by Ian Whates
Boring raises his glass. “Here’s to Mendozer,” he says. “Middleman from start to finish. Skull it.”
“Skull!” we all say, and chug back our glasses. We clonk the empties down on the lid of Mendozer’s box, and Boring nods to Neats to refill them.
As Neats gets busy, Moke asks the question we’re all thinking. “We don’t usually do this,” he says. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because we should,” says Boring. “Shows respect. Isn’t usually enough time, or there’s no place to do it. Thought it was a custom we should get into.”
The glasses are full again. We hoist them.
“Middlemen, best of the best,” says Neats.
“Skull!” we say. Refill.
I was told the platoon’s nickname is the Middlemen because we get right in the middle of things. Klubs says it’s because we’re always stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere – in this particular instance, with a dead bloke in a box in a pressurized bunker that smells like bad wind.
The concept of the wake is unfamiliar to some of our number, so Fewry explains.
“It’s a mourning custom,” he says. “A watch kept over the departed.”
“Why?” someone asks.
“In case they’re not dead,” says Klubs. “In case they wake up.”
“That’s not right,” says the Surge, who’s the most educated of the Middlemen fraternity.
“It isn’t?” asks Klubs. “I thought that’s why it was called that.”
The Surge shakes his head. “That’s just a myth,” he says. “One of those old wives’ tales.”
“But I heard,” says Klubs, never one to let a thing go, “that they used to dig up old coffins and find fingernail scratches on the insides. ’Cause people didn’t have proper medic stuff back then, and sometimes they thought some poor sod was dead when they wasn’t, and they’d bury them and then they’d wake up looking at the lid. So they’d hold one of these things to keep an eye on the body for a while and make sure it wasn’t going to wake up before they bunged it in the ground.”
“I understand,” says the Surge. He has a patient tone sometimes. “I understand what you mean. It’s just the word comes from a different root.”
“Oh,” says Klubs.
We neck a few more (“Death to all Scaries!”, “Mother Earth!”, “Second Infantry, defenders of the World!”), and in between we remember a few stories about Mendozer. You could count on him. He was an OK shot with the Steiner, but really gifted with the grenade gun. He didn’t snore much. He had a couple of decent jokes. There was that one really funny time with the girl from stores and the ping-pong bat.
The mood relaxes a bit. Each of us takes a moment to individually tilt a glass to the box sitting there on the chrome gurney, and say a last few words of a personal nature. A few of us sit back. The cards come out. Moke and some others dig out the sticks and the ashtray puck, and start playing corridor hockey on the pitch marked out on the tiled hallway leading through to medical. There’s a lot of shouting and body-slamming into doors. Boring watches them, almost amused. The pitch outlines are wearing away. It’s been there as long as any of us can remember. No one knows who painted them.
The Surge pulls out a second deck, and starts to do some of his famous card tricks. Nimble fingers. Fewry goes off to get some bacon strips, crackers and pickles from stores.
Every now and then, someone hoists up his glass and calls out a toast, and everyone stops what they’re doing, even the hockey players, and answers.
Usually, it’s a simple “Mendozer!” and we all answer “Skull!”
If I’m honest, I’m not sure how long we were kicking back before someone noticed. Couple of hours, minimum. I know that Neats told me to go get another bottle out of the carton for top-ups, and I saw we’d skulled half of them already. The party had broken down a bit, and spread out through the rooms around the Rec.
Moke suddenly says, “What’s he doing there? That’s not respectful.”
No one pays Moke that much attention, but I look up. Mendozer’s box is no longer in the centre of the Rec. It’s been wheeled aside, and it’s standing under the big blast ports, three or four metres away from where the Surge parked it.
No mystery. I mean, it’s obvious as soon as you look at it. The gurney’s spring loaded brake-lock has pinged off and it’s rolled. Maybe someone brushed against it.
Except they haven’t, and it hasn’t. The brake-lock hasn’t disengaged to such an extent; in fact, Moke is actually having trouble unfastening it so he can roll the gurney back into the middle of the room where it’s supposed to be.
I go over. Bend down. Help him. The Surge heeled that brake good. The pin needs oil. It takes a moment of effort and a few choice words to unfix it.
Moke and me, we go to roll the box back into pride of place.
“Wait,” I says. He can feel it too. He looks at me. It’s a bad look. I immediately wish I’d sat out the last couple of toasts, because the drink has got me paranoid. Maybe I’m being clumsy. Maybe I’m a little happy-handed and everything seems skewy.
The box feels too light. The gurney’s rolling far too freely. There’s no weight in it.
“’Sup?” says Boring. He’s right there at my shoulder all of a sudden. Around us, people are still playing cards and telling jokes. Out in the hall, the corridor hockey tournament is reaching its climax.
I look at him, say nothing. It’s in the eyes. Boring puts one hand flat on the top of Mendozer’s box and just moves it from side to side. He can feel it too. You can see it. The whole trolley fishtails slightly under the stir of his palm. Nothing like enough weight. It’d have to be empty to behave like that.
Boring looks at me, quick, then back at the casket. Someone’s left an empty glass standing on top, and it’s left a ring of condensation on the shiny plastic. Boring picks up the glass and hands it to Moke. Moke has got eyes big as saucers by now.
Boring runs a finger along the edge of the lid. There are catches, but they’re floppy plastic, nothing secure. He flicks them.
Then he opens the lid.
I don’t want to look, but I look. It’s not that I want to see Mendozer dead in a box, but I would find it reassuring at least.
We see the inside of the bottom of the box. Casket’s empty. No Mendozer, nothing.
Boring shuts the lid.
“This isn’t funny,” I whisper.
He points to his stony expression, a familiar gesture intended to emphasize the fact he isn’t cracking up.
“Did someone take the poor bastard out as a joke?” I asked. It seems unlikely.
“Maybe the Surge pulled the wrong box out of the fridge?” Moke suggests. His voice is as low as ours.
That seems unlikely too.
“Wouldn’t the Surge have noticed the box was light when he brought it through?” I ask.
Boring doesn’t answer me. He looks around the Rec, winks at Neats. Neats makes an excuse about needing a slash to gently extract himself from his card school. Boring looks back at me.
“Bosko,” he says. “Go fetch a Steiner. Meet me in medical.”
“OK,” I say.
“Take Moke with you.”
“OK.”
I don’t know what to think. I get that creepy cack-yourself feeling you normally only get when Scaries are around. My hands are shaking, no word of a lie. Moke looks how I feel. We slip out the back way, avoiding the hockey insanity in the hall, and head down the link tunnel to Dock Two.
The lights there are down to power conserve. Half of me wants all the alcohol in my system flushed out so I can clean my head-space. The other half wants another skull to steady me.
All our platoon kit and hardware is stacked up in Dock Two where the extract discharged it. Most of the carrier packs are heavy-duty mil grade, but some look disarmingly like Mendozer’s box. Just smaller. Like they were made for parts, not whole bodies.
Nice thought to dwell on.
Moke watches the door, twitching from foo
t to foot, while I locate one of the gun crates in the pile of kit. I slide it out, punch in the authority code, and crack the lid. Half a dozen platoon weapons are racked in the cradle inside. There’s a smell of gun oil. All Steiner GAW-Tens. I pull one, like Boring told me to. I pull one, and four clips.
The Steiner Groundtroop Assault Weapon Ten A.2 is our signature dish. Some platoons these days favour the Loman BR, and that’s a fine bit of business, but it’s big, and really long when it’s wearing a flash sleeve, and it’s not a great fit in a tight space where you might need to turn at short notice. The Middlemen have been using GAWs since bloody always, Eights back during the last war, then every model upgrade ever since through to the current Ten A.2s. The Ten is compact but chunky. It loads low friction drive band HV, in either AP or hollowpoint, and it’s got full selective options. I take hollowpoint out of the crate, not AP. We’re in a pressurized atmospheric environment. Penetration control is going to be an issue.
I’m clacking the first clip into the receiver as I rejoin Moke.
“Screw this bollocks,” he says to me. “This is a joke. This is someone’s idea of a bloody joke. When I find out who, I’m going to de-dick him.”
No argument from me.
“Unless it’s Boring,” he adds.
I nod. I let Moke hang on to that possibility, because it’s more comforting than the alternatives.
But I saw the look in Boring’s eyes.
This isn’t his prank.
Boring’s in medical with Neats. They’ve got the walk-in fridge open. It smells of ammonia and detergent wash. The light in the fridge is harsh and unflattering, sterile UV. Moke and I wander in. I wonder if it’s like a normal fridge and the light only comes on when the door’s open. I don’t volunteer to stay inside to find out. There’s no handle on the inside.
Boring and the Sergeant are sliding caskets off the rack and opening them. Just from the way the caskets move on the rollers, you can tell there’s nothing in them.
“Checking the Surge got the right one?” I ask.
Neats nods.
Boring slams the last box back into place with an angry whip of his wrist, and it bangs against its cavity. “Nothing,” he says.
Behind us, we can hear the whoops and crashes of the hockey still in play.
“Makes no sense,” says Neats.
“Somebody like to explain this?” a voice interrupts.
We turn. It’s the Surge. He looks pissed off that we’re trespassing on his domain.
Boring explains. He uses the fewest possible words. He explains how we thought the Surge had pulled the wrong box, and that we came in here to find the right one. He explains they’re all empty.
Now the Surge looks twice as pissed off. “That can’t be,” he says.
“Tell us about it,” says Moke.
The Surge pushes past us into the fridge. “No,” he says, “I don’t know what’s happened to Mendozer. That’s a thing in itself.”
“And?” asks Neats.
The Surge is checking the ends of the caskets for label slips. “Nine Platoon lost a guy in a cargo accident on their way through last week. They left him here.”
“What are you saying?” asks Boring.
“I’m saying Mendozer or no Mendozer, these shouldn’t all be empty.”
He locates the label he’s looking for and pulls the box out. There’s nothing in it, but it’s not clean inside. There’s like a residue, wet, like glue. There’s a smell too, when the lid opens. Decomp. You can smell it despite the extractor fans and the detergent.
“The bloke from Nine should be in this one,” says the Surge.
“What are you saying?” Moke asks. He’s starting to get that whine in his voice. “What are you saying, exactly? We’ve lost two stiffs now?”
“Someone’s taken a joke way too far,” says the Surge. “Cadavers don’t just get up and walk away.”
He looks at us. He sees the look we’re giving him. He realizes it was a really bad choice of words.
We go back out into medical. Boring sends Neats and Moke to round up everyone else and get them into the Rec. If this is a joke, he’s going to scare an admission out of the perpetrator.
The Surge touches my arm. I see what he’s pointing to. “Lieutenant?” I say.
Boring comes over. There are spots of wet on the floor.
“I mopped up in here,” says the Surge.
The spots dapple the tiles. They’re brown, not red, like gravy. There’s no indication of spray or arterial force. Something just dripped.
Boring heads towards the bio-store that joins medical. The door’s ajar. There are graft banks of vat tissue in here, flesh slabs, dermis sheets and organ spares kept in vitro jars. We can smell the wet as we approach the door. Wet and decomp, spoiled meat.
We hear something.
I catch Boring’s eye and offer him the Steiner. He signs me to keep it, to keep it and cover him. I swallow. I toggle to single shot, ease off the safety, and rest my right index finger on the trigger guard. The stock’s tight in the crook of my shoulder, the barrel down but ready to swing up. I feel naked without a body jacket. I’d have given real money for a full suit of ballistic laminate. The Surge drops back behind us. I edge in beside Boring. He picks up a tube-steel work chair by the seat back, one-handed, and uses the legs to push the door open. Like a lion tamer, I think.
There’s something in the bio-store. It’s down the end, in the shadows. The tops have been pulled off some of the vitro jars, and slabs have been taken out. There’s fluid on the floor. One of the jars has tipped, and stuff is drooling out like clear syrup. I can see a pink, ready-to-implant lung lying on the tiles, like a fish that’s fallen out of a net onto the deck.
The thing in the shadows is gnawing at a flesh slab. It sees us. It rises.
The fact that it isn’t Mendozer is hardly a consolation prize. It’s just steak. A man-shaped lump of steak, raw and bloody, tenderized with a hammer. It has eyes and teeth, but they’re none too secure, and it’s wearing the soaked remains of a 2nd Infantry jump suit. It takes a step towards us. It makes a gurgling sound. I can see white bone sticking out through its outer layer of mangled meat in places.
“Bang it,” says Boring. “Put it down.”
Not an order he needs to repeat. I bring the nose of the Steiner up, slip my finger off the guard onto the trigger, and put one right into the centre of its body mass. In the close confines of the bio-store, the discharge sounds like an empty skip being hit with a metal post. Booming, ringing, resounding.
The thing falters. It doesn’t drop.
I punch off two more, then another pair. The post hits the skip again: boom-boom, boom-boom. I see each round hit, see each round make the thing stagger. I hear the vitro jars on the shelves behind it shatter and burst.
Boring snatches the Steiner off me. In my fuddle, despite my best intentions, I’ve slotted AP rounds. The hyper velocity slugs are punching right through the advancing mass, not even stopping to shake hands and say hello.
Boring ejects the clip. I yank one of the spares from my pocket, this time checking it’s got an HP stencil on it. Boring slams it home, charges the gun and bangs off on semi.
The hollowpoints deform and expand as they hit, preventing overpenetration, while simultaneously creating maximum tissue damage. They gift their entire kinetic force to the target. The thing kind of splatters. It shreds from the waist up in a dense cloud of wet and vaporized tissue and bone chips.
Now it drops.
We approach. There’s wet everywhere, splashed up all surfaces. Flecks of gristle are stuck to the wall, the ceiling, the jars, even the light shade.
The Surge grabs a lamp and a stainless steel probe. He squats down and pokes the mess.
“What the hell is it?” I ask, hoarse.
The Surge holds up the probe in the beam of his lamp. There’s a set of tags hanging off it.
“Hangstrum, private first class, Nine Platoon.”
“The one kille
d in the accident?”
“The pattern of injuries is consistent with crush damage from a cargo mishap,” says the Surge. He looks at Boring. “Not counting the mincing,” he adds.
“Any idea why he was walking around like it was a normal thing to do?” asks Boring.
“Maybe he wasn’t dead,” I say, grasping at straws. Reassuring straws. “Maybe Nine should’ve held a wake to make sure he was—”
“He was dead,” says the Surge. “I read the path. I even checked in the box when we first came on station.”
“But his body was in the fridge with Mendozer’s,” says Boring. It’s not so much a question.
“Yes,” the Surge says.
Oh, it’ll all come out later. It always does. The stuff we don’t know about the Scaries. The stuff we’re still learning about how they tick, why they tick, their biological cycle, what they do down there in the blind-as-midnight darkness of Scary Land. We’re still learning about how they kill us, how their bioweapons work, how they evolve as they learn more about our anatomy from killing us.
The techs don’t even know for sure yet whether it’s part of their regular life cycle, or just something they developed specially for us. It wasn’t claws the Scaries killed Mendozer with; it was ovipositors. Parasitic micro-larvae, jacking the blood cells of his cooling corpse, joyriding around his system, multiplying, leaching out into the other dead meat in the fridge, hungry for organic building blocks to absorb.
Even now, we don’t know what they’d do to living tissue. We don’t take the chance to find out. Incinerators are SOP. Incinerators, or disintegration charges. The Surge keeps grumbling about airborne particles and microspores, about tissue vapour and impact spatter contamination. But Boring tells him to zip it. We’ve got bleach and incinerators and sterile UV, and that’s all, so it’ll have to be enough.
We find Mendozer back in the Rec. He’d been shuffling around the halls of Relay Delta aimlessly, lost, late for his own wake. Everyone stops and stares at him, baffled, drunk. Fewry actually raises a hockey stick like a club to see him off, like you’d chase away a stray dog.
Mendozer’s blank-eyed. Glazed over. His mouth is slack, and his chin and chest are bruised black and yellow where the Surge tried to save him and then stapled him back up.