by David Gunn
“Fuck.”
Haze nods. “One other thing. The three-braid is scared. I couldn’t get away with staying shielded if he wasn’t. It’s that soft tech in your throat; he’s worried it’s going to reboot.”
“Doubt it,” I tell Haze. “My body fucks with implants.”
“It’s not your body that’s the problem.”
“What is it then?”
“Your mind,” Haze says. “Fix that and you won’t need my help.”
CHAPTER 48
DEEP IN the belly of our ship the engines start, and the deck beneath our feet begins to shudder. One of the vessels ahead of us is having trouble. A dull thud announces that its engine is turning over but refuses to fire.
One of their officers says something to an NCO. We hear the engine start about three minutes later, and when the NCO returns he’s rubbing his fist.
“Belowdecks,” an enemy corporal tell us.
The others look at me.
“Do what he says.”
Behind me someone laughs, so I turn to face him. It’s a Death’s Head captain I don’t recognize, wearing full combat ribbons.
“Got a problem?”
“I outrank you,” he says.
“So fucking what?” asks Neen, and the others laugh.
Part of me is appalled; part of me knows it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d have said at Neen’s age, although my insubordination was confined to sergeants. Mind you, back then I still believed lieutenants were godlike.
Belowdecks the bulkhead is clean and the grating over which we’re led is freshly scrubbed. Inset lights indicate routes for escape and entry, and the crew move from job to job with cold efficiency. This is a military vessel. Probably armed to the teeth and undoubtedly crewed by professionals.
“In there,” orders the guard.
Seven clicks follow as electronic locks engage. It’s time to ask if anyone else has a weapon, and if the enemy are listening in on us, then that’s just too bad.
Blank faces greet my question.
“Come on,” I say. “Who’s carrying?”
At a nod from Neen, first Shil and then Franc put up their hands. He’s learning fast. As I told Shil way back, the boy’s a natural.
“What have you got?”
Shil produces a dagger and Franc reaches into her top, palming a blade. It’s only when Rachel produces another dagger that I realize Franc has been carrying her weapon all along.
“Let me see.”
It’s my Death’s Head dagger, still oiled and razor-sharp.
Turning her back, one of the younger women reaches under her skirt and produces a blade. It’s crude and cut from cheap steel, but she’s ground the edge as fine as it can go and the point is vicious enough to pierce everything but body armor.
Four knives.
“Anyone else?”
“I’ve got this.” It’s one of the militia sergeants with a flip-out cosh. “But it’s not going to be enough. We need a gun, at least.”
His eyes widen as my hand dips into a pocket and I produce the pistol Rachel stole from the Silver Fist on the quayside.
“Very pretty,” says the captain. “But we’ve still got a locked door. And why would they follow you anyway? If you hadn’t killed the seven-braid, Colonel Nuevo could have negotiated a proper withdrawal.”
“OctoV kills people who retreat.” My voice is matter-of-fact.
“Our dear emperor is three crystals short of an Uplift.”
The captain is upset, that much is obvious. Too upset, it seems to me. And how the fuck does he know it was a seven-braid anyway? It’s not like Colonel Nuevo advertised the fact widely. And then there are those medals. You can’t have ribbons for two battles fought the same week on opposite sides of the spiral arm, it’s just not possible…
“Traitor,” I say, stepping forward.
His neck snaps so easily that I’m lowering his body to the ground before most people have come to grips with the fact that I’ve moved.
“God bless OctoV,” I tell the room.
Whatever Haze sees on my face is not what everyone else sees, because he smiles. “We need to talk,” he suggests.
MY CONVERSATION WITH Haze is brief and to the point. The kyp in my throat is dying, but because symbionts are hard to kill, its death is eating up my body’s resources and leaching power where it can. I can embrace the soft tech or die myself: Those are the only two choices open to me.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Didn’t know you well enough,” says Haze, and I realize how private a person he really is.
It seems my metabolism is at war with something that has already tuned itself to my mental frequency and grown suckers that now reach into my brain and wrap my spinal cord like ivy.
Haze doesn’t call them suckers, he calls them dendritic spurs, but they sound like suckers to me. “These things,” I say. “How are they captured?”
“Sven,” he says.
Haze shouldn’t be calling me Sven, but I let it go.
“They’re grown. Kyps combine a viral matrix with a gene-spliced leech. They’re not alive in any sense you’d understand.”
“It sounds like Uplifted technology.”
“Yes,” says Haze. “It is.”
A dozen people are watching our intense, half-whispered conversation, so I wait while Haze takes a deep breath to steady himself. “OctoV,” he says. “You know what he is?”
I give our beloved leader his titles, rolling the words off my tongue as newscasts always give them, a long list of grandiose phrases stripped of meaning by overuse. Haze checks to see if I’m serious.
“OctoV is an Uplifted,” he says.
It comes as less of a surprise than it should.
“We’re soldiers in a war fought by machines,” says Haze. “Well, augmented hive mind composites.” Seeing from my face that he’s lost me, he simplifies. “OctoV is the rebel; the Uplifted are original. They began as machines for the Enlightened, but things changed.”
I should have known this from the fleeting visit OctoV paid my mind in Farlight. So cold, so distant, so obviously not the heroic child emperor of his own homespun legend.
My decision makes itself.
We’re here; we need to be somewhere else. OctoV or the Uplifted, it’s not much of a choice, but it’s the only choice we have, because the great and the good of the U/Free are not about to take us in. And since we’re already on OctoV’s side, we might as well stay there.
“The kyp,” I say. “What do I need to do?”
“Stop trying to kill it.”
“That’s my body,” I tell him.
Haze shakes his head. “It’s your mind.” His smile is sour, and in his gaze I can see the man behind the boy; the power he will become if he lives that long. Haze is no more human than I am…
And as I stumble over that thought, light floods through my skull and Haze locks me down so hard and so fast that I stumble, both hands clutching my head. Shil is moving toward me before I can wave her away, but Haze does it for me.
“Leave him,” Haze says.
My mind is a circular wall collapsing under the waves that suddenly hit it: readouts from my own body, levels of tiredness, stamina, and battle damage. Apparently I’m in a lot better shape than I thought, and half my danger levels haven’t even been approached, ever.
And then, as my thoughts stabilize, the wall fades and there’s another in its place, only this time the wall is mine, and the wall Haze originally erected tightens to enclose only him, and then it’s gone. Although Haze still stands in front of me, his hand under my elbow as I struggle to stand.
“Lock it down,” says Haze.
So I do. It’s odd taking orders from someone who takes orders from me, but he’s right and I need to be invisible to anybody searching for wave echoes in whatever dimension it is I now inhabit.
“What the fuck just happened?” Shil demands.
“He became a god,” Haze tells her. The boy’s onl
y half joking.
I shake my head, realizing something. “Angel, maybe…demon, possibly. But we’re not gods; none of us comes close to that level.”
“You became an angel?” says Rachel.
“Not really,” I say. “I just became a better fighting machine.”
“Speaking of which,” says Haze. “I’ve got a present for you.” Turning his back on the room, he undoes his jacket and shirt, then untapes a package wrapped in strange silver cloth from his chest.
“This is yours,” he says, untying it.
“Too right,” says my gun. “Try not to lose me again.”
CHAPTER 49
SINCE A crowd is now gathered around me, I tell them the truth. That the six ships with which we travel will never arrive and nothing we can do will save them.
As if on cue, sound waves shake the bulkhead and I understand instantly that this is not coincidence. I just read the signature of a rocket nearing its target half a mile away.
A second explosion follows, and then a third. The fourth explosion comes as a flat inevitability, and it’s not only the militia who are upset by the time the fifth and sixth vessels explode. Most of us had friends or colleagues on those boats.
“Why?” someone demands.
“Because everyone the Uplifted want is already here,” I say.
“That’s true,” says Haze. “The rest was just window dressing.” Anger shows in his eyes, a bitter hatred toward those who created him.
We’re twenty-five people at the most. A hundred thousand made that drop, back in the days before I created the Aux, when my future was a simple case of Hit the ground, shoot anything that isn’t us, and keep shooting until I’m dead or there’s only us left.
“Listen.” I tell them. “You think you’re going to be left alive if you behave yourself? You’re wrong. If they don’t kill you, I will…We’re going to fight, all of us. And we’re going to win.”
I’m manipulating them, obviously. But I’m also manipulating myself, and trying to find my old anger. Only it’s gone, replaced by a cold clarity that terrifies me.
“Haze,” I say. “Take the perimeter.”
Whatever he’s about to say is swallowed when he sees me glare.
“Just do it,” I tell him.
To the others, I say, “I’m going to unlock the door.”
Shil’s staring at me as if I’m mad, and Neen can’t work out why I’ve replaced him with Haze, and I don’t have time to explain that I haven’t.
Turning from Haze, I face the entire room.
“Shut up and listen.”
We’re in semi-darkness. The locker room is large, steel-floored, and lit from the ceiling by flat sheets of luminex, which release something close to twilight. Maybe their psy-ops experts think this will make us less likely to resist. If so, we’re about to prove them wrong.
“We fight now, or we all die later anyway.” They’re listening; the threat of death usually does that to people.
“Haze, tell them why.”
“Mostly you know something the Uplifted think is useful,” says Haze. “Get lucky and they’ll rip your minds. Unlucky, they’ll rip your bodies first, because it’s a quicker way to extract information.”
“Either way,” I tell them. “You’re fucked.”
“Believe it,” says my gun.
People are shaking their heads and sucking at their teeth, the things crowds do when hearing truths they’d rather ignore. “Anybody here think that’s a lie?” My gaze sweeps the room.
No one does.
“So,” I say. “This is what’s going to happen…I’m going to get us out of here, and this man is going to protect me while I do it.”
Being close to the dead bolts has nothing to do with what’s about to happen, but all the same I walk across to the door and put my hands on either side of the lock plate.
“Ready?” I ask Haze.
A wall of silence enfolds my mind almost before he nods.
I can see the inside of the door, examine how it fits together: The sheet ceramic is bonded to a honeycomb of high-tensile carbon fullerenes. The lock operates electronically, with a manual override set into the wall on the far side of the door.
Schematics lay themselves over everything that falls under my gaze, and I’m giving myself a headache until I blink a map away and realize the overlays can be summoned and dismissed at will.
Seven bolts click, snapping themselves back into the frame around the door.
“Impressive,” says Haze. “You check the corridor outside?”
When I shake my head his face blanks momentarily.
“Clear,” he says.
The steps on this ship are steep, like someone forced stairs and ladders to breed, then welded their bastard offspring to the walls. There’s a sailor at the top of the first set of steps, but he’s facing away from us.
He’s alone, says Haze.
Hooking my hands around the man’s ankles, I jump backward, landing cleanly fifteen feet below. His own landing is much messier. Somewhere in the drop, his head clips the edge of a step and renders the knife in my hand redundant.
Neen carries the man back to the locker room. In his pockets are a knife, a pistol, a cosh, and a half-finished bar of chocolate. Around his neck is a medal of Legba Uploaded. Finding it upsets Neen, who wears one very similar.
“Many names,” Haze says. “Many faces.”
Neen repeats the mantra, and somehow that makes it all right. Although letting Maria have the chocolate probably helps.
“You want to go fishing again?” asks Haze.
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s enough for now. Find me the armory.”
By now I’m getting used to seeing his face blank. It’s not something I want to start doing myself. That level of disengagement could get you killed in battle. Also, my party trick with the door has left me feeling as if I’ve just run five miles straight up the side of a mountain, carrying a rucksack full of rocks.
“One level down,” says Haze.
“Let’s go.”
I take point, Shil goes second. We’re armed; I have two knives and my gun stuck in my belt. Its combat chip is shut down for the moment, so Haze and I don’t have to waste energy shielding it.
The SIG’s not amused.
But then it doesn’t see why we need additional weapons anyway, given we already possess the smartest gun ever made…
“Modest, too,” says Shil.
Haze and Maria follow behind Neen, with Franc bringing up the rear and Rachel walking just ahead of her.
The rest remain exactly where they are. There are two things interesting about this. One, the Aux still operate as a tightly knit group. And two, the others do what we tell them, outranked by us or not.
We’re Death’s Head. Worse than that, we’re running some juju shit routine obviously stolen straight from the Enlightened.
“Cover me,” I tell Haze.
He locks down the ceiling cameras so they replay the same endless loop of safe nothing as we head down a level. And as I touch my fingers to the armory door, Haze spins a wall around my mind that’s cold and white and hard-edged, like ice or frosted glass. The door is semi-sentient. I’m still considering this when I realize that I can simply kill the door at a local level while leaving fail-safes and complicity algorithms in place.
Complicity what?
Except I’m inside the armory and no longer care. Wall-to-wall pulse rifles, maritime issue; a couple of belt-feds, although they’re too heavy for anyone but me to hoist, and anyway a belt-fed without a tray is an invitation to trip over your own feet and shoot the ceiling.
And then I see something really interesting.
“What?” demands the gun.
“Over there.”
It scans the armory, its humor worsening as it sees what I do.
A permanent-fire pulse gun, aka the cinder maker.
The cinder maker is slate gray, with a small red dot for a sight and laser optics and aimer slun
g in an elegant tube under the barrel. The power pack is a fat disk hung just in front of the trigger. The barrel is midlength, the muzzle narrow. The handle can rotate three clips in case permanent pulse is inappropriate. It has to be the most beautiful weapon I’ve ever seen.
“Cheap shit,” says my SIG. “Vulgar design. Probably jam on you first time out. Can’t imagine why anyone would want one.”
“But with a real fuck-off power pack.”
“Worthless.”
“So you don’t want to transfer?” says Haze.
“Can’t be done,” my gun says. “Utterly incompatible.”
“But if it could?”
Haze knits code to make the cinder maker accept the SIG’s character base while I lash up a physical fix. Given my newfound knowledge and some of the shit I had to mend back in the legion, making a Colt SW 37-12 accept the diabolo’s combat chip is practically child’s play. I add a fold-down wire stock almost without thinking, checking that it flips down easily and folds up again without a problem.
We’ve just created the SW SIG-37 diabolo, the galaxy’s first fully intelligent machine pistol, with added stock and cinder gun capability. Although that’s nothing like as impressive as the other thing we’ve done, which is reduce my gun to silence.
“You’re grinning,” Shil says.
We leave the armory with enough weapons slung around our necks to start a small war—which is the plan. Haze does his trick with the cameras and we’re back at the locker room within minutes.
“Here,” says Neen. “Take a weapon.”
Everyone wants a pulse rifle, even those who’ve never been near one. I make them all take knives as well, for hand-to-hand. And then the Aux stick half a dozen knives in our belts and lanyard a couple of pistols around our necks. We don’t need them, but we’re already living up to our own myth.
“I’ll go first…”
Neen’s words are half boast and half plea. He requires telling about Haze, because so far Neen thinks we just got lucky in the corridor. And though he knows Haze is different, he has no idea how different. Also, I don’t have time for this.
“Stand back while I talk to my sergeant.”
People do as they’re told.
“If I go down,” I tell Neen. “You’re fucked.”