by Andy Remic
He tried to sleep. Sleep would not come.
He tried to think of happier times, but, strangely, there didn’t really appear to be any.
What did I do with my life? he thought sourly. He’d only wanted to be a soldier, a squaddie, an infantryman. He’d loved the sound, the work, the ethos. He’d signed up aged seventeen; threw himself into Boot Camp, worked his knickers off to make a good soldier. Impressing his COs, he’d been drafted into Special Ops, a long slippery slope of gradual mental and ethical degradation, which had led, eventually, over many decades, to him working as a Spook for a politician slick bitch like General Kotinevitch. And, yes, for a while he had revelled in his role; he had been important, made serious decisions, been up, up, up, launched flying to the top of the ziggurat, and if not directly in charge, then at least seriously influential. However, the toes that you step on while you’re on your way up, may be the same ones that you kiss going down. And now? Irony, now he was a piece of burnt toast in a boat, and, more importantly, a piece of blackened toast... about to die.
No children, he realised suddenly.
Always been too busy; never met the right woman.
He had always wanted children. He nodded to himself.
Shit.
There was a gentle bump.
Betezh lay for a while, trying to ease a droplet of non-existent water from some porous orifice within the desert cavern of his mouth. Then he frowned. His harsh features compressed, aided by severe dehydration. A bump?
Betezh had crawled across the alloy floor of the boat, and sunburnt hands like cooked lobster grasped the rim, hauling his bulk to the edge; land! Land! “It’s land,” he croaked, hauled himself onto the rim, and rolled off amongst the rock pools. He struggled, splashed about, made it onto hands and knees, and then crawled sideways like a crab up the beach towards the protection of the jungle.
He halted a few feet away, staring suspiciously at the massive black expanse; it was even more forbidding under nightfall. He shrugged. What did he have to lose?
Betezh had crawled into solid blackness...
And around him, the jungle creaked.
Fruit!
He’d found fruit!
Betezh gorged like an animal on the ripe soft Ket melon. Chewing a head-sized hole in the rind with gnawing sounds, he plunged his face into the soft flesh, slurping juice, allowing the coolness to soothe his baked skin as he drank his fill, ate his fill, then tossed the huge empty husk aside and belched. He lay on his back, staring up at wavering creepers in the near-absolute blackness, and listening to the chirrup of insects and the far-off lumbering of some prehistoric monstrosity; Betezh sighed.
I’m not going to die after all! he thought.
I’m not going to die! Not going to die!
I will father children! I will meet the right girl!
I will...
“Get up!” The voice was harsh, guttural, and did not inspire confidence. Betezh opened his eyes and looked up into the glowing tip of a Laz-Spear. He scowled. Oh how the Gods mocked him!
Dawn was breaking. Streamers of fire from two directions divided the sky with jagged oil blades. Steam rose from much of the jungle undergrowth. Heat and humidity were already increasing, and Betezh, sweat stinging his sunburn, climbed warily to his feet.
There were twelve Ket-i warriors, huge powerful males wearing bones of the slaughtered with pride. Several were armed with sub-machine guns, most with Laz-Spears and shoulder-holstered plastic pistols.
“I am a stranger in your land,” began Betezh, and the Laz-Spear cracked against his skull and he hit the ground, hard. Betezh growled something incomprehensible and touched his head. Blood came away on his fingers. He glanced up, lips baring teeth like a rabid mutt, but the warrior wasn’t watching him. He was gazing off into the jungle, eyes narrowed, nostrils twitching.
Betezh slowly followed this line of vision, but could see nothing.
There was crashing through the undergrowth, as of a panicked sprinter; a warrior burst into view, slammed to a halt, and gestured wildly behind him.
“Alien,” he managed between gasps for oxygen.
The warriors spread out, Betezh forgotten and left prostrate near the centre of their sudden battle formation. Betezh made as if to scramble for cover, but a glance and wave of a Laz-Spear made him stay put. “Between the devil and the deep blue sea,” he muttered, and spat into the woven jungle matting.
“Not the devil,” said a soft, fluid voice. The man stepped forward, boots creaking the jungle carpet as he walked. He stopped, looked around at the twitchy Ket-i warriors, now numbering thirteen and brandishing weapons at this new intruder. “Just me.”
Betezh gawped like a child without a lollipop.
The man was small, slim and wiry, head bald, torso naked and gleaming under virgin sunlight. He wore simple baggy trousers and tight boots. He was powerfully muscled despite his size, and his flesh was heavily scarred. He carried nothing more than a long knife, black and serrated, dull and held nonchalantly. He was smiling a disarming smile. No man should have been smiling when facing thirteen Ket-i warriors.
Betezh swallowed, despite dehydration.
It was Mr. Max.
“Betezh? What areyou doing down there?I’ve come to take you back.” Mr. Max leant against a tree and surveyed the group idly. He stared hard at Betezh with those black fish eyes. “General Vitch is most displeased. You have shown a distinct lack of progress.”
Betezh nodded; with one hand, he toyed with the staples in his face.
The Ket-i, hardened by millennia of war, attacked with unity. They moved fast, hard, Laz-Spears and sub-machine guns combining to form the perfect integration of violent assault.
Betezh watched as if in a dream.
Mr. Max moved between the Ket-i, his simple blade cutting and slicing. He ducked, disembowelled a warrior, swayed right as a Laz-Spear flashed by his ear, severed the outstretched arm, and as blood pumped over him, the Laz-Spear detonating charges in its fall to the ground, he whirled, ducking low, blade stabbing into a belly, slashing through a windpipe. It was neat, economical. Bullets whined past his face and he swayed back, turning the dance into a roll. He cut another throat, stabbed a warrior through the eye, left elbow ramming back into a face, knife coming round on an arc of blood droplets to slam into the forehead of the huge leader. Mr. Max rode the man to the ground, knees on the Ket-i warrior’s chest, then wrenched free the blade and cleaned it thoughtfully.
Betezh gasped. “You killed them all,” he blurted.
“You expect me to stop and play chess, perhaps?”
“You moved... so fast.”
Mr. Max, who had been checking the butchered corpses, stopped. His head turned and the black eyes fixed on Betezh, who shivered. He’s a fucking machine, thought Betezh... and then something came to him, information he’d read years previous, a concept he had once overheard, from Kotinevitch. Only now did the puzzle slot neatly into place.
The concept had been that of Seed Hunter.
Betezh shivered again. Previously, Mr. Max’s reputation had been just that, a reputation. And yes, he had completed his missions, but then, so did a hundred other mercenaries under Kotinevitch’s command. She was a General; that’s what she did, had people killed for the greater good. But Betezh had watched Mr. Max work, and work was the correct word; there had been no emotion there, no empathy, not even detachment, just a brutal and methodical economy.
“You’re a Seed Hunter, aren’t you?” said Betezh.
Mr. Max was there, beside him, his speed a blur, and the knife pressing Betezh’s throat. He stared into those black eyes—like glass—and knew he was dead: an emotionless dispatch.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself, Betezh. Or I might forget Vitch’s instructions to bring you back alive. You and I both know, Seed Hunters are illegal, killed on sight, burned.” He relaxed a little, settling back cross-legged, his knife before him like a totem. He idly pushed a severed arm out of the way, and fixed Betezh with a
smile. “You do not understand my kind.”
Betezh licked dry lips. He gave a single nod.
“Seed Hunters are not like you read in the text books.”
“I thought you were supposed to have metal skin?”
“It is an alloy, woven into our flesh; makes us hard to kill.”
“And you have a machine brain?”
“Don’t we all?” said Mr. Max.
“I thought you would be... bigger. You are presented as robots... machines, like the AIs.”
“That would be... incorrect,” said Mr. Max. He gave a smile that had nothing to do with humour.
“General Kotinevitch knows, doesn’t she?” said Betezh with a sudden flash of intuition.
“Yes.”
“And yet she still uses you?”
“Our kind are efficient.”
“To the point of genocide?”
Mr. Max rose smoothly. He looked back through the jungle. Sounds of engines echoed, revving and screaming; somewhere distant, machine guns yammered.
“We all die,” said Mr. Max. He turned and strode away.
Klik hated the darkness, despised the cold. Having spent most of his childhood in the jungles and The Bone City, amongst fallen heat-dried trees, wind-blown sand and bone houses, and mostly outside in the daylight, the place in which he found himself was a horror he could not fully absorb, could not truly comprehend. During Klik’s formative years he had spent the short night hours of Ket indoors by the fire, watching the flames and revelling in their dance, enjoying the heat, talking with the demons therein and allowing the dancers to soothe him. Now, in this underground vault, the coldness had quickly penetrated through his scant clothing, and he felt as if it was eating his bones, eating his soul.
The infiltration had been surprisingly easy; a few local charms stolen from small children, and Klik soon reinvented himself as a member of the tribe that had once spat him free and banished him to a future filled with no hope, only a promise of oblivion. Klik, however, had insider knowledge on how tribes operated: customs and styles, subtle speech patterns and hand gestures, and so was prepared—physically and mentally—for the challenge ahead.
However, the further he progressed with his plan—the more he was successful, victorious!—so the more his confidence wavered, the more his surety was eroded by the acid stench of fear... not fear of death, but a desolate horror at the possibility he would not accomplish his task before death embraced him.
The cold, the darkness, the feeling of being entombed beneath the ground was also affecting him mentally. He continually shivered, shudders flowing like a wayward tide through his flesh and left him drained, weak, deeply sick to his stomach. But still he forced himself on, deeper and deeper, and finally into a vast dark cavern, the black arena he had overheard from slack-jawed guards on patrol as he hung like a monkey from overhead pipe-work. Something big and dangerous was going down, and instinctively Klik knew it involved JuJu.
Ahhh, JuJu, the warrior who had killed his father. Klik had been only seven at the time, watching in fascinated horror as JuJu descended with his Royal Honour Guard, exchanged a few short words and slammed his Laz-Spear through his father’s unprotected chest. Klik’s father had fallen to his knees, and JuJu had remained, casual, holding the dying, twitching man rigid on the end of the weapon, and, amazingly, still speaking as if discussing the weather, or a recent gem crop. JuJu’s eyes had been wide and unfocused, spiritually empty on the hallucinogenic root of Gatella Cheop.
JuJu finally kicked the dead body from his spear with contempt, ducked and entered the family home, a modest—some would say poor—bone house, and stood with hands on hips staring at Klik’s mother. Klik had whimpered, withdrawing to the corner of the room as his mother was ordered to disrobe; in fear, she had removed her silks and bone trinkets, as Klik’s older brother emerged from a side room, screamed, attacked, and was batted easily to the ground like a useless insect. JuJu rammed his spear through Klik’s brother’s head. Klik remembered quite clearly watching for a while as brains and blood seeped from a fractured skull where the Laz-Spear connected him to the floor. The rape had been short and brutal, the knife across Klik’s mother’s throat silencing her fake moans of ecstasy and then...
Then JuJu turned his attentions to Klik, silent in the corner.
The huge warrior, angry now for some reason—maybe at the lack of sport from this weak and socially deprived family—retrieved his
Laz-Spear by standing on Klik’s brother’s head and wrenching the weapon free with a crunch. He advanced on the youngest member of the family, who intuitively hunched down, frozen in terror, mouth agape like some injured fish... ultimately, waiting to die.
JuJu stood before Klik, Laz-Spear in his fist, eyes filled with a furious anger.
Klik’s mother, throat slit so that she gaped with two mouths, lunged across the floor, driving her dagger through JuJu’s foot; Klik heard quite clearly the grating of serrated blade slicing flesh, muscle, bone, heard the rainfall pattering of ejecting blood droplets, but did not wait to see JuJu slam his Laz-Spear through the brave woman’s breast, piercing her heart. Instead, he turned, clambered out of the window, and ran with all his might towards eelmarsh... and the sea beyond.
There had been no pursuit.
Klik blinked.
The memories were still brutal, sorrowful; they filled his eyes with tears and his throat with dry pain. It had been a time of great learning, of achieving manhood. The possibility of survival had been remote, but Klik had survived. And now he was back.
He pulled free a fresh bottle of clear liquor—stolen hours earlier—and drank deeply. Alcohol rimed his veins and he welcomed the easy release; yet he knew, deep inside, that he was cheating himself. He lifted the bottle and stared at the clear but potently powerful liquor. He frowned. No, not now, he thought. The drink was wrong. It would deprive him of victory, remove his senses when he needed them most.
He stowed away the bottle, his need, his release, and moved on through the darkness. Sharp eyes finally discerned the circle of Ket’s finest warriors, and Klik approached.
He halted behind the throng of armed guards. They were locked, eyes and minds entranced on the events unfurling ahead. With brittle cracks, their War Prophet, the Fractured Emerald, was transmogrifying into something more alien than alien. Klik took little note. All that concerned him was the one large regal Ket-i warrior central to the action: the one who had murdered his family, the one who had stolen his life. Honour dictated Klik’s actions; honour and pride gave him the energy and bravery he desired.
Only death could end this mission... one way or another.
The ranks of warriors, despite appearances, were a poorly structured unit. The Ket-i, whilst none could overlook or dismiss their bravery and ferocity in battle, did not adhere to any form of battle order or rank unity. Their formation was a scattering, and between each man was simply enough room to wield a Laz-Spear. Klik moved through these arteries with care, not wishing to arouse suspicion. Despite his youth, he was tall, and his disguise fitted neatly with the culture. He passed more and more warriors until, up ahead, he heard the skittering of sharp-bladed claws on the bone ground, and at last was close enough to see—
Keenan, backing away to Pippa and Franco who had been seized by guards, their weapons taken. Keenan’s eyes were wide and filled, if not with fear, then a terrible apprehension.
Emerald attacked.
Klik blinked, the movements were so fast. The creature left Keenan reeling, blood on his hands as he tried to hold himself together. Klik licked dry lips; Keenan was not his problem. Klik turned. He saw JuJu. JuJu was entranced by this dance of violence. Klik smiled. Violence breeds violence, he thought. He knelt, withdrawing a blade from a Helk-leather sheath against his calf; then, again moving slowly, with easy confidence, he approached JuJu, whose large body was tensed, bathed in sweat.
Klik leapt, arms circling JuJu, and with all his strength he jammed the knife into the man’s throat, feelin
g the keen-edged metal bite into skin, through windpipe, pushing deeper and deeper with warm blood flowing, flushing over his hands, and it was all a dream a beautiful dream. JuJu thrashed beneath him, but his blades were as nothing, useless and pointless. Klik dragged on the knife with a slight sawing motion, felt tendons pop beneath the blade, felt more blood gush in pumping great waves as he pressed and pulled and sawed, and was finally thrown free by the huge gurgling thrashing warrior.
Klik hit the ground, rolled, came up on his elbows. His knife had fallen into infinity. He stared up as JuJu staggered back, the surrounding Ket-i guards opening like a doorway to give him room. Then JuJu dropped to one knee, eyes fixed on the boy, Klik, hands pressed against the huge flap in his throat, as blood poured from the smiling wound and formed a perfectly round puddle on the bone floor. JuJu tried to stand, staggered again, and this time slipped on his own gore and fell to both knees. He stared at Klik for what seemed like an age; then he slowly reclined back, chest heaving, hands clutching his opened throat.
Klik stared at the guards around him; they looked down, back at JuJu, then back to the boy. They did nothing.
Klik climbed to his feet, found his dagger, and approached JuJu. Nobody stopped him; nobody tried to halt, or intervene, in any way. It was a matter of battle. Klik knelt by JuJu’s speechless and fast dying shell.
“You killed my father, my mother, my brother.” Klik’s tears fell, fell into the open wound at JuJu’s throat, but no amount of tears would wash the blood free. “Now you will be their Eternity Slave. I swear this, with my blood, with my honour, and seal it... with death.”
Klik leant forward and continued to work at cutting JuJu’s throat, at the muscles and tendons of his neck. JuJu struggled weakly to push the boy away, but Klik slapped at the hands, knocking the warrior’s blood-slippery grip away from the task that consumed him. He struggled when he came to the spinal column, but his knife was both sharp and serrated, a saw, and he worked methodically, leaned all his body-weight into the task and finally there was a crack, and Klik tugged the head from the corpse and staggered to his feet. He lifted JuJu’s head into the air, streaming blood and torn tendons, and flaps of skin. He simply stood there, snarling his defiance at the people, the tribe, who had made him outcast.