The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (58 page)

“Dunno,” came the illuminating reply. “We came in with you.”

Reynold walked over to Plate and studied him. Blood covered his head and the pillow was deep red, soaked with it. Leaning closer Reynold saw holes in Plate’s face and skull, each a few millimetres wide. Some were even cut through his aug.

“Get Jepson – bring him here.”

Jepson seemed just as bewildered as Reynold. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Are you a local or what?” asked Spiro, who had now joined them.

“Been in the city most of my life,” said Jepson, then shifted back as Spiro stepped towards him. “Brockle … he might know. Brockle’s a farm boy.”

“Let’s get Fat Boy,” said Spiro, snagging the shoulder of one of his men and departing.

Brockle came stumbling into the room wiping tiredly at his eyes. He almost looked thinner to Reynold, maybe worn down by fear. His gaze wandered about the room for a moment in bewilderment, finally focusing on the corpse on the bed.

“Why you kill em?” he asked.

“We did not kill him,” said Reynold, “but something did.” He pointed to the open air-conditioning duct.

Brockle stared at that in bewilderment too, then returned his gaze to Reynold almost hopefully.

“What is there here on Rhine’s World that could do this?”

“Rats?” Brockle suggested.

Spiro hit him hard, in the guts, and Brockle staggered back making an odd whining sound. Spiro, obviously surprised he hadn’t gone down, stepped in to hit him again but Reynold caught his shoulder. “Just lock them back up.” But even as Spiro turned to obey, doubled shrieks of agony reverberated, followed by the sound something heavy crashing against a wall.

Spiro led the way out and soon they were back in the living room. He kicked open the door to the room in which Jepson’s comrades were incarcerated and entered, gun in hand, then on automatic he opened fire at something. By the time Reynold entered Spiro was backing up, staring at the smoking line of his shots traversing up the wall to the open air duct.

“What did you see?” Reynold asked, gazing at the two corpses on the floor. Both men were frozen in agonized rictus, their heads bloody pepper pots. One of them had been opened up below the sternum and his guts bulged out across the floor.

“Some sort of snake,” Spiro managed.

Calm, got to stay calm. “Kirin,” said Reynold. “I’ll need you to do a search for me.” No reply. “Kirin?”

Whatever it was had got her in her sleep, but the sofa being a dark terracotta colour had not shown the blood. Reynold spun her laptop round and flipped it open, turned it on. The screen just showed blank fuzz. After a moment he noticed the holes cut through the keyboard, and that seemed to make no sense at all. He turned to the others and eyed Jepson and Brockle.

“Put them back in there.” He gestured to that bloody room.

“You can’t do that,” said Jepson.

“I can do what I fucking please.” Reynold drew his weapon and pointed it, but Brockle moved in front of Jepson waving those long-fingered hands.

“We done nuthin! We done nuthin!”

Spiro and his men grabbed the two and shoved them back into the room, slamming the door shut behind them.

“What the fuck is this?” said Spiro, finally turning to face Reynold.

The laptop, with its holes …

Reynold stepped over to the room in which Spiro and his men had been torturing their other prisoner, and kicked the door open. The chair lay down on its side, the torture victim’s head resting in a pool of blood. A sticking trail had been wormed across the floor, and up the wall to an open air vent. It seemed he only had a moment to process the sight before someone else shrieked in agony. The sound just seemed to go on and on, then something crashed against the inside of the door Jepson and Brockle had just been forced through, and the shrieking stopped. Brockle or Jepson, it didn’t matter now.

“We get out of here,” said Reynold. “They fucking found us.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” asked Spiro.

Reynold pointed at the laptop then at Kirin, at the holes in her head. “Something is here …”

The lights went out and a door exploded into splinters.

Pulse-fire cut the pitch darkness and a silvery object whickered through the air. Reynold backed up and felt something slide over his foot. He fired down at the floor and caught a briefly glimpse of long flat segmented thing, metallic, with a nightmare head decked with pincers, manipulators and tubular probes. He fired again. Someone was screaming, pulse-fire revealed Spiro staggering to one side. It wasn’t him making that noise because one of the worm-things was pushing its way into him through his mouth. A window shattered and there came further screaming from outside.

Silence.

Then a voice, calm and modulated. “Absolutely correct of course,” it said.

“Who are you?” Reynold asked, backing up through the darkness. A hard hook caught his heel and he went over, then a cold and solid tongue slammed between his palm and his pulse-gun and just flipped the weapon away into the darkness.

“I am your case worker,” the voice replied.

“You tried to stop us,” he said.

“Yes, I tried to obtain your location. Had you given it the satellite strike would have taken you out a moment later. This was also why I planted that locator in the leg of one of Jepson’s men – just to focus attention away from me for a while.”

“You’re the one that killed our last unit here – the one that planted the device.”

“Unfortunately not – they were taken out by satellite strike, hence the reason we did not obtain the location of the tactical nuclear device. Had it been me, everything would have been known.”

Reynold thought about the holes through his comrades’ heads, through their augs and the holes even through Kirin’s laptop. Something had been eating the information out of them even as it killed them. Mind-reaming was the reason Separatists never wanted to be caught alive, but as far as Reynold knew that would happen in a white-tiled cell deep in the bowels of some ECS facility, not like this.

“What the hell are you?”

The lights came on

“Courts do not sit in judgement,” said the fat boy, standing naked before Reynold. “When you detonated that device it only confirmed your death sentence; all that remained was execution of that sentence. However, everyone here possessed vital knowledge of others in the Separatist organization and of other atrocities committed by it – mental evidence requiring deep forensic analysis.”

Fat Boy’s skin looked greyish, corpse-like, but only after a moment did Reynold realize it was turning metallic. The fat boy leaned forwards a little. “I am the Brockle. I am the forensic AI sent to gather and analyse that evidence, and incidentally kill you.”

Now Fat Boy’s skin had taken on a transparency, revealing that he was just made of knots of flat segmented worms, some of which were already dropping to the floor, others in the process of unravelling. Reynold scrabbled across the carpet towards his gun as a cold metallic wave washed over him. Delicate tubular drills began boring into his head, into his mind. In agony he hoped for another wave called death to swamp him and, though it came physically, his consciousness did not fade. It remained, somewhere, in some no space, while a cold meticulous intelligence took it apart piece by piece.

WINNING PEACE

Paul McAuley

War leaves a lot of untidiness, and crows, including alien ones, pick over the wreckage …

Trained as a biologist, McAuley’s forays into conflict range from the war-torn Europe of his award-winning
Fairyland
where disposable gene-engineered “dolls” serve as slaves; through powerful and beautifully written techno-thrillers such as
White Devils
set in a near-future heart-of-darkness Congo; up to his recent interplanetary saga of a Brazilian-dominated Earth imposing control over the outer planets,
The Quiet War,
and its sequel
Gardens of the Sun,
which include amongst much action and political intrigue the most gorgeously written topography. His excellent blog “Earth & Other Unlikely Worlds” is at
unlikelyworlds. blogspot.com.

O
NE DAY, ALMOST
exactly a year after Carver White started working for Mr E. Z. Kanza’s transport company, Mr Kanza told him that they were going on a little trip – down the pipe to Ganesh Five. This was the company’s one and only interstellar route, an ass-and-trash run to an abandoned-in-place forward facility, bringing in supplies, hauling out pods packed with scrap and dismantled machinery, moving salvage workers to and fro. Carver believed that Mr Kanza was thinking of promoting him from routine maintenance to shipboard work, and wanted to see if he had the right stuff. He was wrong.

The Ganesh Five system was a binary, an ordinary K1 star and a brown dwarf orbiting each other at a mean distance of six billion kilometres, roughly equivalent to the semi-major axis of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun. The K1 star, Ganesh Five A, had a minor asteroid belt in its life zone, the largest rocks planoformed thousands of years ago by Boxbuilders, and just one planet, a methane gas giant named Sheffield by the Brit who’d first mapped the system, with glorious water-ice rings, the usual assortment of small moons, and, this was why a forward facility had been established there during the war between the Alliance and the Collective, no less than four wormhole throats.

The system had been captured by the Collective early in the war, and because one of its wormholes was part of a chain that included the Collective’s New Babylon system, and another exited deep in Alliance territory, it had become an important staging and resupply area, with a big dock facility in orbit around Sheffield, and silos and tunnel networks buried in several of the moons. Now, two years after the defeat of the Alliance, the only people living there were employees of the salvage company that was stripping the docks and silos, and a small Navy garrison.

Carver White and Mr Kanza flew there on the company’s biggest scow, hauling eight passengers, a small tug, and an assortment of cutting and demolition equipment. After they docked, Carver was left to kick his heels in the scow for six hours, until at last Mr Kanza buzzed him and told him to get his ass over to the garrison. A marine escorted Carver to an office with a picture window over-looking the spine of the docks, which stretched away in raw sunlight towards Sheffield’s green crescent and the bright points of three moons strung in a line beyond the great arch of its rings. This fabulous view was the first thing Carver saw when he swam into the room; the second was Mr Kanza and a Navy officer lounging in sling seats next to it.

The officer was Lieutenant Rider Jackson, adjutant to the garrison commander. In his mid-twenties, maybe a year older than Carver, he had a pale, thin face, bright blue eyes, and a calm expression that didn’t give anything away. He asked Carver about the ships he’d flown and the hours he’d logged serving in the Alliance Navy, questioned him closely about what had happened after Collective marines had boarded his crippled transport, the hand-to-hand fighting in the corridors and holds, how Carver had passed out from loss of blood during a last stand amongst the hypersleep coffins, how he’d woken up in a Collective hospital ship, a prisoner of war. The Alliance had requested terms of surrender sixty-two days later, having lost two battle fleets and more than fifty systems. By then, Carver had been patched up and sold as indentured labour to the pharm factories on New Babylon.

Rider Jackson said, “You didn’t tell the prize officer you were a flight engineer.”

“I gave him my name and rank and number. It was all he deserved to know.”

Carver was too proud to ask what this was all about, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with Mr Kanza’s financial difficulties. Everyone who worked for Mr Kanza knew he was in trouble. He’d borrowed to expand his little fleet, but he hadn’t found enough new business to service the loan, and his creditors were bearing down on him.

Rider Jackson said, “I guess you think you should have been sent home.”

“That’s what we did with our prisoners of war.”

“Because your side lost the war.”

“We’d have sent them back even if we’d won. The Alliance doesn’t treat people like property.”

Carver was beginning to like Rider Jackson. He seemed like the kind of man who preferred straight talk to evasion and exaggeration, who would stick to the truth even if it was uncomfortable or inconvenient. Which was probably why he’d been sent to this back-water, Carver thought; forthright officers have a tendency to damage their careers by talking back to their superiors.

Mr Kanza said, “If my data miner hadn’t uncovered his service record and traced him, he’d still be working in the pharm factories.”

Rider Jackson ignored this, saying to Carver, “You have a brother. He served in the Alliance Navy, too.”

“That’s none of your business,” Carver said.

“Oh, but I think you’ll find it’s very much
my
business,” Mr Kanza said.

Mr E. Z. Kanza was a burly man with a shaved head and a short beard trimmed to a sharp point. He liked to think that he was a fair-minded, easygoing fellow, but exhibited most of the usual vices of people given too much power over others: he was arrogant and quick-tempered, and his smile masked a cruel and capricious sense of humour. On the whole, he didn’t treat his pilots and engineers too badly – they had their own quarters, access to good medical treatment, and were even given small allowances they could spend as they chose – but they were still indentured workers, with Judas bridges implanted in their spinal cords and no civil rights what-soever, and Mr Kanza was always ready to use his shock stick on anyone who didn’t jump to obey him.

Smiling his untrustworthy smile, Mr Kanza said to Carver, “Jarred is two years younger than you, yes? He served on a frigate during the war, yes? Well, I happen to have some news about him.”