by T Q Chant
“Agreed, Miller, and the sitch has been well and truly scoped.”
“That just leaves finding out who the fuck we're up again, da?”
“And finding out if Cane is still alive.” Cahaya couldn't keep the note of hope out of his voice.
“If we can. Best we can say right now is that she was alive until recently.” Williams looked round at each of the group in turn. “Mission rules of engagement have changed. If we're outside this chamber, we're tactical. That means personal weapons hot, even you two.” She jabbed a finger at Cahaya and Kora. “We're going to go nocturnal – as far as we can on a planet where night never truly falls. Might give us an edge.
“Most important point is this. Until we work out what the hell is going on, we go low-tech. Guns, dumb grenades and knives, people. We'll keep comms on for now. Snoopy and Medusa stay in lock down – I don't want to hear it, Kora.”
“Going old school,” Dirchs commented with a certain amount of satisfaction.
“Dirchs, you're cuddling that rotorcannon like it was your lady.”
“She is just as beautiful as my wife, Miller.”
“Your wife's a coder for IntelliCorp but she's still more low-tech than that thing.”
“That's the most I think I've heard Williams say in one go,” Yvgena broke in before it could turn nasty. “Anyone else worried by that?”
Williams could feel the emotional knife-edge bleed out of the team. They'd all been shocked by Ortuz's death, particularly the way he went – he'd always seemed entirely indestructible. They were all professionals, though, and they'd all been in live-fire zones before. Her one cause for concern was Kora – she'd taken Ortuz's death hard, pretty obviously blamed herself for it.
“Tactical outside this room,” she reminded Kora as she got up and headed for the door. With a small sound of disgust, the slight heavy weapons operator drew her compact subbie and stalked out of sight.
“You're gonna need to talk to her,” Yvgena said quietly, under the cover of Miller and Dirchs exchanging good-natured barbs. “Maybe she and Cahaya need to hold our position here while we go out?”
“Not sure I want to go splitting us up like that.” Williams unfolded her long frame from the swivel chair that had become the commander's seat. “But you're right, better talk to her. Shame I don't like talking.”
Kora was down in the demolished launch chamber. She'd found a perch halfway up the half-demolished, skeletal launch array and sat with her legs pulled up, staring upwards. It wasn't really dark enough for the stars to shine, not in the way Williams remembered them from her childhood in South Australia; or even the rare glimpse of them when the smog over Camp Willard broke. The dim second star meant there was no true night here.
Kora was obviously thinking the same thing. “Remember the team's first mission?” she asked as Williams clumped up the steps, jumping the last gap where a falling girder had smashed through, and crouched down beside her, following her gaze.
“Two weeks in a hazardous-environment hide in the Pwyll Crater, watching a Europan separatist camp.”
“The stars were very clear and bright, there.”
Williams smiled despite herself. “I kept busting your chops for spending more time watching them than the subject.”
“And the way the water plumes caught the starlight, and what sunlight there was.”
Williams knew where this was going. She remembered it quite clearly, the hours hunched over scopes and scanner screens, close and low-profile observation op, waiting for the leader of a terrorist splinter group to show her face. Europa's water vapour eruptions, kilometres-high but gossamer thin curtains that glittered in the light when they were hurled out of the thin atmosphere, had been their only diversion. Ortuz in particular had been drawn to the phenomenon. “You know full well it wasn't your fault.”
“Medusa...”
“Had been co-opted by a hostile combat-hacker with freaky skills or code, or both. The hostiles killed Ortuz, and the first step in fucking them up is finding out where the fuck they are and who they are. And to do that I need everyone wired in.”
She stood up, took a last glance at the half-night overhead. There was a pale glimmer of light, which might have been the cutter's running lights or the stars. “Remember how the Europa mission turned out?”
“The Liaoning landed a detachment of Marines and we walked them in on the target. The Europans barely fired a shot.”
“And they're all still doing time. Don't think it's gonna be that easy, or that peaceful, but let's make sure we get the same result.” She was about to reach down and help Kora up, but a noise below caused her to hunker down again, drawing a sidearm.
Kora joined her, weapon in hand. “I heard that too.”
“And this is why we are tactical outside the control room,” Williams whispered back as...something...skittered into sight below them.
**********
Janssen had obviously been executed with little debate or argument – his guilt and the necessary punishment were obvious. Samrit knew his sins – striking one of the Saved, not following orders given to him by one of the Saved, attempting to flee the rightful servitude in which he was kept. The punishment for any of those could be death, most certainly for striking one of the Saved. She felt as much as heard the growl of approval running through a section of the crowd. Those must be Jonathan's people. Something about their manner of dress and how they were acting marked them out from the other, older inhabitants of this strange city.
She knew as well the nature and magnitude of the transgression that had occurred in the derelict harvester. Congress outside of marriage was deeply frowned upon, and that sin was compounded by the fact that two men had been caught together. All four of the sinners were tied to poles on the plaza, dressed in simple white robes. The third man was hanging limply from the bonds, blood trickling from the hole in the middle of his forehead. His head had been tied back to hide the horrible mess the bullet would have made as it came out the other side. The scar on Samrit's forehead started to throb with sympathetic pain.
A lot of people in the crowd were reacting with horror and revulsion. She knew she should feel the same way, but that knowledge wasn't gut-deep in the way it was for many around her. Just a superficial notion that she found easy to reject.
Cho and Jonathan were up on the plaza, Cho obviously angry and Jonathan displaying the unnerving calm that seemed to be his trademark. Okafor was off to one side, cleaning blood from his hands. Samrit stared, transfixed, at her ostensible fiancé as he removed the traces of what he had done to Janssen
– arterial spray –
and Bethany gripped her arm tightly. “He is unflinching in his appointed tasks. I'm sure he'll be steadfast in his duties as a husband and father.”
Like fuck is he ever touching me again. Samrit wasn't sure if she'd spoken out loud, but the crowd's volume was rising anyway. She realised Cho and Jonathan were arguing with those at the front, original-flavour Saved rather than their own people.
“Why are they objecting?” she whispered to Bethany, having to pull herself up on her toes to speak into the taller woman's ear as the crowd became more vocal. “The sin is obvious.”
“Our way is one of forgiveness,” Bethany said, but something wasn't ringing true. “I'm sure this was their first offense, and...” The rest of the words were lost as the crowd roared and surged forward.
Cho stood immovable, massive arms crossed over her chest. “The sin was clear!” she roared back at the crowd, a look somewhere between fury and contempt on her face. “I myself saw the congress between these two men, with my own eyes, and this woman lying naked with her lover!”
They don't want to see their own punished.
“Good people!” Jonathan said, raising his hands, speaking loudly but with that same paternalism that made Samrit's skin crawl. “I know this has horrified you, and that you cannot believe it of your own kin, your friends. But the offense is clear, and the Bright Ones are clear on what the
punishment must be!”
Samrit realised that Jonathan knew the real reason the crowd was objecting, and they knew it. They just didn't want to see these newcomers hand out punishments to their own kind; she was certain many of them had known of that spot and what happened there, even if they didn’t use it themselves.
“Friends, I know your instinct is to show mercy, but surely this sin has gone too far. Not just to fornicate, but in one case for one man to lie with another. This the Bright Ones cannot countenance. If our community is to achieve Rapture, such sins must not be tolerated or forgiven, but stamped out!”
“The newly Saved is right,” a new voice rasped, and the crowd almost immediately fell silent. This time Samrit immediately fell to her knees with the others as one of the Near-Raptured – it may have been Salvatore, who had sent them to the fields – limped forward. “The Raptured have spoken, and the punishment must enacted.” Glancing up under her fringe of hair, Samrit could see the look of distaste on his warped face. “You may proceed, Jonathan.”
The spokesman for the newly Saved didn't show any glee, but there was a certain smugness rather than reverence about the way he inclined his head. Cho just looked pleased as she walked behind the first of the condemned.
The woman died fast, at least. Samrit made herself watch every moment, made herself see the damage she had done as Cho looped a thin cord around her throat and pulled it tight, putting all her weight into it. The woman fought for breath, fought for life, face turning red then purple, eyes bulging as she jerked against her bonds. Then the cord, more of a wire really, bit through skin and into arteries, blood venting down her front, staining her robe red as her body slumped.
One of the men was struggling, eyes wide with fear. He was crying out to the crowd for help, a lone desperate voice that seemed utterly alien and incomprehensible in the hush that had fallen over the plaza. His lover was staring down in resignation, shoulders slumped in defeat, and Cho killed him first. So the weaker one will be driven into a frenzy. Samrit wanted to look away, wanted desperately to look away and throw up, but she owed them this, at least, and kept her eyes forward as Cho walked around to stand beside him, drawing an ugly, vicious blade that Samrit recognised, but didn't know why. She kept watching as he cried out for the first time, drowning out the other man's voice with a terrible scream as Cho opened his abdomen and then started to work the gleaming steel lower.
A low noise started to rise amongst the watching crowd. Samrit found herself hoping, as Cho started severing parts of her victim's body and forcing them into his mouth, that the noise was of disapproval and anger. She hoped the crowd would rise up, but then she realised the noise was one of approval. It had started amongst Jonathan's people but now others amongst the Saved were starting to cheer, rising up on their feet as they watched their gods' will being done. Samrit's view was blocked at that point, mercifully, and she turned empty eyes on Bethany, relieved to see that she stood silent and still, tears showing at the corners of her eyes.
Samrit took her arm, a reversal in their usual roles, and started guiding her back through the press of people. “We can't leave – it is forbidden,” her mentor told her.
“Yeah, but we can make sure we're in a good spot to get out of here when we can.”
She looked around. The cheering, the roar of approval, was definitely strongest amongst the newly Saved. They were, it seemed, the most fervent. Some of the others, particularly those who were too far back to see the full horror of the mandated punishment, were also cheering vehemently, no doubt caught up in the mob's bloodlust. Others cheered purely to be seen to approve, while they tried to mask the horror and anger in their eyes.
Glancing back, she caught a glimpse of Cho holding up a severed, gory head, driving Jonathan's people to a new excess, while even some of the more enthusiastic Saved recoiled slightly.
“And that's how I crack these bastards open,” Sam muttered to herself, her voice lost in the noise of the crowd. “Wide fucking open.”
**********
“Is it me or does it look almost human?” Kora whispered, bringing up her sidearm.
“Hold your fire,” Williams murmured. “And yeah, it does. Kinda.”
The thing that paused in the pool of pale light was certainly grotesque, squatting there on all fours. Its front limbs could very well be arms, and certainly seemed to have gripping digits surmounted by needle-thin claws. Writhing tendrils fanned out from where a human's eyes would be, almost as though it was tasting the air around it. Its torso and limbs seemed to be clad in some sort of flexible natural armour. Williams could smell it, even at this distance, sickly sweet and cloying.
She took aim with the flechette pistol, thumbing it to fire a consecutive burst rather than a spread pattern, but paused. “If we can smell it that strongly...”
She spun round just as a second creature, which had crept down on them, launched itself forward. The launcher barely made a sound in her hand as it spat out a stream of little darts that ripped into the thing, tracking up its body. It hissed with pain, but its landing was controlled and it lashed out with its claws. Williams ducked back as the lethal appendages slashed millimetres away from her face. Kora, ever-graceful, jumped the gap in the staircase and landed neatly further down. Williams shot the thing centre mass, the flechettes ripping chunks out of its – flesh? Armour? It coiled back, preparing to strike, and Williams realised that it was, or at least had been, some sort of human.
Kora blew its head apart with a burst of caseless 5.5mm frangible, the subbie deafeningly loud and echoing in the chamber. “Sometimes, the head is a better target,” she said with a terrible calmness.
The creature on the ground reared up, emitting an ululating cry that made the hairs on the back of Williams' neck stand up. She realised it was communicating with its fellows, and then she realised just how outnumbered she and Kora were.
She flipped on the squad comms. “Contact contact contact!”
Kora started firing, crouched low and braced, boot-camp-perfect two-handed grip as she tried to suppress the creatures. Williams didn't wait for confirmation from the rest of the team. “Cover me!” she shouted and vaulted the gap, landed with less grace than Kora had, rolled out at the bottom of that flight of steps, coming up snapping fire out at the creatures that had started to swarm up the metal uprights towards them. She clipped one and the others slithered round the supports to put them out of sight under her feet. “Count four on the launch array.”
More were creeping along the walls, and as she watched one of them leapt the ten metres onto the steps above Kora. She put a burst into its head as her squadmate moved down to her, slapping a fresh strip of bullets into her hungry weapon. “Take position at the bottom of the steps.”
“Oscar mike.”
Her helmet comm crackled into life. “Yvgena, Caha, you hold this room while we get the boss and Kora!”
Even in the middle of this nightmare fight, with some sort of mutant beasts trying to eat her face, she felt a stab of pride at the professionalism of her team, and the fact that she was already the boss to them.
“Copy that,” came Yvgena's level response.
Williams backed down the stairs, Commando dagger in one hand and Mauser in the other, until she reached Kora. She put one down as it tried to come up over the railing, couldn't get a line on a second before it managed to bowl into her as she was reloading, the two of them tumbling down past Kora. Williams grunted as the thing landed on top of her, got her hands onto its wrists to stop it driving its talons into her. She grunted in pain as its feeling tendrils probed at her face and started to push through her closed eyelids. With a great effort she shoved its arms apart, giving her just enough time to let go of its wrists and grab its head, twisting violently until she heard vertebrae grind and snap.
“Fuck you!” she yelled, throwing off the corpse and coming up on her knees, casting about for her weapons. Kora was being backed into a corner, firing single shots now at the creatures as they darted fro
m cover to cover, eating up her ammunition. Over the comms she could hear Miller and Dirchs swearing and yelling instructions to each other, probably somewhere on an upper level, fighting their way to the ramp that led down into the chamber.
“No fucking way, mate. Not going down here,” she told one of the things as it loped towards her. She drove off from the ground like a sprinter, going straight into it shoulder first.
**********
Bethany disappeared as soon as they got back to the hostel. She had been pale and shaky on the walk back, and had to stop in a dark service tunnel to puke discreetly.
Samrit was surprised that she'd managed to keep herself under control and not join Bethany in losing her lunch. In her tiny, spartan room she stared at herself in the mirror, seeing how her face was filling out as the bruises faded. Her gaze was haunted, though.
It's because you've seen stuff like that before. Because they've made you do that before.
“I could never do what Cho did,” she told her reflection.
Nothing like that, no. A bullet still fucks someone up plenty, though.
Samrit sank to the floor, turning her back on her reflection. She felt as though she was going mad, being tormented by a familiar voice in her head, talking to herself.
She probed the scar on her forehead. Pain was blossoming from it, had been since the grizzly scenes in the plaza. Almost as though it was trying to tell her something.
Trying to tell her that she was coming back.
“I need to get clean,” she muttered to herself, knowing that it wasn't just the day's dirt that was making her feel grimy.
One of the shower stalls was occupied when she pushed in, and she didn't have to be a genius to work out who was sobbing quietly inside. She tapped gently on the door. “Bethany?”
“I'll be out in a moment.” The voice was strangled; the other woman had obviously being crying for some time.
“Bethany, I know that was an awful thing to see. But was it not the right thing for Marshal Cho to do?”
