War Machine (The Combat-K Series)

by Andy Remic

  Klik shrugged. “The stores back on the Gem Rig. Mr. Keenan, when you see so many of your friends die, you need a little something to keep you going. It brings great reserves of strength; it fortifies the blood; it makes a Ket-i warrior powerful.”

  With a hiss, Keenan tossed the bottle into the lake. It sank without trace.

  Klik’s eyes widened. “No!” he breathed, lips wet and glistening, face contorting in horror. “Mr. Keenan, what have you done?”

  “Help you overcome your addiction, lad.”

  Klik ran to the edge of the poisonous soup and, for a terrible moment, Keenan thought the boy was going to leap in after the bottle. Instead he turned, his whole body shaking with... rage.

  Despite the boy’s youth, Keenan was suddenly glad of his MPK and Techrim pistol. He eyed the huge hunting knife at the boy’s belt; its blade was serrated, black, more a machete than a knife. Klik had blessed the blade, said it was the weapon that would slay the enemies of his dead family.

  Klik let out a howl, a screeching wail that cut through the mist, and then he was gone, stampeding through the group and disappearing into the swirling white. His footsteps, slapping on bone, quickly faded. A terrible silence seemed to close in, oppressive and claustrophobic.

  “Shit,” said Keenan.

  “Well done,” said Pippa, “ever the genius at child psychology.”

  “What would you have me do? Allow the kid to get slowly massacred, then lead us straight into an eel-lake?”

  “No, but the lad’s young and traumatised. He’s seen so many of his friends killed. Is it any surprise he’s turned to drink? After all, we’re not so damned perfect; it’s the first thing wedo when we have a bad day at work, and we’resupposed to be adults.”

  “Anybody for coffee?” said Franco, holding up the pan of boiling water.

  The mist swirled around their hiatus in conversation.

  Then a noise cut through the white. It was a howl, high-pitched, keen, reverberating. It held the high note for maybe a minute, wavering and fixed, then died into a lullaby of silence.

  Combat K stood frozen: statues, a tableaux.

  “Was that Klik?” said Franco softly. The pan in his hand wavered.

  Keenan gave a quick shake of his head, bringing his MPK round and making sure the weapon was ready to go. “Wrong direction.” His words were clipped, economical.

  “The mist can play games with sound,” said Pippa, voice barely above a whisper.

  Then they came: ghosts running in crouches, sprinting from the mist like a flood. One warrior, huge and frightening in visual ferocity, leapt at Keenan whose MPK screamed in hairline trigger-instinct, bullets raking the sky, the mist, as the alien crashed into him bearing him violently to the ground with one knee in Keenan’s throat, the other in his chest. Keenan slammed against the hard bone-rock with a grunt of surprise, MPK gun useless and body shocked into a stunned incapability by the sheer blurred speed of the attack... and throat dry with instant fear. He fought back with a snarl hammering a right hook into the alien’s jaw but the blow barely rocked the figure and a bone dagger rose above Keenan’s eyes. Its tip was stained with enemy blood. The warrior’s face loomed above him like a monster, contorted in a killing frenzy. Light sparkled from emerald shards woven in the warrior’s eyelids making pools of green flood his face. Keenan scrabbled in desperation for his Techrim but he knew time was his enemy a brutal enemy. Pressure on chest and throat crushed him and he could not draw and fire before the dagger plunged into his eye and into his sweet soft brain beyond. He cursed his loose attitude and weakness and his unreadiness and it was gone and done in an instant as the dagger slammed towards his face and in reflex his eyes snapped shut...

  Chapter 11

  The City of Bone

  Keenan was a little boy again. He lived in a small house on a small street in a small town. The house had two bedrooms, no garden, and a sloping stone-paved back yard. His mother grew roses in pots, huge towering bushes with severe thorns and bright heavy-scented blooms of red and pink. In the summer bees came and buzzed around the flowers, and once Keenan—only eight-years-old—had been stung by a big fat bee. With tears leaving trails down his face he had run across the flags, sandals flapping, up the steep stone steps and into the kitchen. He skidded left, nostrils twitching on a strange, strange smell and then... stopped dead. His mother lay, at the bottom of the stairs, head to the ground and twisted to one side, legs still trailing up onto the lower stairs. One arm was caught beneath her, one arm tossed carelessly above her head. Her eyes were open and staring as Keenan moved close. “Mom,” he said, his bee-sting forgotten, “Mom!” and the smell came to him from that black bottomless open stinking maw, the smell that always lingered on her breath and meant she would be bad to him because of the bad things he did, and more and more often the bad things had got worse, and her punishments were more violent as bruises blossomed like black and purple flowers up and down his legs, across his back and shoulders and backside. He crouched by her and looked into dead eyes. Something went click inside his soul as understanding flooded him, and he reached out and slowly prodded the corpse. Only then did he see the blood. A pool slowly expanded beneath her head on the wooden floor from a ten-inch crack in her skull. The blood was a deep rich crimson; a little like the full-scented blooms that grew in the back yard. Keenan dipped his finger into her blood and sniffed at it, then wiped it on his shorts.

  They found him two days later in a serious state of dehydration. The Urban Force kicked down the door after being alerted by neighbours, and a female officer called Ekaterina tenderly picked the little boy up, although he flinched at her touch as if she might strike him. She held him tight, her own pain melting in light of three miscarriages and a narrow walk across a tightrope, on one side of which lay the blade of a razor and oblivion; on the other, a vibrant beauty of new life.

  It took three months to clear the arse-ache bureaucracy of adoption paperwork. And as summer drew to a close Keenan found himself sitting on a park bench with two strange fat women who smelled of sweat and kept shoving packets of boiled sweets under his nose. He pushed them away. Ekaterina came, like a dream, walking down the gravel path. She was dressed in civilian clothes, a short green flared skirt, a cream blouse, knee-high brown boots, and the sun shone against her radiant skin making her glow. She smiled when she saw him, crouched down and held out her arms. He tugged free of the restrictive fat women, symbols of a bureaucracy aimed not at simplifying the adoption process, but of turning it into a nightmare of paperwork and pointless obstacles. He ran to her; fell into her arms, pushed his face into her hair and smelled her femininity underlined by a distant essence of coconut. He cried and her hair absorbed his tears. “There, my little love,” she was saying. “Everything’s all right now, everything will be just fine. I’ll look after you. You’re mine now. Nobody will ever hurt you again.”

  Keenan blinked as the dagger slammed towards his face. His mouth opened as a tiny sound escaped an “O” of disappointment that his life should end like this and he blinked as the snarling teeth-bared face above imploded with a crump as the bullet ate into his head and exploded in a mushroom of bone shards and blood mist. Lumps of burnt flesh exploded outwards. Keenan twisted as the corpse began its sideways topple and Pippa, Makarov levelled, transferred her gaze as if in slow motion as the second figure crashed into her and she went hammering backwards and down. Keenan pushed the corpse from him, surging to his knees; the next warrior was on him. The bone dagger slashed at his face, but he took the blow against his arm, crashing his fist into the attacker’s nose, a devastating blow that spread his attacker’s flesh. Slivers of diamond embedded in Keenan’s knuckles and he ducked a return slash, ramming a low punch into the warrior’s groin and drawing his Techrim smoothly. The man stepped back, grinned a snarl, and Keenan shot him in the face. Features disintegrated with an implosion of gristle and exit of bone.

  “Keenan!” Pippa’s voice was panicked. Keenan leapt to avoid a burst of machine gun
fire, his face dropping into a cool dark scowl of controlled anger and low-level hatred. He landed on his shoulder, rolled, came up firing. The Techrim barked in his hand, bullets past the boulders of bone and skimming a heavy-set warrior with yellow eyes. The Ket-i warrior’s Laz-Spear came up and a burst of unseen energy crackled across the clearing. Keenan was already diving, hitting the hard bone ground with a grunt that stripped skin from the palms of his hands; from his prone position he aimed the Techrim. The first 11mm bullet entered the warrior’s throat, destroying his voice box; the second smashed his clavicle and exited on a spray of shards like tiny raining teeth. The third found its mark between the Ket-i’s eyes and he folded in half, deflating, as Pippa pushed him aside with a snarl and grabbed the Laz-Spear.

  Keenan found his feet and whirled to see Franco engaged in a savage bout of fist-fighting. The Ket-i warrior was backing away as Franco delivered blistering combinations of left and right straights, left hooks and right uppercuts. The warrior’s face was blistered, and Keenan realised Franco had used the pan of boiling water as a weapon. Keenan’s Techrim tracked the alien Ket-i warrior, and slowly, with measured grace, he pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed the warrior’s skull, and his legs folded neatly beneath him; with a grunt of vomiting blood he mated with the bone-rock ground. Franco frowned, then whirled to Keenan...

  Who held up one finger, wait. He glanced back at Pippa. She was on her knees, her Makarov in both hands, head scanning from left to right. The mist swirled, thicker now. Silence flooded the clearing; a muffled silence after the sudden brutal onslaught.

  Four down, thought Keenan. But... where had they come from? And more importantly, how many were left? He loaded a fresh mag in his Techrim, clicks echoing through mist like a crackle of discharge. Then another enemy, moving fast, Laz-Spear levelled and the hiss blasted heat across the clearing. It picked Pippa up, hurling her across the platform and against the rocks where she slammed like a rag-doll, limbs contorted and angular, and hit the ground hard, face down. Keenan’s pistol was cracking as he tracked the warrior but he was there, a ghost from the mist, above Pippa’s limp form holding a long black blade to her throat.

  “I kill her.”

  The words were slurred but understandable, and Keenan froze, Techrim still locked on the warrior. I can take him, he thought. He flowed with the moment.

  “No,” said Franco, voice hushed.

  Keenan lifted his gun, palms open: submission. “OK.”

  He turned to the right as the mist parted, and a mammoth titan of a man—alien, Keenan corrected himself—emerged. He was heavily muscled and garbed for war. He stopped before Keenan, a good two heads taller, a scowl on his terrifyingly pierced and scarred face.

  “I am JuJu. You have invaded our world.”

  “We are not your enemy,” said Keenan, eyes locked, Techrim a hot prick-tease in his hand.

  “All are enemy. You must fight. You, and I, for supremacy here in this place; for your life.”

  Peripherally, Keenan saw Franco with two of the Ket-i; they held blades to his throat, and in deference to Pippa, to stop her having her throat slit, Franco had put up bloodied fists.

  “Drop your weapons. Or we cut the woman’s throat out.”

  Slowly, Keenan peeled free the MPK and it clattered on the bone platform. He tossed aside his Techrim and eyed the huge warrior warily. Hardly a fair fight, he thought, staring at the massive physical supremacy that greeted him. He grinned sourly. But then, who said life was going to be fair? Bitch.

  Four left, then. This was the leader; the four dead had been the scout party, or “testers”? To see what Combat K were capable of? Keenan growled. Well, he thought: fuck you; I’ll show you what I can do.

  JuJu was bristling, a powerhouse of meat. He stripped free his weapons and grinning down at Keenan, advanced. Keenan stepped forward, and JuJu attacked, faster than anyone so large had a right to move.

  Fists lashed out, left and right and Keenan just managed to dodge. With growing horror he realised the Ket-i warrior was armed; JuJu had short blades bone-welded to his forearms, and tiny slivers of sharpened gems attached to each finger like glittering razor nails.

  Keenan backed away, fists up. “Nice to see a fair fight,” he snapped. “Pretty little jewellery.”

  “I will slice you open like fish,” said JuJu. He no longer grinned. For the Ket, war was a serious business.

  He leapt, and Keenan feinted left, then caught the warrior with a crashing right hook that powered the Ket-i down on one knee. Keenan slammed another right hook, then crashed his left knee to the warrior’s jaw. Gem-blades flashed, and with tiny cracks,JuJu’s forearm blades sprang forward past fists and slashed at Keenan’s head.

  Keenan laughed a short bitter bark. “So, fucker, no playing fair with you, is there?”

  JuJu said nothing, swaying.

  “Hurt you, didn’t I, maggot?”

  JuJu stood. Blood trickled from one corner of his mouth and his nose. He attacked again, a blur, blades slashing the air, Keenan stumbling back to avoid the onslaught. Reaching Franco’s hissing burner, he scooped the small item up and launched it but JuJu clattered the jet aside to rattle across the bone ground and roll at Franco’s feet, blue flames jetting like tiny spears. Keenan ran at the Ket-i warrior, eyes focused and the blades flashed up to meet him as Franco, eyes gleaming, tapped the burner with his sandal. The hissing jet rolled into the creamy pool and suddenly there was a whoosh as a sheet of fire erupted across the gaseous marsh and billowed out across the platform, scorching hair and flesh as it screamed. JuJu, distracted, caught the full force of a barrage of blows from Keenan which ended with a double-booted hammer to the face. The great Ket-i warrior hit the ground and Keenan was on him, one boot beneath the warrior’s arm, the other coming down with a crack that snapped the bone-welded blade from JuJu’s forearm. The warrior screamed, a bloodcurdling sound, as Keenan rammed another fist into his face, breaking a tooth; then he stomped on the second bone-welded jewelled blade. This, too, snapped with a geyser of blood from torn forearm flesh which showered Keenan. Keenan snatched one blade, head snapping right to where Pippa—in the shockwave of erupting fire—had ducked and rammed her elbow back into the Ket-i’s throat with the force of an assassin; which she was. The warrior staggered, and Keenan launched the severed jewel blade across the clearing with a hiss of rushing air. It slammed the warrior’s eye socket and dropped him without a sound. Blood poured out and turned the bone-rock red. Franco was struggling with his two warriors, and Keenan grabbed the second severed forearm blade and pressed it into JuJu’s throat, hard. Blood welled against the razor tip.

  “Call them off, fucker.”

  “Kazxai!” shouted JuJu. Instantly, the two warriors backed away from Franco, who deflated a little, his face and upper torso battered and covered in blood and bruising.

  “Pippa, a gun.”

  Pippa handed Keenan his Techrim, and two cracks echoed across the bone platform. The Ket-i warriors reeled back, both with bullets in their skulls. One lay still, leg twitching, the other rolled and fell into the marsh where the flames had died to nothing more than an amber murmur. The body sank, and there was a sudden frenzy of activity as huge eels, their black glistening coils rising above the surface, fed. Bubbles rolled across the marsh waters. One arm lifted from the depths, stripped to the bone with only a few twitching tendons still attached to flexing fingers, but then the feeding was done and the arm sank, and the soup returned through ripples to a gentle stillness.

  Keenan looked back, down at JuJu.

  “You are a man of war,” said the Ket-i around bubbles of blood. Keenan nodded, eyes hard.

  “You prefer to die with gun or blade?” Keenan said.

  “Blade,” said JuJu, eyes fixed on Keenan’s. “I expect no less.”

  Keenan nodded, and tensed. And realised JuJu was laughing.

  “This a comedy moment for you, son?”

  “I am just imagining, in this the moment of my death, your face when you
reach the Fractured Emerald.”

  Keenan glanced at Pippa, then Franco. Franco shrugged, and dabbed at his battered lips.

  “Tell me what you know?”

  “They know your mission, those in the Metal Palace.”

  “And you are?”

  “I am JuJu, one of the Princes of KellKet. I volunteered to hunt you down. Even men such as you will find it difficult to reach the Fractured Emerald. You will never penetrate the defences of the Metal Palace.” His voice dropped, eyes glittering. “This is not your world, human. You must leave here. You must go home. Only death awaits you, death and something... more.”

  “I seek... information,” said Keenan, “that is all. There is something I need to know; and the Fractured Emerald will find answers for me.”

  “Only if she chooses to Commune. She must give freely, Keenan. Did Prince Akeez not explain to you?”

  “Prince...” Keenan grinned, relaxing back on his heels. He gestured to JuJu to stand, and in defeat the huge warrior climbed wearily to his feet. His shoulders sagged and he bore his betterment like a cloak. Blood pumped from his torn arms and pattered to the bone-rock. “Tell me what you know of Prince Akeez.”

  “Only that you are betrayed, Keenan. Akeez is an evil man. His dream is greater than you could ever imagine.”

  “Convenient. Maybe you’re bluffing?”

  JuJu shrugged.

  Franco jogged over. “Are we killing him, Keenan? I’ll be honest, this place gives me the creeps. And now it’s filled with bodies, I’d like to move on; find somewhere to make a fresh pan of coffee.”