The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  Now it felt as if there was a fifth presence among us, crouched at my side, grinning and squeezing the shards of broken bone in my arm. I sat in my own biotech-damped pain, remembering what had happened to Sutjiadi’s predecessors while the Wedge gathered to watch like the faithful at some arcane altar to the war.

  ‘How long does this last?’ asked Deprez.

  ‘It depends. Most of the day.’ The words dragged out of me. ‘It has to be over by nightfall. Part of the ritual. If no one stops it earlier, the machine sections and removes the skull at last light. That usually does it.’ I wanted to stop talking, but it seemed no one else wanted to stop me. ‘Officers and noncoms have the option to call a coup de grâce vote from the ranks, but you won’t get that until late afternoon, even from the ones that want it over. They can’t afford to come across softer than the rank and file. And even late, even then, I’ve seen the vote go against them.’

  ‘Sutjiadi killed a Wedge platoon commander,’ said Vongsavath. ‘I think there will be no mercy vote.’

  ‘He’s weak,’ Wardani said hopefully. ‘With the radiation poisoning—’

  ‘No.’ I flexed my right arm and a spike of pain ran up to my shoulder, even under the neurachem. ‘The Maori sleeves are contam combat-designed. Very high endurance.’

  ‘But the neurache—’

  I shook my head. ‘Forget it. The machine will adjust for that, kill the pain management systems first, rip them out.’

  ‘Then he’ll die.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ I shouted. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’

  No one said much after that.

  A pair of medics arrived, one the man who had treated me earlier, the second a hard-faced woman I didn’t know. They checked my arm with elaborately non-committal competence. The presence of the inhib unit crouched on my nape and what it said about my status both went carefully unremarked. They used an ultravibe microset to break up the bone fragments around the shattered elbow joint, then set regrowth bios in deep, long monofilament feed lines topped off at skin level with the green marker tags and the chip that told my bone cells what to do and, more to the point, how fucking rapidly to get it done. No slacking here. Never mind what you did back in the natural world, you’re part of a military custom operation now, soldier.

  ‘Couple of days,’ said the one I knew, peeling a rapid-dump endorphin dermal off the crook of my arm. ‘We’ve cleared up the ragged edges, so flexing it shouldn’t do any serious damage to the surrounding tissue. But it will hurt like fuck, and it slows down the healing process so try to avoid it. I’ll grip-pad you so you remember.’

  A couple of days. In a couple of days, I’d be lucky if this sleeve was still breathing. Recollection of the doctor aboard the orbital hospital flashed through my head. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The absurdity of it bubbled through me and escaped as a sudden, unlooked-for grin.

  ‘Hey, thanks. Don’t want to slow down the healing process, do we?’

  He smiled back weakly, then hurriedly turned his gaze to what he was doing. The grip-pad went on tight from bicep to lower forearm, warm and comforting, and constricting.

  ‘You part of the anatomiser crew?’ I asked him.

  He gave me a haunted look. ‘No. That’s scan-related, I don’t do it.’

  ‘We’re done here, Martin,’ said the woman abruptly. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘Yeah.’ But he moved slowly, unwillingly as he folded up the battlefield kitpack. I watched the contents disappearing, taped-over surgical tools and the strips of brightly coloured dermals in their tug-down sleeves

  ‘Hey, Martin.’ I nodded at the pack. ‘You going to leave me a few of those pinks. I was planning to sleep late, you know.’

  ‘Uh—’

  The female medic cleared her throat. ‘Martin, we aren’t—’

  ‘Oh, shut the fuck up, will you.’ He turned on her with fury boiling up out of nowhere. Envoy instinct kicked me in the head. Behind his back, I reached for the pack. ‘You don’t rank me, Zeyneb. I’ll dispense what I fucking like and you—’

  ‘’s OK,’ I said quietly. ‘I got them anyway.’

  Both medics fixed on me. I held up the trailing strip of endorphin dermals I’d grabbed free in my left hand. I smiled thinly.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t take them all at once.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said the female medic. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Zeyneb, I told you to shut up.’ Martin gathered up the kitpack in a hurry, tightening it in his arms, cradling it. ‘You, uh, they’re fast-acting. No more than three at any one time. That will keep you under, whatever you h—’ He swallowed. ‘Whatever is going on around you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They gathered the rest of their equipment and left. Zeyneb looked back at me from the bubblefab flap and her mouth twisted. Her voice was too low for me to catch what she said. Martin raised his arm in a cuffing gesture, and they both ducked out. I watched them go, then looked down at the strip of dermals in my clenched fist.

  ‘That’s your solution?’ asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. ‘Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?’

  ‘Do you have a better idea?’

  She turned away.

  ‘Then get down off that fucking prayer tower and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.’

  ‘We could—’

  ‘We could what? We’re inhibited, we’re most of us a couple of days off death from catastrophic cell damage, and I don’t know about you, but my arm hurts. Oh, yeah, and this whole place is wired for sight and sound to the political officer’s cabin, which, I imagine, Carrera has ready access to when he wants it.’ I felt a slight twinge from the thing on the nape of my neck, and realised my own anger was getting the better of my weariness. I locked it down. ‘I’ve done all the fighting I’m going to do, Tanya. Tomorrow we get to spend the day listening to Sutjiadi die. You deal with that any way you want. Me, I’m going to sleep through it.’

  There was a searing satisfaction in throwing the words out at her, like twisting shrapnel out of a wound in your own flesh. But somewhere underneath it, I kept seeing the camp commandant, shut down in his chair, current running, the pupil of his remaining human eye bumping idly against the upper lid.

  If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again. I heard the words again, whispering out of him like dying breath. So I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.

  I wondered what kind of discomfort I’d need at this stage of the game. What kind of chair I’d need to be strapped into.

  Somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

  And I wondered why the hand at the end of my injured arm was not empty.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Sutjiadi started screaming shortly after it got light.

  Outraged fury for the first few seconds, almost reassuring in its humanity, but it didn’t last. In less than a minute, every human element boiled away to the white bone of animal agony. In that form it came searing up the beach from the butcher’s slab, shriek after peeling shriek filling the air like something solid, hunting listeners. We had been waiting for it since before the dawn but it still hit like a shockwave, a visible flinch through each of us where we sat hunched on beds no one had even tried to sleep in. It came for us all, and touched us with a sickening intimacy. It laid clammy hands over my face and a clamped grip on my ribcage, stopping breath, spiked the hairs on my neck and sent a single twitch through one eye. At my nape, the inhib unit tasted my nervous system and stirred interestedly.

  Lock it down.

  Behind the shrieking ran another sound I knew. The low growl of an aroused audience. The Wedge, seeing justice done.

  Cross-legged on the bed, I opened my fists. The dermal strips fell to the quilt.

  Something flickered.

  I saw the dead visage of the Martian, printed across my vision so clear it might have been a retinal display. this chair—

  —wakes me.

  —spinning motes of shadow and ligh
t—

  —dirge of alien grief—

  I could feel—

  —a Martian visage, in amongst the swirl of brilliant pain, not dead—

  —great unhuman eyes that met mine with something that—

  I shuddered away from it.

  The human scream ran on, ripping along nerves, digging into marrow. Wardani buried her face in her hands.

  I shouldn’t be feeling this bad, a detached part of me argued. This isn’t the first time I’ve—

  Unhuman eyes. Unhuman screams.

  Vongsavath began to weep.

  I felt it rising in me, gathering in spirals the way the Martians had done. The inhib unit tensed.

  No, not yet.

  Envoy control, cold and methodical unpicking of human response just when I needed it. I welcomed it like a lover on Wardani’s sunset beach - I think I was grinning as it came on.

  Outside on the slab, Sutjiadi screamed pleading denial, the words wrenched out of him like something drawn with pliers.

  I reached down to the grip-pad on my arm and tugged it slowly towards my wrist. Twinges ran through the bone beneath as the movement snagged the regrowth biotags.

  Sutjiadi screamed, ragged glass over tendon and gristle in my head. The inhibitor—

  Cold. Cold.

  The grip-pad reached my wrist and dangled loose. I reached for the first of the biotags.

  Someone might be watching this from Lamont’s cabin, but I doubted it. Too much else on the menu right now. And besides, who watches detainees with inhibitor systems crouched on their spines? What’s the point? Trust the machine and get on with something more rewarding.

  Sutjiadi screamed.

  I gripped the tag and applied evenly mounting pressure.

  You’re not doing this, I reminded myself. You’re just sitting here listening to a man die, and you’ve done enough of that in the past couple of years for it not to bother you. No big deal. The Envoy systems, fooling every adrenal gland in my body and plastering me with a layer of cool detachment. I believed what I told myself at a level deeper than thought. On my neck, the inhibitor twitched and snugged itself down again.

  A tiny tearing and the regrowth bio filament came out.

  Too short.

  Fu—

  Cold.

  Sutjiadi screamed.

  I selected another tag and tugged it gently side to side. Beneath the surface of the skin, I felt the monofilament slice tissue down to the bone in a direct line and knew it was also too short.

  I looked up and caught Deprez looking at me. His lips framed a question. I gave him a distracted little smile and tried another tag.

  Sutjiadi screamed.

  The fourth tag was the one - I felt it slicing flesh in a long curve through and around my elbow. The single endorphin dermal I’d shot earlier kept the pain to a minor inconvenience, but the tension still ran through me like wires. I took a fresh grip on the Envoy lie that absolutely nothing was happening here, and pulled hard.

  The filament came up like a kelp cable out of damp beach sand, ripping a furrow through the flesh of my forearm. Blood spritzed my face.

  Sutjiadi screamed. Searing, sawing up and down a scale of despair and disbelief at what the machine was doing to him, at what he could feel happening to the sinewed fibres of his body.

  ‘Kovacs what the fuck are you—’ Wardani shut up as I cut her a look and jabbed a finger at my neck. I wrapped the filament carefully around my left palm, knotted it behind the tag. Then, not giving myself time to think about it, I splayed my hand and drew the noose smoothly and rapidly tight.

  Nothing is happening here.

  The monofilament sliced into my palm, went down through the pad of tissue as if through water and came up against the interface bioplate. Vague pain. Blood welled from the invisible cut in a thin line, then blotched across the whole palm. I heard Wardani’s breath draw short, and then she yelped as her inhibitor bit.

  Not here my nerves told the inhib unit on my own neck. Nothing happening here.

  Sutjiadi screamed.

  I unknotted the filament and drew it clear, then flexed my damaged palm. The lips of the wound across the palm split and gaped. I stuffed thumb into the split and—

  NOTHING is happening here. Nothing at all.

  —twisted until the flesh tore.

  It hurt, endorphin or no fucking endorphin, but I had what I wanted. Below the mangled mass of meat and fatty tissue, the interface plate showed a clear white surface, beaded with blood and finely scarred with biotech circuitry. I worked the lips of the wound further apart until there was a clear patch of plate exposed. Then I reached back with no more conscious intent than you’d get from a back-cracking yawn, and jammed the gashed hand onto the inhibitor.

  And closed my fist.

  For just a moment, I thought my luck had run out. Luck that had seen me through removing the monofilament without major vascular damage, that had let me get to the interface plate without severing any useful tendons. Luck that had no one watching Lamont’s screens. Luck like that had to run dry at some point and as the inhib unit shifted under my blood-slippery grip I felt the whole teetering structure of Envoy control start to come down.

  Fuck

  The interface plate - user locked, hostile to any uncoded circuitry in direct contact - bucked in my ripped palm and something shorted out behind my head.

  The inhibitor died with a short electronic squeal.

  I grunted, then let the pain come up through gritted teeth as I reached back with my damaged arm and began to unflex the thing’s grip on my neck. Reaction was setting in now, a muted trembling racing up my limbs and a spreading numbness in my wounds.

  ‘Vongsavath,’ I said as I worked the inhibitor loose. ‘I want you to go out there, find Tony Loemanako.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The noncom who came to collect us last night.’ There was no longer any need to suppress emotion, but I found the Envoy systems were doing it anyway. Even while Sutjiadi’s colossal agony scraped and raked along my nerve endings, I seemed to have discovered an inhuman depth of patience to balance against it. ‘His name is Loemanako. You’ll probably find him down by the execution slab. Tell him I need to talk to him. No, wait. Better just tell him I said I need him. Those words exactly. No reasons, just that. I need him right now. That should bring him.’

  Vongsavath looked to the closed flap of the bubblefab. It barely muffled Sutjiadi’s uncontrolled shrieking.

  ‘Out there,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ I finally got the inhib unit off. ‘I’d go myself, but it’d be harder to sell, that way. And you’re still wearing one of these.’

  I examined the carapace of the inhibitor. There was no outward sign of the damage the interface plate’s counterintrusion systems had done, but the unit was inert, tentacles spasmed stiff and clawed.

  The pilot officer got up unsteadily. ‘Alright. I’m going.’

  ‘And Vongsavath.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Take it easy out there.’ I held up the murdered inhibitor. ‘Try not to get excited about anything.’

  It appeared I was smiling again. Vongsavath stared at me for a moment, then fled. Sutjiadi’s screams blistered through in her wake for a moment, and then the flap fell back again.

  I turned my attention to the drugs in front of me.

  Loemanako came at speed. He ducked through the flap ahead of Vongsavath - another momentary lift in Sutjiadi’s agony - and strode down the the centre aisle of the bubblefab to where I lay curled up on the end bed, shivering.

  ‘Sorry about the noise,’ he said, leaning over me. One hand touched my shoulder gently. ‘Lieutenant, are you—’

  I struck upward, into the exposed throat.

  Five rapid-dump dermals of tetrameth from the strip my right hand had stolen the previous night, laid directly across major blood vessels. If I’d been wearing an unconditioned sleeve, I’d be cramped up and dying now. If I’d had less conditioning of my own, I’d b
e cramped up and dying now.

  I hadn’t dared dose myself with less.

  The blow ripped open Loemanako’s windpipe, and tore it across. Blood gushed, warm over the back of my hand. He staggered backwards, face working, eyes child-like with disbelieving hurt. I came off the bed after him—

  —something in the wolf splice weeps in me at the betrayal—

  —and finished it.

  He toppled and lay still.

  I stood over the corpse, thrumming inside with the pulse of the tetrameth. My feet shifted unsteadily under me. Muscle tremors skipped down one side of my face.

  Outside, Sutjiadi’s screams modulated upward into something new and worse.

  ‘Get the mobility suit off him,’ I said harshly.

  No response. I glanced around and realised I was talking to myself. Deprez and Wardani were both slumped against their beds, stunned. Vongsavath was struggling to rise, but could not coordinate her limbs. Too much excitement - the inhibitors had tasted it in their blood and bitten accordingly.

  ‘Fuck.’

  I moved between them, clenching my mutilated hand around the spider units and tearing them loose as they spasmed. Against the shift and slide of the tetrameth, it was almost impossible to be more gentle. Deprez and Wardani both grunted with shock as their inhibitors died. Vongsavath’s went harder, sparking sharply and scorching my opened palm. The pilot vomited bile, and thrashed. I knelt beside her and got fingers into her throat, pinning her tongue until the spasm passed.

  ‘You O—’

  Sutjiadi shrieked across it.

  ‘—K?’

  She nodded weakly.

  ‘Then help me get this mob suit off. We don’t have a lot of time ’til he’s missed.’

  Loemanako was armed with an interface pistol of his own, a standard blaster and the vibroknife he’d loaned to Carrera the night before. I cut his clothes off and went to work on the mob suit beneath. It was combat spec - it powered down and peeled at battlefield speed. Fifteen seconds and Vongsavath’s shaky assistance were enough to shut off the dorsal and limb drives and unzip the frame. Loemanako’s corpse lay throat open, limbs spread, outlined in an array of upward-jutting flex-alloy fibre spines that reminded me fleetingly of bottleback corpses butchered and half-filleted for barbecue meat on Hirata beach.