fifteen minutes.”
Sam gulped her wine and made for the door. Rintoul, a stocky, chubby-faced kid,
whispered “Shit!” His pudgy fingers clasped at his belt as he glanced around the
bar nervously. Charlie made a dry, choking sound through her mouth. Laughter.
“Teague’s no fool,” said J.B.
“Ten years ago he wasn’t,” agreed Charlie. “Five years ago he maybe wasn’t. But
only maybe. Now times have changed. He’s sucked this place dry for too long, put
nothing back in its place. Maybe the blood was rich twenty years ago, but it’s
thin as whey now. The assets are stripped. Cupboard’s bare. There’s nothing
left. Teague don’t know what’s going down half the time. Strasser’s king of the
shit pile, and he’s insane. All he cares about is watching kids killing kids,
male and female. You get the message?” She glared at Ryan accusingly.
Ryan drank some more of the wine. Stasis he understood, the stagnation of
empire. Evil and greedy men flogging a horse to death but not realizing, not
understanding when it was dead, when extinction had been reached, and continuing
to beat it and beat it and beat it.
“You telling me the deadline’s been reached? Mocsin’s ready to blow?”
Fishmouth Charlie stared at him for some seconds, her bulging eyes fixed on his,
then she looked down at the bar top, spreading her hands on its shiny, highly
polished surface.
“Not as easy as that, Ryan.” Her voice seemed, if anything, deeper, certainly
gruffer. “Couple of months back we had some kind of epidemic run through the
gaudies on the Strip. Real bad. Something internal, rotted ’em out. Teague’s
medics couldn’t cope, so they killed ’em, killed ’em all, girls and boys. First
off they needled ’em, but that was too damned slow, so one night they came and
took ’em away in vans. Machine-gunned ’em and burned the bodies. Out in the
desert. So all the gaudy houses had empty rooms and Strasser blitzed the place,
went through Shantytown dragging out just about anyone under the age of twenty,
took ’em off. They had to have something to keep the miners quiet, but some of
the men cut up more than usual. There was a riot, lotta guys shot. The sec men
contained it, put the clamp on, but maybe that was the final straw.” She
shrugged, gestured around. “You can see how it is. Place is falling apart.
Generators going bust and there’s nothing to mend ’em with. Lack of parts, lack
of interest. Everything in this town is too old, too damned worn out.
Unrepairable. Any case, you force a guy to use his wrenches at the point of a
gun, he ain’t gonna do a prime job. He’s gonna do just what’s necessary to stop
himself getting his head holed and that’s all. He’s not gonna sweat for you, now
is he? So things just get worse. And worse.”
Ryan nodded. He said, “But the miners. Stockpiling food, drilling new vents that
the overseers don’t know about. Shit, Charlie, like Sam said, all that takes
time, not to mention a hell of a lot of effort, planning, thought.”
Charlie shrugged.
“Who knows? I ain’t privy to everything that goes down in this shithole, Ryan.
All I know is that Mocsin’s on the edge. It’s like there’s a button somewhere
and there’s a finger hovering over it. And once the finger jabs down, once the
button’s pressed—Blooey!”
Rintoul, still casting glances at the hostile faces of the drinkers staring at
them, said, “Yer’d think the place’d be an armed camp if all this shit is going
on. Patrols in the street, curfew, shoot to kill. Like that.”
“We got a lot of crap at the entrance to town,” said Ryan, “and they were
nervous, but they didn’t seem to be pissing in their pants.”
Charlie reached under the bar and pulled out a cigar. She warmed it over a
candle before sucking flame into its end.
“It’s like I said, Teague’s lost his grip and Strasser doesn’t seem to care. I
guess they just don’t understand after twenty years of tight control. They’re
blind. It happens.”
Ryan acknowledged the truth of this. All he knew of history told him that often