Embers of War

by Gareth L. Powell

  Ashton Childe gave me another smile, this one strained with barely concealed impatience.

  “I’m more than aware of the Trouble Dog’s resignation, and I’m not here to give her a hard time about it,” he said. “I’m sure she and I will be able to tolerate each other for the duration of this rescue.”

  “I hope you’re right.” I got to my feet. There wasn’t much use in talking further. Maybe it was Clay’s constant disapproval, maybe it was my irritation with Preston’s night terrors, or maybe it was the fact it seemed likely this would be my last mission for the Reclamation—whatever the reason, I’d made up my mind to let these two hitch a ride with us, and to hell with the consequences. I’d had a couple of drinks and I figured a little extra company might do us all the world of good. At the very least, it might stop us killing each other before we could help the poor bastards we were on our way to save.

  I took a deep breath. I had come to a decision, but that didn’t mean there weren’t stipulations.

  “We had a spook on board once before,” I warned. “About a year ago. The silly fool tried to smuggle a pin-sized AM mine into the cargo hold.”

  “And?”

  “The Trouble Dog blew him out the airlock in his underwear.”

  Childe’s smile remained fixed, but his left eye twitched. “Is that a warning, Captain?”

  “Most definitely.” I checked the time. “Any weapons you bring on board will be locked in my cabin for the duration of the flight. If you don’t like that, you don’t get aboard.”

  Childe’s eye twitched again. He seemed about to protest, but Petrushka put a hand on his arm. “We understand, Captain,” she said.

  I checked the time. “In that case, you have five minutes to collect your things and report to the ship.” I downed the last of my drink and clunked the glass back onto the table. “Thanks for the drink, Mr Mulch, but it’s time we were going.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Standing at the bar, Mulch now clenched a fat pistol in his thick and hairy fingers. On the other side of the wooden counter, the barman held a scuffed and scratched combat shotgun.

  The two spooks sat motionless in their chairs, hands frozen halfway to their own weapons.

  “What are you doing?” Childe asked.

  Mulch sneered. “You shouldn’t have refused my offer.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The man took a step forward, the pistol held out at arm’s length, covering us all. “We’re desperate, Captain. If you won’t help us, we’re going to have to commandeer your vessel.”

  From the port I heard shouts, followed by the unmistakable crackle of small arms fire.

  My earbud blipped. I had an incoming signal from the ship. Luckily, only I could hear it. Moving as slowly and unobtrusively as possible, as if absently reaching to scratch an itch, I touched my finger to the device.

  “Captain.” The Trouble Dog’s voice resonated in my inner ear. “I am under attack. What are your orders?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  ASHTON CHILDE

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. Couldn’t I even get off this shitty planet without someone trying to kill me?

  Like all Conglomeration agents, I had been optimised for combat. Not a full military upgrade, but enough for most civilian situations. As soon as Mulch pulled his gun, I felt the conditioning kick in and the world seemed to slow. Sounds stretched and deepened. My heart began to thud like a jackhammer trying to batter its way through a castle’s walls.

  By the way her jaw tightened, I saw Captain Konstanz had received bad news via her earpiece. And, judging from the noises coming from the port, I guessed someone was trying to hijack her ship. I had to give her credit, though; she barely reacted. And she’d managed to activate her comms device without Mulch noticing.

  I took a glance at Laura. For most of our time on this stupid planet, our relationship had adhered to professional rules of engagement. Why was I now thinking of her as “Laura”? In my mind, she’d been “Agent Petrushka” right up until the start of this trip. Was it leaving the jungle that had caused this change? One thing was for sure: it hadn’t been intentional. Get too comfortable in this game, and you were asking for trouble. That had always been my motto in the past, drummed into me by the kicks and punches of my fellow police officers. Trust the wrong person and you would die. You wouldn’t even hear the shot that killed you. And yet, right at this particular moment, as I stared down the barrel of the fat handgun Mulch held, I knew there wasn’t anybody I’d rather have at my side. Despite our political differences, I knew I could count on her to do the right thing.

  “What’s going on, Mulch?” I lowered my hands a fraction, keeping my body language open and non-threatening, keeping his attention on me. “What’s this about?”

  The man gave a snort.

  “The war’s spreading. It will be here soon.” He scowled. “The war you people started.”

  “And so you’re taking the ship?”

  “I don’t have a choice.” He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “The whole town wants to leave.”

  Konstanz looked incredulous.

  “You’re going to try to hijack a Carnivore?” She shook her head. “Are you insane?”

  Mulch glowered. “We have you. The ship won’t target civilians without your authorisation. If it won’t open voluntarily, we can fix a breaching charge to the lower cargo doors and force access to the interior.”

  “That won’t work.” Konstanz leaned forward across the table. “Even if you get to the bridge, she won’t cooperate with you.”

  “She will, if we threaten to shoot her captain.”

  Konstanz lowered her hands. “I think you may be overestimating her sentimentality.”

  “We shall see.” Mulch grinned like a man holding five aces. He waggled his gun at me. “I have you. As soon as my colleagues get access to the ship, we’ll be leaving.”

  My hand still hovered a few centimetres from the butt of my pistol. I could almost touch it with my index finger.

  I heard a loud snap from the street outside. Somebody had fired a pistol in front of the saloon. Two further shots followed, and were answered by a fusillade of small arms fire from the far end of the street.

  Frowning, Mulch stepped over to the window, putting himself directly between the barman and me. Taking the opportunity to act unobserved, I quickly dropped my hand to my jacket pocket and wrapped my fingers around the handle of my gun. I didn’t bother drawing it, just squeezed the trigger, firing through the material. I put two bullets into Mulch. His knees wobbled out from under him and he fell. As he went down, I fired again and again, punching a line of holes through the wooden bar. Splinters flew. I caught the barman before he quite knew what was happening. The slugs hit him in the lower body—in the stomach or abdomen, I couldn’t see exactly which—and he staggered back. As he fell against the wall, his hands jerked and the shotgun fired.

  The noise was deafening.

  The pain was worse.

  Something punched me just below the ribs and I bent forward, clutching my left side. Even with the numbing effect of the combat conditioning, it felt as if a burning spear had skewered me. Beside me, Laura let out a yelp. She put her hands to her leg.

  In slow motion, I heard the barman work another round into the chamber.

  Cha-chunk.

  I wanted to shoot him, but I was lying on the arm holding my gun, and the gun itself was still trapped in the pocket of my jacket.

  The shotgun barrel turned towards me and, for a terrified instant, I looked Death squarely in the eye.

  Then a tall, dreadlocked woman crashed through the bar’s front door. Bullets blew splinters from the doorframe behind her. The windows shattered. Startled, the barman tried to swing his shotgun towards her, but she was faster, and already held an Archipelago pistol in her outstretched hand. As he wheeled on her, she fired. There was a muffled thud and his head blew apart in a vibrant splatter of blood, brains and bo
ne. Loosed from his fingers, the shotgun rattled across the counter and crashed to the floor.

  In the sudden silence, I withdrew my weapon from the smouldering remains of my pocket and kept it trained on Mulch. The man was injured, but I could see his chest rise and fall and knew he was still alive. My left hand covered the wound in my side. Hot blood welled between my fingers. A roar filled my ears and my vision smeared and swam.

  The former contents of the barman’s head began to drip and slide down the wall.

  With her smoking gun held at the ready, the woman with the dreadlocks assessed the room. She had two black eyes and a strip of white tape across her nose. When she spoke, it was to Konstanz.

  “You good, Captain?”

  With her eyes still fixed on Mulch, Konstanz nodded. She seemed stunned by the violence. A shotgun pellet had taken a bite from her sleeve, and I could see blood soaking into the material. The captain didn’t seem to have noticed.

  “Yeah…”

  A fresh burst of automatic fire perforated the front of the building. Glass rained down around us.

  I looked across at Laura. The hole in her left thigh told its own gory story. That damn barman had got us all with a single shot. Laura was sitting with the leg out straight in front of her. She had drawn her own weapon, which, I was unexpectedly irritated to see, was bigger, sleeker and much more powerful than my own. She kept it pointed at the floor.

  “Does your ship have a shuttle?” she asked, voice tight with the strain of her injury.

  Kneeling beneath the table, Konstanz frowned, as if the words Laura used made no sense.

  “What?”

  “We’ll never make it to the port,” Laura said, speaking slowly, raising her voice over the sound of gunshots from outside. “There are too many people out there. But if the ship can send a shuttle to pick us up…”

  For a moment, I thought Konstanz hadn’t heard. She looked down at her ragged and bloody sleeve as if seeing it for the first time. Then her eyes seemed to snap back into focus and she grinned.

  “I can do a lot better than that!”

  Possessed of sudden energy, she tapped her ear and barked at her ship, “Are you fuelled? Do you have the rest of the crew on board?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  TROUBLE DOG

  “Emergency evacuation,” the captain ordered.

  “Hostiles in the vicinity?”

  “Yes, danger near. Four for extraction; three wounded.”

  “Am I allowed to engage ground forces?”

  Captain Konstanz didn’t answer straight away. “No,” she said after a thoughtful pause, “only if they threaten us directly. In which case, they deserve everything they get.”

  “I understand.”

  Four hostiles had been trying to fix an explosive charge to my lower cargo doors. They had backed a truck beneath me and were using its roof as a platform as they attempted to secure the bomb. From the size of the device, I estimated there was a fifty per cent chance the doors’ integrity would be compromised. And, as far as I was concerned, that constituted an attempted attack—so I incinerated them with a manoeuvring thruster.

  A second group was in the process of attacking the saloon in which the captain was sheltering, pouring fire into the front of the structure. I adjusted my AG field and began to drift across the tarmac, away from the remains of the burning truck. As my shadow fell across them, a couple of members of this second group turned their weapons on me. I listened to their bullets rattle against my armour like hailstones against a toughened glass skylight.

  For sixty seconds, their shots continued to bounce off me. Then something that must have been a rocket-propelled grenade exploded against my heat shield.

  The other guns fell silent, waiting to see how I’d react.

  I let the smoke clear.

  I felt calm, focused, and possessed of an almost hallucinatory clarity. I had been designed for combat, engineered to take satisfaction in the fulfilment of my function. Even now, having been absorbed into the House of Reclamation, that initial conditioning remained entrenched at the core of my being, etched into the carbon and silicon neurons at the heart of my processors. And, right at that moment, as I loomed over the settlement like the clenched fist of an angry god, I realised with a stone-cold certainty that no matter how many lives I saved, I would always be a killer at heart.

  And right at that moment, that was fine with me.

  Another RPG spiralled up at me on a twisting pillar of white smoke. I could have stopped it, but instead let it splash against my flank.

  Let them test me. See what good it would do them. They were ants assaulting a wolf. They had picked a fight with the wrong ship.

  I opened a channel to the captain. “Taking incoming fire,” I said. “Permission to neutralise remaining hostiles?”

  The line crackled. “Can you do it without killing them?” She sounded reluctant.

  My primary weapon systems may have been removed, but I still retained defensive capabilities. Using considerable (and I thought commendable) restraint, I activated my anti-collision cannons. They were the least deadly of the limited choices remaining in my arsenal. Designed to deflect and destroy potentially damaging interstellar detritus or incoming torpedoes, the cannons were each capable of dispensing fifteen hundred tungsten needles per second, at velocities guaranteed to shred any chunk of rock or ice large enough to damage my hull plating.

  It was the work of a moment to assign targets and devise maximally efficient firing solutions.

  “Affirmative.”

  The captain considered my answer for a couple of seconds, weighing up the risks. “Then do it,” she said.

  “Aye-aye.”

  I collated the data from my targeting sensors and fired my cannons. It was a short burst, no more than a second and a half. When it was over, eleven men and women lay injured, the flesh flensed from their limbs, parts of their skeletons shattered and pulverised—but all still technically alive.

  In the sudden absence of small arms fire, silence returned, broken only by the wind scouring the rocks and feathering the grass.

  “Hostiles neutralised,” I reported.

  I aligned my long axis with the direction of the street and began to descend. My pointed bow had plenty of clearance, but my wider stern caught the front of a shop on the opposite side of the road to the saloon and began to crush it. The AG generators whined in protest, but I persisted, forcing my bulk lower and lower, ripping down through the building’s façade with a piercing squeal. Dust and rubble fell into the street, but I kept lowering until the heavy armour plate of my belly almost kissed the mud.

  The remains of the saloon’s bullet-tattered door hinged open and Alva Clay appeared on the threshold, gun in hand, alert for attack from the street. She was supporting an unknown female with a gunshot wound to the leg. Behind her, Captain Konstanz helped an injured male into the daylight. I opened my anterior airlock and moved back a little—further demolishing the shop front on the opposite side of the road—in order to make it possible for them to step directly from the raised walkway at the front of the saloon to the shelter of the airlock’s interior. At the same time, I kept the majority of my attention on the surrounding buildings. Via my sensors, I could see dozens of people huddled in cellars and back rooms. Their infrared silhouettes blazed against the background chill of their draughty houses, and my cannon turrets clicked and swivelled to keep them all covered. If any of them so much as reached for a breadknife, they’d be shredded meat before they had the slightest chance to further imperil my crew.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ONA SUDAK

  After two hours of walking, Adam and I were so deeply entangled in the labyrinth that even had I wanted to find my way back to the shipwreck of the Geest van Amsterdam, I doubted I’d have been able. The air temperature in the canyons felt close to freezing and I was grateful for both the warmth of the survival suit, and Adam’s presence of mind in having procured it for me. Without it, the thin surgeon’s scrub
s that I had pilfered would have been of little comfort.

  We didn’t talk much, saving our breath for the effort of walking. Beside me, Adam trudged with his face down, looking at his feet. However battered I felt as I thumped one exhausted foot in front of the other, I knew his suffering was worse. After all, I’d already experienced my share of horror. He had just seen his home, the ship on which he’d been born, destroyed, and the majority of her inhabitants killed. Everything familiar had been torn from him. His friends and family were either missing or dead, and he had been left stumbling through a surreal maze, beneath walls two kilometres high, with the ever-present threat of his own violent demise itching at his back.

  No wonder he didn’t feel like talking.

  For my own part, my thoughts were preoccupied with questions. Firstly, I wondered who had been responsible for the torpedo assault on the ’dam, and what could have motivated such an attack against a civilian liner. Granted, we had been cruising through a disputed system, but such naked aggression could only lead to further and more acrimonious dispute. And what of the ’dam itself? Those torpedoes should never have been allowed to get close enough to detonate. Even civilian liners carried defensive cannons. The ship should have deployed them the instant it identified the incoming warheads. Instead, it seemed the vessel’s consciousness had been asleep at the helm. I could only hope it had managed to send a distress signal before powering down.

  Secondly, I wanted to know why the attackers had bothered to follow us down to the surface of this ridiculous, planet-sized bauble? They could just as easily have finished us from orbit, using more torpedoes to destroy the wreck instead of going to the trouble of coming down here to shoot the survivors individually.

  Unless they are looking for one survivor in particular…

  The thought brought a chill of paranoia. Were these unknown assailants after me? Had they seen through my assumed name and restructured face? I hunched into the warmth of the tight suit, and decided it didn’t really matter. When all was said and done, the reasons why you were being killed were largely irrelevant. They only mattered to the people doing the killing. To the victim, a bullet to the head would always have the same result, no matter the gunman’s motives.