War Machine (The Combat-K Series)

by Andy Remic

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, almost reverently. Since McEvoy’s murder, Keenan seemed to have adopted an invisible mantle, an aura of quiet but dreadful respect.

  “I’m not sure,” said Keenan. His voice was a low growl. He lit a home-rolled, and the ceiling air-filters clicked on. The glow of the cigarette turned his eyes amber.

  “It’s clear, as far as I can see,” said Pippa. “All the scanners ID. The Hornet hasn’t been tampered with. Anti-intrusion detectors are fine.”

  “Let’s just wait it out for a while.”

  They sat in the gloom, in silence. The rain started again, sheeting across the landscape. Lightning crackled distantly, illuminating a nightmare skyline: a skyline from the spastic brush of a mad artist. Towers bristled like spikes. Lights glimmered neon against a surreal staccato landscape.

  Franco stared hard at the back of Keenan’s head. Shall I tell him? he thought. Then: Naaah. It’s irrelevant. Anyway, he’ll find out soon enough. Franco chewed his lip, worried a little.

  “I’ll recon. Watch for my signal; then bring in the Apache so we can transfer the kit.”

  “Yes,” said Pippa.

  Keenan stepped out into the rain, and was instantly gone. Pippa watched on the scanners, and glanced up, realising Rebekka was staring hard at her: a focused, intense stare.

  “What you looking at?”

  “You said you’d kill me.” Rebekka was shivering a little. Pippa felt herself deflate.

  “I... apologise. Those words were said in anger. Don’t take it too personally; I’ve had a kind of hard life.” She smiled. “Maybe we could be friends?”

  “That would be... better,” smiled Rebekka uncertainly.

  “It’s a long time since I’ve had a friend,” said Pippa with a deep sigh. She saw Keenan’s signal. “Come on, the boss says we’re good to go.”

  “Thank God for that!” blurted Franco.

  Pippa spun up the rotors, and gave him a sideways glance. “You sound very relieved, Franco. Something you’re not telling us?”

  “No, no. No. No! Well, yes,yes, maybe, possibly, but that’s the whole damn point. I’m not telling you.” He grinned with the smugness of the deranged.

  Keenan peered into the darkened interior. “Cam?”

  “Yeah, Keenan, I’m here.”

  “You OK?”

  “Hmm, sort of, except for a pounding at the fists of that ginger lunatic.”

  “Ahh, so that’s how he got out.”

  “Yes.” Cam spun slowly, a grey light blinking. “Bastard gave me a right hook, sent me bouncing down the corridor like a ping pong ball. Let’s just say he caught me unawares.”

  “Never underestimate the insane.”

  “Believe me, Keenan, I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  “Everything else OK?”

  “As far as I can ascertain. The rain has been driving me mad with its incessant pounding. I didn’t realise we were putting down in the tropical season.”

  Keenan nodded, watching the Apache skim low over the landing port and touch down nearby. Donning Gore-tex jackets, which soon glistened, Keenan and the others began transferring weapons, WarSuits, ammo, flak-armour, bombs and other kit from the belly of the Apache into the Hornet’s bomb-proof hold. They attracted little attention in the bustling surroundings; FukTruks roared and flyers hummed overhead. All around the noise was a magnification of chaos. Combat K worked, with the help of Rebekka, loading and checking equipment.

  “Where will you go now?” asked Keenan, during a lull where he lit a cigarette. Under the canopy of the Hornet’s low wing, he watched heavy raindrops rolling and dropping with a fast tick tick tick.

  “I’ll build a new life here,” said Rebekka. She smiled; it lit up her face. “I’ll just have to keep a low profile, away from the Syndicates.”

  “Will you be safe?”

  “As safe as any other gun-running Syndicate-hunted proxer on a human-run cash-only lawless non-policed world.” She grinned. “So, things haven’t got any worse, then. Looks like the Syndicates were on to me; shit. I thought I was too clever for them.”

  “Never underestimate the enemy,” said Keenan. He looked down, blowing smoke to his boots.

  “The enemy?”

  “Yeah, I think the Syndicates have earned that tag from me... for sure. I was in my own little world of pain. I’d forgotten such... scumstill existed, still operated, still abused the weak and the poor. When I’ve completed my current mission—if I’m still alive—then... hell yeah, I’ll be back.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his thumb, leaving a smudge of machine gun oil. “I’ll be back, and I’ll be packing nukes.”

  “Come on Keenan, you lazy bastard, these cases are heavy!” As if to emphasise his point, Franco allowed his to thud against the ground, and he leant on it, panting, sweat sheening his face.

  Keenan stood, and with Rebekka close behind, moved back into the rain, which clattered against his Gore-tex. Only then did he see the dark-swathed figure standing, almost nonchalantly, with a long, barely disguised industrial molecule stripper—or IMS—in both hands. Water gleamed against the deadly, terrible weapon. It lifted and pointed at the group. Keenan swallowed.

  The figure threw back the hood of the thick black coat. A battered, bruised face glared at them; one eye was swollen shut and ringed with thick purple flesh. The nose was twisted. Lips, smashed to a pulp, were stuck together with tape.

  Franco gave a wave. “How’s it going, Betezh?”

  Betezh growled something incomprehensible. The hydraulic footfalls of Louis the Razor-droid stomped behind him, through the rain. The battered AI halted, metal hands on metal hips, staring at them.

  “Kill them all,” it hissed.

  Betezh nodded, refocusing the IMS. The charge whined, and Keenan tensed; when the gun ignited it would take out him, Combat K, half the Hornet and possibly a ten metre cube of concretealloy runway beneath their feet. An IMS was not, technically, a weapon; they were used in the building trade for construction and—more importantly—destruction. A man with an IMS could demolish a skyscraper single-handedly. A drugged maniac could rearrange half a city quite competently.

  Keenan felt his Techrim dig in his back, hard, real. But there was no time to draw, to fire. It was as useless as deadwood... and all his dreams, his nightmares, of a needful revenge, a necessary hunt, a joyful murder, would disintegrate, spiralling down as his skin, his muscle, his bones, his shell powdered into dust and tumbled into nothing. His girls would lie cold in anodyne graves, unloved, tainted spirits, victims of a non-justice. It tasted bad in his mouth: tox, nuke-ash. His hand crawled towards his gun as he saw the muscles writhe and contract in Betezh’s beaten face... and realised with a dawning horror there would be no words, no reprieve, no simple parody of parole...

  Just brutal extermination.

  Julian X was a SIM. And it was a bad day.

  With the others—SIMs and human soldiers alike—he helped load float-carts with the corpses of his dead companions, mown down by the mini-guns of the Apache helicopter on the roof of the Syndicate HQ. Although he felt few emotions—they had been efficiently machined out of his skull—he felt something as his gloved bio-mechanical hands dropped and closed, lifted and scattered corpses and body-parts onto the low-walled titanium trailers. Here lay Hugo VV, head caved open, brains, skull and tiny mechanical clusters fighting for precedence in the blood and grey mush soup. There, DickFish XII, both arms severed and mechanical eyes smashed into black holes by the onslaught of whining mini-gun bullets.

  To top it all, the top dog big boss dude in charge—McEvoy—had been taken by the escapees. Kidnapped! Abducted! It was unheard of, a disgrace. Julian X wondered idly what time they’d let him into the feeding VATS. His hunger was gnawing. And he thought about his mother; in a distant, abstract manner. After all, he had been young during severance from umbilication. And, like most SIMs, he thought about his mother when the hunger came.

  “What is this? Human intruder?”
The voice was the mechanical clicking of Justice D. Justice D was renowned for having very, very little sense of humour. He was, in fact, ideal for hunting REBs out in the DREGS. Julian X had seen Justice D mow down a whole platoon of unarmed female protesters with placards; then head home for chilli beans on toast. Justice D was legend.

  Julian glanced up. A tiny grey-white single-person stealth jet was hovering above the open roof. Strangely, none of the auto-Z Turrets had locked on and blasted the hell out of the craft, which was what normally happened to unidentified vessels behaving suspiciously.

  “Must have permission,” said Julian X, pausing to glance down at a severed face in his gloved hand.

  “No. There is no registration blip,” snapped Justice D, checking a chart on his arm. His mechanical eyes clicked and whirred. “The craft is an Interceptor. This craft is not known to us. Sound an alert. We must shoot it from the skies!”

  But even as Justice D was announcing his far from eloquent appraisal, the small craft dropped, suddenly, circled the chamber low over the soldiers’ heads with a blast of exhaust, then tipped its nose to the sky and disappeared instantly.

  “This a strange day,” said Julian X.

  “A bad day for no umbilication,” confirmed Justice D.

  They nodded in unity, and went back to loading the dead.

  Mr. Max stared at the stars, caught himself in time, and paused, the Interceptorhanging suspended, as below, lazily, The City turned. Why travel when you can fire your ship vertically, wait for the planet to spin, then drop in on a designated target? Mr. Max found it an economical way of traversing any planet.

  It saved him energy for what he did best.

  He licked thin lips.

  His black eyes stared like cold dead cobalt. With a click Directional finders locked to Freeport 557.

  Mr. Max dropped silently out of nowhere.

  Part 3

  State of the Art

  Chapter 8

  Crash and Burn

  Ket was a hot and humid planet fed by twin suns; one cool and orange, one older, larger, a white fish eye nailed to the heavens. With both suns heating the tumbling ball of jungle, there was perhaps only an hour of night between the two of them, depending in which latitude one happened to be standing.

  The planet’s regions ranged from savage equatorial jungle, a mass of stinking rotting vegetation wreathed in steam, and suffering ten hours of rainfall every eighteen; to salt deserts so vast and dune-raked there was no possible crossing for water-based organic life without machine support. Through the jungles and deserts tore mountains, staggered staccato ranges machine-gunned from the buckled earth a hundred million years previously and constantly changing thanks to the planet’s violent and apparently random seismic activity. Many mountains, when not rumbling in quake mode, towered over ten thousand metres high, their summits and the majority of their upper flanks permanently wreathed in snow.

  Ket had originally been “discovered” and tagged as an Adventure Planet, back before the War. Whether your particular fetish was hunting strange spiked reptilian beasts through the vast million year-old steaming jungles, adventure motorbike racing over sweeping hardcore seas of salt desert, power-boat exploration across the Milk Oceans, which often suffered from violent whirlpools and sudden storms; and again thanks to seismic intrusion, mountain climbing, ice climbing, crevasse exploration, desert survival, and the reasonably new sport of caving in seismic rifts, Ket was the perfect location for those with a very large screw loose and the need for an adrenaline injection.

  Rugged, wild, dangerous; and when one factored into the equation the prospect of meeting one of the fiercely territorial tribes of Ket warrior clans that roamed the planet in a state of constant battle, conflict, war, it added that extra zing so many thrill-seekers needed to enjoy their lives back home at the bank, insurance company, management hierarchy.

  Then had come Unification, and the integration of Ket into the mainstream of Quad-Gal politics, economics and social acceptance. Ket’s government won their votes, put in a bid to Quad-Gal and was accepted with open arms into the Whole. QG offered an umbilical giving access to SPIRAL port technology, and Ket was linked—like so many planets—at the end of a SPIRAL dock. It made life easier for visiting tourists, trade, and political negotiation. Once spacecraft integrated with the SPIRAL dock it was a matter of a few short minutes before the person, or cargo, was dropped down the SPIRAL to a series of anodyne land-ports at SPIRAL’s End. This technology had helped Quad-Gal open up the Galaxies; it was also a badge of social acceptance, of civilisation, of trade unity, hell, even humanity.

  The problem with Ket was a three million year history of war. The clans and tribes were natural warriors, larger and stockier than humans; the most ferocious had killing blades gem-grafted to the bones of their forearms. Manhood initiation rituals included this bone-grafting surgery without anaesthetic (a process that killed thousands) followed by immediate combat. The Ket-i were close to seven feet in height, stocky, heavily muscled, nearly entirely black and hairless, thanks to the proximity and mixed radiation of the planet’s dual suns. Many wore traditional iridescent green-skin war tattoos with pride; it was usual to find tribal markings squirming across torsos, arms, necks and faces, often with lists of script naming the Ket-i warriors bested in battle. Most went naked, and shunned technology and more traditional projectile weapons. Although the Helix War had brought a massive influx of said technology and the planet was awash with guns and bombs, missiles and tanks, traditional Ket-i found this battle technology abhorrent to the point of sacrilege. Mechanical weapons brought impurity, they argued. It was like introducing a deviant to the gene pool.

  After the Quad-Gal Peace Unification—which effectively brought the Helix War to a necessary end—Ket refused to surrender arms, quoting a catalogue of war crimes committed against its people, which meant that due to ancient esoteric Honour Laws it could not, in fact, surrender until all parties were totally annihilated. Thus, in breach of Quad-Gal law, the SPIRAL docks were subsequently decommissioned, leaving Ket to regress into a shadow of its former social and diplomatic self. The Quad-Gal saw further breaches of law, and, in further escalations, more and more sanctions were imposed.

  Ket, in turn, saw this activity as a betrayal and announced war against all representatives of Quad-Gal. War, in fact, against every living organism that did not reside on Ket.

  They did not see this as an act of madness (which it surely was); just an act of necessity as befitted the contractual obligation of their quite insane and logistically impossible honour code.

  Keenan, teeth bared, breath frozen in his throat, waited to die. Then, everything happened so fast it was a blur of incomprehension, which saw Keenan on his knees, hands over his head, wondering why the hell he wasn’t a corpse.

  Cam, spinning slowly as he watched events unfold, clicked into battle-mode. For a PopBot this was a simple sub-routine, which routed all power and instruction sets into the art of destruction/survival. The only indicators were black lights glittering on the PopBot’s casing, and a quicker turn to its spin.

  Cam shot from the shadowy hold of the Hornet using Keenan’s bulk as a mask, veering at the last moment, with only a millionth of a millimetre between its case and Keenan’s skull, to strike Betezh a crashing blow to the centre of his forehead. Betezh reeled, IMS pointing at the sky and discharging with a crackle that flickered like lightning for a half-klick radius. On the rebound, Cam whirled in a low thrumming arc under the belly of the Hornet, swinging wide, then smashing back as if attached to an invisible elastic cord to deliver a second, skull-crushing blow to the back of Louis’s head. The GG dropped instantly, its IMS discharging with fizzles of electricity to neatly remove its own legs.

  Louis lay there, twitching and examining its destroyed anatomy. Runs of metal streaked the concrete like fluorescent mercury blood. Gradually, the GG lay back and was still, the IMS clattering to the ground and dark eyes closing in finality.

  Cam moved to hove
r near Keenan.

  “I’d get that second gun if I was you. Betezh looks stunned.”

  Betezh was, indeed, stunned, sitting on the concrete with a confused and childlike look stamped on his features. A lump the size of an egg hovered above his eyes, blood-red and decorated with webs of burst purple veins.

  Keenan hurried forward and prised the IMS from slack fingers. He stared hard at Betezh.

  “Ain’t this your mate, Franco?”

  Franco grunted, and dropping to one knee he bound Betezh’s hands with a loop of raze-wire.

  “What you doing?”

  “He’s coming with us.”

  “Why?”

  “Interrogation.”

  Keenan met Franco’s gaze. “What’s this about?”

  “Believe me, Keenan, he said some stuff back at the hotel—I know, I know, I’ll explain later—but he said some stuff that is important for all of us: important for Combat K.”

  Keenan stared down. “I suppose we can always dump his carcass in space, later.”

  Suddenly, Rebekka was there. “I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but there’s a lot of interest coming this way.”

  “Interest?” said Pippa.

  “The Syndicates.”

  “They found us,” snapped Keenan. “Pippa, get the engines started. Franco, drag this heap of offal to the Medical Hold. And Rebekka...” Keenan glanced over her shoulder. “Shit, I can’t leave you here with those.” A storm of soldiers appeared a half-klick away, mostly SIMs; they started to fire, bullets whining and humming across Freeport 557. Close by a flyer was struck multiple times. It rattled, then exploded. A ball of blue gas screamed into the sky. Other people, aliens, were cut down by stray shots. Bullets crashed up the flank of the Hornet as beneath engines glowed hot, and Keenan grabbed Rebekka’s arm. She did not resist. “You’re going to have to come with us.”