Vickers (Corp.s.e.)

"3:51, Mr. Vickers. Only just adequate."

"I'd give a lot to see a TV."

"They've got us completely cut off."

"But no movies? No tapes, no card chips?"

"I guess they figured if they gave us monitors one of us at least would be able to rig them to pick up satellite signals." Debbie turned to Gomez. "Ain't that true, Gomez?"

"Believe me, I don't know any more than you do."

"I don't believe you. You're full of shit. You've got some idea of what's going on here, you just aren't telling." Gomez shrugged. He was used to this sort of thing. "Whatever you say."

Vickers, Debbie and Gomez had been teamed for guard duty. It was the midnight-to-dawn watch of Vickers' eleventh day at what he still thought of as El Rancho Mars.

"I know one thing, I'm getting fucking sick of that training. I can't see any point to it. It's not like we're training for anything. There's no pattern to it. It all seems to be make-work."

"No gain without pain."

"No gain period."

"What's the word, Gomez, is there any pattern to it?"

Gomez was starting to get a little irritable.

"What am I supposed to say?"

Debbie mimicked his flat, colorless accent. "I just do what Streicher tells me."

"Will you lighten up?"

There were times when Debbie could ride someone beyond any productive limit. Vickers was also getting tired of the way she was beating her frustration into the ground.

"Yeah, knock it off. We've got to spend the whole night together in here. It'd be better to get along."

Debbie slid deeper into her chair, at the same time crossing her bare legs. The outburst of body language wasn't missed by either Vickers or Gomez. The two men glanced briefly at each other but held their silence. Debbie had a petulant streak.

There was something womblike about the red room. It was dark, quiet and strangely oppressive. The deep-padded contour chairs were just a little too comfortable. The air was just a little too warm and a little too dry. The smell of rubber and electrons could wrap itself around those on duty like a cocoon. The lines and columns of LEDs glowed red, amber and green. They could hypnotize anyone who stared at them for too long. There was one, dim worklamp. All other light came from the sixteen scopes that monitored the perimeter and approaches to the house. The gray-green of the ground radar, the red ghosts on the heat scopes and the patchwork multicolors of the thermals were reflected in their watching faces. The dim, concentrated quiet was like that of the cabin of a large aircraft, except it slightly lacked the calm but watchful tension. The red room quickly became boring. Vickers drank coffee from a styrofoam cup. He wished that he had two or three Marvols, even a greenie. He knew, very soon, the repetitive nothing on the screens and scopes would put him to sleep.

"It's a pity we don't have a TV. I wanted to see what happened with Tomoyo Nakamora and the gorilla. I wonder if they ever got to fuck."

"The whole thing was disgusting."

"You don't believe in cross-species sex?"

"How would you like to fuck a dog?"

"Plenty of guys fuck sheep. At least, that's the legend."

"That's only…"

"Wait a minute!" Debbie was staring intently into the screen.

"What?"

"I thought I saw something."

"Where?"

"It was just a faint blip on the ground radar. It could have been a jack rabbit or nothing at all. It was right out on the edge."

"Let's take a look. You got a bearing?"

"Maybe oh one five."

"We'll go out on oh one five, on thermal."

Gomez tapped in instructions and, on the main screen, an image moved outward from the house in the rough direction that Debbie had indicated, segueing slowly from one clump of sensors to the next. The color patchwork of the thermal showed nothing but the blue groundheat of the rocks and sand.

"Looks like it was nothing."

"They ought to have robots out there. Then we could all go to bed."

"You can't use robots in this kind of country. Whatever they do, the sand always fucks 'em up."

"You sound pleased."

"I'm working."

The scan was now feeding from the outermost cluster of sensors. There was still nothing doing.

"We could go around the perimeter."

Debbie shrugged. "I don't know. It was probably nothing."

"Hold it."

There were four yellow smudges. Five, six, there were nine yellow smudges rapidly getting bigger.

"Faces. They give out more heat. Here come the bodies."

There were nine… no, ten of them, moving toward the house.

"Put up the audio."

Vickers pushed up a fader. The room was filled with the soft crunch of feet and the superamplified rustle of clothing. There was a quiet curse. Gomez picked up the phone.

"Streicher… yeah, right. Yeah, but listen, we've got a bunch of people out on the perimeter and moving this way; you'd better get down here."

He hung up. Debbie tapped the screen with a long, tangerine-flake fingernail. "What do we do about this?"

Gomez brought in the redscope. Ten figures were trudging across the desert. They appeared footsore.

"For the moment, we watch. Streicher's on his way down."

Vickers was thoughtful. He regarded the screen in front of him.

"If I were going to take a place like this, this is exactly the way I'd do it."

"Oh yeah?"

"The only other way would be to come in by air, but they'd have to figure that we've the capability to take out an unauthorized chopper."

Debbie was also staring into the screen.

"Why not just stand off and flatten the place with some kind of missile?"

"I don't see how it could be that kind of an emergency unless there's something that Streicher's really not telling us. You need a hell of a lot of justification before you start rocketing another corporation's real estate."

"They could just be lost. Massacring civilians is hardly encouraged."

Vickers gri

"And what advice would you offer, Mort?"

The three swivelled in their chairs as Streicher came in.

"If I was you, I'd play the odds and grease them right away but, then again, I'm not you."

Streicher scowled. "And that's a fact." He glanced at Gomez. "Try metal on them. See if they've got any weapons."

The presence of metal was indicated by a violet glow on the thermal screen.

"Three guys carrying frame packs that contain metal objects. I can't tell if they're cans of food or weapons. One other guy's got a pistol and the rest are clean."

"It all looks i

"Or they could be trying to confuse you by loading all the weapons into three packs."

"Perhaps you should ease up on the advice, Vickers."

"We should have hit a fucking road by now."

The muttered comment boomed and reverberated through the red room, blown out of proportion by the speakers.

"We got to take a break."

First one figure and then another flopped to the ground. There was no mistaking their seeming exhaustion. Streicher was still undecided. One of the figures was rummaging in his pack. He continued poking through it for a full minute more. Gomez shook his head.

"This isn't right."

"Drop a flare on them."

The main screen changed to real image as the flare floated down and lit up the desert. The people on the ground were all dressed in identical black coveralls and stocking caps. Their faces were smeared with black makeup.

"They ain't the survivors of no plane crash."

Streicher nodded. "Hit them."

At that exact moment, the red room went haywire. The LEDs blinked frenziedly as though the system was in pain. Some screens blanked out, others froze and a couple exploded in abstract, psychedelic effects.

"They've hacked in."

"That's what that bastard was doing with the pack. He was tapping into one of our landlines."