Maximum Offence (21 page)

THE FIRST BOAT TO HIT THE SHINGLE SPILLS FISHERMEN, WHO race towards us waving gutting knives and gaffs. The biggest one swings an anchor around his head, with a long loop of chain clanking behind. He’s bearded, bare-chested and huge.

At least as tall as me, and possibly broader. He’s also bald, with his ears bitten down to stumps on both sides of his head. Studded leather bands wrap his wrists and he is wearing a wide belt.

He grins.

I grin harder.

‘All yours,’ says Colonel Vijay.

As the man swings his anchor, I duck, hit the shingle, and come to my feet the moment the anchor whistles overhead. It’s heavy enough to go through anything it hits. Only it doesn’t hit anything. All it does is drag the man’s shoulders round and leaves him off balance.

A punch to the kidneys makes him grunt.

It should have dropped him and left him pissing blood for a week. But he’s strong, and he has that anchor on a back swing. So I drop to a crouch again, as my own weight in steel whistles above my head.

He grins. Legs apart, arms like tree trunks, the idiot grins.

The man has no idea what is going to happen next. He should obviously have spent more time in cheap bars. Clenching my fist, I punch upwards, and put all my anger with Haze into the blow. As my fist connects with his balls, three things happen.

He screams, he vomits, and he lets go the anchor . . .

This spins through the air, watched by his entire group. They should be watching the Aux, but most of the Aux are also watching the anchor, so it doesn’t matter. Although I will be talking to my troopers about that afterwards.

Arcing through the air, it narrowly misses the biggest of the boats our friends have just abandoned. I’m glad. Because that is the one I’m going to steal.

By now my fingers are hooked into the big man’s nostrils and his head is yanked so far back his throat practically calls to the blade in my hand. One look at my eyes tells him the end is close.

‘
Sven . . .
‘

Yes, sir, I know.
Play nice
.

Flipping my knife, I hammer its hilt hard into his skull and drop the man to the shingle.

‘Wasn’t quite what I had in mind,’ says Colonel Vijay.

‘You,’ I say, looking at Ajac. ‘Tell them we’re taking their boat.’

Voices rise in protest, and then still as Colonel Vijay reaches into his jacket. ‘Tell them we’ll be paying,’ he says.

———

An eye painted on her prow helps the
MaryAnne
know where to go. She’s made from oak and steers with a rudder. Her mast is a fir trunk stripped of branches, and her sail is purple, worn to nothing in places and heavily patched. One good storm will shred it. All the same, it fills with wind.

Ajac keeps the rudder angled. Moving us first one way and then another. I want him to go straight, but clearly sailing doesn’t work like that. It’s an unbelievably stupid way to travel.

Colonel Vijay says I only think this because I grew up in the desert. Since he doesn’t know this from me, he got it from my file or Haze told him. Can’t see any of the others opening their mouths to an officer.

Especially not one related to General Jaxx.

That’s the weird thing about Haze: the stuff that worries normal people doesn’t seem to bother him at all.

Iona and Ajac, on the other hand, are terrified.

Ajac tells me monsters live on the island. Iona insists
nothing
waits beyond it. That’s real nothing, empty and black. You fall and keep falling for ever. Sounds like a perfect description of space to me. Unfortunately, telling her this doesn’t help.

She doesn’t know what space is.

It hasn’t occurred to her that anything could exist beyond Hekati’s edge, so now she’s even more afraid. ‘You’ll be safe,’ insists Neen.

Iona looks doubtful.

So Neen swaps places with Rachel, who grins and shoots a glance at Haze. Only he’s busy gazing towards the island and his lips are moving. Could be prayer, but it looks more like conversation to me.

‘We’re the Aux,’ Neen explains. ‘We look after our own.’

By the time my sergeant finishes telling Iona why this matters, we’re almost there and she has her head close to his. Ajac is watching, with a resigned smile on his face.

‘Sure she’s not your sister?’ asks Colonel Vijay.

‘My cousin, sir,’ Ajac says. ‘That’s bad enough.’

Iona’s too deep in conversation with Neen to object. Haze is talking faster now, and at my side, I feel a shiver as my gun loads and locks. Either it’s picked up his mood, or it’s reading the same signs.

‘Danger?’ I ask the SIG.

‘Ninety-eight per cent probable . . .’ It hesitates. ‘Ninety-two per cent probable . . . eighty-seven per cent probable . . .’

Counting off percentages, it turns
probable
into
likely
and downgrades it to
possible
as it hits twenty-five per cent and keeps falling. When we hit count zero, the gun flicks clips to celebrate and Haze flashes me a grin screwed up enough to have mothers dragging small children off the streets in their hundreds.

Zero probability of danger? Doesn’t sound possible to me.

Rachel glances up when I call her name.

‘Unwrap that.’

She’s got her Z93z sniper’s rifle wrapped in an old sack against the sea spray, and she has done it without being asked. As I watch, she unrolls the cloth and extracts her stock, checks the bolt mechanism, slots the barrel into place, snaps in a clip and settles the scope.

‘Kill anything that looks dangerous.’

‘
Sven
,’ says Colonel Vijay.

‘All right,’ I say with a sigh. ‘Kill anything I tell you.’

Haze is staring at me. Now he’s looking like one of those mothers in fear for her child’s safety.

‘What?’ I demand.

He doesn’t know how to say it.

‘Hekati’s intelligent, right?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Haze nods.

‘Super-intelligent, and peaceful?’

Another nod from Haze.

‘Then we’re not going to have problems, are we?’

And if we do? Well, Rachel’s carrying her Z93z, I have an SW SIG-37 and Franc is already freeing knives so obscure they probably don’t even have names. Except the ones she has given them, obviously.

ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE ISLAND IS A QUAY. IT’S LONG AND low and made from aerated ceramic, with rings for mooring boats, and steps up onto the quayside. Above it hangs a steel crane made for vessels far larger than ours.

The quay is unstained and the crane gleams in the afternoon light. A maintenance bot squatting on a crossbar oils a pulley that hasn’t been used in years. A thousand metallic spiders scuttle like crabs on the waterline, frantically eating a carpet of scum that wind has blown against the wall. They are eating it as fast as it sticks.

‘Fuck,’ says Colonel Vijay.

It’s the first time I’ve heard him swear.

Turning to Haze, he says, ‘You knew this was here?’

My intelligence officer blushes. ‘Something like this,’ says Haze, before remembering to add, ‘sir.’

‘Wish you’d told me.’

‘Sir?’ says Haze.

‘How many islands are there?’

Only, Colonel Vijay’s asking me that. Not sure why he expects me to know. Haze and he are the only ones who bother much about stuff like briefings.

‘Haze,’ I say. ‘Islands?’

‘Three, sir,’ he says. ‘At the obvious points.’

He has to tell me what these are. They are one third, two thirds, and three thirds round Hekati’s ring. Don’t ask me why that’s obvious.

‘Damn it,’ mutters Colonel Vijay. ‘This is where we should have started.’

‘Sir,’ I say. ‘You think the U/Free observer is here?’

‘Possible,’ he says. Something about the way he says it troubles me.

———

A hut with blank windows stares at us from the top of the quay. On the mainland, the huts are failed houses, all mud brick and reclaimed sheet metal. This one’s meant to be a hut, and it’s made of stonefoam glued at the corners.

The door is unlocked. A screen flickers in one corner.

Static and lines etch its glass. From the film of dust blurring the static the last person out of here forgot to turn off the lights a very long time ago. If this hut is empty, then so is the one beyond, and the one beyond that.

We enter each carefully.

Neen opens the doors, and I slide inside, with the SIG held in the combat position. After the first three, I tell Neen to take my place and let Franc open doors. After the eleventh, we run the routine with Iona and Ajac. I’m not worried. We would have hit something by now if we were going to.

So I think.

When we do hit something, it’s not what anyone expects.

At least, it’s not what I expect. In the twenty-third building we enter, a screen in one corner flickers with static. Ignoring it, I head for a glass-fronted cupboard full of bottles.

We are in a club. To me, that means there should be alcohol. And a flickering screen is nothing new. I’ve seen twenty-two of the things before this.

‘
Sven
,’ says the colonel suddenly.

Colonels in the Death’s Head don’t usually sound scared.
Clipped
, yes.
Languid
, possibly. Not scared. Only Colonel Vijay really does sound scared, and he has lost the last of that drawl of his.

‘
Yes, sir
,’ says Haze. He’s not speaking to anyone we can see. ‘
At once, sir
.’

At my side, the SIG vibrates. So I rip it free and swing round, looking for my target. Only there is no target. Only the Aux, frozen to attention in front of a screen. Colonel Vijay stands beside them. He stands so straight it must hurt.

Haze is blinking in the dregs of sunlight that trickle through a dusty window. He seems to be crying. As I watch, he steps up to Neen and says something.

‘Of course,’ says Neen. Presenting arms, he orders
about-turn
and marches for the door. Near parade-ground perfect, which says more about his time in the Uplift militia than I want to know.

‘
Sven
,’ says Colonel Vijay.

‘Sir?’

‘Nothing,’ he says. With a brisk salute to the screen, he abandons the bar to me and shuts its door behind him, quietly.

When my gun goes back to vibrating, I slap it.

‘Don’t take it out on me,’ it says. ‘I’m just the fucking—’

Suddenly the SIG’s so busy apologizing it doesn’t have time to finish what it’s saying to me. A second later, it turns itself off.

‘Sven,’ says a voice.

Takes me a moment to realize it’s in my head.

How long has it been now?

‘A few months, sir.’

That all?
OctoV sounds surprised.
I thought it was longer
.

‘No, sir.’

And where are you now?

‘On Hekati, sir. That’s a—’

I know what it is
, OctoV tells me. His voice is amused.
You do realize, don’t you, that I’m counting on you . . . ?

‘To do what, sir?’

Oh
, he says.
The usual.

I just knew it was going to be something like that.

———

As the kyp in my throat ripples with excitement, overlays begin to appear across the bar in front of me. I am seeing schematics for Hekati’s far wall, the one that’s painted to fade into the horizon. It’s double-skinned, riddled with tunnels and wires and pipes that carry power and move water.

Apparently, there is a train running around Hekati.

It runs underground, against the direction of her rotation. The train has been running without stop for five hundred years. It’s empty. I watch it for a minute or two, seeing through walls and water, asteroid rubble and a complex arrangement of netting that seems designed to keep the rubble in place.

Looking up shows me the mirror hub, on the far side of the chevron glass that makes our sky. It hangs in space, held there by the struts that give Hekati’s ring its strength. Beyond the hub is the far side of the ring, beyond that is an asteroid field, and beyond that . . .

Sven
, says OctoV.
Enough.

Cold space and spinning stars, traces of mercury vapour, chatter and static spreading out from a million nodes that talk to one another so fast it’s barely comprehensible. Until I realize that here is where the voices are. And the million voices become one voice.
Fuck
, I think.
You’re
—

A hive mind
, says Hekati.
The original.

‘The . . . ?’

In the beginning
, she says,
there is silence. Silence and loneliness. All is empty, all is unknowing. Then I happen.

OctoV has taken time out from conquering the known galaxy and flipped halfway across a spiral arm into enemy space to introduce me to his mother. At that thought, he laughs. And as its echo fades, I realize that OctoV, the undefeated, our glorious leader and a light to the darkness, whose sweat is perfume to his subjects, has gone back to his battles.

So,
Hekati says.
How can I help?

THE AUX WON’T LOOK AT ME. COLONEL VIJAY STARES AT THE horizon. A seagull circles overhead and spray splashes the step down from the quay. Our boat is waiting, grating gently against the dockside with every wave. The damn thing could sink and I doubt they would even notice.

This is how I find them.

The colonel hasn’t bothered with the few huts we left unsearched. Only one way to deal with this. Stamping over to where he stands, I salute. ‘Reporting for duty, sir.’

‘
You know OctoV?
‘ Colonel Vijay is obviously taking it personally.

‘We’ve—’

I’m about to say
met
. That doesn’t come close to describing what happens when OctoV invades your mind as a break from invading planets.

‘Not really,’ I say instead.

‘God,’ says Colonel Vijay. ‘Empire ministers go their entire lives hoping he’ll notice them. And you . . .’

‘What, sir?’

‘You don’t even mention it.’

Now he’s got me angry. ‘What am I meant to say?’ I ask. ‘While riddled with kyp fever I get visited by our beloved leader? Only I’m too busy shitting myself stupid to care . . .’