War Machine (The Combat-K Series)

by Andy Remic

  “Shit.” Franco chewed, subdued.

  “You think of me as a Prophet, a being that can read the future. But it is not so clear cut.” She smiled. “Nothing ever is. I can read certain pathways, but these Skeins don’t always come to fruition, don’t always blossom into flowers. It is not a science, more an art form. However, once, a million years ago, when I had my seat in The Factory, I was more powerful.”

  “What’s The Factory?” said Pippa.

  “A place where all documents are real, where the spellbook comes true. The Factory holds the source, the essence, a physical manifestation of the things that bind all life together through the cold voids of Space. It is a place of truth, of justice and of reasoning. It holds my power, my soul, and I am organically bound to it; it is what creates my Prophet. Inside The Factory, with my power returned, with the Leviathan Song bright in my mind, I could read your future for all eternity, and I could, without fail, give Keenan the answers he so desperately seeks.”

  Keenan frowned. “You’re telling me you can’t see into the past?”

  “I can search,” said Emerald, with a gentle smile, “but it is harder than you could ever imagine. What you have to realise is that for it to become factual, to extend beyond Art, I must become what I was. I must elevate to my former position; I must retake my Mantle, my Crown, my Seat of Dominion.”

  “What are you?” said Keenan.

  “I am Kahirrim,” said Emerald, eyes glowing bright, “a name you would not know. I am part of the Family related to what you consider the Dead GodRaces. However, I never was, or ever could be, as powerful as they.” Her eyes grew distant. “They were... awesome to behold, striding the stars, creating the planets and moons.” She sighed.

  “You have fallen from grace?” said Pippa.

  “Yes. And, I’m a long way from home. There was once a great war. I was party to the losing side. I was stripped of rank, of powers, of dignity; I was cast into an eternity of oblivion; into the Pit.”

  “So you seek to regain your power?”

  “Yes,” said Emerald, “but for one purpose only: so that I may die, know peace. I am tired, humans, I am so tired. However, I would fulfil my part of this bargain. I need to reach The Factory... and there, by fire and dark energy, you will have your answers, Keenan. You will have the name you seek. Take me to face my enemy, my haunted past. Allow me salvation, redemption. Allow me the ability to die. Help me to leave this place.” She bowed her head.

  “What do I need to do?” Keenan’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  “You will have to kill my greatest enemy, the One who stripped me of rank and life, and dignity and power; the one who banished me from Teller’s World. His name is Raze.”

  “Is he powerful?”

  “He is my brother.”

  Franco sat on the injecto-toilet, face contorted in pain. He grimaced and chomped, chewed and ground his teeth. He grunted, coughed, sighed. Shit, he thought. And that was just the problem, his shit.

  Why me? he thought.

  Why the hell is it always me?

  Since his tumble into eelmarsh, to put it bluntly, his arse had been far from OK. Pain had become a constant companion; that, and an unwilling and unnecessary need to defecate, which seemed to strike him every fifteen minutes or so, and forced him to grind and gromp, chimp and churn, hump and squawk.

  It’ll be OK, he thought.

  He smiled through the pain.

  Damn that alien planet!

  Damn that alien arse-virus!

  He pulled a small bottle from his pocket, removed the cap and tapped free a tiny blue pill. He smiled; it was a knowing smile, but his eyes echoed with un-spilled tears.

  Franco ate the pill, closed his eyes, and waited for sanity to kick in.

  Keenan sat in the darkness of the cockpit, while the others slept, brooding. His chin rested on the heel of his hand, his thumbnail between his teeth as he chewed thoughtfully. He shook his head. Shit. It was impossible. How could it be possible to kill a creature like Emerald? With guns and bombs? Missiles and fire? You think Raze had never seen such weapons? He was older than the stars, and apparently in charge of a dead black planet, a featureless ball of nothing that consumedhumans like a plague.

  Keenan remembered seeing the ProbeScouts: a series of a hundred unmanned ships sent to Teller’s World on exploratory missions, and carrying the most sophisticated in penetrative surveillance and survival equipment. The ships used PlatinumPropulsion, had voluntary AI, and shields that could withstand SunFloating on a photosphere of eight thousand degrees. They were advanced, and built in order to unravel the mysteries of planets such as Teller’s World. Keenan had watched with a billion others as live relays fed back video of the ProbeScouts swooping down through a harsh toxic atmosphere. Below, a panorama of flat black nothingness opened under an onslaught of storm and then...

  Bam, nothing: instant obliteration.

  Every single ProbeScout destroyed.

  No warning, no missiles, just instant... disintegration?

  Debates had raged for weeks between various academic facilities, each striving to provide an answer, but one thing was for certain: no global economy rushed with further financial funding in order to explore the unexplorable. Teller’s World was hostile, and the first planet discovered that was so insanely dangerous as to be dubbed DeadWorld. Since that moment, another six planets were investigated and labelled Forbidden Zones, but none were as alluring as this.

  Teller’s World: the First.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Keenan glanced up, watching Emerald ease into the cockpit and sit at the controls. Still naked, her ringlets tied back, she turned ancient eyes on him. He felt himself squirm under that gaze.

  “I make you nervous.”

  “No!”

  “It is fine, Keenan. No need to be shy. Which elements of my construction sit unholy in your mind?”

  “You have a way with words,” grinned Keenan, relaxing a little.

  “I have had time to practise.”

  “It’s that thing you turned into, no offence meant. I just wonder if it could happen again. Without your, ah, knowledge? You said you were a slave to JuJu, and he had a controller unit.”

  “The controller has been imbibed. The change cannot happen again without my control. I have removed the slave circuitry, the organic mechanisms. I have regained some of my lost dignity.”

  Keenan scratched his stubbled face. “Something’s really bothering me about that. How did someone like JuJu and his people—admittedly fearsome warriors, but in terms of Sinax technology not the most advanced example of a species across the Cluster—how did they manage to imprison you? If you are what you say you are.”

  “They were given a mechanism, and instructions. It was passed down through the ages, from a very, very long time ago: from the beginning, when the Kahirrim were a slave race to Leviathan.”

  “So,” Keenan frowned, “somebody brought this controller back from Teller’s World?”

  Emerald nodded.

  “I thought none had ever left?”

  “I never said that. That is part of your social misinterpretation, not mine.”

  “So people, humans, aliens, have visited Teller and come home?”

  “I believe so.”

  “So it is possible?”

  “Yes, but highly improbable.”

  “Tell me what we are facing.” Keenan’s eyes were bright. “I need to know details. I need to plan strategy. If we are to take you to this Factory, so you can regain your power, I need to know exactly what I’m up against, and how to kill it.”

  “All in good time,” said Emerald. “First, I need to explore your memories.” She saw Keenan withdraw a little, curl into his shell. “You will feel no pain, but I want—need—to get a... how can I explain? Get a smellfor the Threads.”

  “What would you seek?”

  “What makes you, what created you, what drives you, how you came to be a part of Combat K; your dreams,
desires, gifts, hatreds, impurities... Keenan, do not be frightened. I will not change my mind. We are locked together in an embrace of fate. We must trust one another. Only then can we both discover peace.”

  “OK.”

  “I will need to search Franco and Pippa as well, for together you are a Unit. You are, whether you like it or not, whether you acknowledge it or not, integral cogs in a single working machine. You are Combat K. You are Warrior Class. You carry a Dark Flame, a Dark Seed within you.”

  Franco appeared, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “I heard voices.”

  Keenan glanced at Franco, smiling. “Emerald wants a chat.”

  “What sort of chat?” Immediately suspicious.

  “An intimate one.”

  Franco perked up. “Really?”

  “She wants to read your soul: your innermost desires, you darkest demons.”

  “Will it hurt?” said Franco.

  “Trust me.” Emerald took his hard-skinned hands.

  Franco stared at her breasts—he just could nothelp himself—and felt himself being dragged suddenly down, down into the freezing depths of icy annihilation.

  How did I get like this?

  How do any of us get like this?

  Take a normal, hard-working, OK kinda guy, sprinkle liberally with bullshit and unnecessary bureaucracy and BAM! Instant psycho. Or so it could seem when nobody understands what bubbles beneath the surface. After all, nobody trulyunderstands what goes on inside somebody else’s head, in the private places, in the nightmare zones.

  Franco worked the quarries, had done for a long time after being kicked out of university for fighting and putting his Geography lecturer in hospital with a well placed essay. Good honest work from now on, he told himself; none of your academic masking, none of your hiding behind language. I thought language was supposed to simplify meaning, not increase the basis of misunderstanding?

  Franco’s day was a nice tight unit. Get up, brush teeth, full hearty breakfast of sausage and bacon, walk to work through town—usually just before the sun was rising—clock in at Reinhart & Seckberg Quarries Ltd, put his jacket and lunchbox in his locker, then head for his Section, of which he was Sec Leader. Such was the privilege of time. Put in the hours, earn that promotion. And Franco had put in the time: a huge block of his life, driving diggers, working the belts, operating sorters, but more often than not he was in charge of demolitions. Franco choreographed the perfect explosion: no mistakes, neverany mistakes. His perfection and dedication had been commented on many times by superiors, and he’d even won an award for his destruction in Blast! Monthly! Franco’s blasts were always an equilibrium: the perfect amount of explosives, the perfect choice of explosives, accurate timing and with, guess what, perfect end results. Whatever was asked of Franco, he delivered: a half mile desecration of mountain range? No problem. Call Franco. The collapse of three miles of abandoned quarry tunnel? Give Franco an hour with a head-torch and a notebook, and you’d get that perfect detonation, no worries.

  Franco was proud of his job, proud of his work, and, dammit, he enjoyed his work, in there with the stone and the dust, the chemical smell of HighJ or OptionX, cloying at his nostrils, and his experienced eye tracing fractures and contours in the rock. He’d instruct a bore hole for a sample just there, or pick up and rub fine particles of stone between his calloused fingers, grinning because he knew one mistake, just one mistake, and he could well be a dead man: dog meat. What a buzz!

  If the truth be known, Franco had no idea where his innate talent originated. It had been a latent skill, untapped. And, without training or specific education, it had been a miracle Franco had stumbled into this: his perfect career.

  For eight years, Franco worked the White Tooth Range, part of the Southern Sector’s permitted Blasting Area; and in that whole eight years Franco had never, ever had a single day off. And not just that, he had asked for nothing, and was therefore indebted to no man. It was just the way Franco’s brain worked, and just the way he liked it. He came in, did his job, and fucked off home.

  Franco lived at home with his mom, a fact many found comical, but something of which Franco was decidedly proud. His father had died when he was fifteen years of age; a savage blow which had, for a few years at least, sent him careering violently off the rails of socially acceptable behaviour. Slowly, his mother had reeled him back in, and nurtured him, and now he was glad to play at Master of the House. And anyway, reasoned Franco, who had had limited success with women (before his bare-knuckle fighting days, at least), his mom cooked for him, washed and ironed his quarry uniforms, made interesting chit-chat when they were watching TV, and generally—and this was the clincher—did not nag the living shit out of him. Franco watched many friends bemusedly as they slowly drifted and whined in shadow-lives of servitude, of new settees and beige carpets, of forced candlelit meals and missing the football. And gradually, one by one, his friends became encompassed in their little nests: like tree trunks with all their branches excised, so friendship umbilicals were gradually severed by their loving (m)other halves.

  Franco chose the good hard solid honesty of whores, instead, and, when he won a fight, the charity of those who wished to bask in his glory. Of which he turned away none.

  The fighting started when Franco had been working the mines for a year. He had heard rumours of underground bare-knuckle matches where huge sums of money could be won. Franco, however, did not consider himself a fighting man; he knew that he was stocky, powerful and fast, but he had never trained, never worked at pugilism, never really had a fight, except for one or two incidents in his teenage years when he had decimated his challengers. No, Franco kept his head down, his eyes on his pint, and resolutely out of trouble. This was because a) Franco believed that there were reasons to fight, and reasons not to fight. If somebody threatened his mom, then smack, down they would go, but a spilled beer? Here mate, let me get you another pint. But there was also b) and b) frightened Franco a lot more than a) ever could. It was something inside his head: a knowledge, an understanding, a self-confessed fearthat once he started... he would not—could not—stop. If fury took him in its fists he was capable of so much more than knocking a man to the ground. And this latent power frightened a young Franco worse than any simple name-calling in the playground or pub. When Franco went out, he went all the way.

  One day Franco was working the quarry when he accidentally drove a digger over Korda’s stranded lunchbox. Now, Korda was a giant of a man, a man-mountain,a titan with a reputation for heavy-handedness, a powerful right-hook and a love of beating women. Franco did not like Korda, but Korda had never noticed Franco. Franco did not enter Korda’s sphere of proposed violence; to Korda, Franco was simply a ginger midget with a comedy beard.

  With the digger’s engine still running, Franco jumped down from the cab and stood looking at the crushed blue plastic lunchbox, which had once borne the faded picture of a Nuke Train. Franco looked up, looked around to see if he’d been spotted, and turned into a right straight that sent him staggering backwards with a split lip to sit down in the dust. Within seconds, a crowd of men had sprinted to the scene and formed a circle with Franco and Korda at the hub. Franco had blinked away his shock and tested his nose, which he realised was broken. Anger radiated through him. However, powerfully, he calmed the savage beast.

  “You crushed my box!” bellowed Korda, his brutal flat face filled with naked aggression and a look that said he would willingly kill any man for even touching his shitty little lunchbox, never mind crushing it into a platter of plastic shards.

  Slowly, Franco climbed to his feet.

  Korda rolled up his sleeves.

  “You shouldn’t have left it there,” said Franco, retaining his calm.

  “My lunchbox!” screamed Korda.

  “I’m not disputing ownership,” said Franco gently, “I’m just saying it was a mighty dumb place to leave it. This is where all the diggers pass through. To leave it on the floor here was... well, dumb
.”

  “So you calling me dumb?” intoned Korda, who was not the brightest bulb in the pack.

  “We-eeell, yes,” said Franco, still tenderly dabbing at his battered nose.

  “Bastard whore piss pot!” screamed Korda, and charged.

  Franco swiftly side-stepped, and Korda lunged, missing. He whirled, boots kicking up dust.

  “Put fists up and fight!”

  “I really don’t think this is the place to fight,” said Franco, glancing nervously about. “After all, we’re at work, right? And if the bosses see us...” But then he noticed the bosses were present, even the rotund and short-haired CB, normally so reserved and severe, but now with a coloured flush to her cheeks which spoke of something they all thought impossible in the sterile stern old goat: excitement.

  Korda slammed a right hook; it took Franco in the side of the head and sent him hard to ground. He lay there for a while, coughing on the dust, and smiled to himself. OK, he thought. It’s going to be like that, is it? Going to fight dirty, are you? But again, he calmed the flutter of savage rage in his chest and lay there, allowing Korda to have his moment of glory.

  Let it go, he thought.

  Let it be.

  The steel-capped boot connected with Franco’s ribs and lifted him from the ground, rolling him over in the dust with stars flashing pain through his ribcage. He’d felt two crack. The pain was incredible.

  He opened his eyes to see Korda looming over him. The giant of a man hefted a titanic black rock above his head. He was grinning, a light of insanity flashing motes in his eyes... a triumph that spoke the pitiful language of the bully, not just of beating a man, but the worst trait of all true cowards: kicking a man when he’s down.

  Inside Franco, for the first time in his life, something went click. A tiny door opened. Black light flooded his soul. And, as death stared down at him from a stupid flat face with the lop-side of the inbreed, Franco allowed everything—everything—to flood away. He reached out with a rangy powerful hand and slammed a devastating blow to Korda’s kneecap. There was a crack. Korda howled, and dropped his rock, which landed on his other foot. Korda reeled back staggering on two injured limbs, as Franco reverently climbed to his feet, dusted himself down, and strode towards the big hopping man.