‘Yeah, maybe we did.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t necessarily like anything that you just said, Khouri. Fact is, if we didn’t have company, and if we weren’t suited up, I might take a few moments to teach you how easily I could break your neck. Might still do it, one of these days. But I’ve got to admit. You’ve got spite. Most of her puppets usually lose that straight away; if she doesn’t fry them first.’
‘You’re saying you misjudged me? Excuse me if I don’t sound grateful.’
‘I’m saying maybe you aren’t as much her possession as she imagines.’ Sudjic laughed. ‘It’s not a compliment, kid — just an observation. It might be worse for you once she realises. It doesn’t mean you’re off my shit-list, either.’
Khouri might have replied, but anything she intended to say was drowned out by Volyova, who was again speaking over the general suit channel, addressing the three of them from her vantage point high above, near the chamber’s middle. ‘There is no structure to this exercise,’ she said. ‘At least none that you need know about. Your sole obligation is to stay alive until the scenario is over. That’s all there is to it. The exercise begins in ten seconds. I won’t be available for questions during the course of it.’
Khouri absorbed this without any undue worry. There had been many unstructured exercises on the Edge, and many more in the gunnery. All it meant was that the deeper purpose of the scenario was masked, or that it was — literally — an exercise in disorientation intended to represent the chaos which might follow an operation which had gone badly wrong.
They began with warm-up exercises. Volyova watched them from on high while a variety of drone-targets emerged from previously concealed trapdoors in the wall of the chamber. The targets were not much of a challenge; at least, not at first. At the beginning the suits retained enough autonomy to detect and react to the targets before the wearer had even noticed them, so that all the wearer needed to do was issue consent for the kill. But it became harder. The targets stopped being passive and began to shoot back — usually indiscriminately, but with steadily mounting firepower, so that even wide-shots posed a threat. The targets also got smaller and faster, popping out of the trapdoors with increasing frequency. And — keeping pace with the increasing danger posed by the enemy — the suits suffered progressive losses of functionality. By the sixth or seventh round most of the suit autonomy had been eroded, and the sensor webs which each suit draped around itself were breaking up, so that the wearers had to rely increasingly on their own visual cues. Yet though the exercise had increased in difficulty, Khouri had worked through similar scenarios so often that she did not begin to lose her cool. One had to remember how much of the suit functionality remained: one still had the weapons, the suit power and flight-capability.
The three of them did not communicate during the initial exercises; they were too intent on finding their own mental edges. Eventually it was like getting a second wind; a state of stability which lay beyond what at first seemed like the limits of normal performance. Getting there was a little like entering a trance state. There were certain tricks of concentration one could call into play: rote mantras which mediated the transition. It was never just a matter of wishing it and being there; it was more like climbing onto some awkward ledge. But as one did it — and did it over again — one found that the move became more fluid, and the ledge no longer seemed quite so high or inaccessible. But it was never reached simply, or without some expenditure of mental effort.
It was during the ascension to that state that Khouri half thought she had seen the Mademoiselle.
It was not even a glimpse, just a peripheral awareness that — momentarily — there had been another body out there in the chamber, and that its shape might have been that of the Mademoiselle. But the sensation vanished as quickly as it had come.
Could it have been her?
Khouri had not seen or heard from the Mademoiselle since the incident in the gunnery room. The Mademoiselle’s last communiqué to her had been more pique than anything else; delivered after Khouri had helped Volyova finish off the cache-weapon. She had warned her that by remaining in the gunnery so long she had brought Sun Stealer on herself. And — indeed — the moment that Khouri tried to leave gunspace, she had felt something rushing towards her. It had come at her like a largening shadow, but she had not felt anything when the shadow seemed to engulf her. It was if a hole had opened in the shadow and she had passed unscathed through it, but she doubted that that had really been the case. The truth was almost certainly less palatable. Khouri did not want to consider the possibility that the shadow might have been Sun Stealer, but it was a conclusion she could not ignore. And in accepting that, she also had to accept the likelihood that Sun Stealer had now managed to ensconce a much larger part of himself in her skull.
It had been bad enough knowing that a small part of that thing had come back with the Mademoiselle’s bloodhounds. But that at least had been contained; it had been within the Mademoiselle’s powers to hold him at bay. Now Khouri had to accept that a more substantial fragment of Sun Stealer had reached her. And the Mademoiselle had been curiously absent ever since — until this voiceless half-glimpse, which might have been nothing at all; less than a figment of her imagination; something which any sane person would have dismissed as a trick of the light at the edge of vision.
If it had been her… what did it mean, after all this time?
Eventually the initial phase of exercises finished, and some of the suit functionality was reinstated. Not everything, but enough to let the three of them know that a certain slate had been wiped clean, and that from now the rules would be different.
‘All right,’ Volyova said. ‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘I’d take that as a compliment,’ Khouri said, hoping to elicit some vague camaraderie from her compatriots. ‘But the trouble with Ilia is she means it literally.’
‘At least one of you gets it,’ Volyova said. ‘But don’t let it go to your head, Khouri. Especially as it’s about to get serious.’
At the far end of the chamber another clamshell door was easing open. Because of the constantly shifting light, Khouri saw what happened more as a series of frozen, glare-saturated images than actual motion. Things were spilling out: an expanding mass of ellipsoidal objects, each perhaps half a metre long, metallic-white in colour, with various protrusions, gun-nozzles, manipulators and apertures interrupting its surface.
Sentry drones. She knew them — or something similar — from the Edge. They had called them wolfhounds, because of the ferocity of their attack, and the fact they always moved in packs. Although their main military use was as an instrument of demoralisation, Khouri knew what they could do, and she knew that wearing a suit was no guarantee of safety. Wolfhounds were built for viciousness, not intelligence. They carried relatively light weapons — but they did so in large numbers, and, more to the point, they acted in unison. A pack of wolfhounds could collectively target their fire against a single individual, if their pooled-processors deemed that the action was strategically useful. It was that singlemindedness which made them terrifying.
But there was more. Embedded in the mass of erupting drones were several larger objects, also metallic-white in colour, but lacking the spherical symmetry of the wolfhounds. It was difficult to make them out clearly in the intermittent bursts of illumination, but Khouri thought she knew what they were. They were other suits, and they were very unlikely to be friendly.
The wolfhounds and the enemy suits were dropping away from the central axis now, vectoring towards the three waiting trainees. Perhaps two seconds had elapsed since the other door had opened, but it had seemed much longer as Khouri’s mind easily switched to the mode of rapid consciousness which combat demanded. Many of the suit’s higher autonomous functions were disabled, but its target-acquisition routines were still operable, so she ordered the suit to lock onto the wolfhounds, not actually firing, but keeping a bead on each one. She knew that her suit woul
d confer with its two partners; between them devising a moment-by-moment strategy and allocating targets to each other, but that process was largely invisible to the wearer.
Where the hell was Volyova?
Was it possible she could have moved from one end of the chamber to the other, in time to appear in the pack? Yes, probably — motion in a suit, at least on a scale this compressed, could be so rapid that a person might seem to disappear from one point and appear hundreds of metres further away an eyeblink later. But the enemy suits Khouri had seen had definitely come through the other door, which would have necessitated Volyova leaving the chamber and making her way to the other end through normal ship corridors and accessways. Even in a suit, even with the route keyed in beforehand, Khouri doubted that anyone could do that so quickly; not without becoming liquid en route. But maybe Volyova had a short-cut; a clear shaft through which she could move much more rapidly…
Shit.
Khouri was being shot at.
The wolfhounds were firing, lancing her with small-grade laser fire, emerging in twin beams from malignant, closely spaced eyes in the upper hemisphere of their ellipsoid shells. By now their chameleoflage had adapted to the floor metal, turning them into purple lozenges which seemed to dance in and out of clarity. Her suit skin had silvered to an optically perfect mirror, deflecting most of the energy, but some of the initial blasts had done real damage to the suit integrity. She would lose points for that — she had been too busy cogitating on Volyova’s vanishing act to pay attention to the attack. That diversion, of course, had almost certainly been Volyova’s intention. She looked around, confirming what the suit readouts were telling her, which was that her compatriots had all survived. Flanking her, Sudjic and Kjarval resembled androform blobs of mercury, but they were not hurt and were returning fire.
Khouri set her escalation protocols to stay one offensive step ahead of the enemy, but not to obliterate them. Her suit sprouted low-yield lasers, popping up on both shoulders, pivoting on turrets. She watched the beams converge ahead of her, knifing forwards, each burst leaving a lilac contrail of ionised air. When hit, the shining, flying purple wolfhounds tended to crash out of the sky, bouncing to the ground or just exploding in hot blossoms. It would have been unwise in the extreme to be out in the chamber without a suit.
‘You were slow,’ Sudjic said, on the general-suit, even as the attack continued. ‘This was real, we’d be hosing you off the walls.’
‘How many times you seen close-quarters action, Sudjic?’
Kjarval — who until then had said next to nothing — cut in on them. ‘We’ve all seen action, Khouri.’
‘Yeah? And did you ever get close enough to the enemy to hear them scream for mercy?’
‘What I mean is… fuck.’ Kjarval had just taken a hit. Her suit spasmed momentarily, flicking through a series of incorrect chameleoflage modes: space-black; snow-white and then florid, tropical foliage, making it look as if Kjarval were a door leading out of the chamber into the heart of some remote planetary jungle.
Her suit stammered, and then regained its reflective sheen.
‘I’m worried about those other suits.’
‘That’s what they’re for. To make you worry, and louse up.’
‘We need help to louse up? That’s a new one.’
‘Shut it, Khouri. Just concentrate on the damned war.’
She did. That part was easy.
Roughly a third of the attacking wolfhounds had been shot down, and no new forces were emerging through the chamber’s still-open end door. But the other suits — there were three of them, Khouri saw — had done nothing so far except loiter near the hole, and were now slowly moving towards the floor, correcting their descent with bursts of needle-thin thrust from their heels. As they did so they too assumed a colour and texture which matched the shot-up floor. It was impossible to tell which — if any — were occupied.
‘This is part of the scenario; those suits — they’ve got to mean something.’
‘I said shut it, Khouri.’
But she continued, ‘We’re on a mission, right? We have to assume that much. We have to impose some structure on the damned thing or we don’t know who the hell’s the enemy!’
‘Good idea,’ Sudjic said. ‘Let’s schedule a meeting.’
By now the wolfhounds, and their fire-returning suits, were using particle-beams. Maybe the lasers had been real — it was just within the bounds of possibility — but it seemed certain that any significantly more powerful weapon would be only simulated. After all, it would not be an auspicious end to the exercise if one of them blasted a hole in the chamber wall and vented all the air into space.
‘Let’s assume,’ Khouri said, ‘that we know who the hell we are and why we’re here — wherever here happens to be. The next question is, do we know those bastards in the other three suits?’
‘This is getting way too philosophical for me,’ Kjarval said, loping away to draw fire.
‘If we’re having this conversation,’ Khouri said, doggedly talking over Sudjic’s interjections, ‘then we have to assume we don’t know who they are. That they’re hostile. And that means we should shoot the scum first, before they do whatever they’re going to do to us.’
‘I think you could be fucking up big-time, Khouri.’
‘Yeah, well, as you kindly pointed out, I’m the one who isn’t going down anyway.’
‘Amen to that.’
‘Er… people…’ This was Kjarval, who had noticed what it took Khouri and Sudjic another moment to absorb. ‘I don’t like the look of that.’
What she had seen was that the wrists of the three other suits were morphing, each extruding an as yet unformed weapon. The process was unnervingly rapid, like watching a party balloon inflate into the shape of an animal.
‘Shoot the fuckers,’ Khouri said, with a voice so calm it almost scared her. ‘Full fire-convergence on the leftmost suit. Go to minimum-yield ack-am pulse mode, conic dispersal with lateral cross-sweep.’
‘Since when are you giving…’
‘Just fucking do it, Sudjic!’
But she was already firing, Kjarval too; the three of them were now standing apart by ten metres, directing their suits’ fire towards the enemy. The accelerated antimatter pulses were simulated… of course. If they had been real, there would have been little of the chamber left to stand on.
There was a flash, one so bright that Khouri felt it reach out and push taloned fingers into her eyes. It felt too intense to have been properly simulated… too concussive. The noise of the blast hit with a force that seemed almost gentle by comparison, but the shock was still enough to throw her backwards, keeling into the mottled chamber wall. The bump was like bouncing onto a mattress in an expensive hotel room. For a moment her suit was out cold; even when her eyes began to clear she could see that the readouts had either died or turned to unreadably cryptic mush. They lingered in that state for a few agonising seconds before the suit’s back-up brain staggered on line, reinstating what it could. A simpler — but at least comprehensible — display returned to life, detailing what remained and what had been destroyed. Most of the major weapons were out. Suit autonomy was down by fifty per cent, the persona slipping towards machine autism. There was extensive loss of servo-assistance in three articulation points. Flight capability was impaired, at least until the repair protocols could get to work, and they needed a minimum two hours to finesse a bypass solution.
Oh, and — according to the bio-medical readout — she was now minus one upper limb, from the elbow down.
She struggled to a sitting position and — though every instinct told her to spend the time getting safe and assessing the surroundings — she had to look at the shot-away limb. Her right arm ended just where the med-readout said it would; truncating in a crumpled mass of scorched bone, flesh and intermingled metal. Further up the stump, the gel-air would have shock-congealed to prevent pressure and blood loss, but that was a detail she had to take for granted. Ther
e was no pain, of course — another aspect in which the simulation was utterly realistic, since the suit would be telling her pain centre to shut down for the time being.
Assess, assess…
She had lost her orientation completely in the blast. She looked around, but the suit’s head articulation was jammed. There was suddenly an awful lot of smoke out there; hanging in coils in the air venting from the chamber itself. The intermittent illumination provided by the aerial drones was now only a stuttering strobe-effect. There were the wrecks of two suits over there, suffering the kind of comprehensive damage which might indicate that they had been hit by combined ack-am pulses. But the suits were too mangled up for her to tell if they had — or had ever had — occupants. A third suit — less critically damaged, and perhaps only stunned, as her own had been — rested ten or fifteen metres away around the great curve of the chamber’s scarred wall. The wolfhounds were gone, or destroyed; it was impossible to tell which.
‘Sudjic? Kjarval?’
Silence; not even her own voice properly audible, and certainly nothing resembling a reply. Intersuit comms were compromised, she saw now — a detail on the damage readout she had ignored until then. Bad, Khouri. Very bad.
Now she had no idea who the enemy was.
The ruined suit arm was fixing itself by the second, scorched parts sloughing to the ground, while the exterior skin crawled forwards to envelop the stump. It was faintly disgusting to watch, even though Khouri had seen it happen many times before, in other simulation scenarios on the Edge. What was really nauseating was knowing that no such immediate repair was possible for her own wounds; that they would have to wait until she was medevacked out of the zone.
The other suit, the one less damaged, was moving now, raising itself to a standing position, just as she was doing. The other suit had a full complement of limbs, and many of its weapons were still deployed, jutting from various apertures. They were locking onto Khouri, like a dozen vipers poising for the strike.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, before remembering that the comms were offline, probably for good. Out of the corner of her eye she saw another two suits off to one side, emerging from banners of languid, charcoal-dark smoke. Who were they? Remnants of the original three which had come down with the wolfhounds, or her comrades?
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