and quickly most of the time, as if they were at the park against their will.
Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just …” “I’ve got really good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected pistonpunk might ask her elders, “but wouldn’t it be useful to …?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.
With a little more propagandist verve, the Church of God Kraken might have issued its fighters FN P90s, say, or HK53s, and explained with sententious sermon-logic how the rate of fire made the fanning vectors of bullets reach out like tentacles, or that the bite of the weapon was like that of a squid beak, or some such. As an excommunicant, Dane was no longer restrained. What he dug out of the earth where it had been delivered was a heavy handgun.
They did not know how many charges the phaser had, so Billy did not use it to practice. “I know what we can do,” Dane said. He took them to amusement arcades, pushing through crowds of teens. Billy spent hours going from machine to screaming machine, firing plastic pistols at incoming zombies and alien invaders. Dane whispered advice to him on stance and timing—marksman words, soldier-insight among these play deaths. The sneers of watching youths decreased as Billy’s skills grew.
“Done well, man,” one boy said as Billy defeated an end-of-level boss. It was all disproportionately exhilarating. “Yes!” Billy whispered as he succeeded in missions.
“Alright, soldier,” Dane said. “Nice one. Killer.” He dubbed Billy a member of various violent sects. “You’re a Thanicrucian. You’re a Serrimor. You’re a gunfarmer.”
“A what?”
“Watch the screen. Bad bastards, once upon a time. Raised guns like fighting dogs. Let’s get you shooting like them. Pay attention.”
From Time Cops to the latest House of the Dead to Extreme Invaders, so Billy wouldn’t learn the looped attack patterns. Marines and soldiers learned with such machines, Dane told him. Juba the Baghdad sniper went from zero to his deadly skill set using these. And these pretend guns had no recoil, no weight, no reloading—just like the phaser. Their limited realism made them paradoxically perfect practice for the real, ridiculous weapon Billy had come into.
Billy kept asking about the knuckleheads he might face. How do they eat? How do they see? How do they think?
“That’s not the issue,” Dane said. “The world can always finesse details. And who’d choose it? Always people ready to do that kind of thing.”
SO THEY KNEW WHAT BAIT HAD GOT SIMON PORTING. THEY NEEDED to talk to Saira.
What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground. You don’t know who to trust. Grisamentum’s postal box was not a Royal Mail address, nor the service of any other carrier they knew. The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?
“It must get to him,” Billy said.
“Yeah but not by the usual bloody routes.” There would be no staking out the mail drop.
“How’s Simon?” Billy said.
“Alright. I was there earlier,” said Wati, from a Victorian statue. “I mean, not really. Mo’s good with him though.”
“What about the Londonmancer?” Dane said.
“I got as close as I could. She don’t look like she even has a home. She sleeps in that building. Near the stone.”
“Alright,” said Dane. “We’ll have to get her there, then. Wati, help me out. I’m trying to teach our boy some stuff about things.” Billy heard the grinding sound of glass at the fringe of his consciousness. It had been a while. He waited, trying to understand it as a message.
“Alright, so …” he said eventually, when they passed a locksmith and he noticed something on display in the window. He remembered Dane’s lesson at the bins, and stared at the miniature door to which various different on-sale handles had been attached, for show. “Alright so if you got hold of that,” he said, “and did whatever to it, put it into a wall. Then you could, I bet you could …”