Authors: Gavin Smith
I moved behind her, using her for cover as the polearm hit her shield, then reached around to grab her forehead and yanked her head back as I brought my knee up into the back of her skull. I sidestepped as she stumbled back and four nine-inch blades extended from my knuckles on either hand. I punched her in her sword arm. Three of the four blades on that fist punched clean through her arm and momentarily pinioned her arm to her side. I ripped the blades out and kicked her knee as she continued staggering back. I heard it break. She tumbled to the ground and I stamped on her head.
I didn’t want to kill her and I was pretty sure I hadn’t. She was obviously an augmented combat vet. But I didn’t want her getting up behind me as I tried to deal with the other two.
The crowd went wild.
I turned and ran towards the shaven-headed guy. He saw me coming and swung at me. I twisted as I ran and tried to deflect the blow with my prosthetic arm. The chain wrapped around it. The blade of the polearm wielded by the marine hit me solidly in the back and I screamed. It went through my subcutaneous armour and bit into my reinforced spine, but he would have had to hit a lot harder to sever it.
I leaped into the air and felt the blade tear out of my back. Scarface tried to put his shield between him and me. I landed on it. He buckled under my weight. I punched down with my claws. Boosted muscle pushed the carbon-fibre blades through the wood and iron shield and into his shoulder. He cried out. I twisted the blades, hoping to render his shield arm useless.
Scarface yanked on the ball and chain’s wooden handle. The chain was still wrapped around my arm. I fell awkwardly onto the ground. I had a moment to realise that the polearm blade was flying towards my head. I rolled out of the way and sand flew as the blade hit the ground. I yanked the chain that still connected me to the ball and chain, jerking Scarface towards me, and kicked out with a sweep, taking his legs from him. I axed my foot down into his face with as much power as I could muster and was rewarded with the satisfying noise of subcutaneous armour, bone and cartilage being crushed. His face looked like it had been split. Blood spurted from his mouth and nose.
I rolled out of the way of another polearm blow, towards Scarface and, just to make sure he wasn’t going to get up and come after me, rammed my claws through both his kneecaps and into the muscle and flesh of his lower legs and then tore them back out. I left him a screaming, bleeding, crippled mess on the floor.
Then I stood up and turned to face the marine. He was backing off. I stared at him as I unwrapped the ball and chain from around my prosthetic arm. The crowd were jeering him. A polearm is great in a medieval infantry line working in conjunction with others. Less good one on one, particularly against an opponent with paired weapons.
I paced left and right looking for an opening. He was making half-hearted thrusts towards me, trying to keep me at bay. I charged him. He swung at me. I parried easily and was past the weapon’s reach. Then he did something I’d rarely seen marines do. He turned and ran. The problem was he didn’t have anywhere to go. He ran straight into the crowd, who pushed him back. He started throwing punches and I saw one rich guy’s nose explode as the marine tried to fight his way through. But by that point I’d thrown myself into the air.
I landed on his back and pushed both sets of blades through his shoulders. I didn’t want to kill him but I was really, really angry. There was resistance as I pushed through his subcutaneous armour. The blades appeared from his chest and the crowd became more excited as more of them were spattered with blood.
I pulled the marine down on top of me. He kept screaming as I used my claws in his flesh to turn him over so I was astride him and he was face down on the sand. Then to the wild screaming cheers of the crowd I grabbed the back of his head and rammed his face into the ground until blood seeped out into the sand around him and he stopped moving.
I didn’t care if I had killed him. I stood up. I was covered with blood, some of it mine, most of it not.
‘Where is he?!’ I was panting for breath but I still managed to scream hoarsely. I was scanning the room for Alasdair. I could see Fiona watching. She had a hungry grin on her face.
Of course they turned on him. They were laughing. He wasn’t; he was sobbing and begging as I made my way through the crowd towards him. Anyone who got in the way had their legs kicked out from under them or got an elbow in the face.
As I reached him he turned and started to beg. I grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and carried him through the crowd by his neck until I could slam him into the wall.
I pulled my arm back and extended my blades. Fiona was standing next to me. The look of expectation on her face was almost sexual. Her look turned to one of disgust as Alasdair soiled himself. There was laughter. Someone grabbed my arm. I whipped my head round ready to hurt someone else and saw Calum there.
‘No!’ he shouted. Then calmer: ‘You can’t do this, Jakob.’ There were sounds of disappointment from the crowd. I let Alasdair go and retracted my blades. He sank to the ground in a pool of his own muck.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you people?’ I asked, shaking my head. I was disgusted, as much with myself as with them. I wouldn’t fight to do something worthwhile like kill Rolleston but I’d become a spectacle, entertainment for these scum. These were the people that the Cabal had worked to protect.
‘You could have stopped this,’ I said accusingly to Calum.
‘I told you. A man in my position is expected to provide entertainment for his guests. Though I may not like it.’
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We may as well have been from different species.
‘If I’ve killed one of those three,’ I said, pointing back towards the broken bodies lying on the sand, then I’m coming back here and killing him.’
Calum held his hand up in a placatory gesture. ‘Look, why don’t you let Fiona patch up your wounds?’
‘C’mon, Jakob, please?’ Fiona took hold of my arm. The concern in her voice lacked sincerity. I shook her off and stormed from the cellar, grabbing a bottle of whisky off a table as I did so.
I’d taken worse beatings, notably at Rannu’s hands, but this seemed even more pointless than my fight in New York. I emptied about a quarter of the bottle of Glenmorangie into my mouth, just managing to swallow it before crying out as I forced too much whisky into my system and it burned my cuts. I leaned heavily against the wall of the corridor.
‘Are you okay?’ Fiona asked, her voice full of mock concern.
‘Oh just fuck off, will you,’ I told her wearily.
‘Daddy wants me to make sure you’re okay. I want to make sure you’re okay,’ she said coquettishly. I wasn’t coping well with this.
My head jerked round to stare at her. How fucking bored and jaded was she? She leaned in and kissed me. I tried not to think of Morag as I returned the kiss. Or rather I tried to think about all the things about Morag that angered me.
Anger was the emotion of this fuck. And that’s all it was, a fuck. Watching your partner through thermographics during sex can be beautiful. Looking at the colours and how they shift and change as they become hotter. The internal blush of sex. In this case I did it so I didn’t have to look at her.
She was wild in bed but less than happy when I called her Morag. There was screaming and slamming of doors. I didn’t care. I had the rest of a bottle of Glenmorangie to drink. The bed looked like someone had been murdered in it. I should have got my injuries sorted out but I was so tired.
Of course they were Spetsnaz. Who else could they be? And we owed them big time. Lieutenant Vladimir Skirov and his Vucari. The name was from some ancient Russian werewolf myth. Skirov and his people claimed that they weren’t try-too-hards who wanted to be scary but rather that the idea of warewolves, as they called themselves, made sound tactical sense. Having seen them in action I could see what they meant. The physiological changes that allowed them to run on all fours made them a lot faster. They had heavily augmented arms for the running, which gave them a lot of power in hand-to-hand, particularly with their steel-claw-tipped fingers. Their maws also gave them an edge in hand-to-hand combat. Assuming you didn’t mind getting a mouthful of what you’d bitten, and these guys didn’t
.
The thing was, however, that Russian cybernetics and prosthetics, particularly military ones, where built for function and power rather than looks and finesse. They looked less like the sort of werewolves you’d see in horror vizzes, immersions and on street-gang augmentations, and much more like mechanical, faintly canine monstrosities. Mudge had told Skirov this earlier, which had caused Skirov to shoot vodka from his nostrils he was laughing so hard. Russians had an odd sense of humour
.
They also drank a lot. Vladimir had told us proudly that, after combat, the biggest cause of casualties in the Russian armed forces was drinking non-beverage alcohol. I think a lot of what they drank was the fuel for alcohol-burning combat vehicles
.
We owed the Vucari. This meant that we’d spent a week engaging in a fine tradition of the Regiment. Stealing. In this case every bit of alcohol we could find to say thank you. There was no doubt in any of our minds that without the timely presence of these cheerful Russian psychos we would have been dead
.
We’d drunk to Dorcas. We’d drunk to the Spetsnaz who’d died on their patrol. Mudge had even suggested drinking to my arm. We’d drunk a lot
.
Saturday night found us in the NCOs’ mess. Fortunately the lieutenant was not too proud to drink with enlisted and NCOs. I suspected he’d drink with the Berserks if they asked. The mess was a partially bombed-out bunker, a twisted labyrinth of tunnels with various chambers used for drinking. The deeper parts belonged to special forces and you took your life in your hands straying into them unless you happened to be a very pretty squaddie on a date with someone hard enough to look after you
.
The cybrids weren’t Spetsnaz, they were Cossacks originally from southern Russia. The Cossacks often supported Russian special ops in much the same way the Special Forces Support Group did for British special forces and the Rangers did for the American Delta Force. They were lead by Captain Kost Skoropadsky. He was young and didn’t seem as big a wanker as many officers. He mainly kept quiet, and despite his higher rank tended to defer to Vladimir. The cybrids had removed their horse bodies and had attached cybernetic legs to become bipeds. I think they felt a little uncomfortable
.
In the wake of the Organizatsiya’s takeover of the Russian Federation the Cossacks had rebelled and set up their own autonomous state of Cossackia. While Cossack regiments still fought with the Russian army, if they met Spetsnaz on the streets of Moscow there would probably be bloodshed as memories were long in that part of the world. The rebellion had badly bloodied both sides. However, these particular Cossacks were descendants of colonists on Sirius. The plains of Sirius, before the war at least, were close enough to the steppes of their homeland. They had bred horses before They had come, and when They had come the Cossacks did what they always did: they fought
.
The cybrid centaur bodies had been developed to aid their horse ranching. They were capable of speeds comparable to many wheeled vehicles and had the ability to go places that wheeled vehicles just couldn’t. The Cossacks had soon found a new use for their cybrid bodies
.
Kost told me that he had never even seen a real horse. They had all been killed before he was born. Sometimes he would go to the sense booths and go riding or just stroke one. He wondered if they had got their smell right
.
The dogs were called Tosa-Inus, and were extensively modified Japanese fighting dogs. One of them had his head in Vladimir’s lap and he was scratching the animal behind its ears. I liked dogs. We’d been lucky enough to have one as a child. It was a working dog, a Border collie, but these were scary. They followed the Spetsnaz everywhere and were utterly silent. Vladimir explained that they’d had their vocal cords cut. I reached down to rub the back of one of their heads. The dog opened an eye and looked at me. The eye was a matt-black plastic lens, just like mine
.
In some ways it was horrible that they were used as weapons but there was something comfortable about their presence here. It was like a parody of normality
.
Service in the Spetsnaz practically guaranteed you a high-ranking enforcer position within the Organizatsiya. Many of Vladimir’s people were stripped to the waist and proudly sporting tattoos. Hundred of years ago they would have been prison tattoos, but to go to prison in Russia you have to commit a crime that the Organizatsiya did not approve. Most never made it to prison
.
Mudge, who’d had to fight for his place in the mess and had nearly died in doing so, had pulled. Frankly, the huge warewolf Spetsnaz looked terrifying
.
‘Won’t it be a bit like bestiality?’ I drunkenly asked him
.
‘Yes!’ he shouted with altogether too much enthusiasm. I took this moment to head to the bar with some of my hard-earned back pay. I made my way through the crowd, knowing I was going to have to bargain to get reasonable-quality vodka. I say reasonable-quality – something that wouldn’t make you sterile. It was lucky that our eye implants meant we couldn’t go blind
.