by David Gunn
Neen still doesn’t get it.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘We can kill the O’Cruz if needs be. But every new person who knows we’re here doubles the danger.’
‘Sven.’ That’s the colonel, obviously. He’s working his way round to behaving as if nothing happened up in the mirror hub. ‘We can’t,’ he says. ‘I mean . . .’
‘Believe me, sir,’ I say, ‘we may have to.’
———
A dozen people drag a cart along the dry bed of what was once a stream. The cart has spoked wheels and fretted sides. It has been painted grey so it doesn’t reflect the sun. The men pulling it wear camouflage so cheap I only hope it came free. Mostly it matches whatever its owner was standing on a few seconds earlier.
The women, all three of them, wear rags. These are so filthy they provide better camouflage than the suits worn by the men.
Every twenty paces, the group stop and twist a stick into the ground. After a few seconds, one of the men shakes his head. So they drag the cart another twenty paces and start again.
‘Prospectors.’ Rachel is certain of this.
‘They’d have better equipment,’ says Colonel Vijay.
‘With respect, sir.’ Turns out Haze is the only one to remember his briefing. A good half of the prospectors here are illegal. It’s an expensive jump; a licence from the Enlightened doubles the price and takes a third of anything found.
‘Colonel,’ I say. ‘We should let them pass.’
‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘They might have met the Azari.’
Laughing, Racta says, ‘Of course they’ve met the Azari.’ His gesture sweeps the valley. ‘These are your ghosts.’
‘What did he say?’
‘These are our ghosts.’
‘No they’re not,’ says Colonel Vijay. Makes me wonder how he knows.
‘So,’ says Racta. ‘We kill all but one. Agreed?’
Dropping out the clip on his rifle, he counts bullets. He has two in the clip, with one in the breech. So, our little caudillo-to-be has three. This explains his willingness to toss down his rifle earlier. And why he turns his back on his men before extracting the clip.
Every shot he fires weakens his power.
I want to let them pass, and Racta wants to capture one and kill the rest. So Colonel Vijay suggests a compromise. We will capture them all. Since this is about as stupid a suggestion as I can imagine, Racta agrees immediately.
‘See,’ says the colonel.
Yes, I know. Compromise and respect.
‘Carry on,’ he tells me.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Racta heads them off. We come up from behind.’
Racta’s about to insist he comes up from behind, when he realizes heading off the prospectors is exactly what he wants to do. So he nods, as if doing me a favour, and slams the clip back into his rifle.
A minute later, I hear a gunshot up ahead.
‘What’s that?’ demands the colonel.
He must know.
Unholstering my own gun, I start running. All thoughts of coming up behind the prospectors are gone. We keep low, weaving from instinct. Shale skids beneath our boots, but we keep moving. On a mountainside that is all you can do.
Cresting a small ridge, we look down in dismay.
Well, the colonel’s dismayed.
I’m just fucking angry. Most of the prospectors are dead. One is still standing and a couple are on their knees. As we watch, Racta uses his rifle as a club and one of those kneeling hits the dirt.
A tracker has a woman on the ground with her skirt round her hips. Another searches the pockets of a dying man. A thin scream from the woman ends when her attacker loses patience. He wipes his knife on her skirt.
‘Permission to finish this, sir?’
‘Sven . . .’
‘Take that as a yes,’ suggests the SIG. ‘Now, let’s take the fucking lot to their knees.’ It rotates clips, selecting overburst. I’d love to, but my gun knows it’s impossible. We are behind enemy lines.
Well, we’re in Uplift Space.
Holding the SIG steady, I walk downhill.
Not one of the O’Cruz doubts I’ll kill them if needed. As we pass Racta’s man going through the pockets of the woman he killed, Neen clubs him. As the man falls to his knees, Rachel walks up behind him and kicks him hard between the legs. There’s no need for Shil to stamp on his fingers as she goes past.
‘We agreed capture.’
Racta scowls. ‘They fought back.’
‘Of course they fucking did,’ I say. ‘You attacked them.’
‘This is our valley,’ he tells me. ‘You’re here because we allow it.’ He spits at a body at his feet. ‘They deserved to die.’
‘What did he say?’ the colonel demands.
‘They deserved to die . . .’
Colonel Vijay looks around. And has trouble dragging his gaze from the splay-legged woman with the severed throat.
‘Animals,’ he says. ‘They’re animals.’
What the fuck does he expect? Battles that start at noon and carefully considered last words from the dying?
‘Tell him we don’t approve of this.’
‘Sir . . .’
‘Just tell him.’
So I do. And guess what? Racta doesn’t give a shit.
‘We’re done here,’ the colonel tells me. ‘Tell him this is where we part company. We’ll find the ghosts for ourselves.’
Racta isn’t happy about this. He wants his five gold coins. So I point out it was for finding the ghosts, not for killing old men and raping women. And since he hasn’t found the ghosts, he doesn’t get the money. This makes him unhappier still.
Unhappy enough to jack the bolt on his rifle.
Wait, I tell myself.
The moment he raises his weapon will be the moment I kill him.
A step to reach him, a single flick of my blade . . . Should be easy enough.
I’m still edging my knife from its sheath when someone beats me to it. A shovel is as good a weapon as anything else if thrown hard enough. And I know it’s luck that makes the shovel break Racta’s rifle arm. But sometimes luck is all you need.
Stalking towards Racta, the prospector picks up his shovel and smashes the blade sideways into Racta’s knee.
‘My woman,’ he says.
We know who he’s talking about.
As Rachel, Neen and Shil keep their weapons trained on the other trackers, the partner of the dead woman drives the edge of his shovel into Racta’s throat.
The screaming stops.
Chapter 14
A VETERAN OF SIFTING MINING WASTE FOR ORE MISSED THE FIRST time round, Mic Chua has a face that is mottled from toxic chemicals and tattooed so deeply with dust that it looks like powder burn from a shotgun. His eyes are red, although he tells me that is the wind.
Mic has one earring, and a ponytail faded to the grey of dry dog turd.
All the same, for someone so slight, he handles that shovel like the weapon it isn’t. ‘Used to be one of you,’ he says.
Legion? I almost ask.
But I don’t.
I don’t say Death’s Head either. I just nod, smile, and wonder what the fuck I am meant to do with the O’Cruz prisoners my troopers now guard.
‘We don’t kill them,’ says Colonel Vijay.
Of course he does.
Killing them makes sense. As does killing Mic and the few prospectors left alive. They are going to die anyway; you can see it in their eyes.
‘So,’ says Mic. ‘Where did they scoop you?’
Our conversation is getting weirder by the second. But there are times you stay quiet, and this is one of them. So I hold my tongue and try to look interested, but not too interested. Not like, maybe, I don’t have the faintest fuck what he’s talking about.
‘Us,’ he says, ‘they got us right outside a mine.’
I grunt something. I hope it sounds sympathetic.
‘Used to do asteroids,’ he says. ‘All that suit
ing up and shit, the stale air and long months in tin cans. Gave it up. I mean . . .’ The upturn of his hands says, come on. ‘Why bother, if you can get rich on the ground.’
‘Legally?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
Mic’s eyes narrow. ‘No problem, either way,’ I assure him.
‘Illegal is quicker.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And if you get high enough to call yourself emperor, or senator or glorious uplift, you can announce it’s not a crime anyway.’
Mic grins sourly.
We agree here. ‘So,’ I say. ‘They scooped you?’
‘Yeah, right outside our mine. All these fucks with guns are standing in a circle glaring at us. It must have been the same for you. All those warnings about not trying to escape . . .’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘I hate that.’
‘So they took us back to the camp. And then let us out in work details to dig their damn trenches and fix their pipes . . . Took me a while to work out what was happening.’
‘And then?’ I say, thinking, give me a clue here.
Something bleak enters Mic’s eyes. ‘When we struck for more food, they killed five the first hour, five the next, five the hour after . . . Chosen at random. So we killed the guards, cut the wire and this is what’s left.’
He gestures to three people, who are all that remain of his group.
They walk towards us slowly. If I were them, I wouldn’t trust us either.
His group turns out to be one woman and two men. Mic doesn’t introduce them and I don’t ask. If anything, they look worse than he does.
———
We give the ejército a water bottle and march them into the shade of an overhang. Then, while Shil and Franc keep their rifles trained, Neen walks along the line with a shovel and breaks the left ankle of every one.
‘Here,’ he says, giving Mic back his shovel.
‘My pleasure.’
The colonel’s furious. Since it’s already done, I can’t see his point. ‘It’s barbaric,’ he tells me. He is so cross he insists we have the conversation in private.
‘Your decision, sir.’
He scowls at me.
‘We’ve no cuffs, no rope, and you said I couldn’t kill them. With respect, what the fuck was I meant to do?’
Saluting smartly, I leave him with the question.
The ejército yell at us as we head out. All the usual insults. There are x million suns and x million planets, yet all you ever get is insults about your mother, your sister and your girlfriend. Well, the first two are dead, and I don’t have a third so I’m not too bothered. But I translate them anyway, just for the pleasure of watching Colonel Vijay’s lips tighten.
As the afternoon goes on, Mic trails further and further behind. Until our only choice is, leave him or make camp and wait. When he finally arrives, Shil has a fire burning, Neen has caught what looks like a dog, Franc has gutted the beast, seasoned it with bark and has a stick stuffed up one end and out the other.
We offer the prospectors meat, and give them the wine from Pavel’s flask. It does little good. One dies in the night. He’s old, with skin that looks like cheaply cured leather.
We find him at first light. Back against a rock and face towards the sun. I know, it’s reflection in a mirror . . . light enters Hekati through chevron safety glass and servomotors in the hub shift huge silvered sheets to create the illusion.
It still looks like dawn to me.
He has stripped off his shirt and lesions disfigure his chest. The skin over his gut is purple as if the corruption set in long before he died. Rachel is not the only one to make a sign against the evil eye. Shil does, when she thinks I’m not looking.
Colonel Vijay says it’s the plague.
‘Radiation,’ says Haze.
The colonel stares at him.
‘Know the symptoms,’ Haze says. Embarrassment stops him. ‘It’s unmissable, I guess.’ He looks at Mic and the other two, and his blush gets worse. ‘If you want me to take a look at you, I might . . .’
What? I think. Be able to save them?
Then I realize it’s possible. Haze has more processing power in his skull than most cities. And Paper Osamu gave him the run of her ship’s library that time we asked the U/Free for help. Mind you, look where that got us - here.
Mic says, ‘Thanks, but it’s too late.’
‘What a choice,’ adds the only woman. ‘Sickness or the Silver Fist.’
Colonel Vijay makes himself unfreeze the moment I glance across. Bits of earlier conversations are coming into focus. Spitting, I grind the spit under my heel.
‘May they rot.’
Grinning, Mic does the same.
It’s an old militia curse. Although these days everyone uses it. I have heard it from militia about Death’s Head, Octovians about metalheads, legionnaires about the ferox, and civilians about all of us everywhere.
‘You should keep moving,’ Mic says.
My look is a question.
‘We’re slow,’ he says. ‘And they’ll be tracking us. If we travel together they’ll get you as well.’
‘Move out,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll cover you.’
He tries to work my angle. Am I planning some trick? Sacrificing him in some way that cuts us free? He’s old and he’s ill and he has a right to be worried, but he’s also wrong. We’ve found our ghosts. All we need to do now is capture one.
Stamping up to Colonel Vijay, I salute.
‘Permission to deploy.’
‘Sven.’
I want this battle. And watching Colonel Vijay, I realize something else. What happened in the hub was disgraceful enough. I want to see how this little shit behaves under fire. A medal for planning Ilseville.
The idea makes me vomit.
‘Rachel,’ I shout.
She jogs over, salutes.
‘Dig in over there.’
We need to cover the floor of this valley from a slope. As Rachel leaves, she begins to pull sections of rifle from slots and pouches on her back and belt, already screwing them together as she jogs towards a scar of red earth.
Now Mic is really staring. ‘What are you?’ he asks.
‘The best,’ says Neen.
There’s best and best. Mic decides we’re renegade militia with five-year-old rifles, used to lording it over new conscripts lucky to have weapons at all. I’m happy to leave it that way.
‘You plan to bury your man?’
‘No point,’ he says. ‘We’ll be joining him soon enough.’ His shrug is that of someone grown used to the idea of his own death. ‘Might as well save our energy.’
With that, he slopes away, weighed down by a pack a six-year-old should be able to carry. I doubt we will see him again and Mic obviously feels the same, because he doesn’t look back and nor do the couple stumbling after him.
Chapter 15
‘SVEN,’ SAYS COLONEL VIJAY. ‘A WORD.’
‘Sir . . . ?’
‘What’s wrong with that man?’
‘The air, sir,’ I say. ‘He comes from a planet with more oxygen. Hekati’s atmosphere is thinner.’
The colonel considers this. ‘Do his nosebleeds happen often?’
I consider this in my turn. ‘Some months,’ I say, ‘he bleeds more than Shil, Franc and Rachel put together.’
Colonel Vijay decides he wants to be somewhere else.
The Aux are digging a slit trench across a dry river bed and that is where I find Haze. Climbing out of the trench, he wipes blood from his face.
‘I’m fine, sir.’
Trooper Haze hasn’t been fine the entire time I’ve known him. But his softness is going and he causes less grief than before. Of course, he’s always going to be large and he’s always going to look stupid when he runs. Still, he can now hold a rifle and dig slit trenches with the best of them.
‘Sir,’ says Haze, ‘can I ask something?’
‘Depends what it is.’
He wipes his nose again.
‘Ask,’ I s
ay.
There is a famous triple-sunned planet in the northern spiral, but a single sun is more than enough for me. And for Haze, clearly, because he turns his back on the brightness and stares in the other direction.
He’s listening.
Only Haze doesn’t listen like other people. At least, he doesn’t listen to frequencies the rest of us hear. ‘Can you hear it?’ he asks finally.
I shake my head.
‘Sir . . .‘
A lot hangs on that word, and I am going to leave it like that. I’m not about to start barking when he’s the dog I keep to do it for me. Plus, I like it when the kyp in my throat sleeps. Food tastes like food and colours look vaguely normal. I can even wake in the morning without my mouth foul with static.
‘So,’ I say. ‘What can you hear?’
He struggles to put it into words. While I struggle to understand the words he does manage. Insane signal to noise ratio. Off scale. Way too much loopback for a habitat that’s on file as deserted.
I ask Haze if he is certain.
He’s certain. This habitat is on U/Free lists as uninhabited. The prospectors qualify as short-stay visitors and the gangs don’t count, being residual and indigenous. As for Hekati herself, she shows clear signs of abulia, with secondary signs of emotional cri du chat. About one word in five of this makes sense.
‘Haze,’ I say, ‘just dig the fucking trench.’
He turns, head down and shoulders hunched. So I tell him to come back when I’m going to understand what he is saying.
As Colonel Vijay watches, we scatter dirt.
A few strategically placed rocks and bushes will help hide the trench. We don’t have to worry about the bushes dying on us. They are dead already. He’s not happy about me stripping to the waist and doesn’t approve of my helping dig.
‘You’re an officer.’
‘I was a sergeant first, sir.’
And you should still be one, his look says. But he keeps the words to himself and stares towards the head of the valley. ‘If they are Silver Fist . . .’
‘They’ll be fucking hard to kill.’
‘Sven,’ he says. ‘About what happened in the hub. I don’t think you understand . . .’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I think I do, sir.’
He flushes. ‘You’ve fought the Fist in battle?’