The chute came down on top of him, smothering him in artificial silk. For a few moments he was incapable of doing anything but lying there, enshroudeda"but he knew that he wasn't dead, and there was a certain relief and exhilaration to be found even in that simple fact.

When he was finally able to make the attempt to sit up, and then to stand, he did so very gingerly, not knowing which of his many aches might flare up when pressure was put on it. At first, it seemed that his elbows had taken the worst of ita"but then he tried to transfer his weight from his right foot to his left and realized that he would not be walking properly for some time to come. His left ankle blazed with pain, and he knew that if it was not actually broken it was very badly sprained.

He cursed, but felt oddly unsurprised and resentful. It seemed somehow to be only fair that he should not have escaped from this lunatic adventure entirely unscathed.

He pulled the chute away and peered out, blinking against the glare of the late morning sun. The desert was not yet at its worst, but it soon would be. He limped to a rocky shelf and sat down, looking around for Kid Zero's chute; but the ground was all ridges and spires and jagged outcrops of rock, and although he was high upa"only just below the flat top of a curved ridgea"he couldn't see his erstwhile prisoner. He could see Pasco, though, floating downa"apparently as lightly as a wind-borne feathera"a couple of hundred yards away.

The SecDiv man obviously had skill enough to avoid the worst of the rocks. Carl churlishly expressed a private hope that Pasco might break his leg anyway, but he knew that his prayer had gone unanswered when the big man's chute billowed, settled, and then was quickly swept aside as Pasco came swiftly to his feet. Although they were a long way apart Carl could see that the man with the ruined face already had his gun in his hand, and was looking furtively around for possible danger.

Carl didn't move; he just watched as Pasco sprinted towards him.

"You okay?" the big man shouted up at him.

"No," Carl shouted back sourly. "I'm not okay. Ankle's gone."

Pasco didn't seem to be listeninga"he was looking round anxiously as he began to clamber up over the rocks.

"Where's the Kid?" he demanded. "Which way?"

Carl shook his head. He didn't know which waya"he had lost his sense of direction while concentrating on his own troubles.

Pasco grimaced in irritation, but didn't say anything. He moved away from the rock-face against which Carl was perched, looking one way and then the other before turning to crane his neck, peering at the top of the ridge behind him.

Carl saw the expression on Pasco's face change even before he heard the engine of the bike, and he ducked as he guessed from the combination of signals that the machine was going to come straight over the top of him.

Pasco obviously thought that the leaping bike was going to crash right into him, because instead of standing his ground and firing he dived away to his left. Carl had never seen a bike-jump like ita"the thing flew over him and soared into the air with unbelievable grace. Maybe it would have hit Pasco if he'd stayed where he was, but it would only have clipped his head, because it landed a full ten feet further on, bucking and bouncing over the rocks as the rider steadied it before bringing it around in a wide arc.

Its tires screamed as it came about, but the rider didn't want to waste any time at alla"which was a wise decision, considering that Pasco still had his gun in his hand and was getting madder with every moment.

Again the big man had to dive as the bike came straight at hima"but if he hadn't time to fire, neither had the man on the bike, no matter how close his firing studs were to the right handgrip. The rider had to give one hundred per cent to steering the bike across the rough terrain, and his first-strike weapon had to be the bike itself.

This time, Pasco wasn't quite quick enough. The bike caught him a glancing blow as he tried to evade its charge, and sent him tumbling down a slope into a gully. The bike couldn't get down there without trapping its wheels, so it was as safe a retreat as Pasco could ask for, and the rider knew it. The bike swerved and ran down another slope, just as Carl finally managed to haul his own gun out of its holster.

Carl got off one shot as the biker disappeared from view, but he knew that he hadn't hit the man. Ignoring the pain in his leg he stumbled over to the narrow fissure into which Pasco had fallen, and dropped down beside the other man. Their position was defensible, but it had the disadvantage of a very restricted view. They couldn't see the biker and they couldn't see Kid Zero.

Carl had the sensation of having been here before. Once again they were waiting for the birds to come and bail them out.

But Pasco wasn't content with that. "Stay here!" he said to Carl, with an insistence which suggested that he hadn't quite registered the fact that Carl was in no shape to run around. Then he was gone, hurrying along the gully in the direction opposite to the way the bike had gone. Within five seconds, he too was out of sight.

Carl crouched down, hugging the protective angle of the gully's end. The roar of the bike's engine had briefly overloaded his hearing, but now the engine had stopped altogether, and the silence seemed unnaturally deep. Carl judged that he would be safer a dozen feet further back, where the walls of the gully loomed higher and the shadows were deeper. Painfully, he began to inch his way along.

The silence was unbrokena"until he heard the warning rattle.

Carl froze instantly, knowing exactly what he'd got himself into. There was a nearby crevice in the rock, nearly head high. Steeped in shadow as it was he hadn't been able to see into ita"but the snake inside could certainly see out, and was telling him in no uncertain terms that he was too d.a.m.ned close.

He could see the snake's head now, jaws already agape.

Carl knew that the creature didn't really want to strike at hima"but he also knew that it was a prisoner of its instinct, and that if he moved again, in whatever direction, the striking reflex might be triggered.

He looked down at the hand which held his pistol, wondering if he could alter its att.i.tude so that the barrel of the guna"which was currently pointed at the ground, could be focused on the snake. The angle would be very awkward, but he thought that he could fire from therea"the question was, could he hit a target as small as the snake's head? The range was no problem, but judging the angle of shot and taking the recoil were by no means easy. A more arrogant man might have brought his arm up gunfighter-style and tried to beat the snake's strike, but Carl wasn't that stupid. The snake was already coiled and readya"it had the drop on him.

Somewhere away to his right there was a burst of machine-gun fire. He heard both the stutter of the weapon and the sound of the bullets ricocheting off the rocks. Whether or not there was a pistol shot mixed in with the burst, he couldn't tell.

He winced because he thought the sudden burst of noise was sure to make the snake strike, but the creature's head didn't move. Those eyes were still fixed on him, coldly and hypnotically.

Carl decided that trying to shoot the snake was too chancy. He decided that he might be able to move away instead, if he went very slowly. If the snake had any sense, it would let him go.

If.

But he couldn't move. He couldn't a.s.sert sufficient conscious control over his muscles. He willed himself to move, but his body wouldn't obey. He couldn't do anything except keep his eyes fixed on the snake's head, as though he really were hypnotized.

It's only a horrorshow, he told himself. It's only a game. But he had told the lie too often and now it was impotent, even as mere ritual.

How long the impa.s.se would have continued before he plucked up the nerve to break it Carl had no idea, and the matter remained unsettled because it was broken anywaya"by the arrival of a third party.

Carl didn't see the third party arrive, but when he heard the soft voice he didn't have to turn round to know how close he was.

"Don't move, Mr Preston," said Kid Zero.

The command was so utterly absurd that Carl had to suppress an urge to giggle.

In fact, it was the Kid who laughed, very softly. He laughed because he could see what kind of double trouble Carl was in.

"With friends like yours, Mr Preston," said the Kid gently, "you don't really need enemies. Unfortunately, you have a lot of them. It isn't going to be easy for GenTech to own the world, when there are so many people in it who are determined not to be owned."

"Can you shoot the snake?" asked Carl, without moving his lips at all.

"Why should I shoot the snake?" asked the Kid silkily. "I like snakes. That might be Lady Venom's little sister. I don't like you, Mr Preston. If you weren't who you are, you mightn't be such a bad guya"but as things stand you're GenTech's man, and you're Zarathustra's man. I'm rooting for the snake."

There was another burst of machine-gun firea"and this time, unmistakably, there was returned fire from Pasco's magnum. But the sound came from quite some distance away.

Carl tried to suppress a tremble. Again, he felt certain that the snake would strike. But it didn't. In fact, it relaxed its gaping jaw, and withdrew its head into the shadowed depths of the crevice. Then, with a long lazy sc.r.a.pe of scale against scale the coils of its body withdrew likewise into some deeper covert.

Carl staggered back from the position in which he had been frozen for what seemed like an eternity. He came to rest with his back against the other wall of the fissure and his ankle throbbing fearsomely. He turned his head to look at Kid Zero, who was covering him with a thirty-eight.

"Drop your gun, Mr Preston," said the Kid.

Carl obeyed. "Who is that guy on the bike?" he asked, sourly.

"A friend of mine," said the Kid. "Not just an enemy of my enemies, but an authentic twenty-two carat friend. Kick the gun over here."

Again, Carl did as he was told. He knew that Kid Zero wasn't going to shoot him now. The Kid and the snake had a great deal in commona"they were unreasonably discreet with their deadliness. They struck only when they were forced by circ.u.mstance to strike; unpredictability was part of their individuality, but they were not indiscriminate in their lethals.

"The mercy boys are on their way," said Carl, for no particular reason. They had both been here before, and they both knew the script.

"Story of my life," said the Kid. "The mercy boys are always on their way. So far, they've always arrived too late."

Carl heard the sound of a motorbike engine being jerked back to life. Then he heard the sound of the vehicle approachinga"though he couldn't see it at all. His eyes were fixed on Kid Zero's eyes, as though held there by hypnotic command. It wasn't until the Kid looked away that Carl felt free to turn around and look at the flat ap.r.o.n of rock where he had fallen out of the sky.

The distant thrum of copter engines was audible now, filling the air with muted vibration, but they were still half a mile away. As the Kid had prophesied, the mercy boys were too late.

The Kid leapt out of the gully, and ran lightly to the bike, which had swerved and paused with its back end pointed towards them. The Kid climbed on to the pillion, and the bike came to life again, hurtling away into the maze of canyons. Carl blinked as a stray bit of sand ended up in his eye. He heard Pasco's gun go off three times, but he knew that the shots were a gesture of rage and disgust rather than a serious attempt to bring the bikers downa"they were already out of range.

Carl concentrated on getting out of the crack in the rock as fast as he could, just in case there were other snakes nearby. He sat on the flat top on the sun-warmed stone, ma.s.saging his ankle, and he didn't bother to look up until Pasco's shadow fell across him.

As he'd expected, the big man's ugly face was even uglier than usual. Of all the lop-sided scowls Carl had so far seen, this one was the most hideous.

"How did the freakin' b.a.s.t.a.r.d know?" growled the SecDiv man. "How did he know to be here, waiting?"

Carl knew well enough that Pasco had been outguessed again. He didn't know how, so he couldn't answer the question, but in general terms it was obvious what had happened. Pasco hadn't jumped out of that plane; he'd been pushed. Somehow, they had been set up. Somehow, they had been caused to deliver Kid Zero back into the tender care of his own kind.

"Ace the freakin' Ace," Pasco went on, spitting out the words as though they were poisonous. "It was Ace the Ace, without a single Low Number to back him up. The guy's a geriatric has-been! It makes no sensea"no freakin' sense at all."

While he spoke, Pasco was staring out at the northern horizon, and Carl realized that they had never heard any kind of explosion, or seen any great plume of smoke. Whatever holocaust Pasco had hoped to avoid by jumping had not happened.

As the helicopter came in to land, Carl realized that he'd be face to face with Dr Zarathustra very soon. He didn't have the disc; he didn't have the snake; and now he didn't have Kid Zeroa"all he had to show for all his trouble was a busted ankle. It wasn't going to do his career prospects any good at all.

The only comforting spark of brightness he could find to fasten on was the thought that this would probably be the very last time he would have to look at Ray Pasco's acid-eaten face, and hear him say: "Aw, s.h.i.t!"

5.

When Homer Hegarty looked up from the pages of The World as Will and Idea and saw those pale blue eyes watching him from the spare bunk he was momentarily convinced that he was a dead man. He felt like a complete cowarda"not just because of what the Kid might have come to do to him, but because of what he'd earlier done to the Kid. But the Kid didn't even have a gun in his hand.

"How do you do that?" asked Homer, a little hoa.r.s.ely. "I'm half deaf, on account of spending too much time with earphones on and the sound of a copter's engines howling up my a.s.s, but those Delta Force boys are supposed to be good."

"If they were any good," the Kid pointed out, "they wouldn't be guarding a trailer park in the middle of nowhere."

Homer put the book down, and wondered if he dared to move. "You want a beer?" he said.

"Sure," said the Kid.

Homer eased his legs off the bed and went to the ice-box. He wondered whether there was enough Dutch courage in a can of beer to help him to face the threat of violence without wincing, but decided that it didn't matter. If the Kid had come to kill him, he probably wouldn't get a chance to finish the can.

"I'm glad you got away, Kid," he said, as he pa.s.sed on the can. "I really am."

"They wouldn't have caught me in the first place," the Kid pointed out. "If you hadn't told GenTech that I'd been here."

"You shouldn't have given me the disc," Homer told him. "It was too hot to hold. I'm a showman, Kid, not a hero. The kind of news I deal in isn't the kind of news which changes anything. There was nothing I could do but cover my own a.s.s. I'm sorry if I didn't live up to your expectations, but my feet of clay go all the way up to my armpits. No b.a.l.l.s, Kida"no b.a.l.l.s at all."

"I should have known," said the Kid, sipping the cold beer. "I think I know better, now. How much do you know about what happened to me?"

"I heard that you paid a visit to the south polea"that Mitsu-Makema picked you up and then lost you again. The details are hazy, but I guess I got the gist. That software attack which Gen-Tech launched caused a lot of anxious talka"some people thought that M-M might reply in kind. We can all be glad that things went quiet again."

"They may not stay that way," said the Kid ominously.

"So why'd you come back?" asked Homer. "You want to settle the score?"

The Kid shook his head. "I came to hear the news," he said. "The kind you don't put out on the air. I figure that you probably get to hear things people don't hear, and that you understand things better than most. I have a few little t.i.tbits for you, tooa"some for private use only."

Homer sat back down on his own bunk, and looked at the Kid wearily.

"Quite frankly," he said, "I'd just as soon you took it all to Lola Stechkin. Not that she could help you any, but I hate the b.i.t.c.h, and it might just give her a heart attack if you popped up in her apartment the way you keep popping up in here. If you want to do me a real big favour, you'll make sure I never set eyes on you again."

"It could be arranged," said the Kid softly, "but it might cost you."

Homer sighed. "Okay, Kid," he said. "You're mad, bad and dangerous to knowa"just promise me this is the last time, and I'll tell you anything I can."

"There are a couple of minor points," said the Kid. "Firstly, this arrangement has got to be mutual. I don't want to be a TV star any more. I don't want to be the last of the true outlaws and the only free man in America. I want you to lay off me, Homer, after you tell one last story. In fact, I'd like you to announce my death."

"They won't believe it," said Homer. "Not without a corpus delicate."

"Just do your best," said the Kid. "The story you can put it out is how Ace the Ace, the one-time leader of the Low Numbers, risked his life to pick me up after ugly Ray Pasco threw me out of an airplane with my hands and feet tied together. You make it clear that the Ace was a real hero, okay? You can put in as much fancy detail as you likea"only you say that when I hoped on his pillion so that he could drive me off into the sunset I copped a bullet from Pasco's magnum, and bled to death. The Ace is available for interview, and he'll give you a real tear-jerking account of my last few minutes. You've never been fair to the Ace, Homera"Noe's your chance to set the record straight and give him the break he deserves."

Homer shook his head. "It ain't going to convince the guys who care," he said dolefully, "but I'll do it if you want me too. I'll look up the Ace tomorrow. What else?"

"I don't want you to put it out on the air, but I'd like you to spread the whisper about the reason that Pasco threw me out of the plane and jumped after me."

Homer c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "You got an explanation for that?" he said. "Whole world thinks the guy just went crazy with paranoiaa"thought that M-M was going to zap the plane with a sat-based laser."

"That's about it," said the Kid. "But there's one extra detail you might find amusing. I didn't figure it out all at once, but I'm not so stupid I can't put two and two together. You ever play the horrorshow booths?"

"Once or twice," Homer admitted.

"You know the script where you're on the plane that's under attack from three sides at once and getting set to crash?"

"Sure," said Homer. "It was a weak one, thougha"too much like all the other arcade games where you're supposed to be in the c.o.c.kpit guiding the plane in. The horrorshows didn't really begin to get frightening until they started the streetstalker scenarios. What's it got to do with Pasco?"

"Pasco is a horrorshow freak. He's played them all. He's even played them in his sleepa"the ones which won't be coining into the arcadesa"

"Which ones are those?"

"The interactive ones, where the booths produce a top-quality illusion, backed up by a computer which can take in signals from your brain to modify its programme. Nothing supernaturala"just picking up ordinary brain waves. It seems hat the brain is uncannily clever at forging a relationship with the machine. Pasco's brain was even cleverer. M-M have a whole fleet of experimental booths wired up for this kind of two-way stuff, and Pasco was such a good subject they ran their entire battery of tapes by him while he was coming out of the deep sleep they put us all into when they hijacked us down to Antarctica. One of the scenarios they gave him was the plane coming in to land, with all kinds of data coming in about possible attacks. In the game scenario the plane eventually gets zapped by a laser from a skyball. M-M knew exactly how Pasco would react if they gave him a couple of cues at the right timea"they knew far better than he did. They made him jump, and they tipped off the Ace to be waiting downstairs. Those guys don't smile a lot, but they sure have a sense of humour."

Homer nodded slowly. "That explains why the Maniax created a diversion for the birds," he said. "I suppose you don't know what the flock of model planes which overflew the base did? There were no explosions, and GenTech's not saying."

"Maybe they were only there to feed Pasco his cue," said the Kid, with a shrug. "Maybe they were there to demonstrate to Gen-Tech that M-M could have paid them back for the raid on Antarctica, if they'd wanted to. That's not importanta"just put the story about Pasco around. I want him bounced right out of GenTech, and SecDiv can't afford to have him around if they think that M-M may be able to jerk his strings any time they please."

"He'll come after you," Homer pointed out.

"But he'll come on his own," said the Kid. "On his own, he's nothinga"with GenTech behind him, he'd be dangerous."

Homer shrugged. "Is that the lot?" he asked.