Maximum Offence (20 page)

Actually, he only says the first letter. Because my kick lifts Neen off the ground so fast that Colonel Vijay forgets to finish his order.

‘Stay down,’ Haze tells Neen.

When I step forward to stamp on Neen’s knee, the colonel glares at me. Seems we’re fighting this by rules after all, just unspoken ones. Always hated those worst of all. Your own unspoken rules, that’s different. They’re what you want them to be.

Something has changed in Neen’s eyes when he crawls to his feet. I hope the colonel thinks that’s good. No one but a fool expects an enemy to go easy on them. And my enemy is what Neen is.

You fight me that’s what you become.

If he could kill me, he would. Only he can’t. So he is going to go down trying.

I break his nose. He shuts one of my eyes. I’m tired and beginning to hurt from the effort of not killing Neen. That, I could do quickly. Keeping him alive and at arm’s length is a lot harder.

And yeah, I know,
Good
and
sergeant
. Two words to sit uneasily in the mouth of anyone who has ever been in the Legion. But he
is
a good sergeant, and in the last few seconds, he got better. When he comes in swinging, I take the blows. And slam my head into his face. ‘Stay down,’ yells Haze. Rachel nods at his shout.

Colonel Vijay is smiling, the smile of a man watching his plan come together. I’m turning Jaxx’s son into a proper officer, and a bit of me wonders if that is really a good idea.

Then the colonel’s smile is gone. Because Neen’s rolling sideways to grab a dagger from the dirt. When he comes off the floor it’s fast, with the dagger in his hand jabbing faster. We’re abandoning match rules, here.

‘Sergeant,’ shouts Colonel Vijay.

Neen hesitates. It’s enough.

Grabbing his wrist, I squeeze. Bones stress and the fury goes out of his eyes. Pain does that for you. Or so I’m told.

‘Neen,’ says Colonel Vijay. ‘Drop that knife.’

I can see Neen wondering what is going to happen next. All that happens is that I let go of his wrist and step back as the colonel steps forward.

‘You two,’ Colonel Vijay says to Haze and Rachel. ‘Hold him.’

They look at each other and something passes between them. Fear or resignation, who knows . . . ? It passes quickly. Neen is a mess. His nose is almost flat to his face. One tooth is missing. A rip at the side of his mouth gives him a grin at odds with the emptiness in his eyes.

‘Hold him tighter,’ insists the colonel.

So they do. Reaching forward, Colonel Vijay grasps Neen’s nose and wrenches it back into shape. ‘You carrying thread?’ he asks Franc.

When she nods, he smiles. ‘Sew it at the bridge,’ he tells her. Maybe Horse Hito taught him battlefield medicine as well.

TEN MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME COLONEL VIJAY HAS GIVEN FOR moving out, I stalk from the house to find the Aux waiting. Neen sits on his pack, checking clips, his face sewn back into shape. Haze and Rachel have their heads close together. To my surprise, Haze still wears his scalp bare to the sun. His braids are longer than I remember. As for Franc, she’s chewing a sliver of wind-dried meat thoughtfully.

Probably working on a better recipe. It must be great to have your life simplified to knives and food.

Mind you, I can talk.

The surprise is two villagers standing beside her. One is a girl about Franc’s age, wearing a woollen dress, tied at the waist. Her feet are bare. The rope round her waist makes her breasts look bigger than they probably are.

The other is a boy of a similar age. A leather bag hangs from his shoulder and a large knife juts from his belt. His beard is thin and blond. He obviously thinks he’s coming with us. As does the girl, I realize.

‘Who are these?’

‘Villagers, sir,’ says Rachel. She looks at Haze, who shakes his head.

‘Neen?’ I ask.

‘Kyble said . . .’ Standing, Neen makes himself start again. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘Kyble says taking them is the price of her hospitality.’ He hesitates. ‘She said you would know this already, sir.’

‘She said I’d know this?’

‘Yes, sir. Says your voices would have told you.’

‘Wait here,’ I tell them, and they’re still waiting when I return with the colonel fifteen minutes later to tell the two villagers they can come with us. Strange the things that can change your mind.

Colonel Vijay left the final decision to me.
Operational matters
, he calls it. Apparently, those are my responsibility. So I stand there, inside the house, while Kyble runs through her reasons.

We owe her, that’s one.

The second is that Pavel’s now on the move, taxing villages. We’ll need these two to help us find him. Her third reason is that one of them will save my life before I leave this world.

‘I’ll save my own life,’ I tell Kyble.

She frowns. Luck’s a whore, she tells me. She’ll smile one minute and cut your throat the next. It doesn’t do to throw favours back in her face. That’s not how Kyble puts it — but it’s what she means.

‘We can’t take them,’ I tell her.

The colonel nods back when I glance towards the door.

‘Nineteen years ago,’ says Kyble, as his fingers touch the handle, ‘the Fist billeted here. Ten men in all, two . . .’ She puts her thumbs to her head, indicating braids. ‘And eight like you.’

Nothing like us
, I want to say. But it would be a lie.

‘When they left,’ she says, ‘they left those two, in the bellies of twins from this city. Young girls,’ Kyble looks at me. ‘Good girls . . .’

‘What happened?’ asks Colonel Vijay.

‘After the soldiers went?’ Kyble makes the sign for throats cut.

‘But they spared the infants?’ He sounds surprised.

‘They ripped them from the women.’ Kyble’s voice is hard. ‘And they would have ripped the guts from the infants. I stopped them . . .’ She sighs, turns to me. I don’t want to see this woman plead. Women like Kyble don’t plead.

‘
You’re old
,’ I say. Colonel Vijay thinks I am being cruel.

‘I’m dying,’ Kyble replies.

‘Your voices told you?’

She snorts. ‘I don’t need my voices to know the obvious.’

‘And when you’re dead there’ll be no one to protect those two?’

‘See,’ says Kyble. ‘I knew you’d understand.’

———

The man is called Ajac, the woman Iona . . . They are younger even than Franc, or Neen, a whole lifetime younger than me. Kyble gave them their names after she buried their mothers.

‘You’re cousins, right?’

They nod.

‘Thank god,’ I say. ‘I’ve had it up to here with brothers and sisters. OK, these are my rules. You do what you’re told. You stand, you fight, if necessary you die. Break any of those and I kill you myself.’

I look at them. ‘Right?’

‘That’s it?’

‘There’s another,’ says Neen, slotting a clip into his rifle, and climbing to his feet. ‘Whatever it takes, that’s what we do.’

Stalking over, he inspects them as if he is General Jaxx himself.

‘You’re not in uniform,’ he says, ‘but you’re still in the Aux . . . I’m your sergeant and you do what I say. This is my lieutenant,’ he says. ‘I do what he says. And that,’ he says, nodding at Colonel Vijay, ‘is our CO. We all do what he says.’ His glance checks with me that he has this right.

He has.

‘Sir,’ says the girl.

Neen tells her to call him
sergeant
.

‘Sergeant,’ she says. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘Believe me,’ says Neen, ‘you don’t want to know.’

PEARL CITY IS EIGHT HUTS ON STILTS, A WAREHOUSE MADE FROM fibrebloc and a rotting jetty that slips below the waves at its far end. A couple of upturned boats decorate the narrow shingle that stretches between the city and us.

Another half-dozen boats dot the horizon, their triangular sails dark against the sky. A shimmering on the horizon looks like smoke, but it’s Hekati’s far wall painted a pale blue so it blends.

An island rests halfway between this beach and that horizon. On the island, we will find catalytic burners and a cryogenic-distillation system that removes volatile oils and simple molecular gases. That’s Haze again, his face shining with joy as if offering me life membership of a strip joint.

We know there are no Silver Fist hunting us nearby. Haze has already checked. So I’m letting him play. He’s happier than he has been in weeks, and it has to be those braids. In the two days we take to reach Pearl City, his scalp heals so cleanly it almost looks normal. Well, as normal as it’s ever going to look.

‘You can sense the machinery?’ asks Colonel Vijay.

He nods.

‘Can it sense you?’

Haze shakes his head. ‘A subset,’ he says.

So Colonel Vijay asks what a
subset
is. And Haze thinks the colonel is asking,
a subset of what?
Most of what he tells us is of interest only to Haze. This applies to most things Haze talks about. The colonel stops him at one point to make Haze repeat something.

‘Quantum time?’

We get another bout of enthusiasm.

Translated, it means AIs live faster, much faster. A generation for us is an age of history for them. I don’t know what
an age of history
means, but something strikes me as obvious.

‘So they’re old?’ I say.

Haze is worried. Mostly, about how to disagree with me without getting himself thumped. ‘Say it,’ the colonel tells him.

‘Most AIs self-replicate. And thinking keeps them young.’

I look at him. ‘Thinking about what?’

Not that it matters, they’re machines. But I need to be careful, because our beloved leader is also a machine.

Well, maybe. Or part of one.

It’s complicated and not relevant, since no one can do anything to change it anyway and some things are best left unmentioned.

While Haze works out his answer, we keep heading up the beach.

I offer my water bottle to Colonel Vijay. When he shakes his head, I take a swig of my own and pass it to Neen, who gulps deeply and nearly chokes. A gasp draws spirit vapour into his lungs, and he is looking at me goggle-eyed.

‘Fuck,’ he says finally. ‘What’s that?’

I shrug. ‘Got it from Kyble.’

Iona puts out her hand, although it’s not her turn. We work on seniority, and she’s last. All the same, Neen gives her the bottle and she sniffs, and then grins.

‘Rak,’ she announces.

Tipping a little into her hand, Iona dabs it on Neen’s lip. Apparently, rak’s an all-in-one antiseptic, alcoholic drink and fire-starter. It’s also good for keeping off flies and sterilizing wounds.

Franc drinks next, then Rachel. It’s Haze’s turn, but he is still inside himself. At a nod from me, Rachel hands the flask to Ajac, who swigs and hands it to Iona. Haze comes out of his trance just in time to see Iona choke.

‘What’s so funny?’ he demands.

Neen slaps our new recruit on the back, takes the flask from her fingers and offers it to Haze, who shakes his head.

‘Sleep,’ he announces. ‘That’s what Hekati’s thinking about.’

———

A burnt-out hut tells us that Pavel has already taxed this area. A dog bares its teeth at me, but keeps its distance. A woman comes to a door, sees we’re strangers, retreats and locks a bolt firmly behind her. A child cries, is slapped, and cries louder.

‘Where would Pavel head next?’ Colonel Vijay asks Ajac.

‘Towards the other Pearl City,’ he says.

And before I can shout him out for an idiot, Ajac points up the coast towards smoke curling into the sky. It could be a cooking fire. Equally, it could be another village in flames. Tax-collecting is a grim business. Believe me, I’ve done it.

‘OK,’ says Colonel Vijay, ‘then that’s where we’re going.’

No one wants to go up against Pavel tired, but we’ve lost time and the colonel wants to make it up.

‘Sir,’ says Franc.

Turning back, I realize Haze is missing.

Then I see him, out on the far end of the jetty, with waves lapping at his boots. The idiot has his back to us. He’s staring at the horizon.

Neen should be dealing with this shit. Only Neen’s flicking glances at Iona, and she’s staring at the ground and pretending not to notice.
Fuck
, I think.
Give me a whore every time.

It’s simple, it’s fast. You get what you pay for, and no one whines about it afterwards.

‘Sergeant,’ I say.

He snaps to attention. Follows my gaze and realizes it’s no joking matter.

‘Get him back here.’

There are still boats on the horizon. Only not as many as there were. At least three of the fishing vessels are close to the shore. Paying Pavel is bad enough, but paying a second group . . . Plus, their women and children are in those huts. Time to leave, or time to fight. That covers most of my life.

‘Well?’ I demand, when Neen returns.

Stopping in front of Colonel Vijay and me, he hesitates. He still has a black eye, a swollen lip and stitches holding the top of his nose to his face. Fuck knows what Iona sees in him.

‘Sir,’ he says. ‘Haze refuses to move.’ Neen’s voice is carefully neutral. Although he is watching to see how we’ll react.

‘Really,’ says Colonel Vijay. ‘Did he say why?’

‘No, sir.’ Neen shakes his head.

‘
Sven . . .
‘

Turning back, I see the colonel is watching me with amusement in his eyes.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Listen to him first.’

I leave Colonel Vijay where he stands and I stamp my way onto the jetty to find Haze still staring at his bloody horizon.
Only it’s not a horizon, is it?
I remind myself. It’s a wall painted blue and grey. And that island is a stack of machinery. Should have known Haze would get like this.

‘Trooper,’ I say.

He would retreat, but the sea is behind him.

‘Permission to speak, sir?’

‘Make it brief.’

‘We need to find Shil. Right, sir? So we have to find Pavel first. And we’re looking for a U/Free . . .’

This doesn’t sound like keeping it brief to me, it sounds like a series of pointless questions. There is undoubtedly a technical term for that.

The colonel would know.

‘Sir,’ says Haze. ‘Hekati would like to help.’