by David Gunn
‘Earth to Anton,’ the SIG says.
I’m getting there.
Ramming my gun against the creature’s throat, I pull the trigger and watch bits of steel spine, wire and withered flesh exit through the back of its neck. Hollow-point, got to love it.
‘Throat?’ Anton says.
Obviously. I doubt if it has a brain worth shooting.
Man down. Anton kneels at my side as blood pools in a fuzzy-edged circle round me. Darkness is here and the night goggles he’s slipped over my eyes make my blood look almost fluorescent.
‘Sven . . .’
‘I’m fine.’
He stares at me.
‘Go get the buggy,’ I tell him.
Flicking up his own goggles, he examines my face. Not sure what he expects to see without night vision. ‘OK,’ he says. He wants to say something more. Goodbye, probably . . . Idiot thinks I’m dying.
He’s right, of course. Only my metabolism isn’t that simple. Already I can feel flesh closing and bones beginning to heal.
‘Sven,’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It hurts. Now fuck off.’
He leaves without looking back. Sir Anton Tezuka, armiger and trade lord . . . Walks away, with his head up and shoulders back. Losing himself in the darkness to give his friend space to die with dignity.
Shit, you’ve got to love the Tezuka-Wildeside.
They’re screwed to hell. But they know how to behave.
Reaching into the gash in my chest, I find a cracked rib and pull it straight. The broken ones are trickier.
There are three of these. Two have simply snapped, but the third is smashed in two places so I deal with it first. Feeling for the sharpness of broken bone, I slot the section into place. Hurts like fuck, again.
Always does. Every single time.
That’s why I sent Anton away. Don’t like showing pain, and sometimes, like now, it’s impossible not to. Blood from a bitten lip drips on my jacket. When the ribs are done, I settle myself against a rock and wait.
Anton isn’t getting the buggy. He’s gone to fetch a burial party.
Dumb bastard.
It’s almost daylight before I hear a vehicle in the valley below. It’s not the buggy. An ex-militia scout car to judge from its camouflage. Painted-out numbers are just visible on the turret. A whip antenna flicks in the breeze.
Gears shift and the scout car begins its climb.
Fat-wheels lurch as it bounces over rock and slams down again. The reconnaissance vehicle isn’t fast, but it’s powerful enough to grind its way up this slope.
I can hear it change gear, the wild dog that has been watching me can hear it change gear, and so can the buzzards circling high in the pink sky overhead. Guess Anton reckons that if Horse Hito is out there he’d have attacked already.
First out of the cab is a blonde-haired girl, who runs towards me, loses her nerve and slides to a halt, face twisted with misery. About a year back, the first fifteen years of Aptitude’s well-ordered life crashed into mine.
The stiffness to her shoulders tells me she’s crying.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK.’
‘Sven . . .?’
I’m almost on my feet, when she flings herself into my arms and almost knocks me over. I’m a foot taller, twice her weight and twice as broad. You need to see us together to realize how absurd that is.
‘Dad said . . .’
Aptitude stops. Realizes she’s clinging to me.
She steps back. Probably just as well. Because I’m realizing all the wrong things. Like she smells good and her breasts are firm and her lips are close. She’s sixteen, for all she’s a widow. I’m twenty-nine, maybe thirty.
That’s too wide a gap for either of us.
Of course, her husband was three times my age. But that’s the Octovian Empire for you. ‘Don’t get rid of me that easily,’ I say.
We’re halfway back to Wildeside when my SIG wakes. Its faint shiver has me scanning the horizon for Horse Hito. Looks clear to me. Although I squint out of the window into the sun for a few seconds, because that’s where he’ll be coming from.
Well. It’s where I’d be coming from.
‘What?’ I demand.
‘Sven,’ it says. ‘The good news? Or the bad?’
‘The good,’ Aptitude says.
Anton suggests we start with the bad.
I sit it out. The SIG-37’s locked to my DNA. So mine is the answer it’s waiting for. Plus it wants to tell me anyway. ‘Don’t forget the other furies out there.’
‘That’s the bad bit, right?’
‘No,’ it says. ‘That’s the good. Most died.’
‘What’s the bad?’
‘Debro owns the ship they died in.’
‘OK,’ I agree. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Oh,’ my SIG says. ‘That’s not the bad bit . . .’ It hesitates. ‘Well, not the really bad bit. The ship was travelling on a false certificate.’
‘Oh shit,’ Anton says.
But the SIG’s got more. ‘And its journey wasn’t logged. You know what that means . . .’
All trading journeys in the Octovian Empire must be logged in advance, with cargo given and routes outlined. Once chosen, routes must be adhered to. Failure to log an upcoming journey is treason. The penalty for treason is death.
Round here, that’s the penalty for everything.
Chapter 3
IT’S ALMOST NOON WHEN WE CREST A SLOPE TO SEE A shattered cargo carrier on the high plain in front of us. Imagine a giant silver fish, and then smash its spine with a metal bar and that’s how it looks.
Make that a fish with no markings.
‘Poetic,’ says my gun.
Slapping the SIG into silence, I tell Aptitude to stay where she is and Anton to cover me and kill anything that moves. Neither looks happy.
Too bad.
Gun held combat-style across my body, I head down a slope, giving myself cover where I can. That’s most of the time, because the bits of slope not littered with rock have fragments of cargo carrier as big as our scout car.
Of course, that means anyone down there has cover too. Only the gun says the sole life sign inside the cruiser is on the edge of flickering out.
A section of tail fin lies in the dirt. A name stencilled beneath a number, both crudely painted out. The angle of the sun makes the name visible.
Olber’s Paradox.
No idea who Olber was. Not too sure what a paradox is either.
The first casualty lies a hundred and fifty paces from the wreck. The cargo loader’s guts make a pattern in the dirt, what’s left of them. The arrangement looks accidental. His head rests twenty paces beyond.
Blowflies rise, furious at being disturbed. Only to resettle. There’s a stink to the air. The heat isn’t being kind to the corpses.
This is nasty.
A crew member stares at the sky. Her eyes poached white by the sun. Her pistol is in its holster. The handle of a dagger juts from her boot. Although her neck is broken and the back of her head pulped, the blood on a rock behind her says her death is an accident.
‘Still getting life signs?’
‘They’re fading,’ the SIG says.
It directs me towards a middle section. This obviously flipped on impact and came to rest upside down. A wide scar in the dirt shows where it spun before hitting a massive boulder that brought it to an abrupt halt.
I’m surprised anything is alive in there at all.
‘Hollow-point,’ I say.
The SIG swaps clips.
Stepping up to a wall of ripped metal, I swing myself round its edge and sweep the inside. A dozen bodies lie at my feet. They’re even ranker than those outside. Eight chairs and a table are bolted to the floor over my head.
Broken beer bottles. Dried blood.
A naked girl no bigger than a kitten whirls six inches from a cracked holo watch belonging to one of the bodies. Every time she reaches between her thighs, she vanishes in a crackle of
static, only to reappear and start again.
Seems I’ve found the crew quarters.
One of the beds is occupied.
Its owner hangs limp from the fat strap that kept him locked down and alive when Olber’s Paradox crashed. A hard habit to break. Buckling yourself in. Speaks to me of a life spent planet-hopping. Since the man can’t release his belt without smashing everything left unbroken in his body, I have to go to him.
‘Make it fast,’ the SIG says.
Punching a hole in the wall gives me my first foothold and lets me stretch for a handhold above. It would sever the fingers of anyone normal. But I’m using my prosthetic arm and aiming for a safer hold above that.
My arm’s combat issue. No idea how many people have used it before me.
The real problem comes when I reach the top. Eight beds are bolted in a row. The one I want is in the middle. The bolts securing the nearest bed hold when I reach for it and swing free. After that, I swing myself from one metal bed frame to another. Takes me a couple of minutes to reach the last person alive in this ship.
‘You in there?’
Something flutters behind his eyes.
‘Wake up . . .’
He doesn’t.
‘Sven,’ the SIG says. ‘Bad choice.’
OK, I’m not going to slap him awake. In the end I work my way to the side of his bed and reach for the buckle of his safety belt. It’s jammed, obviously. So I’m hanging from an upside-down bed, trying to free someone who’s bent double like a piece of wet washing.
‘Admit it. You’re enjoying yourself.’
Reaching between my shoulder blades, I find my throwing knife and half cut the strap. There’s a story to that blade. But now’s not the right time for it. Dropping the blade to find later, I reach forward and yank at the weakened strap.
He falls as the strap snaps. And so do I, almost.
At the last second, I tense my arm, and the bar, the bolts and my bones are strong enough to stop us hitting the floor.
Leaving my survivor in the shade, I search the rest of his ship.
Another dozen crew members are in various states of corruption. A small cage is full of those creatures that attacked earlier. Another cage is ripped open. The ceiling above the first one did a good job of introducing itself to the floor, and it looks like a dead monster sandwich.
Sheet metal. Smashed creature. Sheet metal.
Works for me.
A quick trawl of the rest produces nothing useful. I had in mind gold, diamonds, body armour or at least some interesting weapons. The things legionnaires dream about, when they’re not dreaming about beautiful young tribal women willing to remove their clothes.
Used to live in the desert. Probably shows.
And the only tribeswomen willing to take off their clothes did it for money, and were neither young nor beautiful. They were sullen and silent, and regarded us with something between fear, hatred and contempt.
Aptitude comes running. Only to stop when she sees me scowl.
‘What?’ she demands, chin up and eyes narrowing.
She really is ridiculously beautiful. Even wearing her father’s old combat jacket and desert boots. I wonder about the jacket, before realizing it has a temperature-controlled lining and she’s been baking up there in the truck.
‘You didn’t know it was safe to come down.’
‘The gun said there was only one thing left alive in there. You’re holding him. How can it not be safe?’
She’s angry at being told to wait.
Probably angrier still at working herself into a state because she thought I was dead. Then discovering I wasn’t. Several women who know me would get angry about that.
‘Aptitude—’
She glares at me.
‘Let’s get him deeper into the shade.’
Taking his legs, she helps me up the hill, although I take most of the weight. We dump him in the shadow of the truck and Aptitude goes to find a first-aid kit. She does it without being told. She’s not the kid I think.
That’s half the problem.
‘Morphine,’ Anton tells her.
Aptitude’s already on it. She hands me a hypodermic with a tiny needle and a tube that needs squeezing. Might be old-fashioned. But battlefield morphine works and it’s cheap and you can buy it anywhere.
Much like Kemzin 19s. The cookie-cutter SLR of choice for skinflint dictators everywhere. Anonymous, efficient, near impossible to break. Our glorious leader loves the Kemzin 19. Not that I’m suggesting for one minute that our leader . . .
The crew carried Kemzins.
Now why would the crew of a cargo carrier be armed? Leaning close to the injured man, I take a better look and swear.
‘What?’ Aptitude demands.
I ignore her.
Pumping a second syringe into his neck, I watch the crew-man’s eyes roll back and his breathing steady. He’s luckier than he deserves. A handful of smashed ribs, from where the strap compressed his chest on impact. A dislocated leg and cracked hip. A broken arm. Some ugly bruising. Could be worse.
The dehydration is killing him.
And we can deal with that.
‘Let me,’ Aptitude says, dropping to a crouch. She has a bag of saline solution in her hand. As we watch, she slides a needle into his wrist, lets the blood flow back to rid it of air bubbles and attaches a plastic tube, turning a petcock to let the liquid flow.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘School,’ she says.
Anton’s watching with amusement.
‘So,’ Aptitude says, when her father disappears to fetch a splint. ‘Who is he?’
His name is Carl and he’s a cargo skipper. The last time we met I swapped my coat, ex-Death’s Head, ballistic-lined, for passage into Farlight from an off-world orbit. I didn’t know it then but I was on my way to kill her.
Aptitude . . .
Anton’s only daughter.
The one who’s wondering what my scowl means this time.
No idea what Carl’s second name is. Probably doesn’t have one. Most people I know don’t. I do only because Debro gave me one.
Sliding my hand into his jacket I find his ID.
Same face, false name. Unless it was false last time round. Makes me wonder if the whole crew signed on with false papers. This makes me wonder something else . . .
‘SIG,’ I say. ‘Check the black box.’
‘There isn’t one.’
Of course there is. It’s bad enough not logging the journey. But no black box? My gun will tell me Olber’s Paradox isn’t carrying an emergency beacon next.
‘Hey,’ the SIG says. ‘Guess what . . .’
The UFree, who own three quarters of the galaxy, don’t approve of unregistered ships. Being on the United Free’s non-approved list is a bad place to be. Of course, the UFree don’t own anything. As they’ll be the first to tell you. They are a Commonwealth of Free Peoples united in their wish for peace.
The fact we still use money amuses them.
On their planets, houses build themselves, the weather does what it’s told and everything is free. Our habit of killing each other amuses them less. So they provide observers to ensure we slaughter each other according to the rules.
Break the rules and bad things happen.
Planets find themselves in different orbits. Whole sun systems disappear. Galactic maps get redrawn. The U/Free talk quietly. But they carry a very big stick.
OctoV doesn’t approve of unregistered ships either. Of course, his list of capital crimes would fill a book. Probably does. But we’re talking serious here. Death for the captain. Death for his crew. Quite possibly death for the owner.
Our glorious leader and his ministers don’t object to smuggling as such. They just want to make damn sure they get their cut.
‘I mean it,’ the SIG says. ‘No recorder.’
Either this is black ops, or the captain came from so far out-system he didn’t know the rules. We can skip that becau
se Carl would have told him. So that means we’re dealing with black ops.
Not good, given Anton promised OctoV to stay out of trouble.
‘Where are you going?’ he asks me.
‘Forgotten something.’
‘What?’
‘My coat.’
Same flies, same headless cargo loader, same stench on entering the crew quarters. A woman lies on top of my coat, and her guts are rotted to the softness of jam. So I scrape the worst off with my knife, then take the thing outside and scrub it with handfuls of dirt.
‘He had your coat?’ Anton’s looking at me strangely.
‘Yeah. It’s a long story.’
‘We’ve got time.’
‘He hasn’t.’
Anton helps me load Carl into the scout car.
Using back roads, we loop round to approach Wildeside from the opposite direction, arriving as the sun is starting to set. Not sure it’s going to make any difference. If OctoV is lenzing us from high orbit, he’ll have been tracking us the whole trip anyway.
Debro’s not sure if she’s delighted to see me alive, furious we’re so late back, or prepared to wait to find out what happened. Being her, she decides to wait. And her anger fades when she sees Carl. Peeling back his shirt without wincing at the stink, she checks his broken ribs and Aptitude’s handiwork.
She’s impressive, Debro.
Aptitude is going to be like her when she grows up. Aptitude just doesn’t know that yet. ‘Get him inside,’ Debro says. Anton and I carry him between us.
The room she chooses is down three flights, and in the far corner of the palazzo. We’re underground. I’m wondering if there’s any significance in that when Debro’s next question tells me, yes . . .
‘You plan to tell me where you found him?’
I shake my head.
‘Sven . . .’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘But Aptitude and Anton know already.’
‘Then you’d better make sure you’re the one who replies if anyone comes knocking. Hadn’t you?’
She’s smart enough to know that’s an answer in itself.
Chapter 4
WHEN I’M TWELVE A LEGION LIEUTENANT PUTS A PISTOL TO MY head.
It misfires. Maybe he can’t be bothered to try again. Maybe he decides the goddess luck, that whore whose favour soldiers need, has decreed I should live. Alternatively, he’s so drunk he forgets why he was going to shoot me.
