Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  My shoulder-laser stabbed out twice, the split-screen targeting system showing me a third Fortunate Son on the other side of the high-ceilinged room. The walls all around me were being chewed away by automatic weapons fire, more and more rounds were finding me. I staggered back, bleeding into the water as a couple penetrated my dermal plating.

  The Fortunate Son I’d blinded with her own blood staggered to her feet, her back to me. I stepped behind her, using her as cover, as her squad mates fired into her. As she fell back into me I grabbed 30-millimetre grenades from her webbing. The grenades could either be fired from the underslung grenade launcher on the Vickers or activated manually. Holding her now dead body up with one hand I armed the grenades. I threw one behind me against the external wall, the rest through the door and the holes in the wall towards the front of the house. I could hear swearing, commands and panic as the Fortunate Sons tried to get away from the grenades.

  ‘Jess, get out now!’ I shouted, but there was no reply.

  Someone tried to jump in through the window, silhouetted by the flickering red light behind him. There was a momentary ruby-red connection between him and my shoulder laser and he fell into the water. I hunkered down next to the wall and pulled the two nearby dead Fortunate Sons over me as the first of the grenades I’d thrown went off. It blew a hole through the wall from this house to the next. The explosion soaked me and covered me in debris. The compression wave created a small tidal wave that rammed me against the interior wall, which bulged from the force but didn’t quite give way.

  Fragmentation from the grenades tore into the corpses I was using for cover, some of it embedding in my armoured coat.

  I pushed the two corpses off me and ran towards the newly made hole between this building and the next as gunfire rained all around me, blowing holes through the walls and making contrails in the water. Another bullet caught me square in the shoulder but I continued to stagger through the water as quickly as I could manage. I dived through the hole as the other grenades began going off behind me in quick succession.

  I waded as rapidly as I could away from the explosions. I went through the room I found myself in as I heard the structure of Pagan’s house begin to creak. The grenades as well as the rest of the considerable damage done to the old house were beginning to take effect on the building, and with the roof garden it was top heavy.

  I made my way towards the window and glanced out. It seemed like the entire Avenues were on fire. The patrol craft was just about level with me but receiving fire from multiple positions as people from the Avenues fought back hard. As I watched, a Fortunate Son standing waist deep in the water was snatched under. Moments later a huge steel-toothed reptilian maw erupted out of the water and tore a chunk out of the side of the patrol craft and a Fortunate Son standing on the deck.

  In front of the house I’d just left I could see the Walker still firing its rotating-barrelled, rapid-fire railgun, raking it up and down the terraces. It had long, thin, powerful legs that made the armoured barrel-like torso, containing the jacked-in operator, look like it was perched on stilts. Around the torso the various weapons systems moved. Its head was the mech’s sophisticated sensor array.

  The crash would’ve been deafening for those who didn’t have audio filters, as the front of the house collapsed. The weight of the soil from the roof garden caused it to tip forward, engulfing the Walker. I watched the servos and gyroscopes on its legs try to compensate but failed, and it collapsed under the earth. That wouldn’t hold it but it would slow it down.

  There was a huge explosion, and I was thrown across the room, slamming hard into the back wall, cracking it and some of my armour. I fought for air, my head ringing and my ears popping as the room turned orange. I got another mouthful of the Humber and realised I was looking up through water at a room filled with flame.

  I screamed and inhaled more water as something heavy landed on me. I fought my way to the surface, stabbing whatever was on top of me repeatedly with my blades, though I was having problems penetrating the thing’s hide.

  Spitting polluted water out and sitting up in about two feet of water, I saw that the room had been burnt from the fiery explosion that had thrown me under, but it was only actually on fire in a few parts. The thing that had landed on me was floating nearby. It took me a moment or two to work out that it was the badly charred headless corpse of one of the cyber alligators.

  I staggered to my feet. Outside the water was covered in a sheet of fire. It was strangely beautiful. The patrol craft had gone. Presumably one of the alligators had penetrated the zippo’s fuel supply.

  Another explosion shook the house and sent me to my knees. It sounded like a man-portable, light anti-armour missile detonating, Laa-Laas as we used to call them. I hoped that was the mech being taken out. I lurched out of the room, eager to get away from the heavy munitions.

  The shot took me full in the chest, knocking me off my feet and sending me back beneath the Humber. I didn’t think it’d pierced my coat. It felt like a shotgun. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I shouldn’t have been caught like that. No excuses, just a long time since I was in combat this intensive.

  I was back up on my feet. It seemed like it took for ever but I was moving faster than anyone. The Mastodon was in my hand. I saw the two feet of muzzle flash from the revolver’s barrel before I recognised that the guy with the shotgun wasn’t a Fortunate Son.

  As our mutual friendly fire incident escalated, time slowed down and with my boosted reflexes I could almost see the bullet. It took him in the chest, piercing his second-rate armour. It seemed like an age as he fell back into the water. Still I didn’t know him.

  ‘I’m on your side, you stupid fucking cunt!’ I screamed at his corpse, angrier with myself for being caught out despite just having experienced multiple concussion waves.

  As I staggered away from the corpse I could see into another room across the hall. Again it was large, with a high ceiling and about a foot and a half of water in it. Inside were three people surrounding a fourth. The three were obviously locals. The fourth was a small man with his back turned to me. He had dark hair and wore a black combat jacket and trousers. Not the kind you would wear on active duty but the kind you’d buy in a shop and wear on the street, or some people would.

  The small man had his hands clasped together above his head, a shotgun pointed at his face; a lever-action hunting rifle on one side and an SMG older than I was on the other. My blue-on-blue incident had distracted the two men and a woman covering the small man. My boosted reflexes allowed me to assimilate this data very quickly. I could see what was coming as the small man began to move.

  ‘No!’ I shouted as I tried running through the water towards the group. The small man pulled his hands about ten inches apart and brought them down in front of him so quickly I could barely follow -he was at least as fast as I was. The barrel of the shotgun held by the woman in front of him fell into the water, as did her forearm, and then the front of her face slid off. It took me a moment to realise he had some kind of monofilament weapon.

  He swung his arms out as my boosted leg muscles carried me into the air, and I made yet another serious mistake in this league. The top of the man with the SMG’s skull came off, bisected by the weighted monofilament. That meant the weapon was in his right hand now. Committed to the kick I moved myself into position in mid-air, the sole of my boot aiming for the base of his spine. Hopefully with enough power to damage even a reinforced skeletal structure.

  From the left-hand sleeve of his combat jacket a compact 10-millimetre Glock appeared. He triggered a quick burst from it and the man with the lever-action rifle’s face disappeared.

  The small man’s three victims were falling away from him and I was about to catch him square in the base of his spine when he appeared to flip backwards without even bending his legs. Suddenly he was inverted in the air, his boot travelling at my face with some velocity.

  He kicked me so hard my internal visual display jumped. My nose d
isappeared into my face and I felt my facial dermal plating and reinforced skull give slightly. I had no idea how he’d powered the kick. He stopped the momentum of my flying kick and the pair of us plummeted into the water, and I went under. Again.

  I raked up with my blades but he was gone. I sat up in the water, my blades withdrawn back into their forearm sheaths, my pistols suddenly in my hands. The small man was running away from me towards a window in the back of the room. He had a compact Glock in each hand and he was firing alternate bursts from them. I think it was supposed to be suppressing fire but it was disturbingly accurate as I felt bullets penetrate my coat, lodge in my dermal plate and then explode, knocking me back into the water. I was not going to be able to take much more of this. All over my internal visual display were red warnings from internal diagnostics.

  I rolled, tried not to think about getting the Humber into my wounds and then sat up. The little man was gone but I’d seen his face. He was Nepalese, an ex-Ghurkha and either a member of 22 SAS or an ex-member reactivated like I’d been. His name was Rannu something or other. The other thing I remembered was that he’d been the regimental kick-boxing champion. I groaned and lay back in the water. I’d never met him but I’d heard stories about him taking money off people in illegal fights in the cargo hold of troop ships bound for Proxima Centauri.

  Rolleston must’ve sent him but I couldn’t work out why they hadn’t come with more operators. Why just him and the Fortunate Sons? If they’d wanted the job done properly then three or four like Rannu would’ve done it. What got me about this was everything I’d heard about Rannu suggested he was sound, and we’d been pitted against each other by a bunch of wankers. A guy I’d probably rather buy a drink had just beaten the shit out of me.

  12

  Hull

  I managed to stagger to my feet. I had to find Morag and get out of here. There was no chance that the Fortunate Sons hadn’t reported the situation. Reinforcements would be en route. I was in a bad way but I didn’t have time to revisit the doc, assuming he was still alive and his facilities hadn’t been destroyed.

  I tried not to think about the humans I’d killed. It was easy killing Them. They looked different and were normally pretty enthusiastic about killing us. Obviously I’d killed people before: in the regiment we went after ‘terrorists’ or people who disagreed sufficiently with the powerful. Terrorists like the people who lived in the Avenues, I guessed. We weren’t supposed to war against each other. That was what we were supposed to have learnt from the Final Human Conflict and the havoc we’d wreaked on the world. Not that that ever stopped us from feeding off each other on the streets.

  From the other Avenues I could hear more gunfire. The Fortunate Sons must have been trying to clear all the Avenues, not just Westbourne. My communications icon was flashing. I was receiving an encrypted message. The code was an old special forces one that I had fortunately kept the key for. It would give whoever was running signals for the Fortunate Sons pause but they’d crack it quickly. It was like everything else about me, I thought, remembering the effortless kicking I’d received at the hands of Rannu moments before: obsolete.

  ‘Yes?’ I said tersely, answering the comms message.

  ‘Where are you?’ Pagan’s icon asked.

  ‘Still on Westbourne, not far from where I started. Be aware there is at least one operator on the ground. What is your situation?’ I asked as I began climbing up the creaking, damaged stairs in the house, hoping to find a way across the roofs and out of the Avenues. I left the bodies where they had fallen, floating. Those that had a face were all staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘We’re mopping up the last of them ...’ Pagan began.

  ‘We still need to get out of here; they’ll be coming mob-handed now. Do you have any prisoners?’ I asked, the patrol leader in me taking over. Pagan seemed to pause. I think he was trying to decide whether or not he wanted to seem to be obeying my authority. The conflict was momentary.

  ‘Yeah, some, but they’re not going to last. People are pretty angry.’ I could hear screams from behind him accompanied by the spite-filled enthusiasm of an angry mob. I couldn’t really find it in myself to feel much sympathy for the Fortunate Sons. They’d burnt these people’s homes, everything they’d built, and many of the people here were vets, not the biggest fans of the Fortunate Sons in the first place.

  ‘What’s your position?’ I asked.

  ‘Where you came in,’ Pagan said.

  I had reached the rooftop gardens. All around me were flames. I made my way carefully across the roofs. The gardens weren’t burning as badly as other parts. There was an explosion to my left as a still launched itself violently into the air. I made my way across to Marlborough Avenue. I felt like falling over: my wounds were making me weak and nauseous. I grabbed one of the walkway’s railings with my left hand and then quickly removed it. The metal was burning hot.

  On Marlborough I could see the ruins of another patrol craft. Every so often I saw a huge armoured reptilian back break the surface of the water.

  ‘Can you keep your pet dinosaurs off me?’ I sub-vocalised to Pagan.

  ‘You’re safe, they won’t attack you unless we specifically tell them to,’ he replied.

  ‘Good,’ I slurred out loud, and then half fell, half jumped the four storeys down into the water. It was a messy landing and for the amount of time I’d spent beneath the unpleasant waters of the Humber I may as well have become an amphibian. I’d knocked the wind out of myself and more red warnings were appearing in my visual display telling me I’d damaged components - metal, plastic and the ones I’d been born with.

  I clambered to my feet and, spitting out the filth I hadn’t swallowed, started wading down Marlborough Avenue, the water up to my waist. Corpses bumped into me. Every so often I was shot at and once hit; I had to scream at my attackers that I was on their side. The worst of it was watching the guard alligators breaking the surface here and there, knowing that they were in the water with me, largely unseen.

  I’d clambered up onto the small jetty at the end of Marlborough Avenue with the help of two angry-looking inhabitants of the Avenues. Pagan was stood in the institutional hotel-like building. Morag was with him but looked a little unsteady on her feet, though not as frightened as I thought she’d be. Sadly she was probably getting used to this. I noticed she was cradling a fifty-year-old Sterling SMG in her arms.

  A large man and woman wearing ragged and wet working clothes, both obviously infantry vets from their bearing, had a Fortunate Son on his knees, hands on his head, in front of them. He was young and, under all the grime, probably blandly attractive in the way the scions of the middling wealthy tend to be. He was scared but mastering it.

  I managed to climb unsteadily to my feat. Morag opened her mouth to say something but Pagan grabbed her arm and she lapsed back into silence. Clever boy, I thought. Don’t let her say anything in front of the Fortunate Son. I staggered towards the young officer, mustering my angriest look. God knows what I looked like, probably a mess. I half collapsed onto my knees in front of him.

  ‘Look, kid, you know that everyone breaks eventually. Spare yourself the pain and tell me what you were doing here.’ The kid looked up and attempted to grin defiantly, trying to mask his terror.

  ‘You don’t have time to break me,’ he said. I gave this some thought. My head was ringing and I didn’t feel like I was thinking clearly.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said and swayed back on my knees drawing the Mastodon and levelling it at the centre of the young lieutenant’s forehead. He did the only reasonable thing he could in the circumstances and wet himself. Sad really, he’d probably played this moment over in his head and saw himself as the stoic type. I tried to move out of the way of the stream of urine without waving the revolver around too much.

  ‘Believe me son none of it’s worth dying for.’ And I pulled the hammer back, largely an act of intimidation on a double-action revolver.

  ‘Okay!’ the ki
d shouted and started weeping. I leant in towards him, again trying to avoid the piss.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s going to know but us and we don’t matter. Why’d you come here?’

  ‘Orders,’ he said.

  ‘To do what?’ I asked.

  ‘We were given your details and told you had a girl with you,’ he said. Shit, I thought, they were on to Morag.

  ‘How’d you know we’d be here?’ I asked. He looked bewildered and frightened. I don’t think he had an idea of how to answer that question.

  ‘You need to help us, son,’ I said, drunkenly waving the huge revolver about.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t think they did,’ he said in a tone of panic.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I slurred.

  ‘Guards units have been mobilised all over the country, searching places like this. They’re looking everywhere for you.’

  ‘This sweep was done on spec?’ I asked, somewhat incredulous. I thought Rolleston would send operators, maybe a task force like the one that had hit the Avenues, once he knew where we were. We must have him really worried, not to mention his masters, if they’d mount an operation of this size and unleash their praetorians on the populace.

  ‘You mean this is going on all over?’ Pagan asked. He sounded as surprised as I was. The lieutenant nodded.

  ‘In places like this,’ the lieutenant said. He meant neighbourhoods not renowned for doing as they were told; any place where people could go to ground and hide. It was sheer luck they’d stumbled on us.

  ‘Why are you looking for him?’ Pagan asked. The lieutenant craned his neck around to look at the scruffy hacker. For the first time I noticed that Pagan was bleeding from a head wound.

  ‘We weren’t told.’ He turned back to me. ‘But you must’ve done something really bad. I think you’re working with Them.’ He spat, his previous defiance coming back. I swayed in towards him until my mouth was by his ear.