“What name?” Lars demanded again, less patiently. Outside her door two men were now shouting at each other and somewhere down the corridor a siren was still going banshee. It would keep howling until the air pressure came up normal — that was what it was there for.
Beneath its distant electronic wail Lars could hear someone fumbling at a manual lock on the cell door, metal grating against metal as whoever it was tried to use a key. Which meant the power was down in this sector. Bad news for...
Ben.
“Shit... Fucking, fucking shit.” Lars punched himself crossly in the head. How could he forget Ben like that? Ben was still out there, stuck in his ice bucket, hanging from a single strand of monofilament on the wrong side of the metal plate. Lars could only think of two ways of getting him back and he didn’t like the idea of either of them. Although retracing his steps from Planetside was a tad more attractive than trying to prise off that metal plate and having another battle with the Baby Black.
“Fuck it,” Lars said loudly, “fuck it, fucking fuck it...”
“Who are you? What’s happening?” LizAlec’s voice was strung to breaking with fear. Lars’s accent might make him sound to LizAlec like he was talking English through a mouthful of sand, but she understood well enough that he was swearing. And even she could now hear Laughing Boy and Mickey wrestling with the door.
“It’s Ben,” said Lars.
“Ben? Who’s Ben? Did my mother send you?” She stumbled slightly over calling Lady Clare her mother but did it anyway: she couldn’t get used to thinking of the bitch as anything else, not even in her own head.
“Ben’s my friend,” said Lars. “But he’s dead, so I’m looking after him.”
That got LizAlec’s attention. “Dead?”
“I’ve got his head in an ice bucket,” Lars told her, his voice quiet but matter-of-fact as if he didn’t find the idea unusual, which he didn’t. The boy was already watching LizAlec’s heavy cell door, which had just clicked loudly as four deadlocks finally slid back. It was opening now, and Lars could see the barrel of a rifle poking nervously through the slit... Had that door been airtight, the girl would probably be dead, oxygen-starved, lungs ruptured open.
“Down,” Lars whispered, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. And when LizAlec stayed standing, Lars kicked her legs rapidly out from under her in one easy sweep and they fell together, Lars’s face pushed tight into the back of her neck. One of his arms went under her, the other snaked up over her face, finding her mouth.
“Quiet,” Lars hissed.
LizAlec bit down hard on his filthy glove and Lars punched her in the kidneys, feeling breath explode from her body. She tried to whimper but Lars had his hand too firmly over her mouth.
“Do you want to get dead?” Lars whispered.
LizAlec wasn’t sure if Lars meant killed by him or by Laughing Boy or Mickey, whichever one it was had just slowly opened the door. Lars didn’t know either. But she shut up and that was all that mattered. At least, it was all that mattered to him.
There was a quick click just outside the door, as if someone was trying and failing to turn on a light, but LizAlec’s cell stayed as dark as the corridor outside. The whole of the rifle barrel was in the room now, held waist high by a tall man wearing the cartoon face of a mouse. Mouse-face had frozen in the doorway, sweeping his gun in a hesitant arc above Lars’s and LizAlec’s heads.
The man was night-blind too, Lars realized. Maybe it was more common than he thought. Ben had been sightless in the dark, reduced to wearing a strange pair of CK NightRyders taken off a dead WeGuard. The CKs made everything glow red in the dark and go fuzzy at the edges. Lars hated them, they gave him a headache.
“Lady Elizabeth Alexandra?” Mickey’s voice was worried, as well he might be. Getting paid depended on nothing bad happening to the girl, Count Lazlo had been firm about that. When he said nothing, he meant nothing: not just crap that might leave permanent scars or bruises. Nothing. Losing her to a blow-out was not acceptable practice.
Lars kept his hand tight over the girl’s mouth, leaving her enough space to breath through her nose, nothing more.
“Lady Elizabeth?”
Silence.
“She’s not answering,” the tall man said sullenly.
Lying face down with some stranger’s hand covering her face, LizAlec forced herself to stop panicking and begin to listen. It was Mickey and he was standing in the blackness above her talking into a button mike. He had to be, since Laughing Boy obviously wasn’t with him.
“Yeah, right...” There was a hiss of static and then the man mumbled agreement to something else. “Yeah, all we fucking need,” the man said tiredly. “You go get a lamp and I’ll check the floor. No... I didn’t know this fucking cell was one skin deep to a vacuum.”
He sighed, drumming his fingers against the zytel stock of his Browning. “Yeah, you’re right. What’s left of her probably is gumming tight a pressure leak.” He sighed again, heavily. “Right, yeah. The Boss is going to fucking love this.”
Lars saw Mickey lower the rifle until its barrel pointed towards the floor and then sweep it backwards and forwards in front of him like a blind man with a stick. Mickey was searching for the girl’s body, Lars realized, but he wasn’t going to find it. Not if Lars could help it. Keeping his fingers tight over LizAlec’s mouth, Lars rolled them both out of the way and saw Mickey suddenly freeze at the slight noise, head turned to one side to hear better, eyes flicking snake-like but useless in the dark.
“Don’t move,” Mickey ordered. “Don’t even think of it.” He had the rifle up now, waist high again, sweeping the small cell. Not that he could risk opening fire on LizAlec, the man had to be professional enough to know the odds were shit. If the Browning was on ceramic then the frag splinters would probably rip him apart too. And if the rifle was switched to pulse... Well, he could risk it but he didn’t know which wall bled to the vacuum. Given it wasn’t the one with the door in it behind him, he had a one in three chance of getting it wrong.
Party time.
Lars rolled off the girl, hearing her drag in a breath as he pulled his trapped arm roughly from under her, fingers brushing swiftly across one bare breast. Lars’s grin lasted just as long as it took LizAlec to scramble to her feet. More than anything, Lars wanted to shout at LizAlec to get out of Mickey’s way, but he didn’t dare give away his own position low on the floor. Instead he watched helplessly as the sweeping gun touched her side and LizAlec gasped.
“That you?” Relief was written through Mickey’s voice. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” LizAlec said slowly, straightening up. “I’m still here.” LizAlec touched a hand to her ribs and winced. She tried to wipe grit from her dirt-encrusted face but had to give up. Her fingers were so battered from fighting the vacuum she couldn’t manage it. LizAlec didn’t know which bit of her hurt the most.
“What happened?” Mickey asked, his question halfway between suspicion and concern. He was reaching forward to touch LizAlec when Lars came up off the floor behind Mickey, wrapping a short length of monofilament around the man’s throat, not fixed with a running knot or toggled at the end like a proper garrotte, just fast and tight with the ends wrapped round his own bare hands. Mickey froze, fixed on the edge of panic.
Then combat reflexes cut in as his right fist swept up and back to punch Lars in the face.
Lars grunted but by then Mickey was already gripping his right fist in his left hand and swinging down to drive his elbow hard back into Lars’s chest, shattering three ribs. Purples and blacks exploded as the boy dropped his monofilament in shock. Lars saw the man pivot and kick, fresh colours blossoming as the blow caught Lars’s shoulder, ripping his upper arm from its joint. Without even thinking about it, the boy hurled himself into the wall, slamming the bone back into its socket. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
Ducking away from a second kick, Lars rolled backwards in the dark and grabbed his dropped length of monofilament. A yard of molywire
would have had the man’s head off but Lars had only heard of moly garrottes, he’d never actually used one himself. Looping the monofilament quickly round Mickey’s foot, Lars scrambled to his feet and yanked upwards, lifting the man’s leg out in front of him. Quick as sin, Lars swivelled sideways and stamped hard into the man’s exposed groin without letting go of the monofilament.
Mickey screamed.
Stupid, Lars told himself as the sweating, gasping guard staggered backwards, bouncing into a wall. Stupid. He should have taken out the man’s knee, put him on the ground permanently. Hauling high his length of wire, the boy swivelled again. This time, hearing the crunch of a foot pivoting on grit, Mickey dropped his hands to his groin, cupping his balls. Pure instinct.
It was all Lars needed. Slamming his heel into the man’s kneecap, Lars ruptured the guard’s synovial capsule, shredding cartilage and dislocating one knee. One was enough. Mickey went down with a gasp of pain and never got up again.
Razor-sharp incisors went with the Sandrat genes: it was part of the package. That, and two prominent lower canines that gave the Ratboys their name. It didn’t matter to Lars that these were originally gene-coded in to allow tunnellers to tear hard rations, back in the days when payloads were expensive, water even rarer than it was now and clone protein came in dried strips, like some whitecoat version of biltong.
Lars used his teeth only when fighting, and then only when desperate. Like now. The first taste he got when he bit into the man’s neck was sweat, followed quickly by a darker taste as Lars’s mouth filled with warm blood.
Mickey shat himself, bowels opening and a fetid stink filling the tiny cell as surely as the guard’s unearthly scream. It was instinct that made Lars hook one yellow canine behind a jugular and rip, incisors chewing at the hot rubbery tube.
Fingers thrust in through Lars’s eyes would have stopped the boy in his tracks, but the man was beyond saving, combat training drowned by panic. Frantically, he pushed one hand up to catch Lars’s chin — and Mickey ended up helping rip out his own throat as Lars pulled away to avoid Mickey’s clutching fingers and tore open the vein as he did.
There was a larger vein somewhere, sunk under thick muscle, and Lars bent his head to find it, chewing raw flesh as he worried his way into the man’s open throat. The vein was where Ben had said he’d find it, but biting it open wasn’t necessary. The struggling man was almost dead, limbs twitching weakly, his screams swallowed down to low animal-like gurgles of pure horror. Lars rolled off the man and spat, already hunkering back on his heels.
The tiny cell stank of shit and blood.
Over in the corner the girl sat, wide-eyed and moaning, her tightly pulled-up knees wrapped protectively in her own bare arms. Lars shrugged. She was alive and one kidnapper was already dead. He didn’t see what the problem was. That looked like a good result to him.
“Shut it,” Lars told her. “I want to listen...” And when she didn’t, he pushed himself noisily to his feet. LizAlec was silent before he’d taken two paces so instead Lars went to fetch the rifle.
“Browning,” it said on one side, not that Lars could read it. “Pulse/R model 3.H. Factored under licence in IslamBeirut.” There was some other stuff about implied warranties and a DNA-recognition chip was set into the gun’s matt-grey zytel butt, but someone had hot-jumped it and taped a h/ware patch into position. Not that Lars knew that: he just saw a cracked silicon square crudely taped over with grey tamperTell.
Pointing the Browning towards the open door, Lars squeezed the trigger, letting loose a ceramic slug. Muzzle flare lit the cell, and in the echoing crash of that single explosion LizAlec saw Lars for the first time. A fat child dressed in a strange white suit that hung round him like someone else’s flayed skin. Bolted to his hip was a black metal bottle, its hose feeding straight into his chest. His slack-jawed mouth was coated in red. LizAlec saw Mickey too, sprawled dead on the floor, neck ripped open — and then she put the two nightmarish sights together.
“Sweet Jesus,” LizAlec whispered as she backed herself against the wall, crouched low, hands folded even tighter across her knees. Her night-blind eyes had dilated with shock.
“What are you?” LizAlec asked.
“Lars,” said Lars, dropping into a crouch in front of her, rifle cradled in one hand. Part of him was listening to her ragged breathing, watching the way her mouth opened slightly with each little gasp, but most of his mind was tuned to the echoing silence outside. The other guard would come down that corridor, Lars was certain of it. And from the way the corridor had echoed his shot, it was long and straight with no tunnels opening off. Which meant that when the man came it would be down an unlit corridor, straight towards Lars’s waiting gun.
Lars grinnned and allowed himself a sly glance between LizAlec’s pulled-up ankles. He wanted to touch her there for real, see if it felt how it looked, soft and salt. There would be a signature scent to her, Lars knew that, but for the moment all his senses were buried beneath the stink of the guard’s death.
Besides, there would be time enough later and Lars had the advantage, he knew that. The little rich girl was night-blind, while he could see her face, her small breasts where they flattened against her knees and that hungry darkness between her legs. He could watch LizAlec without her knowing he watched, though she sensed he was near. Lars could tell that by the way she twisted her head, trying to follow his movements.
“Lars who?” LizAlec asked finally.
“Just Lars,” Lars said, keeping his gaze on the empty corridor.
“And my mother didn’t send you?”
Lars shook his head, then realized the girl couldn’t see him. “No,” he said. “No, not your mum.”
“Then it was Fixx!” The girl said suddenly, a grin splitting her face. “You work for Fixx!” She was nodding to herself as if it was obvious.
“No,” said Lars. “Not your mum, not Fixx. No one sent me.” He rolled backward in the grit, twisting his legs over his head to pivot on one foot, landing face forward, stretched out, the rifle never even touching the ground. Sandrat style. Even a life as brief as his had its advantages.
He knew the other guard was coming long before Laughing Boy waddled into view. Listening intently to the shuffle of Laughing Boy’s crepe soles on the extruded polycrete of the corridor floor, Lars heard the man move carefully through the dark as he swivelled himself round the far corner, wide hips wobbling as he pushed his bulk against the wall, a pistol of some sort held upright, clutched tight in both hands as he crept forward.
Over one eye was a black lens, fed by optic fibre from a box attached to the side of his head by a flyweight boron-fibre Alice band. The thing looked like an expensive version of the NightRyders Ben used to wear.
Lars flipped sideways in the dirt, rolling out of sight. He’d counted on getting off a clean shot, seeing without being seen, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Man coming,” Lars told LizAlec. The girl started to ask some question but Lars hushed her into silence. “Don’t move, don’t speak,” he said. He could have told LizAlec that he needed her as his decoy, that battered, dirty and naked she was worth more to him than a free shot. But Lars didn’t have time and besides he didn’t know the words to say it.
So instead he left her there and trusted she wouldn’t do anything stupid, like move. Hunched against the far wall, knees pulled up under her chin and genitals displayed, LizAlec was in Laughing Boy’s direct line of sight through the open door. If Lars had been that guard, then, scream or no scream, he knew exactly where he’d have been looking. Some instincts were hardwired into the psyche: that’s why they were instincts.
Time to get ready. Resting his rifle briefly against the nearest wall, Lars flexed his hands until he heard the bones in his fingers click. Then he swung his head heavily from side to side, trying to release the tension in his neck. According to Ben, rule one of combat was get wired or hang loose, because there was nothing in between. Ben had liked to hang tight but reflex enhancers
weren’t Lars’s style. He’d tried ice once, though, but all it did was burn when it hit the back of his throat and give him a headache and a bad case of the shakes. Ben thought it was hilarious, but then Ben thought lots of weird shit was amusing.
No, Lars liked loose; it was cooler for a start. Any shithead could go round radiating psycho but Lars preferred to keep people guessing — is this guy dangerous or not? Is this shit for real? Hefting the Browning up with one hand, Lars swivelled the rifle so its barrel was facing down and took up a position just inside the door. He could hear Laughing Boy’s breathing now, heavy and shallow, on the wrong side of nervous... Mind you, he’d have been brick-shitting if he’d heard a scream like Mickey’s coming over his ear bead. The soft shoe shuffle was right outside LizAlec’s cell door now.
“Lars...?”
“Shut it,” Lars hissed, as quietly as he could. This wasn’t the time to let the guard know there were two of them. In fact there couldn’t have been a worse time for LizAlec to open her mouth — but it was all right. Laughing Boy was too busy dealing with his own fear to be paying proper attention.
And then the guard came in. Beretta held high, barrel up, handle gripped between interlocking fingers, standard stuff. Laughing Boy’s eyes raked to the left, checked that corner and then he kicked back the door, steel hitting ‘crete with a loud clang. Nothing there. His eyes began to flick rapidly across the back wall only to stop, as Lars knew they would, when they reached the naked girl. It was a moment’s hesitation only, but it was all Lars needed.
Stepping quietly out from behind the door frame, he swung the butt of the late Mickey’s Browning hard into the point where neck met jaw. There was a crack as bone fractured and then Laughing Boy crashed screaming to his knees. Pushing the fat man sideways with his foot, Lars aimed his butt at the uppermost vertebra — where skull joined spine — and slammed down, snapping Laughing Boy’s neck. Instant silence.
“Lars?” LizAlec’s voice was high, anxious.
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