Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  Then he opens the lid.

  I don’t want to look, but I look. It’s not that I want to see Mendozer dead in a box, but I would find it reassuring at least.

  We see the inside of the bottom of the box. Casket’s empty. No Mendozer, nothing.

  Boring shuts the lid.

  “This isn’t funny,” I whisper.

  He points to his stony expression, a familiar gesture intended to emphasise the fact he isn’t cracking up.

  “Did someone take the poor bastard out as a joke?” I asked.

  It seems unlikely.

  “Maybe the Surge pulled the wrong box out of the fridge?” Moke suggests. His voice is as low as ours.

  That seems unlikely too.

  “Wouldn’t the Surge have noticed the box was light when he brought it through?” I ask.

  Boring doesn’t answer me. He looks around the Rec, winks at Neats. Neats makes an excuse about needing a slash to gently extract himself from his card school. Boring looks back at me.

  “Bosko,” he says. “Go fetch a Steiner. Meet me in medical.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Take Moke with you.”

  “Okay.”

  I don’t know what to think. I get that creepy cack-yourself feeling you normally only get when Scaries are around. My hands are shaking, no word of a lie. Moke looks how I feel. We slip out the back way, avoiding the hockey insanity in the hall, and head down the link tunnel to Dock Two.

  The lights there are down to power conserve. Half of me wants all the alcohol in my system flushed out so I can clean my headspace. The other half wants another skull to steady me.

  All our platoon kit and hardware is stacked up in Dock Two where the extract discharged it. Most of the carrier packs are heavy duty mil grade, but some look disarmingly like Mendozer’s box. Just smaller. Like they were made for parts, not whole bodies.

  Nice thought to dwell on.

  Moke watches the door, twitching from foot to foot, while I locate one of the gun crates in the pile of kit. I slide it out, punch in the authority code, and crack the lid. Half-a-dozen platoon weapons are racked in the cradle inside. There’s a smell of gun oil. All Steiner GAW-Tens. I pull one, like Boring told me to. I pull one, and four clips.

  The Steiner Groundtroop Assault Weapon Ten A.2 is our signature dish. Some platoons these days favour the Loman BR, and that’s a fine bit of business, but it’s big, and really long when it’s wearing a flash sleeve, and it’s not a great fit in a tight space where you might need to turn at short notice. The Middlemen have been using GAWs since bloody always, Eights back during the last war, then every model upgrade ever since through to the current Ten A.2s. The Ten is compact but chunky. It loads low friction drive band HV, in either AP or hollowpoint, and it’s got full selective options. I take hollowpoint out of the crate, not AP. We’re in a pressurised atmospheric environment. Penetration control is going to be an issue.

  I’m clacking the first clip into the receiver as I re-join Moke.

  “Screw this bollocks,” he says to me. “This is a joke. This is someone’s idea of a bloody joke. When I find out who, I’m going to de-dick him.”

  No argument from me.

  “Unless it’s Boring,” he adds.

  I nod. I let Moke hang on to that possibility, because it’s more comforting than the alternatives.

  But I saw the look in Boring’s eyes.

  This isn’t his prank.

  Boring’s in medical with Neats. They’ve got the walk-in fridge open. It smells of ammonia and detergent wash. The light in the fridge is harsh and unflattering, sterile UV. Moke and I wander in. I wonder if it’s like a normal fridge and the light only comes on when the door’s open. I don’t volunteer to stay inside to find out. There’s no handle on the inside.

  Boring and the Sergeant are sliding caskets off the rack and opening them. Just from the way the caskets move on the rollers, you can tell there’s nothing in them.

  “Checking the Surge got the right one?” I ask.

  Neats nods.

  Boring slams the last box back into place with an angry whip of his wrist, and it bangs against its cavity.

  “Nothing,” he says.

  Behind us, we can hear the whoops and crashes of the hockey still in play.

  “Makes no sense,” says Neats.

  “Somebody like to explain this?” a voice interrupts.

  We turn. It’s the Surge. He looks pissed off that we’re trespassing on his domain.

  Boring explains. He uses the fewest possible words. He explains how we thought the Surge had pulled the wrong box, and that we came in here to find the right one. He explains they’re all empty.

  Now the Surge looks twice as pissed off.

  “That can’t be,” he says.

  “Tell us about it,” says Moke.

  The Surge pushes past us into the fridge.

  “No,” he says, “I don’t know what’s happened to Mendozer. That’s a thing in itself.”

  “And?” asks Neats.

  The Surge is checking the ends of the caskets for label slips.

  “Nine Platoon lost a guy in a cargo accident on their way through last week. They left him here.”

  “What are you saying?” asks Boring.

  “I’m saying Mendozer or no Mendozer, these shouldn’t all be empty.”

  He locates the label he’s looking for and pulls the box out. There’s nothing in it, but it’s not clean inside. There’s like a residue, wet, like glue. There’s a smell too, when the lid opens. Decomp. You can smell it despite the extractor fans and the detergent.

  “The bloke from Nine should be in this one,” says the Surge.

  “What are you saying?” Moke asks. He’s starting to get that whine in his voice. “What are you saying, exactly? We’ve lost two stiffs now?”

  “Someone’s taken a joke way too far,” says the Surge. “Cadavers don’t just get up and walk away.”

  He looks at us. He sees the look we’re giving him. He realises it was a really bad choice of words.

  We go back out into medical. Boring sends Neats and Moke to round up everyone else and get them into the Rec. If this is a joke, he’s going to scare an admission out of the perpetrator.

  The Surge touches my arm. I see what he’s pointing to.

  “Lieutenant?” I say.

  Boring comes over. There are spots of wet on the floor.

  “I mopped up in here,” says the Surge.

  The spots dapple the tiles. They’re brown, not red, like gravy. There’s no indication of spray or arterial force. Something just dripped.

  Boring heads towards the bio-store that joins medical. The door’s ajar. There are graft banks of vat tissue in here, flesh slabs, dermis sheets and organ spares kept in vitro jars. We can smell the wet as we approach the door. Wet and decomp, spoiled meat.

  We hear something.

  I catch Boring’s eye and offer him the Steiner. He signs me to keep it, to keep it and cover him. I swallow. I toggle to single shot, ease off the safety, and rest my right index finger on the trigger guard. The stock’s tight in the crook of my shoulder, the barrel down but ready to swing up. I feel naked without a body jacket. I’d have given real money for a full suit of ballistic laminate. The Surge drops back behind us. I edge in beside Boring. He picks up a tube-steel work chair by the seat back, one handed, and uses the legs to push the door open. Like a lion tamer, I think.

  There’s something in the bio-store. It’s down the end, in the shadows. The tops have been pulled off some of the vitro jars, and slabs have been taken out. There’s fluid on the floor. One of the jars has tipped, and stuff is drooling out like clear syrup. I can see a pink, ready-to-implant lung lying on the tiles, like a fish that’s fallen out of a net onto the deck.

  The thing in the shadows is gnawing at a flesh slab. It sees us. It rises.

  The fact that it isn’t Mendozer is hardly a consolation prize. It’s just steak. A man-shaped lump of steak, raw and bloody, tender
ised with a hammer. It has eyes and teeth, but they’re none too secure, and it’s wearing the soaked remains of a 2nd Infantry jump suit. It takes a step towards us. It makes a gurgling sound. I can see white bone sticking out through its outer layer of mangled meat in places.

  “Bang it,” says Boring. “Put it down.”

  Not an order he needs to repeat. I bring the nose of the Steiner up, slip my finger off the guard onto the trigger, and put one right into the centre of its body mass. In the close confines of the bio-store, the discharge sounds like an empty skip being hit with a metal post. Booming, ringing, resounding.

  The thing falters. It doesn’t drop.

  I punch off two more, then another pair. The post hits the skip again: boom-boom, boom-boom. I see each round hit, see each round make the thing stagger. I hear the vitro jars on the shelves behind it shatter and burst.

  Boring snatches the Steiner off me. In my fuddle, despite my best intentions, I’ve slotted AP rounds. The hyper velocity slugs are punching right through the advancing mass, not even stopping to shake hands and say hello.

  Boring ejects the clip. I yank one of the spares from my pocket, this time checking it’s got an HP stencil on it. Boring slams it home, charges the gun, and bangs off on semi.

  The hollowpoints deform and expand as they hit, preventing over-penetration, while simultaneously creating maximum tissue damage. They gift their entire kinetic force to the target. The thing kind of splatters. It shreds from the waist up in a dense cloud of wet and vaporised tissue and bone chips.

  Now it drops.

  We approach. There’s wet everywhere, splashed up all surfaces. Flecks of gristle are stuck to the wall, the ceiling, the jars, even the light shade.

  The Surge grabs a lamp and a stainless steel probe. He squats down and pokes the mess.

  “What the hell is it?” I ask, hoarse.

  The Surge holds up the probe in the beam of his lamp. There’s a set of tags hanging off it.

  “Hangstrum, private first class, Nine Platoon.”

  “The one killed in the accident?”

  “The pattern of injuries is consistent with crush damage from a cargo mishap,” says the Surge. He looks at Boring. “Not counting the mincing,” he adds.

  “Any idea why he was walking around like it was a normal thing to do?” asks Boring.

  “Maybe he wasn’t dead,” I say, grasping at straws. Reassuring straws. “Maybe Nine should’ve held a wake to make sure he was–”

  “He was dead,” says the Surge. “I read the path. I even checked in the box when we first came on station.”

  “But his body was in the fridge with Mendozer’s,” says Boring. It’s not so much a question.

  “Yes,” the Surge says.

  Oh, it’ll all come out later. It always does. The stuff we don’t know about the Scaries. The stuff we’re still learning about how they tick, why they tick, their biological cycle, what they do down there in the blind-as-midnight darkness of Scary Land. We’re still learning about how they kill us, how their bioweapons work, how they evolve as they learn more about our anatomy from killing us.

  The techs don’t even know for sure yet whether it’s part of their regular life cycle, or just something they developed specially for us. It wasn’t claws the Scaries killed Mendozer with, it was ovipositors. Parasitic micro-larvae, jacking the blood cells of his cooling corpse, joyriding around his system, multiplying, leeching out into the other dead meat in the fridge, hungry for organic building blocks to absorb.

  Even now, we don’t know what they’d do to living tissue. We don’t take the chance to find out. Incinerators are S.O.P. Incinerators, or disintegration charges. The Surge keeps grumbling about airborne particles and microspores, about tissue vapour and impact spatter contamination. But Boring tells him to zip it. We’ve got bleach and incinerators and sterile UV, and that’s all, so it’ll have to be enough.

  We find Mendozer back in the Rec. He’d been shuffling around the halls of Relay Delta aimlessly, lost, late for his own wake. Everyone stops and stares at him, baffled, drunk. Fewry actually raises a hockey stick like a club to see him off, like you’d chase away a stray dog.

  Mendozer’s blank-eyed. Glazed over. His mouth is slack, and his chin and chest are bruised black and yellow where the Surge tried to save him and then stapled him back up.

  He makes a sound I’ll never forget. Boring doesn’t hesitate, even though it’s Mendozer and it’s got Mendozer’s face. He hits him with the rest of the HP clip.

  Boring says something, later on, when we’ve washed the Rec down with bleach, dumped the remains in the furnace, opened the rest of the bottles.

  He says the wake was Command’s idea. When he signalled them that we were bringing back a casualty, they advised him to watch it to see what happened.

  Like it wasn’t the first time. Like they were trying to establish a pattern. Like they were conducting an experiment to see what happened to the things that the Scaries killed. An experiment with us as lab rabbits. Middlemen, Middlemen, same as bloody usual. Fun, not to mention frolics.

  We were going to miss Mendozer. Of course we were. I’m just glad Boring decided not to. Emptied the rest of the clip making sure he didn’t. I’ll drink to that.

  I wish that extract would hurry up and get here.

  PSI.COPATH

  —a Combat K Adventure—

  Andy Remic

  “Guys, get your shit together, we’re going in.” Pippa gave a nasty sideways grin, brown, shoulder-length hair bobbing, grey eyes shifting across the scrawled detritus of scattered kit in the Hornet’s narrow, cluttered hold.

  “About fucking time,” snarled Keenan, slamming a mag into his MPK. “I was starting to get bored.” His eyes fixed on Pippa like iron shackles. “Are you sure you’re – ready, for this? After…”

  “I’m ready,” she said, words harsh, tone as abrupt as a slap in the face. She flashed an apologetic glance, bared her teeth, then finished stuffing her pack with emergency provisions. “Sorry, Kee. Still delicate. Woman’s prerogative, yeah?”

  “I’m not surprised, babe.”

  “Guys! I’m here!” boomed Franco Haggis – adventurer, demolitions expert, sexual athlete – as he burst into the hold like a ginger tsunami. He slammed a fully loaded mag into his Kekra quad-barrel machine pistol, waved the weapon negligently, then grinned at his Combat K squad companions who were all ducking, and wincing. “You weren’t going to leave without me? Surely?”

  “We’d never do that,” said Keenan, moving to the Hornet’s controls and punching up a navigational HUD. “After all, who’d pack the sausages?”

  “Or the horseradish,” said Pippa, tone mordant.

  Franco frowned. “Hey,” he said, “don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?” snapped Pippa. “Last time you packed emergency rations you packed twenty crates of pre-cube tinned cheese, and fifteen fucking crates of horseradish. We crashed. I had to exist – subsist – on horseradish for a whole damn month. A girl doesn’t forget a mistake like that, you bearded foetus.”

  Franco frowned. “Hey. Well. They don’t call me Franco ‘Chef Ramsey’ Haggis for nothing, you know. I’m the best damn cook in Quad-Galaxy!” Franco was oblivious to sarcasm, ignorant of irony, mindless of mockery. He extracted the corn and munched from scorn, leaving a pointless and pitiful little s.

  “Right. Stop dicking about. We’re five hundred klicks and closing fast. Lock your harnesses. Vor’s high altitude systems are a violent bastard’s bastard; I can severely do without petty distractions.”

  Keenan and Pippa locked in, harnesses clicking.

  Franco stared at them; hard. Like a man on a mission. “Suppose I’d better put some pants on, then,” he said, glancing down at his big, white, ASDA y-fronts.

  Pippa winked, little more than a sardonic twitch. “Good idea, sweetie. You might need them when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Hey.” Franco grinned again. “There’s nothing like pants in a firefight.�
�

  Vor was an out-range rag-end arsetag planet on the SPAW-riddled circumference of an ii-5 Cluster in the Quad-Galaxy Unification Syndicate Outer Shell. Vor, a planet of natural violence, of raging volcanoes and continent-shattering earthquakes, of monumental tidal waves and jagged, ragged, three-klick leering mountains, and jungles spread and smeared like steroidal gonorrhoea so vast they were practically AI. The mission had come in fastlane through PADs and coreAI, routed via General Steinhauer and dropped in Combat K’s lap like a tossed and battered pancake.

  Shenzar City: formerly a battlezone of brutal savagery, of death and QuickieGenocide – a hundred year battle once raged between combat AIs and a human-like WarSpecies, the GriTags. Now deserted, Shenzar City was a vast ghost town, a monument to war; scarred, crumbling, booby-trapped to its bomb-strapped tits and more dangerous than a nuke-packed SIM. Empty; yes. Dodgy? Hell, more risky than any Japachinese poodle-vindaloo.

  During a flight over Vor, a young lady by the name of Kuminyana, W’hore Princess and daughter of Quad-Gal’s complex military-political Royal Family, had recently suffered engine problems in her advanced tactical Klasp Fighter, and executed an emergency landing. Upon entering Vor’s atmosphere, all contact was lost. Comms died. Kuminyana, pampered to the point of retardation, had nothing but a platoon of eight combat-AI GG machines for company. Which, across a galaxy canvas filled with hardcore soldiers, political assassins, combat gunrunners and plenty of brain-fried tox insane, might well be less than enough.

  Combat K howled through Vor’s ionosphere, their Hornet fluctuating between howls, groans and growls. Franco, now – thankfully – wearing pants, strapped into his safety harness and chewed down on a big fat German sausage, apparently unperturbed by the impending ramslam down to Vor’s surface as he hummed a little tune and glanced up, staring at the back of Keenan and Pippa’s heads where they sat up front in the pilot chairs.

  “So,” he said, through a mouthful of mush-mash, “Kuminyana had eight GG AIs, she was tagged touching down, so we know she didn’t crash, and pretty much all hostile forces on the planet wiped out one another decades ago; a kind of neat and neutralising natural selection, yeah?”