The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘Help me roll him out of—’

  Behind me, someone retched. I glanced back and saw Deprez propping himself upright. He blinked a couple of times and managed to focus on me.

  ‘Kovacs. Did you—’ His gaze fell on Loemanako. ‘That’s good. Now, do you want to share your plans for a change?’

  I gave Loemanako’s corpse a final shove and rolled it clear of the unwrapped mob suit. ‘Plan’s simple, Luc. I’m going to kill Sutjiadi and everyone else out there. While that’s going on, I need you to get inside the ’Chandra and check for crew or conscientous objectors to the entertainment. Probably be a few of each. Here, take this.’ I kicked the blaster across to him. ‘Think you’ll need anything else?’

  He shook his head muzzily. ‘You spare the knife? And drugs. Where are those fucking tetrameth.’

  ‘My bed. Under the quilt.’ I lay on the suit without bothering to undress and began to pull the support struts closed across my chest and stomach. Not ideal, but I didn’t have the time. Ought to be OK - Loemanako was bigger framed than my sleeve, and the servoamp uptake pads are supposed to work through clothing at a push. ‘We’ll go together - I figure it’s worth the risk of a run to the polalloy shed before we start.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Vongsavath grimly.

  ‘No, you’re fucking not.’ I closed the last of the body struts and started on the arms. ‘I need you in one piece; you’re the only person can fly the battlewagon. Don’t argue, it’s the only way any of us get out of here. Your job is to stay here and stay alive. Get the legs.’

  Sutjiadi’s screams had damped down to semi-conscious moans. I felt a scribble of alarm run up my spine. If the machine saw fit to back off and leave its victim to recover for any length of time, those in the back rows of the audience might start to drift away for an interval cigarette. I hit the drives while Vongsavath was still fastening the last of the ankle joint struts and felt more than heard the servos murmur to life. I flexed my arms - jag of unwatched pain in the broken elbow, twinges in the ruined hand - and felt the power.

  Hospital mob suits are designed and programmed to approximate normal human strength and motion while cushioning areas of trauma and ensuring that no part of the body is strained beyond its convalescent limits. In most cases the parameters are hardwired in to stop stupid little fucks from overriding what’s good for them.

  Military custom doesn’t work like that.

  I tensed my body and the suit got me to my feet. I thought a kick to groin height and the suit lashed out with speed and strength to dent steel. A left-handed back fist long strike. The suit put it there like neurachem. I crouched and flexed, and knew the servos would put me five metres into the air on demand. I reached out with machined precision and picked up Loemanako’s interface gun right handed. Digits scrambled along the display as it recognised the Wedge codes in my undamaged palm. Red gleam of the load light, and I knew through the prickling in my palm what the magazine carried. The vacuum commando’s standby. Jacketed slugs, short-fused plasma core. Demolition load.

  Outside, the machine somehow licked Sutjiadi back up into screaming. Hoarse now, his voice was shredding. A deeper groundswell rose behind the shrieks. Audience cheers.

  ‘Get the knife,’ I told Deprez.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Outside, it was a beautiful day.

  The sun was warm on my skin and glinting off the hull of the battlewagon. There was a slight breeze coming in off the sea, scuffing whitecaps. Sutjiadi screamed his agony at a careless blue sky.

  Glancing down to the shoreline, I saw they’d erected metal-framed banks of seats around the anatomiser. Only the top of the machine showed above the heads of the spectators. Neurachem reeled in a tighter view - a sense of heads and shoulders tensed in fascination at what was happening on the slab, and then suddenly a glimpse of something flapping, membrane-thin and blood-streaked, torn loose from Sutjiadi’s body by pincers and caught by the breeze. A fresh shriek floated up in its wake. I turned away.

  You patched and evacuated Jimmy de Soto while he screamed and tried to claw out his own eyes. You can do this.

  Functionality!

  ‘Polalloy shed,’ I muttered to Deprez and we moved down the beach to the far end of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue, as rapidly as seemed safe without tripping some Wedge veteran’s combat-amped peripheral vision. There’s an art to it they teach you in covert ops - breath shallow, move smoothly. Minimise anything that might trigger the enemy’s proximity senses. Half a minute of itching exposure was all it took, and then we were shielded from the seat banks by the swell of the ’Chandra’s hull.

  On the far side of the shed, we came across a young Wedge uniform, braced on the structure and vomiting his guts up in the sand. He looked up out of a sweat-beaded face as we rounded the corner, features twisted in misery.

  Deprez killed him with the knife.

  I kicked open the door with mob suit strength and swung inside, eyes flexed out to total scan in the sudden gloom.

  Lockers stood tidily against one wall. A corner table held an assortment of helmet frames. Wall racks offered boot bases and breathing apparatus. The hatch to the showers was open. A Wedge noncom looked round from a datacoil at another desk, face haggard and angry.

  ‘I’ve already fucking told Artola I’m not—’ She spotted the mob suit and peered, getting up. ‘Loemanako? What are you—’

  The knife skipped through the air like a dark bird off my shoulder. It buried itself in the noncom’s neck, just above the collar bone and she jerked in shock, came a wavering step towards me, still peering, and then collapsed.

  Deprez stepped past me, knelt to check his handiwork and then withdrew the knife. There was a clean economy of motion in his movements that belied the state of his radiation-blasted cells.

  He stood up and caught me looking at him.

  ‘Something?’

  I nodded at the corpse he’d just made. ‘Not bad for a dying man, Luc.’

  He shrugged. ‘Tetrameth. Maori sleeve. I have been worse equipped.’

  I dumped the interface gun on the table, picked up a pair of helmet frames and tossed one to him. ‘You done this before?’

  ‘No. I’m not a spaceman.’

  ‘OK. Put this on. Hold the struts, don’t smudge the faceplate.’ I gathered boot bases and breathing sets at tetrameth speed. ‘The air intake fits through here, like this. The pack straps over your chest.’

  ‘We don’t nee—’

  ‘I know, but it’s quicker this way. And it means you can keep the faceplate down. Might save your life. Now stamp down on the boot bases, they’ll stick in place. I’ve got to power this thing up.’

  The shower systems were set into the wall next to the hatch. I got one unit running, then nodded at Deprez to follow me, and went through into the shower section. The hatch cycled closed behind us, and I caught the thick solvent odour of the polalloy pouring in the confined space. The operational unit’s lamps flashed orange in the low light surroundings, glinting off the dozens of twisting threads of polalloy where they ran down from the shower heads and spread like oil on the angled floor of the cubicle.

  I stepped in.

  It’s an eerie feeling the first time you do it, like being buried alive in mud. The polalloy lands on you in a thin coating that quickly builds to a sliding sludge. It masses on the dome of cross-netting at the top of the helmet frame, then topples and pours down around your head, stinging your throat and nostrils even through your locked breathing. Molecular repulsion keeps it off the surface of the faceplate, but the rest of the helmet is sheathed in twenty seconds. The rest of your body, right down to the boot bases, takes about half as long again. You try to keep it away from open wounds or raw flesh; it stings before it dries. fffffffuuuuck

  It’s airtight, watertight, utterly sealed, and it’ll stop a high-velocity slug like battlewagon armour. At a distance, it even reflects Sunjet fire.

  I stepped down and felt through the polalloy for the breathing set controls.
Thumbed the vent control. Air hissed under my jaw, filling the suit and popping it loose around my body. I killed the air and chinned the faceplate control. The plate hinged silently up.

  ‘Now you. Don’t forget to hold your breath.’

  Somewhere outside, Sutjiadi was still screaming. The tetrameth scratched at me. I almost yanked Deprez out of the shower, punched the air supply and watched as his suit popped.

  ‘OK, that’s it.’ I dialled down to intake standard. ‘Keep the plate down. Anyone challenges you, give them this signal. No, thumb crooked like this. It means the suit’s malfunctioning. Might buy you the time you need to get close. Give me three minutes, then go. And stay away from the stern.’

  The helmeted head nodded ponderously. I could not see his face through the darkened faceplate. I hesitated a moment, then clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Try to stay alive, Luc.’

  I chinned the faceplate closed again. Then I gave the tetrameth its head, collected the interface gun left-handed on my way through the locker room and let the momentum carry me back outside into the screaming.

  It took me one of my three minutes to circle wide around the back of the polalloy shed and then the hospital bubblefab. The position gave me line of sight on the gate and the minimal security Carrera had left there. The same as last night - five strong guard, two suited and one powered-up bug. Looked like Kwok’s hunched, cross-legged stance in one suit. Well, she’d never been a big fan of the anatomiser sessions. The other, I couldn’t identify.

  Machine support. The mobile ultravibe cannon and a couple of other chunks of automated firepower, but all turned the wrong way now, watching the darkness beyond the gate. I breathed out once and started up the beach.

  They spotted me at twenty metres - I wasn’t hiding. I waved the interface gun cheerily over my head, and gave the malfunction gesture with my other hand. The ragged hole in my left palm ached.

  At fifteen metres, they knew something was wrong. I saw Kwok tense and used the only card I had left to play. I chinned the faceplate and waited twelve metres off for it to hinge up. Her face registered shock as she saw me, mingled pleasure, confusion and concern. She unfolded and got to her feet.

  ‘Lieutenant?’

  I shot her first. A single shot, in through the opened faceplate. The detonating plasma core blew the helmet apart as I ran forward.

  —aching throatful of wolf loyalty, rubbed raw—

  The second suit was moving when I got to him, a single leap in the mob suit and a mid-air kick that slammed him back against the carapace of the bug. He bounced off, one hand reaching to slap his faceplate closed. I grabbed the arm, crushed it at the wrist and fired down into his yelling mouth.

  Something hammered me in the chest, threw me on my back in the sand. I saw an unsuited figure stalking towards me, hand gun flung out. The interface gun dragged my arm up a handsbreadth and I shot his legs out from under him. Finally, a scream to compete with Sutjiadi, and time running out. I chinned my faceplate closed and flexed my legs. The mob suit threw me to my feet again. A Sunjet blast lashed the sand where I had been. I tracked round and snapped off a shot. The Sunjet wielder spun about with the impact and red glinting fragments of spine exploded out of his back as the shell detonated.

  The last one tried to close with me, blocking my gun arm upward and stamping down at my knee. Against an unarmoured man, it was a good move, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The edge of his foot bounced off the mob suit and he staggered. I twisted and snapped out a roundhouse kick with all the balanced force the suit would give me.

  It broke his back.

  Something banged off the front of the bug. I looked down the beach and saw figures spilling from the makeshift amphitheatre, weapons levelling. I snapped a shot off in reflex, then got a grip on my ’meth-scrambled thought processes and straddled the bug.

  The systems awoke at a slap to the ignition pad - lights and dataflow in the hooded and heavily armoured instrument panels. I powered up, lifted a quarter-turn about to face the advancing Wedge, selected weaponry and—

  —howl, howl, HOWL—

  some kind of snarling grin made it to my face as the launchers cut loose.

  Explosives aren’t good for much in vacuum combat. No shockwave to speak of, and any blast energy you generate dissipates fast. Against suited personnel, conventional explosives are next to useless, and nuclear yield, well, that really defeats the purpose of close-quarters combat. You really need a smarter kind of weapon.

  The smart shrapnel motherframes cut twinned swerving trails among the soldiers on the beach, locators tilting the flight path with microsecond precision to dump their cub shells into the air just where they would wreak the most organic damage. Behind a barely visible haze of thrust that my faceplate enhancer painted pale pink, each blast unleashed a hail of monomolecular shards sewn with hundreds of larger tooth-sized razor-edged chunks that would bury themselves in organic matter and then fragment.

  It was the weapon that ripped 391 platoon apart around me two months ago. Took Kwok’s eyes, Eddie Munharto’s limbs, and my shoulder.

  Two months? Why does it feel like another lifetime?

  The Wedge soldiers closest to each blast literally dissolved in the storm of metal fragments. Neurachem-aided vision showed it to me, let me watch them turned from men and women into shredded carcasses fountaining blood from a thousand entry and exit wounds and then into bursting clouds of shattered tissue. Those further off just died in sudden pieces.

  The motherframes skipped joyously through them all, impacted on the banks of seats surrounding Sutjiadi, and blew. The whole structure lifted briefly into the air, and was gone in flame. The light from the explosion splashed itself orange on the hull of the Angin Chandra’s Virtue and debris rained down into the sand and water. The blast rolled out across the beach, and rocked the bug on its grav field.

  There were, I discovered, tears starting in my eyes.

  I nudged the bug forward over the gore-splattered sand, kneeling upright and looking for survivors. In the quiet after the explosions, the grav drive made a ludicrously soft noise that felt like being stroked with feathers. The tetrameth glimmered at the edges of my vision and trembled in my tendons.

  Halfway down to the blast zone, I spotted a pair of injured Wedgemen hidden between two of the bubblefabs. I drifted in their direction. One was too far gone to do anything other than cough up blood, but her companion heaved himself to a sitting position as the bug drew nearer. The shrapnel had, I saw, stripped off his face and left him blind. The arm nearest me was down to a shoulder stump and protruding bone fragments.

  ‘What—’ he pleaded.

  The jacketed slug punched him flat. Beside him, the other soldier cursed me to some hell I hadn’t heard of before, and then died strangling on her own blood. I hovered over her for a few moments, gun half levelled, then tipped the bug about as something banged flatly, down by the battlewagon. I scanned the shoreline beside Sutjiadi’s impromptu funeral pyre, and picked out motion at the water’s edge. Another soldier, almost uninjured - he must have crawled under the structure of the battlewagon and escaped the worst of the blast. The gun in my hand was below the level of the bug’s screen. He saw only the polalloy suit and the Wedge vehicle. He got up, shaking his head numbly. There was blood running out of his ears.

  ‘Who?’ he kept saying. ‘Who?’

  He wandered distractedly into the shallows, looking around him at the devastation, then back at me. I chinned up my faceplate.

  ‘Lieutenant Kovacs?’ His voice boomed, overloud with his sudden deafness. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘We did,’ I told him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. He watched my lips, uncomprehending.

  I raised the interface gun. The shot pinned him up against the hull for a moment, then blew him clear again as it exploded. He collapsed into the water and floated there, leaking thick clouds of blood.

  Movement from the ’Chandra.

  I whipped about on the bug and saw a
polalloy-suited figure stumble down the entry rank and collapse. A mob suit leap over the bug’s screen and I landed in the water, kept upright by the suit’s gyros. A dozen strides took me to the crumpled form, and I saw the Sunjet blast that had charred through the stomach at one side. The wound was massive.

  The faceplate hinged up, and Deprez lay gasping beneath it.

  ‘Carrera,’ he managed hoarsely. ‘Forward hatch.’

  I was already moving, already knowing bone-deep I was too late.

  The forward hatch was blown on emergency evac. It lay half buried in a crater of sand with the force of the explosive bolts that had thrown it there. Footprints beside it where someone had jumped the three metres from hull to beach. The prints led off in a sprinted line to the polalloy shed.

  Fuck you, Isaac, fuck you for a diehard motherfucker.

  I burst through the door to the shed brandishing the Kalashnikov. Nothing. Not a fucking thing. The locker room was as I’d left it. The female noncom’s corpse, the scattering of equipment in low light. Beyond the hatch, the shower was still running. The reek of the polalloy drifted out to me.

  I ducked inside, checked corners. Nothing.

  Fuck.

  Well, it figures. I shut down the shower system absently. What did you expect, that he’d be easy to kill?

  I went back outside to find the others, and tell them the good news.

  Deprez died while I was gone.

  When I got back to him, he’d given up breathing and was staring up at the blue sky as if slightly bored with it. There was no blood - at close range, a Sunjet cauterises totally, and from the wound it looked as if Carrera had got him point blank.

  Vongsavath and Wardani had found him before me. They were knelt in the sand a short distance away on either side of him. Vongsavath clutched a captured blaster in one hand, but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She barely looked up as my shadow fell across her. I dropped a hand on her shoulder in passing, and went to crouch in front of the archaeologue.