One Man's War

by Steven Savile

  He stared intently at her.

  “Fragments,” Tenebrae said.

  “Describe one,” he said.

  So she did.

  We were in Venice, city of trash.

  Guerra, Swann and Martagan and me, walking side-by-side toward the main square. It’s a protected place, so nothing’s really changed despite the way the rest of the world has crowded in around it. The old Doge’s Palace and all of those wonderful ruins tottering over the Grand Canal were just as they had been five hundred years before. Now though, it was a Warwulf-Blaze stronghold, and we’d just accepted a gig to protect a bunch of very rich commodity brokers who had just made a shitload of money on the backs of some dubious trades. One of them had been invited to test evolution against intelligent design, and drowned under the Rialto Bridge and left to feed the scavengers skimming the surface in the wake of the gondoliers.

  That was when the others had called us in. Despite the riches, they were frightened little boys looking for someone to bleed for them.

  They didn’t fancy going out the same way. I tried to tell them I’d seen a lot worse, but they seemed intent on disbelieving me. Still, that helped me broker a good price. It was a win-win as far as I was concerned. It opened up a new client to us, for a start, which is always a good thing, and assuming we didn’t screw the pooch and get ourselves killed, and obviously kept the clients alive, then who knew where it could lead?

  Off this stinking trash heap, hopefully.

  They used to think this place was romantic. I don’t think they had any concept of what romance really was if they seriously thought that something reeking of piss, puke, and festering garbage was the stuff of love, then I admit, I know nothing of matters of the heart. To me, it would always be a city built on a mound of garbage. But, like a lot of romantic things, it was only surface deep, so I suppose there was that connection. Behind the façades of all of those perfect blue buildings and those chipped yellow walls the real heart of the city had been gutted and replaced with high tech office spaces connected to the world at large, money pulsing in and pulsing out of the hub that was Venice in a constant digital stream that was worth billions per second. We’re talking mind-boggling amounts of money in trades, stuff the financial hubs couldn’t begin to keep up with because the Venetian services were offering rates on the trades they couldn’t match. The colonnades around St Mark’s Square hid the building we needed to be in and presented all sorts of challenges in terms of putting up a proper defense, but there was no one else I’d rather at my side.

  We were a team.

  A pack.

  The four of us.

  They were expecting an attack. The intel was good. But then it ought to be, these guys were rich, rich people could pay for anything, including the betrayal of those who wanted them dead, it seemed. We put them in the safest place in the building, quite literally. In the vault. And time-locked it so even if we went down there was no way the hit squad was getting in there to kill our clients. We were their last line of defense—the four of us up against however many Bleeders the billionaires they’d screwed over had decided it was worth paying to make sure the job was done.

  I tried to think of it as a holiday.

  I mean, it’s not often you get to kill people surrounded by so much history. Most of the world these days is all the same, basically. It is super towers, glass and neon, stuff that blurs into one as you move through it. There’s so little with actual personality, so little that is unique. And even this wasn’t really, it was just a front, everything behind it was absolutely 22nd Century.

  Eight men went into the vaults. I could see Lisl Martagan’s question, she didn’t need to voice it. Eight men. Where were the women? Surely Warwulf-Blaze wasn’t a male-only domain? There had to be women in the regional management structure, female brokers, too. Were they being hung out to dry by the bastards who’d hired us? Left to fend for themselves?

  It only took a few seconds to bring up the corporate directory and confirm that sixty percent of the employees in the Venice offices were female.

  So much for equality.

  “What do you want to do?” Martagan asked.

  I wanted to do the job I’d been hired for. I didn’t want to do anything pro-bono. That way lies madness. But I didn’t want the blood of a bunch of innocent women on our hands if I could help it. “Go round up anyone you can find, give them a choice, evacuate or relocate down here where we can protect them. Those are the only two alternatives. Then get back down here and help Swann and Guerra get that gun emplacement secure. We don’t know what to expect.”

  And that was the understatement of the year.

  But it was my fault for misjudging our enemy and not taking into account the unique nature of our surroundings. A mistake I wouldn’t make again. Venice is a city of islands, lots of little trash islands, joined by bridges. Implicit in that is the presence of water. I’d locked the people we were supposed to protect into a big steel vault that was basically separated from the murky depths by a few feet of brickwork foundation and not much else.

  The explosions rocked the stanchions that supported the foundations. Rubble wept from the corners of the room, dry, dusty tears falling. If I’d known more about architecture, I’d have understood the significance of what I was seeing. But if wishes were fishes, I’d be a fucking shark.

  A second wave of explosions followed fast on the aftershocks of the first. The building gave a deeper grumble. I looked around. “Where the hell are those bastards?”

  “In a hurry to die?” Marco Guerra asked. He was always so bloody sarcastic. I think it came down to mummy issues. Maybe he hadn’t had enough love when he was growing up.

  “Always,” I flashed him a grin. Let the fucker wonder what I was so happy about.

  Not that I was happy for long.

  Deep beneath us, I felt something tear. I heard it too, a second later, rising up through the old stones, then I heard the unmistakable drip drip drip of water splashing onto the marble floor.

  “How far down are we?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Guerra said, helpfully.

  The vault was locked. It wasn’t like I could knock on the door and ask the guys inside. But a few seconds later as a piece of ancient plaster pushed in, collapsing under the pressure of the Grand Canal bearing down on it, I had all the answers I needed. We were under the canal. All it had taken were a few well-placed charges, controlled detonations, and the entire landscape of our fight changed as the water came pouring in and brought with it all the shit of the most romantic city in the world.

  I heard screams up above.

  Guerra and Swann had barely finished wrestling with the mobile gun turret, sinking its legs through the thin layer of marble over the wooden boards all the way down to the foundations of centuries-old garbage, as Martagan appeared with a handful of refugees and I realized the second flaw in my otherwise not-so-brilliant plan. I couldn’t get them into the vault because we’d set the time lock. It was turning into an utter clusterfuck. “Get them somewhere safe,” I yelled at Martagan, gesticulating wildly like I had an idea where safe was going to be down here. What I hadn’t told anyone at this point was this was my first time at the rodeo. I’d never done this shit before. I could talk the talk, sure. I could make people think I was some great tactical visionary, and spin it every which way so they just assumed they’d somehow crossed my path a dozen times without realizing it, but the truth was I didn’t have a clue. I was out of my depth. And everyone was about to find out just how far soon.

  The third explosion was unlike anything I’d ever heard, and I realized then, a few seconds too late, what the hit squad intended. They’d placed high-density explosives right beneath the vault, the first wave of explosives creating a tunnel in the trash island so they could swim in deeper to plant the second wave and finally blow their way right under the heavy vault.

  Before the dust cleared on the third raft of explosions the gut-wrenching shriek of metal, stone and wood
parting ways told us we were fucked. Well, not us, yet, but the eight men we’d ushered into that sealed cube who were now submerged in an airtight box running out of oxygen, with the sheer weight of canal water engulfing them enough to make sure they never managed to force that huge capstan door open again. We’d killed them by doing exactly what our enemy expected us to.

  There was a lesson to be learned there.

  Being predictable in this game kills.

  I learned it. Too late for those eight money-grabbing bankers, but I learned it in time to save my own skin, which I figure is always the main thing with lessons.

  The floor gave way beneath us, taking with it a small fortune in the form of the mobile gun turret we’d spent the best part of a morning installing. It hadn’t fired a single shot in anger. It was the last time I was wasting my money on a big gun. From now on, assuming we got out of here alive, it was all about faith in my fellow man.

  Time slows down when you’re afraid. It does. Or at least the speed with which your brain processes things accelerates so greatly it seems that way. The hit squad rose up out of the ragged hole in the floor, their subaquatic gear dripping water, the dust of debris a cloud of camouflage around them.

  I reacted first.

  A single shot fired in panic, high and wide, but it started the killing.

  There were four of them, four of us. Their suits were slick, oily, black, but had glo-lights on them that gave us something to aim at. Guerra was the first to make a kill. It was a lucky shot, whatever he says to the contrary. He’d been aiming for the center of mass, but the floor had shifted beneath his feet, throwing his aim off. The bullet, a hollow-point, took the man in the throat, opening up a huge sucking wound that sprayed arterial blood in an arc across the debris all around him. It was a spectacular first kill. Brutal. Bloody. There’s nothing like arterial spray for the sheer mess of death it delivers. Guerra couldn’t have made a cleaner kill if he’d tried.

  But it didn’t all go our way.

  We nearly lost one of our own. As it was, the fall changed his life forever.

  Swann.

  I got him crippled that day.

  I would give anything to be able to change what happened next, but I’m not a god, I can’t simply rewrite life, scroll it back and play again because I don’t like the way things turned out. Because of me, my best friend ended up in an exospine for the rest of his life.

  It’s the little things you don’t think about. That vault took up maybe half of the surface area of the basement level, meaning they’d just blown out a huge portion of the building’s foundations and absolutely undermined its integrity. There was no way it was going to hold against the forces at work on it. You take the skeleton out of a body, and the meat suit will collapse, same deal.

  All sounds of very uncomfortable sounds echoed around us.

  Then the bullets started to fly.

  I dropped to one knee and loosed a volley, high, low, cutting across the line of sight in a harsh diagonal that chopped through another of their first wave. Oh yes, I wasn’t stupid enough to think there were only four of them down there. Those first few were sent to smoke us out. The real force held back, waiting for the dust to settle. They knew what they were doing. They ought to, they were the ones who’d set the charges. They knew what the real damage would be, we were just improvising.

  The brittle weeping of the walls only got worse as hollow points tore into them.

  The increased weight on the shattered foundation struts meant it would only be a few more seconds until another part of the marble floor gave way. Again, the floor lurched beneath me, a precursor to the inevitable collapse as physics took it beyond the point of no return and everything buckled and collapsed inwards, sinking down into the water.

  I was too busy worrying about what else was about to rise up out of that hole in the floor to realize the real risk was from the ceiling.

  Lisl Martagan and I stood there side-by-side, guns locked and loaded, stupid grins on our faces, fighting for our lives and loving every minute of it because we’d just realized there was something broken in our psyche. We were willing more of the bastards to stick their heads up out of the water so we could shoot them. There’s something almost sexual about killing with someone. It was better than any fuck we shared afterward, put it that way.

  Only Guerra wasn’t fighting.

  He stripped off his guns and dove into the murky black under the building.

  That was when I realized what was going on.

  Swann was trapped beneath us. The sheer weight of the debris had dragged Swann underwater, and his injuries meant he couldn’t free himself from the crushing press of the huge slabs of masonry that pinned his broken body to the trash island.

  All Guerra had to go on were the slowly diminishing air bubbles. When that trail ran out, well, I don’t need to tell you what that meant.

  We stared at that hole in the floor, counting the bubbles as the gaps between them stretched out, willing the next heads to break the surface to be Guerra and Swann’s.

  They weren’t. That was when the next wave of Bleeders surfaced, and the women behind us started screaming.

  We went to work.

  They rose up slowly, like the dead crawling out of the grave, first their faces, then their torsos and guns. Only, of course, it wasn’t them, they were holographic projections. Our bullets tore clean through them and out the other side before we realized they didn’t so much as flinch. That was when I realized they were coming up behind us. That’s what the women had been screaming about—and why they weren’t screaming now.

  I spun around barely in time. The Bleeder was right behind me, arc-blade raised for a silent kill. I put a dozen hollow points in his chest, cutting him physically in half so as his knees buckled and his torso fell backward, he came apart.

  I’d emptied my clip into him.

  I didn’t have time to reload. The bastards were on top of us.

  And I was still grinning, realizing I was going to die laughing.

  There are worse ways to go in this game.

  But I didn’t die. I dropped to one knee, scooping up the dead Bleeder’s fallen blade and bringing it up in a savage arc, cutting the second Bleeder from balls to chin as he loomed over me.

  Martagan dispatched her two with brutal precision, no wasted shells.

  One died with a bullet to the eye, the other had his knees shot out from under him, and writhed around on the ground, telling us exactly who had sent them in before she killed him.

  We went to them later and offered our services. After all, we’d killed two of their teams even if we’d lost our clients in the process. In operation terms, it was a failure, but technically it wasn’t. None of our employers had taken a bullet. They’d slowly suffocated to death, trapped in that vault under water. No one had breached that vault. We’d kept them safe while they slowly ran out of oxygen. It was a technicality, but technicalities were important.

  Guerra burst through the surface of the water, gasping and sucking in huge choking mouthfuls of air, Swann in his arms. He looked dead as Guerra laid him out on the floor and started the three short compresses of CPR on his chest, then break, then three, then break, until Swann regurgitated a dribble of water and gagged on the first breath of his new life as a cripple.

  Sometimes I think he’d had rather died down there than spend the rest of his days dependent upon that exospine to move.

  She told it perfectly.

  She didn’t embellish a single detail. No extemporization. It was exactly as I remembered it. It was exactly as Fate remembered, too. We were the only two people left in the world who had been through it, too, and understood the implications of how we wound up working for GenX and how that precious reputation we’d banked at never failing was built on the deaths of those eight money men who had died on a technicality.

  He looked at her, sold.

  She’d just described our first gig with the kind of detail only someone who’d lived through it coul
d know, right down to the grief we felt at Swann’s survival, which I know is an odd thing to say, but he was never the same after that. I think a part of him really did die down under that water.

  It helped that I’d always known Lisl and him had a thing going on, especially on the back of a tough gig, the ones where we’d come closest to losing everything, and Tenebrae had dropped in that one line about the sex. It was that kind of veracity that sold it. As far as Fate was concerned the psychic surgery was a success. His brain was patterning itself on top of hers and bit by bit she was being given glimpses of the hell that was his life.

  He’d seen her fight, now he’d heard her remember.

  What she couldn’t do was tell him what had happened under that water when I’d followed the bubbles down. That was something I’d have to live with. I made the choice. It was that or leave him to die. See, Fate doesn’t know the half of it. I followed the air bubbles, though they slowed, the intervals between them becoming longer. It was hard to see. I was moving mostly by feel, reaching out in the darkness for the sharp edges of rubble, working my way along them, down until I saw the agitated mass in the water ahead and realized that Swann was trapped and thrashing around. I reached out for him, trying to work him free, but the more he thrashed about, the more absolutely trapped he became. I only had so much air in my lungs. I couldn’t hold it forever. I could feel my chest tightening, burning, and really wanted to take a deep breath but I knew if I did my body would become complicit in my drowning, no matter what my mind wanted.

  And he was fighting me hard. He wasn’t dying easily. He was clinging desperately to life and would have killed me down there too if I hadn’t acted. I swam up close to him, coming around behind him as he lashed out, and wrapped my arm around him to try and still the struggle but he was having none of it, so with my free hand I reached up and cupped my palm over his nose and mouth, and clung on grimly as the fight slowly left him.