NECROM

Gibson looked around as though he expected them to come bursting through the cloud cover. "Thank God I'm here and not there."

The messenger was shaking his head. "You ca

"What the hell would I want to do that for? The streamheat don't like me any more than they like the idimmu. I could be killed."

"You will die for sure if you remain here."

"But you told me…"

"This attack has changed everything. The Hole in the Void is your link. It is the route by which you are co

"I can't stay here?"

"Go, Joe."

The landscape vanished and the Messenger of Necrom along with it. For a fleeting instant, Gibson seemed to be in some gray, indistinct limbo, a place of fog and gloom and visual distortion. He sensed that there were other beings crowded around him, but beings who were not completely there, insubstantial and ghostly, a whisper on his senses rather than something fully real.

And then he was standing on an orange hillside above the valley of the Hole in the Void, right in the middle of a fullblown and very real firefight.

The White Room

BACK AT THE clinic, in the days that immediately followed his short-lived escape bid, they kept him submerged in a sea of pills and injections. It was almost as if they were trying to medicate the will for freedom out of him. He was so doped that he didn't even dream, merely drifted through a gray fog of nonfunctioning responses and dull frustration. Only a handful of what could be classed as clear memories came through that period. He could remember passing John West as they dragged him down a corridor bundled up in a straitjacket. West had been sitting in a wheelchair, and he had treated Gibson to a sad salute. "I told you you shouldn't have tried it."

He also remembered Kooning coming to look at him, staring down at his bed with a look of outraged betrayal.

The worst of the lasting memories was the nasty smile on the face of one of the male nurses who had recaptured him; he suspected it was the one who had used the blackjack on his kidneys while they were in the van. The man had leaned so close to him that Gibson had been able to smell the spearmint gum on his breath. "You were iucky they didn't dust off the ECT for you. Back in the old days they used to cook your brain if you broke out."

It was a constant reminder of the helplessness of anyone who got themselves labeled as a mental patient.

Chapter Fifteen

GIBSON, WHO HAD never in his life been in combat, instantly discovered that it wasn't in the least like the movies or even the TV news. Combat happened all at once, and so fast there wasn't enough time to take it in or even to be specifically frightened, just a dry-mouthed, unfocused terror and a gasping, sobbing need to scramble away, out of the line of fire. Beneath him, in the inhabited valley of the Hole in the Void, buildings and vehicles were burning. As far as he could tell, one of the structures on fire was the Rearing Eagle.

"Bastards."

The sky was a dull gunmetal-blue streaked with rushing parallel lines of gray interference that provided little light by which to see. Two large aircraft, black shapes above the glare of the fires, hovered over the valley, filling it with the high-pitched siren wail of their engines. They were like big helicopter gun-ships, but without rotors, and of a design unlike anything Gibson had ever seen in his own world. They were pouring fire into the village, both conventional tracer and the jagged beam of some advanced energy weapon. Small dark figures were moving around among the flarnes, and Gibson could make out the repeated pinpoint muzzle flashes of weapons. He wasn't, however, allowed the luxury of wondering what was going on in the valley. Other dark figures were coming over the crest of the hill above him. To his relief, he spotted Nephredana, still in her armor, among their number, and he realized that they had to be a group of defenders. The bad news was that they were in full retreat.

Gibson yelled and waved his arms, even though he realized the gesture was probably pointless in the gloom. "Hey, over here!"

Nephredana spotted him. "Gibson?"

She hurried to where he was standing. There were scorch-marks on her armor and her face was streaked with dirt. She smelled of smoke and sweat. "Where the hell did you spring from? What happened?"

"He heard about the attack and sent me back here."

He realized that he wasn't saying the name Necrom any longer.

Nephredana glanced over her shoulder. "We've got to get out of here. They're coming up the other side of the hill."

Her voice was momentarily drowned out by the nearby chatter of automatic weapons. "They Pearl-Harbored us right out of nowhere. We never had a chance to get organized. They've got these fucking weapons…"

In the next second, he was able to see these fucking weapons firsthand. A horde of what Gibson instantly recognized as streamheat assault troops from their helmets and uniforms poured over the top of the hill. A number of them seemed to be armed with what looked a great deal like World War II flamethrowers. Tubes were attached by hoses to heavy backpacks. When they opened fire, though, they proved to be flamethrowers from some future hell. Streams of dazzling light danced and shimmered, now spasming along the ground, now juddering through the air, jumping and twitching like a set of random lines in a flick book. When they reached an obstacle they either arced over it or skittered around. Each streamheat trooper appeared to control the lines of energy flowing from his weapon by means of a twist grip behind the trigger mechanism.

Gibson stared open-mouthed until Nephredana grabbed him and dragged him to the ground. "Get down, you idiot!"

They pressed themselves flat as one of the streams of light cracked over their heads. "Holy shit! What are those things?"

"The swine have come up with something that can finish us idimmu."

"Kill you?"

Nephredana shook her head. "It can't terminate us, only the Maker or a direct ground-zero nuclear blast can do that, but they can fuck us up good."

"What will they do to me?"

"Turn you into a fucking grease spot."

A defender was caught by the blazing lines of energy, a hulking brute not unlike Rayx. He screamed horribly, became one with the energy stream, retaining his own basic shape as a burning outline for a few seconds and then vanishing.

Nephredana's eyes were an iceburn. "It's some beefed-up version of the regular streamheat return-gun. It's capable of burying each of us at the fucking heart of nickel-iron planetoid and we'd never get out." She was now looking anxiously for an escape route. "We're in deep shit here."

Gibson could only assume that what Nephredana called a streamheat return-gun was the original weapon that he'd seen Smith; Klein, and French use all the way back on the Jersey waterfront, the same one French had turned on himself in Luxor.

The weapons swallowed a second and third of the defenders and Nephredana was off at a crouching run, ducking and dodging the energy streams as they slashed across the hillside like electric whips. Gibson didn't hesitate; he was right behind her. A gully ran down the hillside a little to their left, and Nephredana dived into it, taking advantage of the momentary shelter. Gibson all but rolled in on top of her. He now had orange stains on his white suit and was gasping for breath.

"Where's Slide?"

Nephredana shook her head. "Don't know. We were separated."