by David Gunn
This is a small and private gathering it seems.
A dozen U/Free turn to watch us, and then a dozen more. By the time I realize the floor’s floating, and we’re expected to step across the gap from walkway to floor, a hundred people are watching.
And you’ve never seen anything like them.
Well, I haven’t.
They’re tall, they’re elegant, and they’re beautiful. A hundred white smiles, a hundred displays of perfect teeth. They’re all holding glasses, and sipping chilled white wine.
‘Fuckers,’ says my gun. It speaks for us all.
‘Sven,’ says a voice from the crowd. ‘How sweet of you to come.’ Paper Osamu’s words ooze warmth. ‘And your friends as well.’ She smiles broadly.
Like we had a choice.
‘I’m sure you need a drink,’ she says.
A waitress appears, wearing a skirt slit to her thigh, with a top tight enough to squeeze her breasts while open enough to reveal their valley. She bows when I take a glass, and the valley gets a whole lot deeper.
Laughing, Paper Osamu says, ‘Come on. There are far more interesting people to meet.’
Morgan is talking to a blonde in a shirt so thin it’s see-through. She has nipples like bullets and the tits of a teenage whore, all four of them. She also has pale blue eyes, and these belong to a woman old enough to be my great-grandmother. As her gaze sweeps down my uniform it rests a little too long on the zip.
‘So,’ she says. ‘This is him?’
Paper nods.
The woman smiles. ‘If you’re interested,’ she says, ‘we might try a threesome?’ She’s talking to me this time.
‘Maybe later.’
As I am herded away, Paper leans close. ‘I’m impressed,’ she whispers. ‘That was almost polite for you.’
‘I meant it.’
She frowns, and then decides I’m joking.
The first hour goes well enough. People talk, I pretend to listen. The waitress with the split skirt and overflowing breasts becomes my shadow. Every time my glass is empty, she fills it from a bottle that looks full.
Her smile gets wider as the night goes on.
Just as I am about to ask what time she gets off, a scowl fills her face and she fades into the crowd, taking the champagne with her. So I turn, none too happy, and find myself staring at an elegant young man with blond hair and high cheekbones. Little more than a boy, really.
He nods, the slightest dip of his head.
So I inspect him the way I’d inspect a trooper back when I was a sergeant. A wispy beard, one of those little fair ones. Teeth that gleam. A narrow waist, and shoulders padded to make them broader. He’s thin and elegant, and he is rotating his fluted wine glass by its narrow stem, lazily.
I hate him on sight.
‘Yes?’
‘Sven Tveskoeg?’ The fact he drawls my name should be warning enough, but I’m not big on warnings.
‘Who wants to know?’
Drawing himself to his full height, the boy sweeps back his cloak.
‘Fuck . . .‘
Well, what am I supposed to say?
He wears the dress uniform of a Death’s Head colonel. And it’s the real thing: with a double loop of silver braid falling from one shoulder, and an impressive row of battle ribbons. An Obsidian Cross hangs at his neck. First class, obviously. Actually, it’s the one above: with a little crown and a spray of oak leaves.
‘Colonel Vijay,’ he says. ‘I’ll be leading this mission.’
‘You’ll be . . . ? ‘
‘Leading this mission.’
He says it loud enough to make a woman next to us turn. Maybe Colonel Vijay has been told to expect an argument. But he’s a senior officer and I’m a lieutenant, and I should have known something like this would happen.
‘Of course you will, sir . . . What mission would that be?’
‘To rescue the missing U/Free.’
‘Missing U/Free, sir?’
‘Captured, Ms Osamu believes. By some god-awful little local militia. We’re going to get him back.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I say. ‘Of course we are, sir.’
Imagine a steel spring uncoiling. That is how fast I salute. It’s so fast, so faultless I might as well have slapped his face.
Can I help if he flinches? Rules are rules, so I hold my salute until he returns it.
‘Enough,’ he tells me. ‘We’re off duty here.’
‘Are we, sir?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We are . . . And providing you follow my orders I’m sure we’ll get on.’
‘Never disobeyed an order in my life, sir.’
The little idiot believes me.
A flash of red under his collar badges tells me he is a staff officer, and that makes me take a closer look at those battle ribbons. One of them is for a campaign fought five years ago. This would make him what? Sixteen at the time? Fifteen?
Then I see Ilseville. It is the medal ribbon we have.
The only one we have.
I was there . . . Might have mentioned that before. I can name every Octovian officer, NCO or trooper who stumbled away from that city alive. God knows, there aren’t many of us. ‘Ilseville?’ I say it without thinking.
His eyes narrow. ‘I helped with the planning.’
Stepping closer, I put my face near his.
‘It was a fuck-up,’ I say, keeping my voice low. ‘A disaster. You know the casualty rate? As close to a hundred per cent as makes no difference.’
‘You survived.’ There is something bitter in his voice.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘No thanks to shits like you.’
‘What did you say? ‘
‘No thanks to HQ, sir.’
‘It was a victory,’ says Colonel Vijay. ‘To suggest otherwise is treason.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Glorious, wasn’t it? Makes me wonder about all those other victories we keep winning.’
Turning on his heel, he begins to stalk towards my troopers and then changes his mind. The next time I see our little colonel, he is laughing with Morgan and the blonde with four tits and thousand-mile eyes.
Strikes me, they are made for one another.
It is a long night and I lose the Aux somewhere down the line. Although I glimpse Colonel Vijay, with a glass of wine. The woman he’s talking to has her face close to his, and they are agreeing about something, strongly from the look of it.
‘I had no idea,’ she tells me later.
‘What?’ I demand.
‘That Octovians . . .’
Can hold their drink? Don’t fart in public? As she struggles with words I’m not interested in hearing, I wonder if it is a good idea for her to stand like that on a mirrored floor when she has clearly forgotten her knickers.
Who knows what she’s trying to say?
The woman hesitates. ‘Are so cultured,’ she says finally.
‘Not all of us.’
She laughs, tells me she wants to introduce me to a friend.
His name is Obsidian, and he’s Paper’s grandfather. Looking at him, I can’t see a likeness. Unless it is his eyes. They are narrow, slightly almond in shape and cold as ice. His smile is equally chilly. ‘Sven,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard interesting things about you.’
‘Can’t say I’ve heard of you.’
Obsidian Osamu tells me I’m part of an important mission. A chance . . . A rare, unmissable chance – their president thinks – for the U/Free to integrate with galactic society. He keeps an utterly straight face as he says this. I’m really hoping he doesn’t expect me to believe it. Even the U/Free can’t think we’re that stupid.
‘But first,’ he says, ‘a small favour.’
The request obviously means more to him than it does to me, because his voice trembles as he tells me what it is. Don’t think I have seen a U/Free nervous before. I file the fact away for later.
‘You’ll do it?’
Looking round the room, I say, ‘Way I feel now it would be a pleasure.’ It’s no
t the answer he’s expecting.
The cubicle walls are marble, the floor is warm and the lighting inside the cubicle so subtle it’s impossible to tell where it comes from. But it is the seashell in a little tray on the wall that interests me. What the fuck is that about?
Crumbling it between my fingers, I discover it’s real.
When I look back another replaces the one I took. So I smash that and keep watching. A third shell appears – and I mean appears – it doesn’t drop down or slide out. It simply appears.
This time when I take the shell, I don’t break it.
Comparing the third and fourth tells me each shell is different. I’m still not sure why they are there. I mean, all anyone comes in here to do is piss or take a shit. Flushing the pan, I wash my fingers and dry them on the seat of my trousers.
There’s nothing else to use.
A door opens in the restroom beyond.
Someone pees, water runs. That’s my cue to get myself out there. At the basin, a U/Free looks up. He is old, examining his face carefully in the glass as if he’s never seen it before.
Seeing a stranger behind him, he scowls. Then remembers his manners and forces a smile. I don’t know his name. But I know he has been watching us all evening.
‘So,’ he says. ‘You’re off to mend bridges . . .’
The coy way he says this irritates me. Also, I don’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about and that irritates me even more. He takes my grunt as an invitation to keep boring me. Meanwhile, I’m thinking mend bridges? Blowing them up is more my style.
‘What bridges?’ I demand, when he finishes.
‘Well . . . Maybe it’s more accurate to say you’re setting off on the final part of a vital search.’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘And what am I meant to be searching for?’ That poncy little colonel said something about a missing observer. However, I’d like it confirmed by one of the U/Free.
‘What we’re all searching for. He looks at me expectantly. ‘Peace,’ he says. ‘Resolution to deep divisions. What else is there . . . ?’
The man turns to go.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Tell me more about Hekati.’
Looking from my face to the way my hand now grips the edge of a sink, he sighs, ‘You’re drunk. Ask Paper about it in the morning.’
‘Not that drunk,’ I say.
He has just realized something.
I’m holding a dagger. It’s small and light and made of glass. And if I concentrate hard, I can remember the dampness of Lisa’s thigh as I took its sister from her garter. The man knows he’s about to be hurt. He knows it’s possible he will die. What he doesn’t know is his next death is going to be his last.
That is what the U/Free fear.
Paper Osamu told me this three months ago. She was doing that deprecating, we’re-also-human thing the United Free do when trying to pretend they don’t believe they are better than everyone else.
‘You can’t-’ he begins to say.
I can, and do. Stabbing hard and fast. ‘Say goodnight to your memories.’
His implant is where you would expect. At the back of his neck, just below the curve of his skull. It is very cross when I rip it free. Slicing away the last tendril, I crush the ‘biont underfoot and flush it. Pulpy threads wriggle as they spin round the pan, but that is just aftershock. Having flushed the man’s memories, I am left with his body.
Leave it, Paper’s grandfather said. We’ll handle that bit.
An interesting moral code. Unwilling to kill, happy to mop up the floor afterwards.
Taking the man’s watch, a handful of gold coins and a diamond ring, I leave him a little pearl-handled knife and the medal round his neck. The coins go in our kitty, the watch I’ll keep, and Franc can have the ring.
‘Where have you been?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
‘Taking a shit.’
He scowls.
Across the room Haze laughs, looking better than I have seen him in a while. As far as I know, he hasn’t vomited all evening. Like the nosebleeds, it is a reaction to the Uplift virus. They are going to stop sometime. Unfortunately, no one can tell us when.
Rachel’s still fretting that his head hurts. But as Haze points out, if she had metal growing through her skull her head would hurt too.
‘She stays here,’ Colonel Vijay says.
‘What?’
‘And the other two. You must know women are a liability in battle.’ He speaks with the absolute authority of someone who has never been near a battle in his life.
‘They’re Aux,’ I tell him.
The colonel stares at me.
So I add, sir. But that’s to annoy the U/Free. Paper’s just been telling Neen that she does not approve of hierarchies. Of course, she has to tell him what they are, before she can tell him why she doesn’t like them.
‘Paper,’ I say.
She inclines her head.
‘You asked for the Aux, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Paper Osamu nods. ‘You know we did.’
‘That’s us,’ I tell Colonel Vijay. ‘All of us.’ Saluting, I step back, and it is my turn to spin on my heels and stalk away. I don’t need to look back to know I have made an enemy.
Like I give a fuck.
Chapter 10
People turn out to see us off on our so-called cultural tour. More people than I expect. Come to that, more people than I imagined were in Letogratz. Almost all are wearing black and silver copies of our Death’s Head uniform. Some even have the leather thigh boots.
‘Started a craze,’ says Paper, standing behind me. She smiles at someone in the crowd. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of daggers the factor boxes have been asked to make in the past twenty-four hours. For decoration obviously.’
‘Obviously.’
She shoots me a glance. ‘You’ve made a big impression.’
‘And that makes you look good?’
‘Of course,’ she says.
Paper hugs me, which shocks Colonel Vijay slightly. Then she walks us to the open door of a shuttle and steps back, smiling. We are on lenz, I realize. Millions of U/Free are watching this.
God these bastards must be bored.
Hydraulics hiss, doors rise, we buckle ourselves in, and Letogratz drops away hard and fast. Fifteen minutes later, we put down eight thousand miles away. On a deserted beach, with coral reefs to one side and a mangrove swamp on the other. The roots of the mangroves are woven tightly enough to make an impenetrable wall.
‘Planted them an hour ago,’ says the pilot. He smiles at our disbelief. ‘Made the island this morning. It will be gone by tonight.’
Now that’s what I call maximum deniability.
Another shuttle is waiting on the beach. And stacked beside it are crates fixed with OctoV’s seal.
diplomatic supplies, reads a stencil. security cleared.
Inside the crates are enough weapons to start a small war. Also flip-down helmets, body armour, boots, field-glasses and battlefield radios. The colonel and I have reached an agreement. The agreement every CO reaches the moment he gets his first command. Find someone competent; tell him to carry on as normal. Of course, that is not how Colonel Vijay puts it.
He will tell me if I do anything wrong.
Ripping open a case, I check the list inside its lid.
‘Here,’ I say.
Catching a package, Rachel unwraps a stripped-down sniper rifle. She has never seen one like it before. She snaps the barrel into place from instinct and gives me a wide grin.
‘Like it?’
‘Fuck, sir. Yes.’
It is an 8.59mm Z93z long-range rifle, with adjustable cheek piece, ?3-?12-?50 spotting scope, floating breech and fluting on the outer barrel to aid heat dissipation. And while it might fire electronically to avoid the snap of a firing pin, it’s bolt action, because snipers cling to the strangest traditions.
The only other Z93z I have seen decorates the wall of a sergeants’ mess in General Jaxx’s moth
er ship. The braids cut from a metalhead general are arranged underneath, along with his shoulder patches.
Colonel Vijay looks at me when I say this.
Not Rachel, she gets taking trophies. Snipers are high maintenance, like their weapons, everyone knows that.
‘Mine, sir?’
‘Until you’re dead,’ I tell her. ‘Or I take it back.’
‘This is my rifle,’ she says. ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. Without it I am nothing.’ Brushing aside long red hair, Rachel adjusts the sight and blind-fires at the shuttle disappearing into the sky above us.
When she lowers the rifle, she’s still grinning.
‘Sir,’ she says. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘That true?’ Colonel Vijay asks a minute later.
‘What, sir?’
‘You were’ – he hesitates – ‘on the general’s mother ship?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being tried for treason. Well, that was the third time. Second time, I was being fitted for this.’ I tap my arm loud enough to make it ring. ‘Of course, that was after Colonel Nuevo rescued me from the ferox . . .’
‘Colonel Nuevo?’
‘Shot himself at Ilseville. All part of a bigger plan.’
The colonel shuts his eyes. Think it might be irritation.
‘So you’ve never met General Jaxx?’
‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘Several times.’
For some reason that doesn’t make Colonel Vijay any happier. ‘See you inside,’ he says, heading for the shuttle. A real CO would give me a time limit.
‘Keep unpacking,’ I say.
It is the second case that excites my gun. The SIG-37’s been pissed off since it hit U/Free territory. No ammo. Mind you, given the way I feel about Morgan, not letting me take a loaded gun into Paper’s party was only sensible.
All the same . . .
‘Sir,’ says Haze. He’s cupping his hand as if it holds an empire’s worth of treasure. So far as the SIG’s concerned, it does.
‘A cinder-maker chip?’
‘Better, sir . . .’ Haze grins excitedly. ‘It’s a conscience override. Would you like me to fit it?’ What he means is, please may I . . .
