He landed in a crouch.
Emerald attacked with the savagery of a lightning strike.
An armoured point ripped a tear through Keenan’s WarSuit and opened the flesh of his chest. Keenan gasped as pain slammed him, and he staggered back, feeling a warm flush of blood beneath the suit, feeling the armour’s shrill cry of damage, and watching numbly as Emerald circled him and he clutched his own cut flesh. Skin and muscle parted beneath questing fingers, a sick gaping mouth.
It sliced a
WarSuit,
screamed his mind.
It does not remember what it was.
In horror Keenan realised he could not fight this creature, could not kill this creature. With an insight that cursed his brain he suddenly understood: this thingwas old, older than humanity, older than the Ket-i; what had JuJu said? She was a danger to all life in the Quad-Gal? From a time before Humanity?
Emerald looked at him. A black maw grinned treacle saliva.
And it nodded towards him, swaying.
It gave him Insight... sprinkled his mind with confused understanding.
Bright lights glittered.
Emerald was Old Life.
Emerald was a Servant of a long extinct GodRace.
Emerald was a Servant of Leviathan.
Part 4
Redemption Song
Chapter 13
Cerebral Fracture
Betezh squatted in the jungle, smeared with grime, exhausted, eyelids drooping, but an edge of fear kept him clinging to consciousness, and wondering just what the hell his next move could be.
After escaping the Gem Rig and paddling off across the Milk Sea like some diseased and grotty Gollum, Betezh had soon realised that the engines on the Raptor Boat had been disabled, immobilised. Oh, how he had smiled nastily at that: Franco’s last laugh? You bet.
And so, Betezh floated for long endless hours, dragged this way and that by tides more powerful than anything he could have dreamed, more forceful than anything against which he could simply paddle. Ket was a savage planet and the Milk Sea was no different. Occasionally, he’d paddle furiously in the hope he could achieve some distance, but, alone, a single oar against the wilds of Ket Nature, it was a useless thankless task.
The bastard known as Franco
,
eternal thorn in Betezh’s side, had efficiently disabled Betezh’s escape, crippled him. Betezh was a soldier, a murderer, could even pull off a reasonable impression of a doctor specialising in mental breakdown, but a mechanic he was not. Yes, he could hack away at a simple engine, but the beasts that lurked in this craft were beyond his admittedly simple engineering skills.
He floated for eternity, his shaved head reddening alarmingly under the beating suns. He cursed, double-cursed and triple-cursed Franco Haggis; it had seemed such a simple mission. Contain the maggot at Mount Pleasant. No problem, a walk in the park, easy peasy. But through a series of unfortunate escalations, Betezh found himself up shit creek... yes, with a paddle, but a paddle that was useless in the face of an aggressive tidal system hell-bent on his demise.
Betezh floated, bobbed, rode waves, sank troughs.
He muttered, a lot, cursing Franco, cursing the Gods, and, ultimately, cursing his boss Vitch the Bitch. “What a bitch,” he would grumble to himself, before splashing around uselessly with his paddle for a while, then giving up—always giving up—and lying back, baking in the boat, tortured skin nagging him with a pain he tried—unsuccessfully—to push away.
Night fell.
With it came a relief from the agonies of torturing sunlight. Without water—an important oversight—Betezh wheezed and panted, moaned and groaned; a twig tongue probed bark lips.
He tried to sleep. Sleep would not come.
He tried to think of happier times, but, strangely, there didn’t really appear to be any.
What did I do with my life?
he thought sourly. He’d only wanted to be a soldier, a squaddie, an infantryman. He’d loved the sound, the work, the ethos. He’d signed up aged seventeen; threw himself into Boot Camp, worked his knickers off to make a good soldier. Impressing his COs, he’d been drafted into Special Ops, a long slippery slope of gradual mental and ethical degradation, which had led, eventually, over many decades, to him working as a Spook for a politician slick bitch like General Kotinevitch. And, yes, for a while he had revelled in his role; he had been important, made serious decisions, been up, up, up, launched flying to the top of the ziggurat, and if not directly in charge, then at least seriously influential
.
However, the toes that you step on while you’re on your way up, may be the same ones that you kiss going down. And now? Irony, now he was a piece of burnt toast in a boat, and, more importantly, a piece of blackened toast... about to die
.
No children, he realised suddenly.
Always been too busy; never met the right woman.
He had always wanted children. He nodded to himself.
Shit.
There was a gentle bump
.
Betezh lay for a while, trying to ease a droplet of non-existent water from some porous orifice within the desert cavern of his mouth. Then he frowned. His harsh features compressed, aided by severe dehydration. A bump?
Betezh had crawled across the alloy floor of the boat, and sunburnt hands like cooked lobster grasped the rim, hauling his bulk to the edge; land! Land! “It’s land,” he croaked, hauled himself onto the rim, and rolled off amongst the rock pools. He struggled, splashed about, made it onto hands and knees, and then crawled sideways like a crab up the beach towards the protection of the jungle.
He halted a few feet away, staring suspiciously at the massive black expanse; it was even more forbidding under nightfall. He shrugged. What did he have to lose?
Betezh had crawled into solid blackness...
And around him, the jungle creaked.
Fruit!
He’d found fruit!
Betezh gorged like an animal on the ripe soft Ket melon. Chewing a head-sized hole in the rind with gnawing sounds, he plunged his face into the soft flesh, slurping juice, allowing the coolness to soothe his baked skin as he drank his fill, ate his fill, then tossed the huge empty husk aside and belched. He lay on his back, staring up at wavering creepers in the near-absolute blackness, and listening to the
chirrup
of insects and the far-off lumbering of some prehistoric monstrosity; Betezh sighed
.
I’m not going to die after all!
he thought.
I’m not going to die! Not going to die!
I will father children! I will meet the right girl!
I will...
“Get up!” The voice was harsh, guttural, and did not inspire confidence. Betezh opened his eyes and looked up into the glowing tip of a Laz-Spear. He scowled. Oh how the Gods mocked him!
Dawn was breaking. Streamers of fire from two directions divided the sky with jagged oil blades. Steam rose from much of the jungle undergrowth. Heat and humidity were already increasing, and Betezh, sweat stinging his sunburn, climbed warily to his feet.
There were twelve Ket-i warriors, huge powerful males wearing bones of the slaughtered with pride. Several were armed with sub-machine guns, most with Laz-Spears and shoulder-holstered plastic pistols.
“I am a stranger in your land,” began Betezh, and the Laz-Spear cracked against his skull and he hit the ground, hard. Betezh growled something incomprehensible and touched his head. Blood came away on his fingers. He glanced up, lips baring teeth like a rabid mutt, but the warrior wasn’t watching him. He was gazing off into the jungle, eyes narrowed, nostrils twitching.
Betezh slowly followed this line of vision, but could see nothing.
There was crashing through the undergrowth, as of a panicked sprinter; a warrior burst into view, slammed to a halt, and gestured wildly behind him.
“Alien,” he managed between gasps for oxygen.
The warriors spread out, Betezh forgotten and left prostrate near the centre of their sudden battle formation. Betezh made as if to scramble for cover, but a glance and wave of a Laz-Spear made him stay put. “Between the devil and the deep blue sea,” he muttered, and spat into the woven jungle matting.
“Not the devil,” said a soft, fluid voice. The man stepped forward, boots creaking the jungle carpet as he walked. He stopped, looked around at the twitchy Ket-i warriors, now numbering thirteen and brandishing weapons at this new intruder. “Just me.”
Betezh gawped like a child without a lollipop.
The man was small, slim and wiry, head bald, torso naked and gleaming under virgin sunlight. He wore simple baggy trousers and tight boots. He was powerfully muscled despite his size, and his flesh was heavily scarred. He carried nothing more than a long knife, black and serrated, dull and held nonchalantly. He was smiling a disarming smile. No man should have been smiling when facing thirteen Ket-i warriors.
Betezh swallowed, despite dehydration.
It was Mr. Max.
“Betezh? What areyou doing down there?I’ve come to take you back.” Mr. Max leant against a tree and surveyed the group idly. He stared hard at Betezh with those black fish eyes. “General Vitch is most displeased. You have shown a distinct lack of progress.”
Betezh nodded; with one hand, he toyed with the staples in his face.
The Ket-i, hardened by millennia of war, attacked with unity. They moved fast, hard, Laz-Spears and sub-machine guns combining to form the perfect integration of violent assault.
Betezh watched as if in a dream.
Mr. Max moved between the Ket-i, his simple blade cutting and slicing. He ducked, disembowelled a warrior, swayed right as a Laz-Spear flashed by his ear, severed the outstretched arm, and as blood pumped over him, the Laz-Spear detonating charges in its fall to the ground, he whirled, ducking low, blade stabbing into a belly, slashing through a windpipe. It was neat, economical. Bullets whined past his face and he swayed back, turning the dance into a roll. He cut another throat, stabbed a warrior through the eye, left elbow ramming back into a face, knife coming round on an arc of blood droplets to slam into the forehead of the huge leader. Mr. Max rode the man to the ground, knees on the Ket-i warrior’s chest, then wrenched free the blade and cleaned it thoughtfully.
Betezh gasped. “You killed them all,” he blurted.
“You expect me to stop and play chess, perhaps?”
“You moved... so fast.”
Mr. Max, who had been checking the butchered corpses, stopped. His head turned and the black eyes fixed on Betezh, who shivered.
He’s a fucking machine,
thought Betezh... and then something came to him, information he’d read years previous, a concept he had once overheard, from Kotinevitch. Only now did the puzzle slot neatly into place.
The concept had been that of
Seed Hunter.
Betezh shivered again. Previously, Mr. Max’s reputation had been just that, a reputation. And yes, he had completed his missions, but then, so did a hundred other mercenaries under Kotinevitch’s command. She was a General; that’s what she did, had people killed for the greater good
.
But Betezh had watched Mr. Max work, and work was the correct word; there had been no emotion there, no empathy, not even detachment, just a brutal and methodical economy.
“You’re a Seed Hunter, aren’t you?” said Betezh.
Mr. Max was there, beside him, his speed a blur, and the knife pressing Betezh’s throat. He stared into those black eyes—like glass—and knew he was dead: an emotionless dispatch
.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself, Betezh. Or I might forget Vitch’s instructions to bring you back alive. You and I both know, Seed Hunters are illegal, killed on sight, burned.” He relaxed a little, settling back cross-legged, his knife before him like a totem. He idly pushed a severed arm out of the way, and fixed Betezh with a smile. “You do not understand my kind.”
Betezh licked dry lips. He gave a single nod.
“Seed Hunters are not like you read in the text books.”
“I thought you were supposed to have metal skin?”
“It is an alloy, woven into our flesh; makes us hard to kill.”
“And you have a machine brain?”
“Don’t we all?” said Mr. Max.
“I thought you would be... bigger. You are presented as robots... machines, like the AIs.”
“That would be... incorrect,” said Mr. Max. He gave a smile that had nothing to do with humour.
“General Kotinevitch knows, doesn’t she?” said Betezh with a sudden flash of intuition.
“Yes.”
“And yet she still uses you?”
“Our kind are efficient.”
“To the point of genocide?”
Mr. Max rose smoothly. He looked back through the jungle. Sounds of engines echoed, revving and screaming; somewhere distant, machine guns yammered.
“We all die,” said Mr. Max. He turned and strode away.