IT WAS ANOTHER HOT, HUMID DAY IN MEMU BAY AS LAWRENCE LED THE PLAtoon on their sixth morning patrol. They’d been on Thallspring for a week now, and this campaign was much worse than the last time he’d walked these pleasant, open streets. Ebrey Zhang hadn’t used a collateral necklace yet, but Lawrence was sure it could only be a matter of time.
Not that this was as bad as Santa Chico, he kept telling himself. Be grateful for small mercies.
Platoon 435NK9’s established patrol sector was the Dawe District. It was an inland area, mainly residential, where the sprawl of neat suburban homes encroached on one of the small hills at the foot of the fortress range behind the town. The streets were broad and clean, with tall Sitka spruces on either side, their branches twisting about wildly to produce a profusion of strange dapples on the pavement. Two tram routes linked Dawe’s citizens to the center of town, the big clumsy vehicles trundling along their tracks with bells clanging brashly at the sight of any cyclist pedaling away ahead. Strangely, the only time the bell didn’t sound was when a Skin suit appeared on the road in front.
Ostensibly the platoon were there to back up the regular police foot patrol. In reality their regular visibility was emphasizing Z-B’s presence.
Platoon 435NK9 made their way up a street lined with small shops. Not many people were outside in the midmorning sun, and those who were stared resentfully as the Skins lumbered past. Taunts and obscenities dogged their every move. The constables they were supposed to be accompanying smiled at the shouts without any attempt to conceal their contempt.
“Oh, man, I hate this,” Hal muttered. It was the hundredth time he’d complained that morning.
Lawrence checked the positional display that his suit AS was displaying. Hal was keeping pace on the right flank. “Just stay with it, Hal. They haven’t done anything.”
“Yeah, give the rest of us a break,” Lewis said.
“But listen to them.”
Lawrence hadn’t been doing anything else. All morning he’d heard Kill-Boy. That one word was yelled over and over again, intended to provoke and intimidate in one hot blast of air. The alleged name of the sniper who’d shot Nic after landing.
KillBoy, already the Robin Hood of modern legend. A wounded, mutilated or persecuted victim of Z-B’s last asset-realization mission to Thallspring—take your pick. He prowled the streets of Memu Bay looking for lone Skin suits. When he found one, superweaponry would cut through its carapace as if it were real human skin. Another vile invader would bite the dust, and all good Memu Bay citizens could walk taller knowing their oppressors were going to lose, and that there was justice in the universe.
Lawrence didn’t like it at all. There was no KillBoy, not in the flesh. Just some shadowy resistance group, probably set up by the government, who’d been issued some nasty hardware. Rumor and tension fabricated the rest. But it gave the locals a solidly believable icon, a protector who would save them if they did step out of line. Not good, for that belief gave them a sense of invulnerability. Which they certainly didn’t have against Skin. And Z-B’s platoons were edgy after the disastrous landing. The situation could only get worse.
Music suddenly swirled out of an open bar, a dance track that quietened with equal speed. Three of the platoon had turned at the disturbance, only to be greeted with several young men lounging around the bar’s door, giving them the finger.
“Guess we can cross that one off the list,” Karl said. “It’s not exactly welcoming.”
“None of them are,” Edmond said.
“Hell, it was never on my list to start with,” Hal grumbled. “Man, what a dive. And there’s no real action in this part of town. We’ve got to get us down to the marina for any serious pussy.”
Lawrence grinned at them as he listened to their inane chatter. They were due some outleave tonight, finally getting away from their barracks. Z-B had commandeered a string of resort hotels just behind the marina to billet the platoons in. Physically, there was nothing to complain about. He’d got himself a double room in a four-star hotel. Big comfy bed, balcony facing out across the harbor; it had a decent restaurant downstairs, and a bar, games room and gym, swimming pool, even a sauna—which the bastard officers had monopolized. But they weren’t permitted out. Not until things had quieted down, Ebrey Zhang declared.
By the end of the first week their commander had decided that time had come. There had been no more sniper incidents. The production levels at the biochemical plants had risen back close to their prelanding levels. They were becoming grudgingly accepted by the local population.
Last night some other platoons had tested the waters, and nothing too untoward had occurred. Tonight, 435NK9 would get its chance to paint the town red.
Lawrence thought it was too early. The junior officers must be feeding Zhang exaggerated reports of the patrol sweeps for him to think things were calm around the city. But nobody had asked his opinion. Still, he was glad the platoons were getting leave. He’d need two uninterrupted days at some time to go out into the hinterland and realize his own personal asset.
A TVL88 helicopter growled overhead, meandering around the edge of the foothills. Several Skins sat on the broad side door, feet dangling out above the skids as they watched the buildings below. Immobile, featureless gargoyles, ready to react to any trouble. The helicopters were Z-B’s own KillBoy, visible support for the troops on the ground, providing invincible firepower backup. Several of 435NK9 waved as the machine passed by.
“For heaven’s sake, you odious child,” Odel was saying. “No Thallspring girl is going to look at you. When we go into a bar, we’ll clear it faster than a swarm of hornets. I absolutely guarantee it.”
“You tell him, cretin,” Karl said.
“He’s right, Hal,” Lewis said. “Stick with a sim-suit running porno-i’s. Those girls will do anything you tell them.”
“I don’t need none of that shit,” Hal protested. “They ain’t too fond of us back in Queensland, either, but I never had any trouble scoring down on the Cairns Strip.”
“Didn’t have much money left over afterward, did you, though?” Karl said. “And every morning after it’s a trip to the surgery for an antidose.”
The platoon’s communication link filled with harsh laughter.
“This ain’t funny!” Hal said. “My balls are going to explode unless I get some serious pussy tonight. And I’m telling you, it ain’t going to be no trouble. Not for me. I’m younger than you guys. And I’m built, you know. I’ve got the look. The girls will go for that, no matter where we are in the galaxy. Being fit never goes out of style.”
“Oh, give me a break,” Lewis said. “If they go for anything, it’s not going to be some punk delinquent working off a court rap.”
“I fucking volunteered for strategic security!”
“What the chicks go for is a guy with some experience. Right, Dennis?”
“Bull’s-eye. You’ve got tonight’s tactics all wrong, kid. We have a certain novelty value: face it, technically we’re aliens from another planet. The ladies will be intrigued by us. We can snag them with that. And the more planets we’ve been to, the more fascinated they’ll be by us. Everyone apart from Hal will benefit.”
“Hey!”
“Face it, kid, you just haven’t got the staying power us mature guys have.”
“That’s a bunch of crap. You old farts can’t even get it up, never mind keep it there. The girls know what they like, and tonight they’re going to overdose on me.”
“Let’s keep this formation tighter,” Amersy said before the bull got any worse. “Come on, Jones, you’re falling behind. And, Dennis, close in; give Odel some support.”
“You got it, Corp.”
The platoon checked their relative positions and improved their formation.
Up ahead of Lawrence, the street opened out into a small square where a tiny central lawn was surrounded by neat flowerbeds. Clunky old gardening robots crawled along the edge of the white-and-scarlet salvias, rusty implements prodding at the soil. The constables slowed their pace, dropping behind. They did it every time there was a major junction, in case there was some kind of ambush around the corner.
Edmond and Lewis went wide, getting close to the shop fronts and covering the opposite sides of the square as they moved forward. There was no ambush. No KillBoy. The platoon crossed over the square with the constables ambling along behind.
“Do you reckon we should buy some clothes from around here first?” Hal asked. “I mean, to blend in with the fashions, and such. We don’t want to come over as total dumbass aliens. You’ve got to look sharp in any bar.”
“Hal,” Lawrence said, “let’s stay focused on current affairs, shall we?” “Sure thing. Sorry, Sarge.”
Lawrence walked off the grass and crossed the road. He didn’t like to intervene with the normal platoon bull. But the kid was too boneheaded to take Amersy’s hints. With a bit of luck, tonight he would actually find some silly tart who fancied screwing an alien invader. The kid needed some way of letting off tension. He was starting to irritate everyone.
Red icons flashed up over Lawrence’s sensor grid. The suit AS spliced his communications into the link that Oakley’s platoon was using. A 2D indigo city map expanded out of its grid, featuring deployment symbols blossoming with script orders as the headquarters tactical AS analyzed the incident.
The incident: one of Oakley’s platoon was down, a squaddie named Foran. A stone wall had collapsed on top of him. Civilian datapool overlap showed some kind of traffic malfunction in the same location, a thirty-ton robot truck had gone offline. Foran’s medical telemetry was intermittent from underneath the pile of rock, but the information so far showed that his Skin carapace had been breached in several places by the fall. Internal organ damage, broken bones and blood loss were showing.
Oakley’s platoon was patrolling the sector adjoining Lawrence’s.
“Dispersal pattern one,” Lawrence told his platoon. It could be a classic diversionary tactic, in which case it was unlikely that the true assault would come quite so close by. But he wasn’t taking chances, not in this environment.
The platoon exited the street with smart professionalism, going into the nearest buildings through doors and larger open windows. Lawrence himself darted into a small hairdresser’s. The row of women sitting under tentacle-armed IR drying units went rigid with alarm. Both the constables were left alone outside, staring around in astonishment. Video telemetry grids showed Lawrence several outraged homeowners yelling at his troopers.
Lawrence switched to the command channel. “Oakley, do you need help?”
“Shit, dunno—! Get it, get it. That one! Come on, lift.”
“Oakley, what’s your status? Is this a prelim diversion?”
“No, it’s fucking not! A goddamn wall has fallen on him. Shit, it’s the size of a mountain. We’re never going to shift it.”
Lawrence saw the deployment icons representing Oakley’s platoon all clustering in one spot. “You’re getting dense. If that sniper’s around, you’re going to get punished. Suggest you pull some of your team back.”
“Fuck you, neurotronic-brain Newton! That’s one of mine under there.” “Newton,” Captain Bryant said, “take some of your platoon and help the dig. We need to get Foran out of there.”
“Sir, I don’t think that’s—”
“He’s alive, Sergeant. I’m not allowing one of my men to die here. This was a traffic accident, not a setup for a sniper. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Lawrence took a moment to compose himself, knowing full well what his own medical telemetry would be showing Bryant. Not that the captain would be looking. “Hal, Dennis, you’re with me. Amersy, finish our sweep.”
It was a narrow alley in an old commercial district. Vertical stone-and-concrete walls with white paint badly faded and peeling, scraggly weeds sprouting all along the base. The only windows were high up and covered with bars, glass too dirty to see through; doors were sturdy metal, welded up or sealed with thick riveted plates. Dust was still rolling out of the entrance when Lawrence arrived, thick gray clouds of dry carcinogenic particles that latched on tenaciously to his Skin carapace. Crowds of civilians were gathered around on the main street, several with handkerchiefs over their faces. They all peered into the gloomy alley. Two TVL88 helicopters were circling just above the rooftops, magnetic Gatling cannon extended from the noses like squat insect mandibles. Their rotors were exacerbating the dust problem.
Lawrence checked around quickly. There was no obvious high building providing a firepoint nest down the alley. His suit AS increased the infrared sensor percentage as he made his way into the dust; his visual picture lost all color apart from gray, black and pink—though the general outlines maintained their integrity. He saw rubbish piled up against the walls on either side of the alley: boxes, bags and drums all printed with the town’s civic emblem, denoting it ready for collection. There couldn’t have been a pickup truck down here for a month. In some places the piles were so big they actually sprawled right across the cracked tarmac. Lawrence had to clamber over them.
There was a kink in the alley, and he was abruptly facing the collapsed wall. He grunted in dismay. “Shit, this is a mess.” A huge section had collapsed, leaving tattered shreds of tigercotton reinforcement mesh flapping along the jagged upright edges. The building behind had been some kind of warehouse, or disused factory, a big empty cube with aging metal beams and ducts running up the walls, now bent and twisted, whole strands torn free and dangling precariously. Its flat concrete panel ceiling had collapsed along with the wall, crashing down and shattering over the floor and a big crumpled truck. On the opposite wall at the front of the building, a roll-up door had been torn apart, showing a wide street outside that was clogged with stationary traffic.
Lawrence took only a second to work out that the truck had gone runaway, bursting through the door to ram into the wall. Exactly when Foran was standing in the alley on the other side.
That was quite extraordinary bad timing.
He didn’t believe any of it. Instinct hardened and sharpened by the last twenty years was flashing up warning icons of a kind more potent than any AS symbology.
Skins swarmed over the massive pile of debris. They flung body-sized lumps of concrete and stone through the air as if they were made of feathers, digging out a wide crater above their fallen comrade. They possessed the desperate stop-go motions of hive insects synchronized for maximum productivity.
“Let’s get to it,” Lawrence told Hal and Dennis curtly. They joined the other Skins, prizing big chunks of masonry free. Grit and powdery fragments spewed off each piece like a dry liquid. The filthy deluge of dust made visibility difficult even with Skin sensors. Infrared helmet beams were turned up to full intensity, creating swirling crimson auras as if vanquished stars were expiring in the cloud.
It took nearly fifty minutes to excavate the rubble. At the end there was only enough room for two Skins to work in the bottom, carefully picking up lumps of stone and handing them to a chain of Skins to be carried clear. The crater walls were so unsteady it would take very little to trigger a further collapse. Foran’s Skin was slowly exposed. Dust around him was clotted into mud with glistening scarlet blood. Bloodpak reserves and stored oxygen had kept him alive, though nearly half of his medical telemetry was in the amber, with several organ functions flatlined red. He was unconscious, too, when he was finally lifted clear.
All the paramedics did was hook his Skin umbilicals up to fresh blood-paks. The Skin was providing the most stable physiological environment possible until they could get him into trauma surgery. They rushed him away to the medevac helicopter that had landed in the middle of the street at the end of the alley.
“I didn’t think anything could get through our Skin,” Hal said lamely as they milled around at the foot of the rubble. The dust was settling now that the digging had stopped, cloaking the immediate vicinity in pallid gray.
“Believe it,” Dennis said. “A hundred tons of sharp rock falling on top of you is going to puncture your Skin.”
“Poor bastard. Is he going to be okay?”
“His brain’s still alive, and oxygenated. So they’ll be able to bring him up to full consciousness without any trouble. The rest of him… I don’t know. He’ll need a lot of replacement work.”
“But we bring prosthetics with us, right?”
“Yeah, kid, we’ve got a whole bunch of biomech spares. I guess at least he’ll be independently mobile at any rate. Whether he’ll ever rejoin the platoon is another matter. You know how top-rate we have to be.”
Even with Skin muscles augmenting every move, Lawrence felt distinctly non–top-rate right now. His own muscles ached from the effort of digging. For a moment, the mantle of cloying dust brought up an image of Amethi during the Wakening, when the slush stuck to everything, imprisoning the world in a decrepit winter. He looked around the narrow alley. The piles of rubbish were as wide here as they were at the end. Foran would have had to walk right next to the wall.
Lawrence slowly moved across the lower part of the rubble until he could see back into the ruined building. The traffic on the main road in front was moving again. Skins stood guard beside the wrecked door. A couple of techs were examining the truck, shifting the concrete slabs so they could get into the engine compartment. Captain Bryant was standing behind them.
“What happened to it, sir?” Lawrence asked over the secure command link.
“They don’t know yet,” Bryant replied. He sounded annoyed. “Damn, I really don’t need accidents like this messing up my command.”
“This wasn’t an accident, sir.”
“Of course it was, Sergeant. The truck went out of control and crashed.”
“It crashed into one of us.”
“Your concern for our personnel is commendable, but in this case it’s misplaced. This is a traffic accident. A tragic one, I accept, but an accident.”
“What did the traffic regulator AS log as the fault?”
“It didn’t log anything, Sergeant. That’s the problem. The truck’s electronics crashed.”
“The software or hardware?”
“Sergeant, you’ll be able to read the report for yourself as soon as it’s been made. We haven’t even accessed the truck’s memory block yet.”
“But what about the fail-safes?”
“Newton, what the hell are you doing? What’s the matter with you? He will recover, you know, he’ll get the best possible treatment.”
“Sir, I just don’t see how this could be an accident.”
“That’s enough, Sergeant. It’s unfortunate, but it happened.”
“Not one fail-safe cuts in when the electronics crash. Sir, not even Thall-spring technology is that shoddy. Then it veers off the road to hit a door square in the center.”
“Sergeant!”
“And after that it demolishes a wall while one of our men is standing directly behind it. One of the few things that can damage a Skin suit. I don’t buy it, sir. That’s not one coincidence, that’s about a thousand falling into line.”
“Enough, Sergeant. It was an accident for exactly those reasons. Nobody could organize anything like this, nobody knew when Foran was about to walk down this alley. That is, nobody else knew. Of course, I was supervising this morning’s deployment. Are you saying I was at fault in some way?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that. The matter is closed.”
The command link went dead. Lawrence shook his head. A fairly pointless gesture in Skin. The trouble was, he could understand why Bryant was reacting in this way. The captain was too weak to acknowledge an opponent who could organize such a beautifully elaborate trap. Accepting the fact that someone did have the knowledge and skill to bring it off was massively unnerving.
“If the Wilfrien were alive today, you’d think you were looking at an angel. They were the golden ones; to be in their presence was to adore them. At its height, the kingdom of the Wilfrien was among the most powerful members of the Ring Empire. Indeed it was one of the founders. Its people helped to explore the thick wreath of stars around the galactic core. They made contact with hundreds of different races, and brought them together. Their technology was among the best in existence. Wilfrien scientists developed fast stardrives that everyone else copied; they worked out how to create patternform sequencers that could reshape raw matter into machines or buildings or even living organisms. And they gave all this knowledge freely to the peoples they encountered, helping them to incorporate it into their societies, extinguishing poverty and the conflict that such disparity always brings with it. They were a wise and gentle race that were admired and respected by everyone else in the Ring Empire. They set a standard of civilization to which most aspired and that few ever really achieved. Every story of the Ring Empire includes them, for they were the shining example of what it’s possible for sentient life to become. Whenever we say Ring Empire, more often than not we’re thinking of the Wilfrien society.” Denise smiled round at the children. They were out in the school’s garden, relaxing on the lawn with glasses of cool orange juice and lemonade. Big white canvas parasols had been opened, throwing wide shadows across the grass. The children all sat in the shade, out of the burning morning sun. As always, they watched Denise with worshipful eyes as she invoked their sense of wonder.
“The Wilfrien inhabited over three hundred star systems. With their patternform sequencers they had constructed fabulous cities and orbital stations. They grew themselves castles in the depths of space; they had metropolises that soared among the storm bands of gas giants, more delicate and intricate in appearance than the twirls of the clouds through which they meandered; they even encased starburst towers inside lenticular force fields and sailed them across the furious surface of their suns as if they were nothing more than coracles on a woodland lake. Oh, they were impressive, the Wilfrien. They lived in such bizarre places almost for fun, to laugh and enjoy everything the universe had to offer, for they could be as wild and exuberant as they were thoughtful and dignified.”
Her narrative never faltered as Prime monitored the progress of the Z-B platoons going about their morning patrols. Information gathered from the platoons’ own communication links was insinuated into her mind by d-written neurons. She regarded their busy little icons and whirring scripts with mild contempt. So crude, when simply knowing the raw data was easy. Several Skins were approaching the alley. “Given their nature, not to mention their reputation, Mozark knew he would be visiting the Wilfrien even before he took off on his quest. Strangely, the closer he got to the kingdom of the Wilfrien, the less impressed the local people were by the magnificent race adjoining them. Eventually, when he arrived at their home planet, he found out why.”
Simple time velocity equations provided a list of three possible trucks. Prime programs installed themselves in their electronics, erasing their own datapool traces as they went.
“The Wilfrien were old as a species; even as individuals their lives extended for hundreds of millennia. They had traveled further and faster than anyone else in the Ring Empire. Their peerless technology had plateaued. Every race around them was content and wealthy thanks to their largesse. There was nowhere outward left for them to go, neither physically nor mentally. If they could be said to have a flaw, it was their impetuosity and interest in all that surrounded them. Yet now, there was no strangeness in their universe, no mystery. In olden times, men would write Here be Dragons around the edge of their maps, when what it really meant was: we don’t know what’s there. None of the Wilfrien starcharts had dragons; they were sharp and detailed all the way out to the end of the galaxy. The only journey left to them now was the journey back to where they came from. They turned inward.
“Mozark landed on the edge of a city whose towers put those of The City to shame. Some of them had tops that pierced the atmosphere; several were alive, like reefs of coral that had thrust up out of the ground; others were composed entirely from planes of energy fields. He even saw one that was made up of blobs of translucent sapphire, as if they were cells ten meters wide; they all slithered and slipped around each other at random, though they always maintained the same overall shape. But they were all empty, those dizzying spires and paradise palaces. The Wilfrien had abandoned them to live on the ground below, leaving them open for wild animals and creeping plants to claim them back.”
One of the Skins was entering the alley. Mounds of rubbish that the cell members had carefully dumped over the last week forced him to walk close to the wall. Denise gave her final orders to the Prime that had taken complete control of the truck. It cut its link to the traffic regulator AS with a last emergency declaration call—broken as it hit the safety barrier. The empty warehouse doors were dead ahead. Inertia took over as the Prime erased itself, propelling thirty tons of truck through the door and onward toward the rear wall at fifty kilometers an hour. “Of course it would take thousands of centuries for any kind of decay to assault the fabulously strong materials that the Wilfrien buildings were made out of. For now they stood as tall and proud as always. But the signs of their inevitable future were already beginning to show. Leaves and twigs were accumulating around the base, mulching into a rich compost from which ever more vigorous plants grew; colors were losing their sheen below spores and grime. Hundreds of years of winds had blown soil and sand in through the lower floors, allowing the rot to begin around all the artifacts that were fabricated from simpler compounds.
“Hardly believing what he was witnessing, Mozark walked across fields of food crops that had been plowed into what had once been majestic parkland. The Wilfrien who were tending them left their labor beasts to greet him warmly. Bowing and stuttering in confusion, for they still inspired awe among those in their presence, he asked what had happened to their civilization, which had embraced over a thousand light-years. They smiled kindly at his lack of comprehension and told him they were done with it. Their battle for knowledge, they said, was won; they knew everything worth knowing. What they were, therefore, had no further purpose in the context of their achievement. They were now embarked on a completely different path of development, one last final application of their glorious heritage. Life itself would become pleasant and simple. Their bodies were modifying and adapting, melding to fit perfectly with a natural planetary environment. But unlike a primitive, pretechnology society, they would never starve or become ill, for this was a designed simplicity, taking advantage of everything their planet could provide. Their minds would quiet over the generations until the joy of a single sunset provided as much satisfaction as breaking down the barriers of space and time with the mental tools of mathematics and physics. They would raise their crops and their children and dance naked as raindrops fell from a wild sky. As the relics of their past crumbled and sank silently back into the earth, so they would become one with their world and be at peace with themselves.
“Mozark raged against such deliberate decay, forgetting both his manners and his earlier awe. He asked—begged—them to reconsider, to find new challenges. To become once more the golden Wilfrien he had worshiped from afar. They laughed sadly at what they saw as his simplicity in believing that progress could only ever be found in one direction, onward and upward. Their nature, they said, had led them to this point. This was what they were. This was what they wanted. Life without complexity. In this new-dawning milieu they would be happy without even trying. Isn’t that what all life should be? they wondered. Did he not want to reach such a destination himself? they asked. When he told them of the quest he was on—for himself, for his own kingdom, and for Endoliyn—they laughed once again, but with even greater sadness. Travel far enough, they told him, and like us you will arrive at the place you started from. The universe is not big enough to hide what you seek.
“Mozark went back to his ship and took off immediately. He pushed his starship’s engines hard, racing away from the Wilfrien homeworld as if it were filled with monsters. As it shrank away in the viewscreens, he cursed them for betraying their ancestors’ monumental struggle. Everything every Wilfrien in history had achieved, they had thrown away like spoiled decadent children. He thought it to be a calamity of the highest order, made worse by the fact that only someone from outside could really appreciate its true magnitude. The Wilfrien couldn’t see what they were doing was so wrong. Their rush into decline went against every belief he treasured. He hurt just thinking what Endoliyn would say if he returned home to tell her that true happiness could only be found in ignorance. For that was what he considered the Wilfrien were doing, closing themselves away from reality like a flower at the end of the day. Perhaps, he thought, they had been beaten by the universe after all, that its wonder was just too great for them. He knew that for all their splendor, his nature was stronger: he would never admit such defeat for himself or his people. In that alone, he had risen above his old heroes, although he was sure he would regret their passing for the rest of his life. A little of the magic had disappeared from the galaxy; the golden were tarnished now, never to regain their luster. But still he flew on, as determined as ever.”
A bulky black helicopter thundered low overhead, the sound washing out Denise’s voice. The children leaped to their feet and charged out from under the parasols to watch the alien warcraft pollute their sky. It streaked away toward the Dawe District, heavy, menacing guns sliding out of its nose cavities with smooth urgency that was almost a sexual motion.
Denise followed them out into the sunlight, watching hot fumes spilling from the invader’s gill-like turbine baffles as it filled the air with its battle cry. She took hold of Wallace’s and Melanie’s hands as the children looked uncertainly from the racing machine back to her. “They won’t sell many ice creams at that speed, will they?” She chuckled. The children broke into ebullient giggles, laughing and pulling faces at the retreating horror. “Come along then.” She swung the hands high, allowing Melanie to twirl below her arm. “I’ve a tale to finish. We’re almost done for today, and the nasties aren’t going to spoil our fun, are they?”
“No,” they all yelled. Getting back under the parasols became a race, with lots of jostling to be at the front. Denise let go of Melanie and Wallace, allowing them to sit at her feet with exaggerated self-importance.
“Miss, did the Ring Empire have people like Zantiu-Braun?” Jedzella asked.
Denise glanced around at the worried faces. “No,” she assured them. “There were people who were bad, sometimes evil. But the laws of the Ring Empire were strong, and the police clever and vigilant. Nothing like Zantiu-Braun and this invasion could ever happen there.”
Edmund turned round to his classmates and went Phew, wiping his hand across his brow. The children smiled again, content that the Ring Empire remained sacrosanct.
Denise hopped off the tram at its third stop along Corgan Street, several hundred meters behind the Skin platoon. She knew where they were without having to apply her d-written systems to the datapool. The noise of ragged voices keyed her in.
KillBoy’s in the driving seat
Crash hit! Crash hit!
KillBoy’s seen the meat
Crash hit! Crash hit!
Skins are in the bodybag
Crash hit! Crash hit!
She smiled behind her sunglasses. KillBoy wasn’t something she could take credit for: some nameless poolpoet had invented him on landing day after the sniper shot. But he was rapidly becoming one of the cause’s biggest assets.
It was youths who were doing most of the chanting. Respectable, responsible adults who would normally call for the police the moment two teenagers started drinking beer on the street were nodding silent encouragement as they walked along the pavement.
This was why she was here, to gauge the mood of the average Memu Bay inhabitant. It wasn’t something she could determine from editorials and reports out of the datapool. Judging by this response, her fellow citizens had a vicious streak she wouldn’t have necessarily assigned to the descendants of right-on liberals. Mocking people whose friend and colleague had just suffered a horrifying accident was a taboo she hadn’t expected to be broken. It left her feeling just a little uncomfortable.
She caught up with the platoon, hanging around on the edge of the crowd that was following them, curious about their reaction. Her d-written neural cells intercepted their communication link, giving her full sound and vision intimacy. They were largely ignoring the chants and abuse hurled at them, busy making private unheard jokes about members of the crowd. Boyishly obscene observations about the girls (including her) were followed up by zooming in on the appropriate section of anatomy with their helmet sensors; sexual derision about the males and their imagined deformities concealed by strange folds in their trouser fabric. Quite the little counterpoint and morale booster.
The platoon crossed into a wide concreted area around the base of a big apartment block, which the local kids used for their games. A dozen or so skinny boys just into their teens were kicking a soccer ball about. Their game trickled to a desultory halt as they turned to stare at the invaders.
Most of the crowd began to turn back, heading for the shops and bars and haunts along the street, probably intimidated by the open space. Denise slouched on the corner by a shop, watching the platoon march away. Following them here would make her too visible; besides, she’d learned what she needed.
Suddenly the soccer ball was powering through the air. It almost hit one of the Skins, the sergeant himself no less, but he dodged back. Denise blinked as his foot shot out, stopping the ball in midflight. His toe nudged it about; then it was arching up. His knee came up underneath and bounced it twice; then he kicked it gently to another Skin. They started passing it to each other.
The boys who’d been playing were now all standing sneering, striking a variety of stubborn hands-on-hips poses designed to show how tough and unintimidated they were.
“Give us the ball back!” one shouted. He was the tallest, all gangly limbs and a thick beret of curly black hair.
“Sure,” the sergeant said.
The kid took a half pace back in surprise at hearing the modestly amplified voice. Then the Skin was walking toward him, nudging the ball along in front. He got right up to the kid, who made the mistake of going for the ball. The sergeant neatly flicked it round him, and kept on going to the next youth. Another attempted tackle, another failure. The sergeant was picking up speed, and the other kids flocked toward him for their own moment of victory. He got around another three, then kicked the ball over their heads. It was a perfect arc that placed the ball at the feet of another Skin. He kicked it firmly, and it smacked against the wall between the two fading white lines that marked out the goal.
The sergeant held his arms high. “Easy.”
“Yeah?” the tallest kid scoffed. “You’re in Skin, asshole. Come out and try that against us.”
There was a moment’s pause, and the sergeant’s Skin split open down his neck. The tall kid took a startled half pace backward as the head wriggled free of the split. His face and hair were shiny with a pale-blue gel, but he was still smiling.
Denise’s hand flew to her mouth, smothering her gasp of surprise. The shock had overridden all her cause-dedicated calm. It was him. Him!
“Skin suits give us strength,” Lawrence said cheerfully, “not skill. Still, not to worry. Some of you have a smattering of talent. Twenty years’ time, you might come up to our level.”
“Fuck off!” the kid cried. “You bastards would just shoot us if we didn’t let you win.”
“You think so? Over a soccer game?”
“Yeah!”
“Then I feel sorry for you. You’re the ones shooting us, remember?”
The kid shrugged awkwardly.
Lawrence gave him a friendly nod. “If you ever fancy your chances on a level field, come and give us a game. Ask for me, Lawrence Newton. We’ll take you on. Buy you a beer if you win, too.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“So call my bluff.” Lawrence winked and began pulling himself back into the Skin. “Be seeing you.”
Clever, Denise thought as the platoon marched away, leaving the kids standing limply behind in a communal bewilderment. The platoon’s communication link was roaring with a dozen variations on what the fuck were you doing?
But then, she told herself, you shouldn’t have expected anything different from him. He was clever, and a bleeding-heart humanist. Someone like that would always try to build bridges with the enemy.
Thank goodness, a tiny traitor part of her mind whispered.
Denise’s jaw hardened with determination. It didn’t matter. He could not be treated any different from the others. The cause could not allow that.
She walked back down Corgan Street, planning how to turn the soccer match to her advantage. In war, which this was, his kindness was a weakness she could exploit.
Myles Hazeldine hated the wait in the anteroom. No matter how urgent the summons, and how irate Ebrey Zhang was, he always had to endure this ritual. He refused to show his temper, conceding the bitter irony. This was his study’s anteroom, and he had always made his visitors wait, be they allies or opponents.
How obvious and petty it was, establishing the true authority figure. Did they once laugh at me for such crudity? he wondered.
The doors opened, and Ebrey Zhang’s aide beckoned him in. As usual, the Z-B governor was sitting behind the big desk. And as usual, it galled Myles. The sharpest reminder of Thallspring’s miserable capitulation.
“Ah, Mr. Mayor, thank you for coming.” Ebrey’s cheerful smile was as insincere as it was malicious. “Do sit down.”
Keeping his face blank, Myles took the chair in front of the desk. An aide stood on either side of him. “Yes?”
“There was a nasty traffic accident today.”
“I heard.”
Ebrey cocked his head expectantly. “And?”
“One of your people was hurt.”
“And in a civilized society, someone would say something along the lines of: Sorry to hear that. Or: I hope he’s all right. Standard conversational procedure, even here, I believe.”
“The hospital says he’ll live.”
“Try not to sound so disappointed. Yes, he’ll live. However, he won’t be returning to frontline duty. Not ever.”
Myles smiled thinly. “Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t push it,” Ebrey snapped. “I’m going to have that accident thoroughly investigated. My people will oversee your transport forensic team. If they find anything suspicious, I’m going to use up some of my collateral. Still smirking, Mr. Mayor?”
“You can’t be serious. A truck hit a wall.”
“That’s what it looks like. But maybe that’s how it was meant to look. How often do your automated vehicles have traffic accidents, Mr. Deputy?”
Myles couldn’t help frowning; he’d never actually heard of one before. “I’m not sure.”
“The last one involving any sort of injury was fifteen years ago. For a fatality you have to go a lot further back. Even your antiquated electronics can manage to keep vehicles running smoothly. I find the timing highly suspicious.”
“The odds pile up. Don’t tell me your systems can do much better.”
“We’ll see.” Ebrey activated a desktop pearl and waited for its pane to unfurl. He glanced at the script that began scrolling down. “Now then, I see the Orton and Vaxme plants still haven’t got up to their proper capacity. Why is that, Mr. Mayor?”
“The Orton plant was undergoing refurbishment when you landed. You ordered it back into production status before the new components were properly integrated. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.”
“I see.” A finger tapped on the card’s screen, changing the script pattern. “And Vaxme?”
“I don’t know.”
“But no doubt you’ll find some engineering-based reason. After all, it could never be a human fault.”
“Why should it be?” Myles asked pleasantly. He knew he was goading Ebrey too hard and didn’t really care.
“Get its production back up,” Ebrey said levelly. “You’ve got ten hours. Make it plain to them. I am not going to be dicked around on this.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Fine.” He waved at the door. “That’s all.”
“Actually it isn’t.” Myles enjoyed the annoyance that washed over Ebrey’s face. “I’ve made this request to your aides twice already today, but never even got a reply. It isn’t as if I shout wolf every time we have a medical problem.”
“What request?”
“I need some resources reallocated from the university biomedical department. You took our most qualified people away to help with those new vaccines you wanted formulated over at the Madison facility.”
“I can’t spare anyone to lecture some bunch of backward students with falling grades.”
“It’s nothing to do with that. There have been a couple of new pulmonary ward admissions at the hospital.”
“So?”
“The doctors aren’t sure, but it seems to be some kind of tuberculosis variant. It’s not something we’ve seen before.”
“Tuberculosis?” Ebrey asked; he made it sound as if Myles had told a sick joke at a funeral. “That’s history. It doesn’t suddenly resurrect on a planet light-years from Earth.”
“We don’t know what it is, exactly. That’s why we need an expert diagnosis.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He flicked the desktop pearl off. “You can have them for a day. But I’ll hold you responsible if Madison falls behind.”
“Thank you.”
The Junk Buoy was modeled on a thousand waterfront resort bars that Lawrence had enjoyed in his twenties, and those had all been centuries out of date long before he even reached Earth. It catered for all sorts, although the sudden influx of Z-B platoons these last two nights had managed to repel most of the locals. When the first platoon came in and slapped on the bar demanding beers, the manager tried to refuse. They were ready for that; the sergeant had a communication card with a link already open to City Hall. A few words were said about licenses and there was no more trouble, only resentment. But the platoons were used to that, it hardly spoiled their evening.
Lawrence and Amersy sat under a thatched parasol out on the patio as the last crescent of gold-red sun sank behind Vanga peak. Both of them were sipping Bluesaucer beer from chilled bottles while the rest of the platoon spread themselves around the bar.
“Did you hear about Tureg’s platoon?” Lawrence asked quietly. None of his own men were close, four of them were round the pool table. Edmond was in a corner booth, talking to a well-dressed local man—which made Lawrence frown briefly. Hal, of course, was sitting up at the bar, wearing a white T-shirt that was tight enough to outline every muscle and smiling at all the girls who came in.
“I heard,” Amersy said. “The hatch nearly cut old Duson in half when they tried to open the lander pod. They reckon the thing was pressurized to ten atmospheres. Goddamn company using cheap suppliers again.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. No way a drop pod could pressurize like that.”
“One of the RCS nitrogen tanks vented. The valve jammed. It happens.”
“A valve jammed! Those things are supposed to be fail-safe. And nitrogen doesn’t vent inside the pod, you know that.”
“It can, if enough things go wrong.”
“Ha!”
“What then?”
“Foran got caught by a runaway truck, didn’t he?”
“Come on!” The patch of white skin on Amersy’s cheek flushed darker. He leaned in closer. “You can’t be serious,” he hissed. “How could they sabotage a lander pod?”
“It was out beyond the boundary.”
“So what: you’re saying this KillBoy resistance group managed to change its descent trajectory?”
“No, of course not. It drifted off track, enough of them do. This one was sitting out there in the middle of the jungle for a week before we got around to dispatching a recovery sortie. Plenty of time for them to find it and rig the nitrogen.”
“You’ve got to be wrong, man. The only way they could do that was if they could get around our software security.”
“Yes.”
“No way. We’re talking e-alpha here. Nothing can break that encryption.”
Lawrence tried not to dwell on the Prime program he still carried in his bracelet pearl. He’d never actually tested it against e-alpha, although it could certainly break Z-B’s second-level software. “I hope not.”
“It can’t, Lawrence.” He was almost pleading. “If they could break e-alpha we’d be wide open to them. Hell, we’d never even have made it down from orbit.”
“Yeah.” Lawrence took another sip from his bottle: it was his fourth, or fifth. Not a bad brew, based on some Nordic ideal of three hundred years ago with an alcohol percentage higher than he was used to. “I guess you’re right.” The sun had vanished now, pulling a veil of deep tropical darkness over Memu Bay. Streetlights and neon signs threw a rosy haze into the air above the marina. Farther down the beach, someone had started a bonfire. He took a slow glance around the bar, watching his men fooling about. “Will you look at that? We’re commanding the biggest bunch of losers in the galaxy.”
“They’re damn good, and you know it. We just got all shook-up by Nic, is all.”
“Maybe. But this whole outfit isn’t what it used to be. There used to be enough of us to damn well make sure there were no screwups like truck crashes and pressurized lander pods. And nobody would ever have taken a shot at us like they did poor old Nic.”
“Lawrence…”
“I mean it. I used to go along with it when I was younger. Now I’m old enough to know better. A lot better.”
“Jesus, Lawrence, are you having a midlife crisis on me? Is that what this is?”
“No, that’s very definitely not what this is.”
“You got doubts about the job, Lawrence? If you have, then I’m telling you, you’ve got to sideline yourself. It ain’t right someone with doubts leading us. You might—”
“Hesitate to shoot? I won’t hesitate to shoot. I came to terms with that a long time ago. Our Skin is the one thing that stops our conscience being put on the line every day. We don’t kill anyone; technology takes care of that. We knock them out and give them the mother of all headaches, but no scruples get trashed on the way.”
“Then what the hell is this about?”
“My life. I shouldn’t be here, you know. I made the wrong choice a long time ago.”
“Ho fuck.” Amersy took a big swig of beer. “Is this about that girl again?”
Lawrence’s hand moved automatically to the small pendant under his T-shirt. “Fate, I was stupid. I should never have left. Never.”
“I knew it! God damn! Who the hell keeps killing themselves over a girl for twenty years? Lawrence, man, I can’t even remember the first time I got laid, never mind what her name was.”
Lawrence grinned over the top of his bottle. “Yes, you can.”
“Yeah, okay. Maybe. But Jesus… twenty years. I mean, your chick, she’s got to be grossing out at a hundred kilos now, a housemom out in the burbs dosing up on antis to get through the day, with at least a couple of ex-husbands, not to mention some grandchildren knocking around.”
“Not Roselyn. She would have made something of her life; she was never as dumb as me. And in any case, she was only a part of Amethi.”
“You always go on about that planet like it’s some kind of paradise. Why did you leave?”
“I told you, I’m a dumb fuck. The dumbest there is. I made a mistake. I had it all, you know, I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
“Everyone’s like that when they’re teenagers. I mean, Christ, you’ve met my kids.”
“Don’t complain, they’re good kids. You’re lucky to have a family like that.”
“Yeah, man. Guess so.”
Lawrence couldn’t help smiling. Hell, two guys getting loaded in a bar, talking about their families and how they’d screwed up their lives. How deeper in could you get? “Would you leave?” he asked slowly, trying to make it come over casual.
“Leave what?”
“The platoon. Strategic security. Z-B. Everything. Would you quit if you could?”
“Come on, man, you know I’ve got a family. My stake’s not big enough to take care of them if I stop work. I can’t quit.”
“But if you could? If you didn’t have to worry about your stake.”
Amersy grinned wide. “Sure. If I could dump this shit, I would. Who wouldn’t?”
“Good,” Lawrence said in satisfaction. If he ever hoped to pull off his private mission into the hinterlands, he would have to have Amersy on his side. “Let’s go get some more beers.”
Edmond Orlov lurched into them as they made their way back to the bar. He clutched at Amersy, barely stopping himself from falling. His smile was beatific. “Hey, Corp, Sarge, how you doing? Ain’t this the coolest place? Apart from the heat, that is.”
He started giggling wildly. Lawrence hadn’t really been paying attention, but he thought Orlov had just come out of the toilets.
“You know, it’s still pretty early,” Amersy said. “You’ve got to learn to pace yourself, man.”
“Sure thing.” Edmond threw a salute, almost missing his head. “You got it, Corp. But don’t you worry. I’m on it.” He tottered over to the jukebox, and after squinting, managed to slide his credit coin in the slot. A spiral video grid twisted up inside the juke’s cylindrical pane. Edmond started muttering: “Oh yeah” and “you, baby, you” to the AS as his finger waved at various grids. “Gimme some of that. Oh brother, I want me a piece of that, too.” Ska calypso music started to pound out of the overhead speakers. Edmond backed away from the juke, eyes closed, arms waving in a rhythm that didn’t quite correspond to anything being played.
All of the locals were nudging each other and smirking at the solitary, swaying figure. His own platoon mates and several of the other platoons laughed and clapped as he began to speed up.
“I gotta have that beer,” Amersy said, and broke for the bar. Lawrence took a last backward glance at Edmond. Something was going to have to be done about him. But not tonight. “Pain level’s too high,” he whispered as he went after Amersy.
Hal was still on his prominent stool at the middle of the counter. His smile flicked on at every girl who walked in. It never lasted long. The girls who arrived in groups checked him out immediately, then giggled among themselves as they found an empty section of the bar away from him. He earned himself some hard warning stares from boyfriends. Single girls had seemingly all perfected the same dismissive sneer.
“I’ve been ripped off,” Hal whined to Amersy as the corporal leaned on the counter and tried to attract one of the barmen. “Can we employ lawyers to sue people here?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Amersy asked.
“This,” Hal grunted. He flicked his glance downward.
Amersy peered at the trooper’s feet. “Your shoes don’t fit?”
“No! Not that!”
“What’s happening?” Lawrence asked. “Hal, you still here? I thought you’d have scored by now.”
“I’ve been sold a dud,” Hal told them through clenched teeth. He held his left arm up. There was a slim black band round his wrist. “I haven’t got a bleep out of it all evening. Eighty goddamn credits that son of a bitch took off me.”
Lawrence had to forcibly hold back his laughter. “Is that what I think it is, Hal?”
“It’s not illegal, Sarge,” Hal protested. “The guy in the shop swore everyone here uses PSAs.”
“Okay. Maybe there’s just no one here with your… preference.”
“There has to be.” Hal lowered his voice to a desperate plaint. “I keyed in an open acceptance. That’s like anything these girls are into, I’ll go with it. The fucking thing still doesn’t work.”
Amersy finally managed to get in an order for some more bottles of Bluesaucer.
“Give it time,” Lawrence advised.
“I’ve been here over an hour already. And Edmond told me about this place.”
“What about it?”
“They like—” Hal swiveled his head from side to side, making sure no one was listening, then lowered his voice. “They’re into threesomes here.”
Lawrence groaned. He might have guessed his men would grab the wrong end of that local legend. “That’s trimarriage, Hal. It’s different.”
“Yeah, but they’ve got to get used to it first, try it out.”
Lawrence put a friendly arm round Hal’s shoulder. “Listen, take my advice, kid, forget the bracelet and the threesomes for tonight, okay? Just be yourself. There must be a dozen girls in here. Go over and ask one of them if she wants a dance.” He gestured at the dance floor, which probably wasn’t the best illustration. Two squaddies were prancing around an oblivious Edmond, imitating his crazed movements with grotesque exaggeration. They were both holding on to their beer bottles, with the foaming liquid sloshing out. Their audience was cheering them on. “Or a quiet drink,” Lawrence added quickly. “It doesn’t matter what you say to them, as long as you say something. Trust me on this one.”
“I suppose,” Hal grunted sullenly. He glared at the PSA bracelet, willing its electronics to flicker into Technicolor life. The little display panel remained stubbornly dark.
“Good man.” Lawrence and Amersy collected their beer and fled back out onto the patio.
After an hour, Jones Johnson had just about got the pool table figured out. One of the middle pockets had a worn cushion that you had to watch when you were shooting from the top, and there was a definite slope away from the bottom left corner. Now that he knew all that, he could maybe start hustling a little credit. Certainly from their fellow platoons, and if he got lucky from a local who thought he was king of the skewed table.
Most of his own platoon hung around as the evening wore on, cheering him, or groaning in sympathy as the balls refused to drop. The Junk Buoy began to fill up after sunset. Platoons who’d been here last night reported that the locals had stayed away. Not tonight.
The pool games went on. Three wins. Two losses (one strategic). Karl and Odel and Dennis ordered them all some surf ’n turf. They dug into the big platters, chugging down the too-sweet horse piss that passed for beer in Memu Bay, keeping their cue on the table.
After a couple of hours, Edmond’s fix was depressurizing. He packed up the dance floor and slumped in a chair, arms hugging his chest and shivering as if the night had brought a front of arctic air in off the water. Jones was kind of pleased about that. Edmond’s dancing was always embarrassing, but stoked up, someone had to watch him. And they’d all seen Lawrence give him the eye—before the sarge and Amersy settled down to get seriously hammered together. Not that it mattered; they all looked out for each other in here as much as out on patrol. That’s what platoon membership was about.
Even the kid, who was now drunk enough to venture around the girls. Nobody could quite hear what his lines were, but he kept pointing at a black bracelet on his wrist as he staggered from one to the next. All the girls he talked to waved him on or turned their backs to him. The dance floor was heaving with people. And now that his cue aim was wavering from the drink, Jones quite fancied his chances out there among the sweaty strutting bodies. The Junk Buoy’s DJ had taken over from the jukebox, and the mood of the crowd was already up and going higher. There were some seriously good-looking pieces of skirt out there, too. And the can-time had stretched on for way too long since they’d left Cairns.
Jones moved out onto the dance floor along with Lewis and Odel. Even with the beer buzzing him, he could move with a decent groove. And there was one girl in a scarlet T-shirt dress with a high hem. She kept returning his grins. She was way too young, still a teen. Which just made it hotter.
He danced with her for a couple of minutes, then put his arms around her and started making out. She was just as eager, letting his hands squeeze her buttocks while his tongue delved down her throat. Her own hand came round, closing on his balls. They’d still not said a word.
Shouting. Angry yells out on the edge of the dance floor. Bodies moving sharply, the way they always did when they were being pushed. Jones lifted his head to look round. “Oh fuck.”
It was the kid. He’d made a play for a girl who was in a group. Hadn’t checked, or was now too drunk to notice, the boyfriend, who was being backed up by half a dozen youths.
Drunk or not, Hal was still trained enough to respond automatically to the shove. Going with the momentum of the impact, then spinning round, arm coming out, hand flat to chop. Screaming at the fuckers to back off. Them screaming their own fury about alien motherfuckers. Two of them closing fast. Hal dropped into a self-defense pose, arms and legs locking just so. Looking pretty silly as the oblivious dancers behind him kept jostling him around.
The first barrage of fists flew. A girl screamed at the top of her voice. Hal’s knuckles crunched into a rib cage with a satisfying jolt running back up his arm. A fist slammed into his own cheek. Red flash. And he was staggering back into more people. Blood foamed out of his mouth.
Everyone in the Junk Buoy was suddenly aware of what was happening: locals seeing an invader—the perv who’d been pestering girls all evening—brutally assaulting one of our lads, platoon squaddies seeing one of ours being surrounded and smacked around.
An implosion of bodies rushed in toward the fight.
Jones levered his way through the barbarous crush. Elbows thudded into him. He kicked out. A broken bottle was stabbed toward his face. He ducked, spinning around, kickboxing the attacker.
Screams. Bloodlust. The DJ kept the volume cranked up big. Wild fists and feet. Random targets. Many people started chanting: “KillBoy.”
A girl jumped on Jones and bit his ear. He bellowed in fury and slammed her into a pillar. She puked up as she fell away. He saw Lawrence staggering back into the room off the patio. A knife flashed.
“Sarge!” A chair registered as a blur of motion above and behind. Jones’s arm came up to block, way too late. The solid wood backrest crashed into his forehead. Stars exploded. Very briefly.
Lawrence just managed to sway away from the knife blade as the man slashed at him. Somewhere in his brain there was a perfect countermove; a sort of physical chess maneuver that would enable him to disarm and subdue his attacker with a bent forefinger. Or something. He laughed joyously as he tried to work out how to slide into a fluid kung-fu–style stance. Unfortunately someone hit the floor behind him and bounced into his legs, sending him toppling backward. He thudded into the wall. “Ouch. Hey, that damn well hurt.” He laughed again, then stopped urgently as he threw up. A girl on all fours beside him shrieked in disgust as he spewed over her short red dress. She slapped him hard and scrambled to her feet. Lawrence waved and tried to say sorry. That was important, he felt. He couldn’t quite see where she was anymore, so instead he threw up again. It’d been ages since he’d been in a decent bar fight. Mind, he was pretty sure it had been more fun last time around.
Police, reinforced by two Skin platoons, arrived at the Junk Buoy within four minutes of the owner raising the alarm. By then the fight had spilled out into the street. Several people were in the water, thrashing about frantically according to how drunk they were.
“Stop this right now,” the senior sergeant said. Even with Skin amplifying his voice, no one took any notice. Several bottles were thrown at the Skins.
The two platoons formed a loose semicircle around the brawl, with the police standing behind them. The senior sergeant took a bulky cylindrical canister off his belt and held it high, angled slightly toward the Junk Buoy. There was a dull thud from one end. Its web flew out, a mesh of fine fiber that seethed like a gray-silver nebula in the air as it expanded, then settled over the fighters. Strands stuck to clothes and flesh alike, stretching with every motion. Nobody noticed. Several thousand volts were pumped through it. People screamed, muscles suddenly locking. Purple-white static flared around extremities, fingers and hair squirting out sparks. Then the fiber’s conductive molecules disassociated and the current vanished.
In its wake it left a stunned silence and convulsed postures. After a second, those it had struck and immobilized juddered down gulps of fresh air. Limbs trembled uncontrollably. Nobody was fighting anymore. Locals regarded the picket of dark Skins with considerable trepidation. Squaddies who’d been caught by the web grinned nervously, holding their hands up.
“Thank you,” the senior sergeant said briskly. “You are all under arrest. Please wait here.” He marched toward the bar’s main door. The spent web canister was dropped, clattering away on the stone-paved road. He pulled another one from his belt and stood in the doorway. “Pack it in!” he yelled. The new web canister was fired into the Junk Buoy.
Lawrence woke up knowing he must have only seconds to live. His head was obviously split open, allowing someone to pour boiling oil over his exposed brain. He groaned feebly, moving about. Which was a big mistake. He dry-retched. His hands waved about slowly, coming into contact with thin strings of vomit beading out of his mouth.
“Oh fucking hell.”
The light was agonizingly bright and penetrating deep inside his broken head. He didn’t so much blink as weep the world into focus. Not a very good focus, he had to admit.
Someone had dumped him in a very weird hell. He was lying on the thin gray carpet tiles of what looked like a brightly lit airport lounge. There were long rows of red plastic chairs screwed into the floor. People were slumped listlessly in them. Some of the men were injured, holding pressure dressings to cuts and bruised eyes, blood staining the white fabric. Girls in small tight dresses leaned against each other, either asleep or staring blankly. There were other people sleeping on the floor—at least he assumed they were sleeping; none of them showed any signs of movement. Several Skins stood guard around the perimeter of the room, imposingly silent and still.
Lawrence got it then, and memory oozed back. The fight. This was a hospital waiting room, then. Not hell after all.
Slowly, very slowly, he turned on his side, then levered himself up to a sitting position. Pain pounded away on the side of his head, making him nauseated again. He winced, dabbing at the spot with fingers. There was a huge tender lump just behind his left ear.
Amersy was sitting in one of the red chairs beside him. The corporal’s white cheek had turned gray; both eyes were badly bloodshot. He was holding a chilpak across his forehead. His shoulders were trembling.
Lewis, Odel, Karl and Dennis were in the seats beside him; Odel with his right hand swallowed by a blue field-aid sheath, Karl with a busted nose and blood on his lips and chin. Edmond was lying on the floor, curled up at Karl’s feet.
“Ho shit,” Lawrence croaked. “What—”
“We got webbed,” Lewis muttered. “The owner called the cops.”
“Oh great.” He paused, pulling down some more air. “Everyone okay?”
“Sure. We were kicking some serious butt in there till our own cavalry came over the hill and shot us. Fuck. I mean, whose side are they on?”
Lawrence wasn’t going to give any sort of answer to that. “What’s our status?”
“The kid’s in with the doc right now.” Amersy jerked his thumb toward the curtained-off cubicles at the back of the room. “Nothing bad, at least not broken. And we’re on notified restraint until the medics clear us.”
“Great.” He looked round to see if there was some sort of pillow he could rest his head on. “Where’s Jones?”
“Christ knows.”
“That’s good. He’ll make his own way back.” The effort of talking and thinking was incredibly tiring. “Let me know when it’s my turn.” He lowered his head back onto the carpet tiles again.
The nurse was surprisingly sympathetic. Lawrence had no idea what time it was when he was finally called into a cubicle to be assessed and cleaned up. Very early morning, he guessed.
She scanned the side of his head where the bump was, and the medical AS decided he wasn’t concussed. “But I’ll get a human doctor to examine the image when we’ve one free,” she told him. “Just to be on the safe side.”
“Thanks.”
“It’ll be a while. They’re a bit busy right now.” She laid him on his side and pulled the grubby T-shirt over his head.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You didn’t start it. Did you?”
“No. But I should have realized it was inevitable.”
She started squirting some kind of cool cleaning liquid on his lump. Lawrence grunted at the sharp sting.
“Any fool could have told you that.”
“I’m not just any fool, I’m supposed to be in charge.”
“In charge, huh?” A gauze napkin was dabbed on his skin, soaking up the excess liquid.
“Yeah, I know. Listen, I don’t suppose you’ve got anything for my headache, have you?”
“Headache or hangover?”
“Both. And they really don’t like sharing space.”
“Not surprised. Hold that.” She took his hand and pressed it against the napkin. He could just see her shoes as she walked over to a wall cabinet.
“Anyone badly hurt?” he asked.
“Us or you?”
“Just anyone.”
“Three deep stab wounds. One emergency regenerative procedure, a girl’s face was cut up—”
“Aw shit.”
“—several broken bones. And that electrocution weapon of yours has left a lot of people very shaky. Nobody dead, though. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.” She handed him a couple of purple capsules and a glass of water. “Take these.”
He swallowed them automatically. Only afterward did he realize how trusting he’d been. Strategic security policy was quite strict on receiving external medical assistance, especially in nonlethal situations.
The curtain was shoved back, and Captain Bryant stormed in. He was in full uniform, the light mauve fabric showing up his anger-heated skin. “There you are, Newton.”
“Excuse me,” the nurse said. “I’m treating this man.”
“He’s cured.” Bryant held the curtain open for her. “That will be all.”
She gave him an indignant look and walked out.
“Would you care to explain, Sergeant?”
“Sir?”
“What the hell happened tonight? I let you out for a quiet drink and the next thing I know you’re restaging Santa Chico.”
“There was some kind of argument. About a girl, I think. It sprang from that.”
“Then it damn well shouldn’t have sprang. For God’s sake, you’re supposed to stop this kind of thing.”
“I wasn’t actually there, sir. Otherwise I would have.”
“You should have been there. You’re their sergeant. I depend on you to keep order.”
“We were off duty.”
“Don’t even start pulling that one on me. There’s a damn sight more to your job than official duties, and you know it. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t have those stripes.”
“Sir,” Lawrence grunted with extreme petulance. If he hadn’t been so unstable he would have said fuck it and simply smacked Bryant one.
“Now where is Jones?”
“Sir?”
“Jones Johnson. Remember him?”
“I thought he’d gone back to barracks.”
“He hasn’t reported in, and the police didn’t take him into custody with the rest of you. Where is he?”
“I don’t know, sir. Have you checked the hospital?”
“Of course I have.”
Lawrence rubbed at his eyes. The capsules seemed to be having some effect. At least the nausea was fading. But he felt desperately tired. “Officially he doesn’t have to report back until oh-six-hundred hours, sir.”
“Don’t play it smart with me, Sergeant, you don’t have the IQ to pull it off. Jones is the only person unaccounted for, and he’s under my command. Have you any idea how badly all this reflects on me? After this total debacle, I don’t want further loose ends. Do you understand that?”
“What I’m saying, sir, is that if he got out from the fight before the police arrived, then he’s probably with a girl.”
“He’d better be. I want you to take that shambles you call a platoon back to barracks right away. You’re on double house duties, and any breakages from the Junk Buoy will be met out of your pay. I shall also be loading an official reprimand onto your record. Now get your act together, Newton.”
The curtain was tugged back forcefully as the captain strode out.
Lawrence gave his invisible back the finger, then groaned in misery as he sank back down onto the examination table.
Jones Johnson woke to a hot ache in his wrists and back. Despite that, he was alarmingly cold.
Not surprising. He was naked, spread-eagled with his wrists fastened in some kind of manacles that hung from an oval frame. Ankles, too, were held fast against the base of the frame. The rest of the room was empty. As far as he could see, it didn’t even have a window, just a plain wooden door on his left. The walls were whitewashed concrete, the floor some kind of spongy black matting.
Instinctively he tugged at the manacles. Whoever had built this frame knew what he was doing. His freedom of movement was very limited.
The worst thing about it was, he simply could not remember how he’d got here. There had been some kind of fight in the Junk Buoy. He’d seen a knife flash. Combined with a chair?
What the fuck happened after that?
His brief struggle with the manacles left him panting. There was the dull throbbing on his forehead that indicated a big bruise.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, can you guys hear me? Anyone there? Hey.”
He watched the door for a while, expecting someone to come see what the commotion was about. Nothing.
It’s a brothel, he told himself, an S and M joint, that’s all. I took a hit in the fight, and those turds Karl and Lewis paid for this. Some dominatrix will arrive any minute and start hitting my ass with a cane. The bastards.
“Hey, come on, guys, this isn’t funny anymore.”
Still nothing happened. He couldn’t hear any traffic sounds, any voices.
Bastards.
He needed to pee, too. God damn!
And who would have thought that Memu Bay had a cathouse that specialized in this kind of stuff. He stopped that train of thought straightaway.
Some time later the door opened.
“About fucking time,” Jones yelled. “Come on, get me out of here.”
A man came in, dressed in a dark blue boilersuit. He paid no attention to Jones at all. He was carrying a large, and clearly heavy, glass container, which he placed on the floor by Jones’s restrained feet.
“Hey! Hey, you,” Jones said. “What the fuck is this? Hey, say something. Talk to me.”
The man turned round and walked out.
Jones shook himself about as much as he could. It was all pointless, the manacles never budged. But the door hadn’t been closed.
“Look, whatever they paid, I’ll match it.”
The man came in again, lugging another, identical, glass container.
Jones found he was sweating now. His heart had begun to flutter in that way that acknowledged his subconscious knew something was deeply wrong. He just couldn’t admit it to himself, because that would be when the panic and dread would kick in.
“Please,” he asked. “What is this?”
But the man had left again.
He didn’t want to think it. Not that. Not KillBoy. That this wasn’t something Karl and Lewis had thought up for a laugh when they were drunk. That he’d been the dumbest fuck in the universe and let some fanatical resistance group snatch him.
“But I don’t know anything,” he whispered. “I don’t.”
Torture was centuries out of date. It really really was. There were drugs, all sorts of techniques. Available to all modern, well-equipped, properly financed police and security forces. Didn’t Thallspring have them? Backward primitive Thallspring?
It didn’t matter, he persuaded himself, because Z-B would be turning the town upside down in their search for him. The sarge would never let them stop. He looked after his men. Good old sarge. Any second now and the door would fly off its hinges, and the platoon would charge in to rescue him.
The mute man was back again, with a third container. This time he’d brought a load of clear plastic tubing as well, which he left looped round the container’s short neck. Jones stared at it, bitterness and furious resentment contaminating his anger. The apparatus was for an enema. He was going to be raped. Gang-raped most likely. Part of the softening up. Part of breaking him.
He clenched his fists, pulling desperately. “God no. No. No.” His contorted face so nearly let tears escape down his cheeks. “Why me? Why did you pick on me? It’s not fair. Not fair.”
The door closed again behind the man. Jones let out a sob, and the tension went out of his body, leaving him drooping painfully from the frame.
“Please,” he told the empty room. “I’m nobody. I’m not important. You don’t have to do this. Please.”
He was sniveling now. Wretched and pathetic. Back on Earth, anti-interrogation training had gone through the routines for strengthening resolve. How to withstand tiredness and strain, how not to be caught out in lies. That was training. That wasn’t real. Not when some bunch of psychotic terrorists have got you stripped naked and strung out like they’re about to crucify you. Not when you are so utterly helpless that you would genuinely sell your soul to the devil you now want to believe in very badly indeed. Because there’s no other way out.
Where were they? God damn it, where were the platoon?
“Everyone is important in their own way, Mr. Johnson.”
Jones’s head snapped up. There was a beautiful young woman in the room: her long flattish face was one that any man would find enchanting. Thick dark hair swung around her head as she stared at him. Her movement was birdlike, examining him from minutely different angles. She was twisting a gold ring on her index finger.
“Please,” he entreated. “Just let me go.”
“No.” She said it with a finality that was horrifying.
“Why! What are you?”
“At this particular stage of our mission, I suppose you could call me a revolutionary anarchist. It is my task to bring chaos and disorder to Memu Bay.”
“What?” he blurted.
She smiled gently and took a step closer. Her proximity was one he found alarmingly sexual. Then she picked up the tubing. One end was carefully plugged into the top of a container. She began to uncoil the rest.
“Don’t,” he begged. “Jesus, please.”
“There will be very little pain,” she said. “I am not a sadist, Mr. Johnson.”
Jones clenched his buttocks as if he were going for Olympic gold. “I’ll tell you anything. Just… don’t.”
“I’m sorry. You’re not here for questioning. I already know more about the universe than you ever dreamed existed.”
He stared at her, coldly shocked by the realization that she was no revolutionary, she was simply insane. Bug-eyed, dancing-in-the-moonlight crazy. It was one of the universe’s most heinous crimes that a creature so beautiful should possess such a demented soul.
“People will die,” he cried. “Your people, the ones you’re supposed to be fighting for. Is that what you want?”
“Nobody will die. Zantiu-Braun will never know for certain if you are alive or not. It is a dilemma that will eat at their souls. That is what I want.”
She brought the end of the tube up to his neck. With absolute horror, he saw the end was shaped exactly like a Skin circulatory nozzle. It clicked neatly into his carotid valve.
“It won’t work,” he said hoarsely. “If you want me dead, you’ll have to do it the hard way. It’s not that easy, bitch!”
“Good-bye, Mr. Johnson.” She glanced at her ring.
Jones laughed in her face. Stupid bitch didn’t know the valves were e-alpha protected. His laugh burbled away to a terminal scream as he saw his precious scarlet blood race down the tube and splatter into the container.
He actually saw her flinch. There were tears in her eyes, revealing shame. “Know this,” she said. “Your essence will go forward to flourish in a world free of sorrow. I promise you.” Then she turned away.
He cursed her to hell and beyond. He screamed. Pleaded. Wept.
All the while his blood flowed along the tube.
Fight it, he told himself. The boys will find me. Don’t lose consciousness. They’ll rescue me. They will. My friends. There’s time. There’s always time.
One of the containers was completely full. And still the tube was red as his heart pumped away faithfully.
Blood and world began their final fade into gray.