“You cannot kill him.” She smiled. “It,” she corrected.
“And he wants you?”
“Yes, they want me dead. They want my power.”
“A lie,” said Mr. Max. “She seeks to bring back Leviathan.”
“Leviathan is gone,” said Emerald.
“For now.” Mr. Max stalked forward, hands stretched into claws, face undulating, rippling as if something beneath the flesh wanted to get out. Subliminally, Keenan saw Betezh sag on the ramp, surprised, horrified even by what he was witnessing.
So, this fight was with Mr. Max— alone.
Keenan leapt forward, braced MPK tracking Max’s head and intersecting his journey to Emerald. Mr. Max halted and blinked, as if seeing Keenan for the first time. Then he smiled a far from human smile. The emotion looked wrong on his face, more pain than humour; far less than organic.
“Get out of my way.”
“Fuck you.”
Keenan opened fire, bullets howling, fire blazing from the MPK’s stocky barrel. Suddenly the world went crazy, filled not just with the remnants of the dying whipping sandstorm but also the harsh scream of bullets, Franco running for cover with his guns yammering, Pippa hitting the ground, her MPK tracking, and Keenan dropping to one knee... to blink, as he felt the MPK smashed from his gloved hands. He watched as if in a dream, fascinated by the still-spinning bullets that squirmed under Mr. Max’s skin, under his face, inside his head. They wriggled like live creatures, and popped free of entry-holes in his blasted skull. Flesh ran liquid and knitted together, wounds healing instantly. Mr. Max bent Keenan’s MPK in half and there was a
crack
as alloy broke. Bullets scattered to the ground from a torn magazine like pebbles and were swallowed by the black desert. Keenan looked into a face of inhuman fury; he smiled, and smashed a right straight to Mr. Max’s groin; he whirled low, leg striking out to sweep Max’s feet from beneath him... Max toppled, but did not hit the ground, instead, he turned shifting and bending and flowing as he fell, reversing the fall into a thrusting uprising attack
.
The blow caught Keenan under the chin and threw him a good twenty feet across the sand, where he rolled and tumbled, coming to a ragged halt. He spat blood, and a tooth, and then pushed himself painfully to his hands and knees.
Mr. Max, scowling, turned, and felt the cold touch of metal against his temple. He began to twist, a blur moving fast, but Franco pulled all four triggers on the quad-barrel Kekra, and four bullets sang on angel wings of fire, caving Mr. Max’s head in and punching him in a flurry of whirling limbs across the sand... to lie still.
The quad gunshot echoed like feedback across the barren desert, reverberating with a metal
crack.
“
Suck on that,” said Franco, and blew down the hot barrels with a hollow whistle, grinning a grin filled with big teeth.
Keenan stood up, swaying, and moved back across the sand towards the
Reason in Madness
where Pippa knelt, shocked, by the ramp, but even as he moved he immediately saw that something was wrong and Mr. Max was still flopping about, his body a skin-bag of pulp that went suddenly rigid. He sat up. Mr. Max stared down at his hands and fought to regain control... over death. There was a
crunch,
followed by the crack of bones realigning, and woodenly he climbed to his feet, flesh falling and rolling into place across the terrible quad gunshot wound to his head, which closed in a concave seal. He looked up, face contorted as flesh flowed into place. Then he breathed, a deep exhalation, and smiled a cold smile, colder than the void, as black eyes glittered and he surveyed the two men holding guns... and beyond, Pippa, head down, face unreadable.
“Unexpected,” he said, and strode swiftly towards Franco.
Franco’s guns came up and he fired but Mr. Max moved fast, leaping, sprinting, evading many of the shots and absorbing others with flesh
slaps
as he accelerated into a blur. Franco screamed as a heavy blow hammered his face and dropped him without a sound. He hit the ground, blood pouring from his caved-in nose; he rolled over several times, then lay still.
Keenan fired his weapon, his Makarov thumping his fist as he charged Mr. Max who met the charge head-on and they clashed, bouncing from one another in a flurry of blows and bullets. Keenan was knocked away, but rolled, finding his feet, his gun lost, and attacked with all his power and might. His attack was filled with the frustration of a mission, a halted journey, an abated revenge unquenched. His arms were pistons and his fists piledrivers as he smashed blow after bloody blow against Max’s pulverising skull knocking the Seed Hunter back and back and back. Keenan launched himself, boots spreading Mr. Max’s lips across his face, splintering teeth. As Max hit the ground Keenan was atop him, a small blade between his knuckles. He was snarling, an animal face filled with rage hot fury in his eyes and all humanity sympathy and empathy gone in a violent red blinding surge of something he could not comprehend. He punched out Max’s eyes with the dagger and watched milky fluid pop and spurt across the Seed Hunter’s face. But Max did not scream, did not cry out, and behind those eyes, those fake eyes, Keenan looked down fell down into a million minute glittering globes. He realised, deep inside his soul, that Mr. Max was so far from human as to be beyond understanding, and his punch dagger slammed Max’s throat cutting deep and sideways, severing the main artery in a gout of warm human blood. It was fake, all fake and false and inside Keenan could sense this charade this petty ersatz production and a sense of imminent danger went
click,
a detonation trigger, inside his head.
He did not see the blow. It sent him squirming across the sand, rolling, coughing on dust.
He glanced up... into Max’s boot.
Again Keenan spluttered, choking, blood pouring from his nose, a forehead cut feeding his eyes and face with a sheen of slick crimson, blinding him. He rolled, over and over, as if trying to get away, a deep groan emanating from his stomach to his lips.
He pushed himself to hands and knees...
Tried so hard to breathe.
The next blow broke three ribs and left him ten feet away on his back.
Mr. Max loomed into vision, his eyes all gone, and deep recessed clusters filling Keenan with a visual madness and an urgent need to laugh like a maniac. He cannot see! screamed Keenan’s brain. But of course, he could. Mr. Max was not human.
“I am sick of this shit,” snarled Max. He kicked Keenan again, sending him rolling across the desert like a limp sack of pulped bones. Keenan gazed weakly towards the tail-end of their Gunship. Colours swirled in his head. Pain receded, and he was filled with a curious light-headedness. He wondered if he would die there, lying in the sand, so close to discovering the truth...
His girls, his dead girls.
So close.
Keenan coughed, then blinked. It seemed to take a long time. His eyelids weren’t working properly. Max appeared, and behind him the Gunship was a blur of dark circular exhaust ports, ribbed with bands of TitaniumII alloy. Keenan tried to roll away, pushed himself onto one elbow, and levered himself up. He could see Emerald beyond; her hand was over her mouth, body deflated with horror, and she was doing nothing, doing nothing to help... fear etched acid on her alien face.
This is it, thought Keenan.
This... is... it.
He slumped back. Mr. Max was staring down at him. He bared his teeth, long black slivers nestling behind the false smashed stumps from Keenan’s blows. He stooped, drawing a long serrated black knife from his boot, the knife that had killed so many Ket warriors... and a million others down through distant centuries.
Max clenched the blade tight, like a lover.
He stepped over Keenan’s wounded, battered body, and straddled him.
“I’m going to cut your throat. I’m going to watch you drown in your own blood. It may take a little while.”
Keenan said nothing. He was filled with pain that pounded him from a hundred sources, a raging surf, and he was incapable of speech. Max filled his vision: a terrible frightening immortal deity looming above him like a dark shivering ghost, and Keenan felt so weak, so lost, so pitiful, so small. Self-loathing and disgust flooded through him, because strength had fled him betrayed him deserted him and he was going to die on a sand-whipped desert floor, begging silently for a life he didn’t deserve.
And he realised.
There were some things you could not fight.
Some creatures just too powerful...
Keenan laughed a cold laugh, bubbling blood...
And watched the slow blade descend.
Chapter 16
Strange Brotherhood
Mr. Max had killed thousands of people during his life. He had murdered women, children, and animals. He had cut the hearts, spines and souls from a thousand species of alien. He had destroyed families, cities, worlds. Empathy and remorse were not words in his lexicon. Mr. Max was a Seed Hunter... only the Seed mattered... the essence of every living organism on which he fed
.
The blade gleamed dull in his fist.
He bent towards Keenan; all else was gone, a blur, dust.
There came a
click.
Mr. Max’s head snapped left, and inside the holes where his eyes had been clusters of vision globes shrank as a billion neural pathways opened to his brain and...
Understanding rocked him.
The
Reason in Madness
fired its ignition, engines whined and a sheet of purple flame fifty feet long blasted from exhaust ports. The fire hit Mr. Max from the waist up, instantly vaporising his skin and human flesh and forcing a terrible high
shriek
that was cut off almost instantly as the jets reached thousands of degrees.
Keenan, on the ground, felt a searing scorch of heat and started to roll away through sheer instinct: pain flooded him and he needed to get away, away from the heat, the fire, the roaring agony. He nudged past Max’s useless legs and rolled and rolled; then Emerald was there, her hands on his smoking WarSuit, which clicked and buzzed in rapid malfunction. Keenan opened his eyes, gazing up into Emerald’s green orbs. He touched her cool hands with their green veins on ebony skin, and something in her eyes made him shiver. It was triumph, a glare of success.
Keenan looked left, where Max—or what remained of him—seemed to dance. The boosters on the Gunship were firing hot, bright white and hard to see, as Pippa, inside the cockpit, increased the fuel throughput, and the whole Gunship vibrated and shook, held in place by stabilising jets, its boosters eating away what was left of Max’s upper body.
Then the fire was gone.
Exhaust ports glowed white-hot; they crackled like breaking ice.
Silence descended; a veil of ash.
Mr. Max was still there, his human legs almost intact below the knees, the rest of his surviving flesh charred. From the waist up he was nothing more than what appeared slick oil bones, not a human skeleton, but narrow lines, a stick-man of greased steel. The spinal column was a single piece, brown, oiled, the skull a tiny sphere. Arms were splinters with serrated points for hands.
Mr. Max sat down, a slow folding, and then slumped sideways to the black desert.
Emerald helped Keenan to his feet; her hands were strong, guiding him up, and he could see Franco across the space occupied by Max’s strange corpse. Franco was playing with his battered nose.
Pippa ran down the ramp.
“Keenan!”
She was in his arms, and he yelped.
“Thank God you’re alive!”
“Well,” he coughed, “I didn’t want to point out what a huge risk you’d just taken, But seeing as you’ve volunteered the guilt—”
“Shut up!” She punched his chest. He wheezed.
Franco arrived, kicking up sand, a Kekra against the head of Betezh. Betezh was staring forlornly at the ground, eyes wide, flesh sickly and pale. He looked terribly shaken.
Franco prodded him.
“Shall I kill him now?”
“No,” said Keenan, leaning heavily on Pippa. Pain shuddered through him. “What was it, Betezh?”
“I... don’t know.” He glanced at the oily brown stick-corpse. “I... I heard he was a Seed Hunter, but does anyone here know what that is? Look at it! It ain’t fucking human, that’s all I can say.”
“I think we should kill Betezh right now!” urged Franco.
“No!” snapped Keenan. “There’s been enough death.”
“But Keenan...”
Ignoring his friend, Keenan moved towards Betezh, and their eyes locked. “You were with him.” His voice was soft; inherent threat tangible. The words did not need to be said. You are both enemies. Mr. Max is gone and dead. Is it your turn?
Betezh shook his head. “This is all wrong, Keenan. I’ve been used, just like you!”
“What?”
“Kill him,” whispered Emerald. She was standing to one side, staring at the sky. Her eyes glowed. She seemed suddenly infused with power, with an energy that bubbled along green veins. Her head dropped. She fixed Keenan with a decisive stare. “Kill Betezh. I have seen it. He will slaughter Combat K in their sleep.”
“No!” snapped Betezh. He made to take a step back, but Franco prodded him with his heavy Kekra. “Listen, Keenan!” There was desperation in his voice. “Don’t trust her! You mustn’t trust her!”