life avatar of whatever that particular pulp author thinks is existential Good — Law and Order, Science and Reason, the Individual, the Healthy Body — and a villainous antagonist, who embodies the hero’s polar opposite. This is why the great pulp heroes have the appeal that they do; it’s because, from their very first appearance, they resonate with their audience on some basic, nearly pre-conscious level. These heroes strike a primal chord, and as long as they continue to resonate around that core appeal, they remain immensely popular.

Pulp is, above all other things, visceral; it is written from and to the gut, not the intellect; it originates in the heart, never the head. Pulp is fantasy, it sets your pulses pounding, it carves its images from the universal id. It is noble good guys fighting evil bad guys, all of whom are somewhat larger than the real life folk they are marketed to. It is thrilling adventure and astonishing action and heart pounding peril!

It is heroes that never say die, and villains that always scream DIE!

Despite the very real nostalgia for pulp… which I’d interpret as simply the same longing for a simpler, more easily understandable and presumably better world that drive much of the modern conservative movement… mass audiences really won’t tolerate something that’s purely pulpy today. However we’ve resisted it, we’ve become too jaded, too sophisticated, too knowledgeable as to how things like science and technology actually work… plus, we’ve seen the same old clichés, those same old hoary plot twists, too many times to be willing to accept them once again. We want our pulp clichés well leavened with post ironic self parody; with a knowing wink and a cynical half smile.

Most unfortunate, very few of us actually read any more, so pulp has to change and mutate for new mediums, mostly TV and the movies. And because things that work well for us when we imagine them while reading often look really stupid when cast onto the small or big screen, pulp has a hard time making that transition.

Mostly, though, we don’t seem to want heroes any more. As a culture, we seem to be tired of larger than life characters who are better than we are. Where once such figures inspired and challenged us, now they just annoy and threaten us. It’s why a movie called PULP FICTION is actually the furthest thing in the world from pulp fiction (and, therefore, became a huge success and a generational touchstone) while a movie that is the very essence of pulp called BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION was a dismal commercial failure.

Or perhaps its simply that generation after generation since WWII, we’ve found ourselves continually disappointed by our real world heroes, and our cultural fiction has come to reflect that. We no longer dare to believe in heroes, because we keep being let down. It’s gotten to the point where if someone really did try to publish new adventures of Doc Savage, we would quickly discover that Monk and Ham are gay lovers, Pat Savage has her own adult porn site, Long Tom is a meth addict, and John Sunlight was never really evil, he was just acting out because of horrible childhood abuse.

We yearn for a brighter, simpler, more easily understood world… but we can no longer believe in one… or even ‘suspend our disbelief’ in it. We’ve seen too much. We know too much. We arrived at the end of the innocence four generations ago… and now, we’re dancing as the sun goes down.

FOREWORD: THE ZOMBIE RAY FROM OUTER SPACE

Closing out the actual stories in this anthology, we have my zombie apocalypse in outer space novella, alternately known as either The Zombie Ray From Outer Space or The Fear Masters.

This novella was deliberately written to be a lot of things -- a zombie apocalypse story set in a fairly typical mid 21st Century backdrop; a pulp story whose primary purpose is to thrill and excite, and a tribute to/pastiche of Robert A. Heinlein’s classic THE PUPPET MASTERS.

This is a slightly different draft of the version that has been published by itself as THE FEAR MASTERS.

THE ZOMBIE RAY FROM OUTER SPACE

I.

Nothing to fear but fear itself -- famous words of a famous man, although I admit, I’ve forgotten just which early 20th Century national chieftain said them.

But whoever he was, he was right. Fear itself really is the worst thing we have to fear—which is to say, in the hands of masters, fear is a lethal weapon… a weapon that is well on its way to wiping out every single one of us -- every last living man, woman and child on the Globe -- the entire human race.

For me this all started way too early on 050232. I rolled my skinny black ass out of the rack and straight into the shower at 0600. After mixing myself a quick breakfast and gulping it right out of the blender, I’d logged in at my keyboard and punched for my daily assignment. It had looked like a no-brainer; me and my usual partner Eddie Barrow on bodyguard detail for Dr. Veronica Hansea, who was taking a quick subway ride up the coast to Boston for some covert corporate/Globe symposium.

A flyer would have been faster but much less safe; American Hezbollah had hit four antigravs in the last six days with Cobra-STRIKE gta missiles. One of the targets was a private commercial transport carrying 354 people – most if not all of them dead before the burning fragments spiraled back to Earth, from the nerve-frying electroshock of the EM impeller going wild.

So our little triad rode the covert coast rail instead. Once upon a time the subway was cheap transit for the unwashed masses, an underground spider-web connecting the East Coast, Midwest, Southwest, and West Coast together into one big 90 minute-maximum commute. After the 12 Minute Failure punched deep glassy craters in North America’s urban landscape, the subway lines were unusable and irreparable… until Globe Chief Landeau had much of the track network secretly restored, to be used as emergency transport for those on official, if highly classified, business.

It would have made excellent sense for Science Sector to have easy access to the secret subway, so, naturally, our New Washington HQ was twelve miles away from the closest entry node. Eddie and I hooked up with the doc in Lincoln Corridor inside Sector HQ and rode up two thousand yards of escalators with her. She never took her eyes off her portable calculator’s screen the entire time; we never took our hands off our gun butts.

We came out through a store selling blown glass curios in the James Earl Carter Indoor Mall, after waiting a few minutes behind a hidden blast door for the proprietor to give us the ‘all clear’. Don’t bother trying to get in that way; that door is cobaltanium cored and will hold off a Markov 77 nuclear tank… at least long enough for someone in HQ to trigger that access tunnel’s demolition charges.

Don’t bother trying to get in any way; Science Sector doesn’t exist. Ask anyone from the Globe Chief on down, they’ll tell you. Me? I’m just a high yellow figment of your imagination. Pay grade 17E.

We exchanged countersigns with the cabbie who was waiting for us at the corner of Fisher Boulevard and California Avenue – not one of ours, I think Eddie flashed her the Urban Surveillance Agency sign of the day, but I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was trying to scan 360 degrees of busy street corner and several thousand feet above it simultaneously -- and then all three of us crammed into the back of the ’23 Hanshaw she was driving. She dropped us at Jefferson and Fourth; we went up another escalator and into Kringle’s Fine Furnishings by a third floor ‘revolving door’ that actually dumped us out in a sub basement sixty feet below ground level. Here we found ourselves being glared at through a reinforced titanium grating by a trooper in combat armor toting a 400 megawatt laser on one shoulder, powered by a 60 kilo charging coil resting on the ground at her feet, where it was doubtless hardwired directly into the urban chem-fusion grid. I refrained from sneering with an effort of will – had Science Sector been in charge of security for the secret subway, unwanted intruders could never have seen, heard, nor otherwise perceived what hit them. Not in the first few minutes, anyway. We strive for the subtle.

Of course, it was always possible that Science Sector was in charge of security for the subway, and that mailbox sized laser cannon was a distraction, to keep unauthorized types from noticing the bio-engineered rhinoviruses rendering their lung tissue down into a chunky chowder inside their own ribcages.

The uniformed guard – Global Union Sky Marines, my old outfit – scanned our IDs carefully, matching the inset holos against our bare faces. Then the gate itself took skin scrapings and checked our DNA against its databases. The theory is, a saboteur might fool a human, or maybe the machines, but getting by both would be a pretty good trick… an impossible one, to date. But Anubis alone knows what the big brains who operate on the other side of the law will come up with tomorrow… or later on today. It keeps our boffins nice and nervous.

Which is why we have Science Sector in the first place. You’d be amazed what a few million kilobucks per annum in government sponsored pure research can do for keeping up with, or, better, ahead of, the Joneses. Of course, sometimes the Joneses – which in this analogy, would be the research departments of international hypercorps who care more about short term profit than the long term health of the global biosphere – come up with some pretty way out and potentially hazardous stuff, too. Then the other half of Science Sector goes into action, and people like me and Eddie have to go blast our way into some secret hypercorp lab somewhere and confiscate stuff that can’t be safely left in the hands of greedy plutocrats.

Anyway. I half saluted the Marine as we went through (Eddie, being former GU Ground Forces, ostentatiously refrained) and we went on down.

Generally these subway rides are entirely uneventful, but every rule has exceptions… which you usually find out about when it rears up on its hind legs and kicks you right in the ovaries. I first realized it was going to be an exceptional morning of the kick-in-the-ovaries variety when the subway car came groaning to a halt somewhere under the ruins of Old New York City.

Then the first half rotted corpse came lurching down the stairs from the old 7th and Lex platform at 4:17, twenty two minutes after our unceremonious halt fifty yards southwards.

At that point, I knew the day had officially gone straight in the dumper. Inconvenient power outage, subway train stalled two hundred feet under the world’s most sprawling radioactive ruin, something fresh out of a shallow grave coming towards me with obvious murderous intent – things had definitely gone from ‘all is well, all is well’ to ‘run in circles, scream and shout’ at terminal velocity.

Staring at what was left of the walking dead man’s face, my brain tried to gibber the 'z' word at me, but I told it firmly to shut up, mama was busy.

The dead man was shambling along at a fast walk, lurching like a drunken sailor but still covering ground steadily, every couple of steps letting go with one of those growly 'rrrrrr' sounds that seems to be standard equipment for all walking corpses in the viewsees that concern themselves with that sort of subject matter. It was goddam creepy, if anyone asked me.

My ocular implants were already set to infra-red, so I knew that whatever this thing was, it had no body heat. It was a shock to see somebody who ought to be decently dead laboring up the tunnel towards me, but I don't freeze up when I'm scared, even bad scared like I was right then. My 'fight or flight' reflex was permanently hard-wired to the former option before I hit puberty, and 13 weeks of boot training in Sumac Bay, followed by three years in a Middle Eastern hot zone and four more doing 'dirty' ops for Global Security’s top secret Science Sector had refined my instinctively violent responses to a monofilament edge.

I had my window cranked down, my gun yanked up and an explosive round on the way before anyone else in our subway car had even realized there was anything untoward out there, much less lurching towards us with flesh devouring intent.

If I’d had any doubt regarding the nature of our attacker, it vanished as soon as I took my first breath of outside air. The creep not only looked like a rotting corpse, but he smelled like one, too. The stench was enough to, as they say, knock a buzzard off a turdwagon, and it would probably have pole axed me, too, if I hadn’t been hardened to even worse sensory input by jungle training.

Eddie, who had been scanning behind us in the UV range, turned around just in time to see my first target’s head explode. Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy, he murmured out of the corner of his mouth, she don't know if she's a girl or a boy. I hope we find a WEE-pun on that corpse when it comes time to file reports, darlin.

Stop flapping your jaw, Eddie, I said, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. Switch your ocs to IR and your clip to explosive rounds. And take a big whiff while you’re at it; it will put you in the picture faster.

Eddie's typical whitebread from Alabama, all muscles and reaction time -- a good sort to have around when the gumbo starts to splatter, but lord above, that boy can get on my last nerve when he's a mind to.

I mean, I can't help that my pop was a big fan of classic movies, nor do I really have any choice about the personal lifestyle preferences Eddie so often heckles me regarding. I knew he thought he was just kidding, but after a while, you get tired of repeating Don't ask, don't tell, and you start itching to make a more direct rebuttal. In my case, it wasn't my knuckles that ached to get into the debate, but the edges of my palms and the soles of my feet... especially the spots where twenty years of kendo-karate training had built up all the calluses.

Eddie has three inches and about eighty pounds on me, and his arms are longer than mine, too. And he is probably stronger. But if he kept pushing my buttons, I had no doubt I could kick his meaty white ass all up and down that tunnel or any other one on the planet. I have a lot of quick, and a whole lot more mean, when I reach down deep to get a handful.

Eddie rolled his eyes at me, but dutifully clicked his contacts through to IR... just in time to catch sight of a well below room temperature mob spilling off the platform and shambling hungrily in our direction, 'rrrrrrrr'ing to beat the band.

He snarled something imaginative in Arabic that managed to be blasphemous, profane, obscene, and anatomically impossible all at the same time, while simultaneously hitting the RELOAD button on the side of his modified Ruger .38, dropping a clip of heatseeker and slapping in one of explosive rounds. By that time I'd dropped two more deaders with direct hits to their faces and three others behind them, presumably from high velocity skull shrapnel. That only left maybe thirty or forty more walking dead lurching and growling their way towards us.

Zombies, goddam it, ZOMBIES, I finally blew out past my clenched lips, we're about to be inundated by a genuine horde of mother karkin' ZOMBIES.

What's the hazard bonus for that? Eddie asked, actually flicking a tight smile at me as he started shooting. I was keeping my cool through an effort of will, but Eddie is one of those nutjobs – not uncommon in the military -- who is honestly baffled by the concept of fear. The way he's wired, 'bloodlust' is the closest he can get to it.

Not frackin enough, I snorted back, keeping a tight grip on the little panicky butterflies that were trying to flutter in my lower intestine. I kept firing until I'd emptied another clip. It took about four seconds; by that time, the only slightly diminished mob had covered about half the distance between the platform and our stalled subway car, and I'd come to the conclusion that this wasn't going to work.

There are too spammin’ many of them, Eddie said, apparently reaching the same conclusion as I had. He didn't sound unhappy about it, just a little irritated at the realization.

Dr. Hansea's voice spoke up from behind us. There's a security cache about a mile past the platform, she said calmly. According to the manifest, it contains an armored four seat flyer and a plenitude of heavy weapons. If we can get through that horde and move quickly enough, we should be all right.

Dr. Hansea is one of the very few people in the world who can use a word like 'plenitude' in everyday speech and not sound stupid. For her, it's just the way she talks. Her bulging brain is why the Sector assigns her a couple of gun jockeys like Eddie and me whenever she ventures outside a secured zone; her curvy chassis is why gun jockeys like Eddie -- and me, I ain’t ashamed of my nature -- are happy to have the assignment.

Well, usually.

You've got a map? I tossed back over my shoulder, while continuing to fire my reloaded weapon.

On my portable, she affirmed. She moved up behind me and slid her arm around my waist so I could glance down and see the screen.

What's that round grey thing behind us? I asked