The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  The shuttle offloaded us directly onto the hospital’s hangar deck, using a device not unlike a massive ammunition feed belt to dump the dozens of capsule stretchers with what felt like unceremonious haste. I could hear the shrill whine of the ship’s engines still dying away as we rattled and clanked our way out over the wing and down onto the deck, and when they cracked open my capsule the air in the hangar burnt my lungs with the chill of recently evacuated hard space. An instant layer of ice crystals formed on everything, including my face.

  ‘You!’ It was a woman’s voice, harsh with stress. ‘Are you in pain?’

  I blinked some of the ice out of my eyes and looked down at my blood-caked battledress.

  ‘Take a wild guess,’ I croaked.

  ‘Medic! Endorphin boost and GP anti-viral here.’ She bent over me again and I felt gloved fingers touch my head at the same time as the cold stab of the hypospray into my neck. The pain ebbed drastically. ‘Are you from the Evenfall front?’

  ‘No,’ I managed weakly. ‘Northern Rim assault. Why, what happened at Evenfall?’

  ‘Some fucking terminal buttonhead just called in a tactical nuclear strike.’ There was a cold rage chained in the doctor’s voice. Her hands moved down my body, assessing damage. ‘No radiation trauma, then. What about chemicals?’

  I tilted my head fractionally at my lapel. ‘Exposure meter. Should tell you. That.’

  ‘It’s gone,’ she snapped. ‘Along with most of that shoulder.’

  ‘Oh.’ I mustered words. ‘Think I’m clean. Can’t you do a cell scan?’

  ‘Not here, no. The cellular level scanners are built into the ward decks. Maybe when we can clear some space for you all up there, we’ll get round to it.’ The hands left me. ‘Where’s your bar code?’

  ‘Left temple.’

  Someone wiped blood away from the designated area and I vaguely felt the sweep of the laser scan across my face. A machine chirped approval, and I was left alone. Processed.

  For a while I just lay there, content to let the endorphin booster relieve me of both pain and consciousness, all with the suave alacrity of a butler taking a hat and coat. A small part of me was wondering whether the body I was wearing was going to be salvageable, or if I’d have to be re-sleeved. I knew that Carrera’s Wedge maintained a handful of small clone banks for its so-called indispensable staff, and as one of only five ex-Envoys soldiering for Carrera, I definitely numbered among that particular elite. Unfortunately, indispensability is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gets you elite medical treatment, up to and including total body replacement. On the downside, the only purpose of said treatment is to throw you back into the fray at the earliest possible opportunity. A plankton-standard grunt whose body was damaged beyond repair would just get his cortical stack excised from its snug little housing at the top of the spinal column then slung into a storage canister, where it would probably stay until the whole war was over. Not an ideal exit, and despite the Wedge’s reputation for looking after their own there was no actual guarantee of re-sleeving, but at times in the screaming chaos of the last few months that step into stored oblivion had seemed almost infinitely desirable.

  ‘Colonel. Hey, colonel.’

  I wasn’t sure if the Envoy conditioning was keeping me awake, or if the voice at my side had nagged me back to consciousness again. I rolled my head sluggishly to see who was speaking.

  It seemed we were still in the hangar. Lying on the stretcher beside me was a muscular-looking young man with a shock of wiry black hair and a shrewd intelligence in his features that even the dazed expression of the endorphin hit could not mask. He was wearing a Wedge battledress like mine, but it didn’t fit him very well and the holes in it didn’t seem to correspond with the holes in him. At his left temple, where the bar code should have been, there was a convenient blaster burn.

  ‘You talking to me?’

  ‘Yes sir.’ He propped himself up on one elbow. They must have dosed him with a lot less than me. ‘Looks like we’ve really got Kemp on the run down there, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s an interesting point of view.’ Visions of 391 platoon being cut to shreds around me cascaded briefly through my head. ‘Where do you think he’s going to run to? Bearing in mind this is his planet, I mean.’

  ‘Uh, I thought—’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise that, soldier. Didn’t you read your terms of enlistment? Now shut up and save your breath. You’re going to need it.’

  ‘Uh, yes sir.’ He was gaping a little, and from the sound of heads turned on nearby stretchers he wasn’t the only one surprised to hear a Carrera’s Wedge officer talking this way. Sanction IV, in common with most wars, had stirred up some heavy-duty feelings.

  ‘And another thing.’

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘This is a lieutenant’s uniform. And Wedge command has no rank of colonel. Try to remember that.’

  Then a freak wave of pain swept in from some mutilated part of my body, dodged through the grasp of the endorphin bouncers posted at the door of my brain and started hysterically shrilling its damage report to anyone who’d listen. The smile I had pinned to my face melted away the way the cityscape must have done at Evenfall, and I abruptly lost interest in anything except screaming.

  Water was lapping gently somewhere just below me when I next woke up, and gentle sunlight warmed my face and arms. Someone must have removed the shrapnel-shredded remains of my combat jacket and left me with the sleeveless Wedge T-shirt. I moved one hand and my fingertips brushed age-smoothed wooden boards, also warm. The sunlight made dancing patterns on the insides of my eyelids.

  There was no pain.

  I sat up, feeling better than I had in months. I was stretched out on a small, simply-made jetty that extended a dozen metres or so out into what appeared to be a fjord or sea loch. Low, rounded mountains bounded the water on either side and fluffy white clouds scudded unconcernedly overhead. Further out in the loch a family of seals poked their heads above the water and regarded me gravely.

  My body was the same Afro-Caribbean combat sleeve I’d been wearing on the Northern rim assault, undamaged and unscarred.

  So.

  Footsteps scraped on the boards behind me. I jerked my head sideways, hands lifting reflexively into an embryonic guard. Way behind the reflex came the confirming thought that in the real world no one could have got that close without my sleeve’s proximity sense kicking in.

  ‘Takeshi Kovacs,’ said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic ‘ch’ at the end of the name correct. ‘Welcome to the recuperation stack.’

  ‘Very nice.’ I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. ‘Am I still aboard the hospital?’

  The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. ‘Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.’

  I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. ‘And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘How did I guess?’

  ‘Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—’

  ‘Skip it. I was being rhetorical.’ I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

  ‘What ratio are you running all this on?’

  ‘Real time equivalence,’ said the woman promptly. ‘Though I can speed it up if you prefer.’

  The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was goi
ng to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.

  ‘There is accommodation,’ said the woman, pointing, ‘for your use. Please request modifications if you would like them.’

  I followed the line of her arm to where a glass and wood two-storey structure stood beneath gull-winged eaves on the edge of the long shingle beach.

  ‘Looks fine.’ Vague tendrils of sexual interest squirmed around in me. ‘Are you supposed to be my interpersonal ideal?’

  The woman shook her head again. ‘I am an intra-format service construct for Wedge One Systems Overview, based physically on Lieutenant Colonel Lucia Mataran of Protectorate High Command. ’

  ‘With that hair? You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I have latitudes of discretion. Do you wish me to generate an interpersonal ideal for you?’

  Like the offer of a high-ratio format, it was tempting. But after six weeks in the company of the Wedge’s boisterous do-or-die commandos, what I wanted more than anything was to be alone for a while.

  ‘I’ll think about it. Is there anything else?’

  ‘You have a recorded briefing from Isaac Carrera. Do you wish it stored at the house?’

  ‘No. Play it here. I’ll call you if I need anything else.’

  ‘As you wish.’ The construct inclined her head, and snapped out of existence. In her place, a male figure in the Wedge’s black dress uniform shaded in. Close-cropped black hair seasoned with grey, a lined patrician face whose dark eyes and weathered features were somehow both hard and understanding, and beneath the uniform the body of an officer whose seniority had not removed him from the battlefield. Isaac Carrera, decorated ex-Vacuum Command captain and subsequently founder of the most feared mercenary force in the Protectorate. An exemplary soldier, commander, and tactician. Occasionally, when he had no other choice, a competent politician.

  ‘Hello, Lieutenant Kovacs. Sorry this is only a recording, but Evenfall has left us in a bad situation and there wasn’t time to set up a link. The medical report says your sleeve can be repaired in about ten days, so we’re not going to go for a clone-bank option here. I want you back on the Northern Rim as soon as possible, but the truth is, we’ve been fought to a standstill there for the moment and they can live without you for a couple of weeks. There’s a status update appended to this recording, including the losses sustained in the last assault. I’d like you to look it over while you’re in virtual, set that famous Envoy intuition of yours to work. God knows, we need some fresh ideas up there. In a general context, acquisition of the Rim territories will provide one of the nine major objectives necessary to bring this conflict . . .’

  I was already in motion, walking the length of the jetty and then up the sloping shore towards the nearest hills. The sky beyond was tumbled cloud but not dark enough for there to be a storm in the offing. It looked as if there would be a great view of the whole loch if I climbed high enough.

  Behind me, Carrera’s voice faded on the wind as I left the projection on the jetty, mouthing its words to the empty air and maybe the seals, always assuming they had nothing better to do than listen to it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the end, they kept me under for a week.

  I didn’t miss much. Below me, the clouds roiled and tore across the face of Sanction IV’s northern hemisphere, pouring rain on the men and women killing each other beneath. The construct visited the house regularly and kept me abreast of the more interesting details. Kemp’s offworld allies tried and failed to break the Protectorate blockade, at the cost of a brace of IP transports. A flight of smarter-than-average marauder bombs got through from somewhere unspecified and vaporised a Protectorate dreadnought. Government forces in the tropics held their positions while in the north-east the Wedge and other mercenary units lost ground to Kemp’s elite presidential guard. Evenfall continued to smoulder.

  Like I said, I didn’t miss much.

  When I awoke in the re-sleeving chamber, I was suffused in a head-to-foot glow of well-being. Mostly, that was chemical; military hospitals shoot their convalescent sleeves full of feelgood stuff just before download. It’s their equivalent of a welcome-home party, and it makes you feel like you could win this motherfucking war singlehanded if they’d only let you up and at the bad guys. Useful effect, obviously. But what I also had, swimming alongside this patriot’s cocktail, was the simple pleasure of being intact and installed with a full set of functioning limbs and organs.

  Until I talked to the doctor, that is.

  ‘We pulled you out early,’ she told me, the rage she’d exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. ‘On orders from Wedge command. It seems there isn’t time for you to recover from your wounds fully.’

  ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘Of course you do. You’re dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you’re going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.’

  I blinked. ‘I didn’t know they were spraying that stuff.’

  ‘No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.’ She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. ‘We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you’d probably make a full recovery. As it is . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital’s axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them, I knew.

  ‘Hey, lieutenant!’

  Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

  ‘You made it out, lieutenant! Way to go!’

  He turned about in the crowd.

  ‘Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.’

  Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally-mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fibre. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

  ‘Lieutenant. We thought—’

  ‘Lieutenant Kovacs!’

  Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

  ‘Good to see you, lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The 391 platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.’

  Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

  ‘Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?’ said Munharto, gesturing flipper-like with his one remaining limb. ‘Seen the milflash yesterday.’

  Kwok’s microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

  ‘You taking the new 391, sir?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.’

  I stayed off the axial deck after that.

  Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring
out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

  ‘Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.’

  It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

  ‘Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.’ He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. ‘I really appreciate you not ah, not—’

  ‘Forget it. I had.’

  ‘Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.’ - I stirred impatiently - ‘Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—’

  ‘Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.’ I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. ‘All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?’

  He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.