Maximum Offence (8 page)

‘But first,’ he says, ‘a small favour.’

The request obviously means more to him than it does to me, because his voice trembles as he tells me what it is. Don’t think I have seen a U/Free nervous before. I file the fact away for later.

‘You’ll do it?’

Looking round the room, I say, ‘Way I feel now it would be a pleasure.’ It’s not the answer he’s expecting.

———

The cubicle walls are marble, the floor is warm and the lighting inside the cubicle so subtle it’s impossible to tell where it comes from. But it is the seashell in a little tray on the wall that interests me. What the fuck is that about?

Crumbling it between my fingers, I discover it’s real.

When I look back another replaces the one I took. So I smash that and keep watching. A third shell appears — and I mean appears — it doesn’t drop down or slide out. It simply appears.

This time when I take the shell, I don’t break it.

Comparing the third and fourth tells me each shell is different. I’m still not sure why they are there. I mean, all anyone comes in here to do is piss or take a shit. Flushing the pan, I wash my fingers and dry them on the seat of my trousers.

There’s nothing else to use.

A door opens in the restroom beyond.

Someone pees, water runs. That’s my cue to get myself out there. At the basin, a U/Free looks up. He is old, examining his face carefully in the glass as if he’s never seen it before.

Seeing a stranger behind him, he scowls. Then remembers his manners and forces a smile. I don’t know his name. But I know he has been watching us all evening.

‘So,’ he says. ‘You’re off to mend bridges . . .’

The coy way he says this irritates me. Also, I don’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about and that irritates me even more. He takes my grunt as an invitation to keep boring me. Meanwhile, I’m thinking
mend bridges
? Blowing them up is more my style.

‘What bridges?’ I demand, when he finishes.

‘Well . . . Maybe it’s more accurate to say you’re setting off on the final part of a vital search.’

‘Really?’ I say. ‘And what am I meant to be searching for?’ That poncy little colonel said something about a missing observer. However, I’d like it confirmed by one of the U/Free.

‘What we’re all searching for. He looks at me expectantly. ‘Peace,’ he says. ‘Resolution to deep divisions. What else is there . . . ?’

The man turns to go.

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Tell me more about Hekati.’

Looking from my face to the way my hand now grips the edge of a sink, he sighs, ‘You’re drunk. Ask Paper about it in the morning.’

‘Not that drunk,’ I say.

He has just realized something.

I’m holding a dagger. It’s small and light and made of glass. And if I concentrate hard, I can remember the dampness of Lisa’s thigh as I took its sister from her garter. The man knows he’s about to be hurt. He knows it’s possible he will die. What he doesn’t know is his next death is going to be his last.

That is what the U/Free fear.

Paper Osamu told me this three months ago. She was doing that deprecating, we’re-also-human thing the United Free do when trying to pretend they don’t believe they are better than everyone else.

‘You can’t—’ he begins to say.

I can, and do. Stabbing hard and fast. ‘Say goodnight to your memories.’

His implant is where you would expect. At the back of his neck, just below the curve of his skull. It is very cross when I rip it free. Slicing away the last tendril, I crush the ‘biont underfoot and flush it. Pulpy threads wriggle as they spin round the pan, but that is just aftershock. Having flushed the man’s memories, I am left with his body.

Leave it
, Paper’s grandfather said.
We’ll handle that bit
.

An interesting moral code. Unwilling to kill, happy to mop up the floor afterwards.

Taking the man’s watch, a handful of gold coins and a diamond ring, I leave him a little pearl-handled knife and the medal round his neck. The coins go in our kitty, the watch I’ll keep, and Franc can have the ring.

‘Where have you been?’ asks Colonel Vijay.

‘Taking a shit.’

He scowls.

Across the room Haze laughs, looking better than I have seen him in a while. As far as I know, he hasn’t vomited all evening. Like the nosebleeds, it is a reaction to the Uplift virus. They are going to stop sometime. Unfortunately, no one can tell us when.

Rachel’s still fretting that his head hurts. But as Haze points out, if she had metal growing through her skull her head would hurt too.

‘She stays here,’ Colonel Vijay says.

‘What?’

‘And the other two. You must know women are a liability in battle.’ He speaks with the absolute authority of someone who has never been near a battle in his life.

‘They’re Aux,’ I tell him.

The colonel stares at me.

So I add, sir. But that’s to annoy the U/Free. Paper’s just been telling Neen that she does not approve of hierarchies. Of course, she has to tell him what they are, before she can tell him why she doesn’t like them.

‘Paper,’ I say.

She inclines her head.

‘You asked for the Aux, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Paper Osamu nods. ‘You know we did.’

‘That’s us,’ I tell Colonel Vijay. ‘All of us.’ Saluting, I step back, and it is my turn to spin on my heels and stalk away. I don’t need to look back to know I have made an enemy.

Like I give a fuck.

PEOPLE TURN OUT TO SEE US OFF ON OUR SO-CALLED CULTURAL tour. More people than I expect. Come to that, more people than I imagined were in Letogratz. Almost all are wearing black and silver copies of our Death’s Head uniform. Some even have the leather thigh boots.

‘Started a craze,’ says Paper, standing behind me. She smiles at someone in the crowd. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of daggers the factor boxes have been asked to make in the past twenty-four hours. For decoration obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

She shoots me a glance. ‘You’ve made a big impression.’

‘And that makes you look good?’

‘Of course,’ she says.

Paper hugs me, which shocks Colonel Vijay slightly. Then she walks us to the open door of a shuttle and steps back, smiling. We are on lenz, I realize. Millions of U/Free are watching this.

God these bastards must be bored.

Hydraulics hiss, doors rise, we buckle ourselves in, and Letogratz drops away hard and fast. Fifteen minutes later, we put down eight thousand miles away. On a deserted beach, with coral reefs to one side and a mangrove swamp on the other. The roots of the mangroves are woven tightly enough to make an impenetrable wall.

‘Planted them an hour ago,’ says the pilot. He smiles at our disbelief. ‘Made the island this morning. It will be gone by tonight.’

Now that’s what I call
maximum deniability
.

Another shuttle is waiting on the beach. And stacked beside it are crates fixed with OctoV’s seal.

diplomatic supplies, reads a stencil. security cleared.

Inside the crates are enough weapons to start a small war. Also flip-down helmets, body armour, boots, field-glasses and battlefield radios. The colonel and I have reached an agreement. The agreement every CO reaches the moment he gets his first command. Find someone competent; tell him to carry on as normal. Of course, that is not how Colonel Vijay puts it.

He will tell me if I do anything wrong
.

Ripping open a case, I check the list inside its lid.

‘Here,’ I say.

Catching a package, Rachel unwraps a stripped-down sniper rifle. She has never seen one like it before. She snaps the barrel into place from instinct and gives me a wide grin.

‘Like it?’

‘Fuck, sir. Yes.’

It is an 8.59mm Z93z long-range rifle, with adjustable cheek piece, ×3-×12-×50 spotting scope, floating breech and fluting on the outer barrel to aid heat dissipation. And while it might fire electronically to avoid the snap of a firing pin, it’s bolt action, because snipers cling to the strangest traditions.

The only other Z93z I have seen decorates the wall of a sergeants’ mess in General Jaxx’s mother ship. The braids cut from a metalhead general are arranged underneath, along with his shoulder patches.

Colonel Vijay looks at me when I say this.

Not Rachel, she gets taking trophies. Snipers are high maintenance, like their weapons, everyone knows that.

‘Mine, sir?’

‘Until you’re dead,’ I tell her. ‘Or I take it back.’

‘This is my rifle,’ she says. ‘There are many like it, but this one is mine. Without it I am nothing.’ Brushing aside long red hair, Rachel adjusts the sight and blind-fires at the shuttle disappearing into the sky above us.

When she lowers the rifle, she’s still grinning.

‘Sir,’ she says. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘That true?’ Colonel Vijay asks a minute later.

‘What, sir?’

‘You were’ — he hesitates — ‘on the general’s mother ship?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Being tried for treason. Well, that was the third time. Second time, I was being fitted for this.’ I tap my arm loud enough to make it ring. ‘Of course, that was after Colonel Nuevo rescued me from the ferox . . .’

‘Colonel Nuevo?’

‘Shot himself at Ilseville. All part of a bigger plan.’

The colonel shuts his eyes. Think it might be irritation.

‘So you’ve never met General Jaxx?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘Several times.’

For some reason that doesn’t make Colonel Vijay any happier. ‘See you inside,’ he says, heading for the shuttle. A real CO would give me a time limit.

‘Keep unpacking,’ I say.

It is the second case that excites my gun. The SIG-37’s been pissed off since it hit U/Free territory. No ammo. Mind you, given the way I feel about Morgan, not letting me take a loaded gun into Paper’s party was only sensible.

All the same . . .

‘Sir,’ says Haze. He’s cupping his hand as if it holds an empire’s worth of treasure. So far as the SIG’s concerned, it does.

‘A cinder-maker chip?’

‘Better, sir . . .’ Haze grins excitedly. ‘It’s a conscience override. Would you like me to fit it?’ What he means is,
please may I . . .

Tossing him the gun, I watch Haze swivel a grip to click the chip into place. Some of what he does deals with a handshake routine for the power pack, but mostly he’s just checking everything is in order. That’s what he tells me anyway.

In the bottom of the case we find two more power packs. Both full.

‘Sweet,’ says the gun.

Rotating through incendiary, explosive and hollow-point, it swallows a third of the first pack and flickers happily. There is an old law against hollow-point, but no one pays it much attention.

‘Lock and load,’ says Shil.

The SIG-37 snorts. ‘It’s load and lock.’

She scowls, just for a change. Although that might be at the way Rachel is still smiling at me. Neen, Franc and Haze pull weapons from a box, and are obviously disappointed. They were hoping for pulse rifles.

What they have are Kemzin 19s, militia standard.

Mud-coloured and squat, short scopes, blunt muzzles, long magazines, under-slung rangefinders. Ugly as fuck.

The galaxy is full of them. At least the bits we occupy.

You can buy a Kemzin 19 rifle for less than the cost of a meal at a café on Zabo Square. There are places you can get one for the price of a beer. Hell, there are probably places where you buy a beer and they throw in a Kemzin free.

‘Shit,’ says Neen.

Shil is swearing in her turn.

Needles in the trigger guards have just drawn blood, allowing the weapons to lock themselves to their owner’s DNA. That kind of modification is expensive.

And OctoV isn’t known for being generous.

So either the U/Free are paying, or the general and OctoV need to be sure no one else is going to be firing these. That means we have to be going somewhere that guns are rare. Even Kemzins.

At least I think that is what it means . . .

Our new combat jackets are interesting. They’re sleeveless, with a dozen ammunition pouches. That’s not what is interesting. Each one has scrub camouflage, great patches of yellow, greys and brown.

‘Rags,’ says Shil.

‘Ballistically lined rags,’ says Haze.

I’d kill for a couple of fat-wheel combats or a light IV, but maybe we’re going to pick up half-tracks at the other end. And maybe we’re not, because the next things we find are boots, with air soles, double bonding and padded sides. These things matter. At least, they matter to anyone who relies on being able to move and keep moving to stay alive.

‘Armour up,’ I tell my troopers.

We lose our fancy jackets, our old boots. All the kit we got for Paper’s party. What interests me is that none of our new kit is Octovian-made. You could slaughter the lot of us and learn nothing from picking over our bodies. In fact, if all you had was Haze to pin the choice on, you would think we were metalheads.

It makes me want to ask Colonel Vijay exactly what getting this U/Free observer back involves. Not that I give a fuck either way, you understand.

Colonel Vijay scowls when he sees us. I’m not sure if it’s the fact we no longer look neat, or he simply doesn’t like what was in the boxes. Everyone wears a sleeveless jacket; everyone wears a helmet, with flip-down visor. Except Colonel Vijay, who still wears his full-dress uniform. He looks about twelve.

The co-pilot’s seat is empty, so I take it.

Having opened his mouth to order me out, the colonel changes his mind. Maybe he believes officers shouldn’t argue in front of their men. Instead, he takes his place in the pilot’s seat in silence.

‘Sir,’ I say.

A sideways flick of his eyes tells me he is listening.

‘About our mission. When do I get briefed?’

He sighs. ‘It’s need to know,’ he says. ‘You don’t.’

Leaning forward, he slaps his hand on a recognition panel, and engines begin to quiver behind us. This shuttle is strictly short-run. I’ve seen one like this before on a landing field in Farlight. Unless our destination is within a hundred thousand miles of here, I don’t see how we are going to get anywhere.