Maximum Offence (38 page)

All we need now is for this to work.

A fold-down sight hangs open in front of Rachel. She is making cross-hairs line up with each other. ‘You almost done?’ I ask.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sir . . .’ Haze has panic in his voice. ‘Hekati’s core is going critical.’

Looking up, Shil glances at Rachel, and then catches my gaze. ‘That’s good,’ I tell her.

She looks like she wants to disagree.

‘Shil,’ I say. ‘Trust me.’

Strange how women always twist their mouths when I say that. After choosing a vast asteroid, I have my gun position us behind it. And then I tell the SIG-37 to take us as close as it can without crashing into the thing.

‘OK,’ I say to Rachel. ‘Now fix me a line.’

Should be easy. We’re a Z-class mining tug for Godsake. And I’m sat in an observation pod — with five harpoons slung below me, a joystick for aiming — next to one of the best shots I have ever met. ‘Do it,’ I tell her.

Rachel’s first harpoon skids across the asteroid’s surface, disappears into space and drags the line behind it. Shil has re-fixed the wires. I know that, because the whole tug twitches slightly when the harpoon reaches the end of its run.

‘Concentrate.’

She aims carefully.

This time a small section of asteroid cracks free.

‘
Sir
,’ says Haze. ‘
We should
—’

Only I’m not listening, because I am staring at the shiny scar revealed by the last harpoon. Rachel’s third attempt snags on a small outcrop, but begins to come free the moment we start the winch. So we stop winching and leave the harpoon snagged where it is. Whatever is under that asteroid’s skin, there’s no way we are going to fix a harpoon into it. We might as well try to hang a picture by nailing glass.

‘Haze,’ I say. ‘How long?’

He knows what I’m asking.
How long before Hekati explodes?
How long before the mother ship gets us in range? How long before a Silver Fist fighter noses its way through the boulders out there and takes another shot?

‘A minute,’ he says. ‘Maybe a minute thirty.’

It takes me ten seconds to scramble out of the harpoon pod, another fifteen to grab a helmet from the wall and fix it over my suit.

‘Running safety routines,’ the helmet says.

It shuts down in a squawk of protest as I override its routines. ‘Open,’ I tell an airlock.

The bloody door stays shut.

‘SIG,’ I say.

Lights glitch on a control panel, and now I have two emergency systems screaming at me. They’re wasting seconds I don’t have. They’re wasting seconds none of us have. Inner door opens, inner door shuts.

The outer door blows at the SIG’s command. And I exit the tug like a cork from a bottle, straight into the side of the asteroid. I might as well try shoulder-barging a cliff.

‘Take care,’ says a voice.

How sweet of Colonel Vijay to remember me at a time like this.

A rib broken
, I think,
perhaps two
. Blood fills my mouth, but that’s me biting my tongue when I hit. I barely notice, because I’m too busy clinging to the asteroid surface.

‘Please, God,’ someone says.

Sounds like Shil. We can’t end like this. I won’t let it end like this.

As my fingers hunt for a fresh grip, my boot finds a crack and I scrabble hand over hand towards the harpoon above me. It straddles a gap between the floor of the asteroid and a rocky outcrop. The line is kinked round the harpoon’s middle and that helps keep it in place. A simple yank will set it free.

But I don’t want to set it free. I want that line tied tight enough to tether us to this bloody great rock.

‘He’s not going to make it . . .’ They have the comms channel open, and I can hear resignation in Colonel Vijay’s voice.

‘Yes, he is,’ Shil says firmly.

I grin.

‘Sir,’ says Haze, ‘Hekati’s about—’

‘Closer,’ I order. As the tug shifts, I grab the line and wrap the slack once round the outcrop. I’m about to wrap it a second time when Haze’s scream tells me to let go the line. He’s right. As the world ends, it snaps the line tight and ties us to the outcrop. At least it feels like a world ending.

Hitting a glancing blow, the Z-class slides off the asteroid and yanks at its new tether. Sound doesn’t travel in space. But I can feel that wire hum in my head.

Cut me in half if it snaps
, I think.

The wire holds, and the tug swings back to glance off the asteroid again, only less violently this time.

Imagine a storm. Then make it a thousand times worse.

Instead of wind, imagine flames from an exploding nuclear core.

Replace torn scraps of paper, dead leaves and broken bottles with chevron glass ripped from the roof of a world and rubble collected to act as shielding. Mix in armour plating from a splintering mother ship, ion drives the size of a small town, disintegrating Z7x fighters and body parts from four thousand troopers. Then add the scream of a dying AI. A scream that echoes so loudly it adds new colours to the inside of your head.

That doesn’t even come close.

Hekati explodes in all directions.

But the mother ship is between Hekati and us. So pieces of both come our way. Instead of water, it rains rubble and molten metal. And the bulk of the asteroid we hide behind is the only thing that protects us from a firestorm of slowly cooling plasma where Hekati used to be.

Shutting my eyes makes no difference.

Anyway, why would I want to shut my eyes? How often does anyone get to watch shit like this? It is the biggest bang we will ever see.

‘Boss,’ says Neen.

‘That’s
sir
,’ I say.

Rachel laughs. And though there is hysteria in her voice, it’s under control when she speaks, which is only a second later. ‘Should have known you’d be all right.’

‘Yeah,’ says Shil. ‘Impossible to fucking kill.’

‘I heard that.’

‘You were meant to.’

We have lived through the destruction of a world. We’ve taken down a mother ship, or, if that’s too big a stretch, we took down an epsilon-class cruiser and we’ll give the mother ship to Hekati. May she sleep well and have a better life next time.

As I cling to the rock and listen to their chatter, I know they’re writing their own legend. We have no right to be alive. Mind you, no one does. That’s line one, paragraph one of the Octovian constitution.

HAVING HELPED ME INSIDE, COLONEL VIJAY OFFERS ME HIS hand. That’s officers for you. Real ones, I mean. ‘Officer on deck,’ shouts Neen.

The Aux come to attention.

Undoing my helmet, the colonel grips it by its lower edge and twists, freeing it from its safety locks. As I drag air into my lungs, he says, ‘You left that a bit tight.’

‘I’ll try to do better next time.’

The colonel looks at me and shakes his head.

Rachel has vomit down her front; Haze has a nosebleed, as always. Neen is watching his sister, something unreadable in his eyes. Emil is smiling. But we have a couple of people missing. ‘Where’s Iona?’ I demand. ‘And Ajac?’

Neen leads me to the crewpit.

Ajac is on his knees, cradling Iona. Her mouth is open in a scream so loud and long that only its echo is left in the misery of her face. She’s precog, God knows what she felt when the habitat died.

‘Stand her up.’

My slap flips her head to one side. I don’t get to land a second, because the gravity carpet on this ship is so old she hits a bulkhead and lands in a heap beneath a safety notice.

‘Iona,’ I say. Only then does something human return to her eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not impressed with being human either. But it’s what she is and what she’s going to stay. Well, if I have anything to do with it.

‘
It was Hekati’s choice
.’

She stares at me; they all do.

That’s when I realize not even Haze knows exactly what happened. ‘You saw the size of the piece that the Enlightened ripped from her shell,’ I tell them. ‘Hekati was dying. She chose to take the Silver Fist ship with her.’

‘Hekati’s gone?’ Ajac says.

‘Everything’s gone. It’s just us now, and half a million new rocks.’

When Iona starts crying, Neen puts his arm round her shoulders and tries to wipe away her tears. I can think of half a dozen more useful things he could do.

‘Check our food supplies,’ I tell him. ‘And look at the oxygen levels.’

He salutes.

‘Take her with you.’

Iona might as well learn how life works around here.

It’s a while before they come back and Iona is still adjusting the buckles on her spacesuit when she does. Grief does that to people. After the slaughter at Fort Libidad, I fucked myself stupid for a week.

‘We’ve got food for eight days,’ says Neen. ‘And the oxygen scrubbers are working at near ninety-nine point ninety-nine.’ He means we’ll starve before we choke.

This is a Z-class tug, mining issue. It’s not built for speed. It’s not built for system-hopping. The damn thing is designed to drag rocks from here to Hekati.

But that is OK.

Because I’m Sven Tveskoeg, Death’s Head lieutenant, Obsidian Cross second class, and I have a better plan up my sleeve. ‘Haze,’ I say. ‘Fix me a call.’

We’ve been here before.

‘You want me to spam the whole galaxy?’

My grin is wide enough to scare Colonel Vijay. ‘Hell, no,’ I say. ‘I want a one-to-one with General Jaxx.’ And that scares the colonel even more. All the same, he asks only one question.

‘Sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘No, sir.’

‘He makes a bad enemy.’

‘Sir,’ I say, ‘we can die here or take our chances with your father.’

‘All right,’ he says a minute later. ‘Make your call.’ I’m not sure it should have taken Colonel Vijay that long to make his decision.

Haze sets up the link.

I don’t know how he does it. That’s fine, I don’t want to know. I just check it can’t be traced and that it can’t be broken. When Haze begins to talk about piggybacking comm sats, I wave him into silence and stand to attention in front of the lenz, only to stand myself down.

I’d send the Aux out of here. But
out of here
is free-floating in space, and even I am not that hardcore. Although I open my mouth to issue the order.

‘Go wait in the airlock.’

They look at me.

‘You can helmet up if you want.’

The Aux go as they are. It shows touching faith.

‘Sir,’ I say, when Colonel Vijay turns to follow.

‘I’ll be with the others,’ he says.

Having heard the inner door lock, and watched the light flicker on that tells me I can open the outer door if I want, and dump them all into space, I leave the Aux and Colonel Vijay to their thoughts. Who knows? If I were to dump them, maybe I’d have enough oxygen to take me somewhere useful.

And maybe I won’t.

‘General . . .’

‘Who is this?’

Haze has done what I ask to the letter. I am through on the general’s private line, minus a picture. And it doesn’t sound as if General Jaxx is too happy about being interrupted.

‘It’s me,’ I say, fumbling with screen controls.

Not the greatest opening line in the world, but it’s too late to worry about that. As I punch buttons in irritation, something shifts and a lenz starts working.

‘
Tveskoeg . . . ?
Now this is a surprise.’

I can almost hear his thoughts turn over. As a woman behind him is busy forcing her full breasts into a skimpy bra, I have obviously caught him at a bad time. It’s Caliente, from the brothel on board the general’s own mother ship. The fact she smiles when she sees me doesn’t help either.

‘Go,’ he says. For a second I think he is talking to me. And then I realize he isn’t. ‘I’ll call for you later.’

Her smile tightens. Turning her back on both of us, she climbs into her skirt, slips on a blouse and vanishes off screen. A second later, I hear a cabin door slamming. It sounds so close it makes me wonder what I’m doing here.

Only I know what I’m doing.

I’m obeying orders, more or less. And using my initiative. Even a general like Jaxx can hardly ask for more. Although he will. Generals always do.

‘Tveskoeg,’ he says. ‘I thought you were dead . . .’

‘Not here,’ I tell him. ‘And not yet.’ I end explaining that’s an Aux saying, and we’re sticking with it.

‘Aux,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘That’s your little group, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘How long have you been together?’

I admit it’s only a matter of months. And he laughs at the idea of us having traditions, then decides it is not a laughing matter after all. Seems he’s recently taken a call from Paper Osamu. She regretted to announce I had been killed in a tragic accident. When I ask where, the general names a planet three systems away from here. I was on safari, a guest of a well-known anthropologist.

After telling me what
anthropologist
means, General Jaxx admits he did find it unlikely. ‘So where are you?’ he says. ‘And what’s with that absurd arm?’

‘Combat issue,’ I tell him. ‘Killed a couple of Vals with it.’

‘Did you now?’ he says.

‘Yes, sir. Got their implants in a jar. Intend to ship them back to Val Central if I get the chance. Feel we owe them that.’

‘And you’re where now?’

On a mining tug, floating in space, off the edge of a dead habitat. Where the fuck do you think we are?
I don’t say it, obviously. But something about his question worries me.

Of course, the fact I’m talking to General Jaxx at all should worry me. Any general is dangerous. A Death’s Head general takes danger to new heights. And Jaxx commands the other generals. If half the things said about him are true, you could float entire planets in the blood he has spilt.

Life was simpler in the Legion. Only I’m not in the Legion any more.

‘Sir,’ I say. ‘Did Paper Osamu say why she wanted us? I mean originally, when the U/Free first borrowed the Aux?’ This is big-picture stuff, not something a lieutenant should ask a general. I know that, even before General Jaxx scowls.

He’s about to break the connection.

‘All I’m asking,’ I say, ‘is, was the job legit?’