Maximum Offence (22 page)

‘
You have a kyp?
‘

The colonel’s taken a step back. I’m not sure he’s aware he’s gripping his pistol.

‘Lieutenant,’ he says, ‘that’s . . .’

‘Illegal technology . . . ? A mortal offence . . . ? Yes, sir. Round here everything is.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘From a man called deCharge.’ I say this without thinking.

‘Senator deCharge? He died in . . .’ The colonel looks at me. ‘Who else knows?’

‘Major Silva.’

‘Dead,’ says Colonel Vijay. ‘I saw the report. Who else?’

‘Colonel Nuevo.’

‘Died heroically at Ilseville . . .’

‘Paper Osamu knows,’ I say. ‘And they know.’ My nod takes in the Aux, standing by the quay and shooting glances in this direction when they think we won’t notice. Colonel Vijay needs to keep his voice down.

‘Paper Osamu knows?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I say. ‘That’s why she asked for me.’

That’s only just occurred to me. What is stuck in my throat might stick in theirs, but the U/Free want me because of what happened after Ilseville. And what happened, only happened because Haze is a braid, I am kyped and the Aux can kill to order the way other people breathe, without needing to think about it first.

‘Sven,’ says Colonel Vijay, ‘what are you?’

‘Ex-sergeant, Légion Etrangère. Now lieutenant, Death’s Head, Obsidian Cross, second class.’

He grinds his teeth.

———

The boat trip back takes half the time. Might have something to do with the wind changing direction.
Every night it changes direction
, Iona tells us. Every night of her entire life. She’s never met anyone who says different.

Neen nods as she says this, and pretends to be interested. Unless he is, and I mean in more than the way that belt around her waist makes her breasts seem bigger. Glancing up, he catches me watching.

I nod.

He smiles a moment later. A slight twist of the lips, once he thinks I’m not looking. It’s meant for Haze and Franc and Rachel. The other two, Iona and Ajac, aren’t included yet, but they’re getting there.

So he knows OctoV
, says the smile.

Rachel shrugs. And the shrug says,
Are you surprised?

Never used to be able to read people like this. In that moment, I realize I can’t; not really. This is just the last of OctoV’s presence bleeding away inside my skull. I’m glad to be back.

‘Mine,’ I say, pointing to the big man waiting on the beach. He’s swapped his anchor for a stick. Actually, it’s half a pine trunk, cut at the roots and lopped about halfway up.

A jump takes me out of the boat, five steps power me towards him, and then he is backing away as fast as he can. Grown troopers would wilt under the weight of that stick of his. Yet he holds it as if he’s planning a hike in the mountains. Turns out, that is exactly what he’s planning.

‘Wait,’ he says.

‘
Sven
,’ says Colonel Vijay, sounding irritated.

I’m glad we are back to normal.

‘Pavel came to tax us,’ the man says. ‘Came with his ejército . . .’ Glancing towards the burnt-out hut we saw earlier, he adds: ‘The taxes are high this year.’ Although this isn’t what he wants to tell me. In fact,
he
doesn’t want to tell me anything at all.

Walking over to the small crowd, he grabs a young boy and drags him across the beach to where Colonel Vijay, the Aux and I stand. ‘Tell him,’ he says.

A filthy face glares up at me. ‘My daughter,’ says the man.

So I take a closer look and realize she is. Eleven maybe, but still filthy-faced, scowling and undersized, reminds me of my own family.

Apart from me, obviously.

‘She said you’d come,’ the girl says. ‘Big man, bad temper. Said, tell you Pavel’s working for . . .’ Glancing round, the girl wriggles her fingers and touches them quickly to her temple.

I recognize the gesture. ‘Anything else?’

Dipping her hand into her pocket, the child pulls out a cheap medallion of legba uploaded. It’s Shil’s.

‘Keep it.’

The man scowls at me.

‘A woman’s good-luck charm,’ I tell him.

He loses interest and the child hangs it round her own neck gratefully.

I have one like it myself, but I don’t see why her father should have it when his daughter gives me Shil’s message.

‘Five gold coins,’ says the big man. ‘And we help you find Pavel.’

‘We can find him for ourselves.’

‘I can find him faster,’ the man says. ‘I know tracks you don’t.’ He smiles at me, before producing his clincher. ‘I know tracks even the snakeheads don’t know exist.’

‘One gold coin,’ I say.

Only Colonel Vijay’s already opening his purse. Makes me wonder just how much gold he is carrying. Also makes me wonder,
why?

———

Marching into the wind, we keep going as darkness falls and with it the temperature. The filthy goatskin waistcoat everyone wears round here is beginning to make sense. Our jackets might have ballistic lining, but Neen insists he would happily swap his for something warm and take his chance with the bullets.

Comes of being that thin, I guess. The cold gets to you more.

Our path is narrow and lit by moonlight. Slopes drop away behind us and a lake shines silver grey beneath the dark sky in a valley ahead. We’ve been climbing for hours. And the big man’s right about those paths. Some of them seem to exist only in his head.

‘Now we wait,’ he says.

While we do, I remember to ask his name. It’s Milo.

‘Now we go.’

In the fifteen minutes we’ve been waiting, the lake has finished setting enough to let us walk across its surface. A camp fire burns in the distance, and dogs bark when they hear us pass. Once we’re challenged by a boy with a stick. At his side is a mongrel that hugs the dirt and keeps its ears back.

He throws his challenge into the darkness.

And we wait until he turns on his heel and stalks away, humming to himself louder than necessary. Skirting one of the high-valley farms, we hear a woman cry in the darkness. In the next farm along, a drunk kicks at a closed door. Either he’s locked out or too drunk to find the handle.

A pissing girl displays bare buttocks to nine strangers. She barely bothers to step beyond her door. Hardly surprising, given the cold.

My troops are sullen.

The lives these people lead are close to the lives they abandoned. Upping the pace, I make them march at double time until we are clear of the area. We give the next few farms a wider berth. The Aux assume it’s because daylight approaches.

‘Sven,’ says Colonel Vijay, ‘you’re smiling.’

Thinking about it, I realize he’s right.

‘Thoughts of finding Pavel, sir,’ says Neen. His voice makes it clear this is a compliment. Neen is a different person now we have news of his sister.

‘First we wait and watch,’ Colonel Vijay says, ‘to see how many snakeheads Pavel has.’

‘And then, sir?’ asks Neen.

‘We kill them,’ I say. ‘And get your sister back.’

Milo grins happily.

———

At cockcrow, a boy driving five goats wanders through a gate. He runs his stick along the stones of a wall and disappears around a corner. About ten minutes later, we see him begin to climb a valley slope opposite. Bare knees gripped to a pony, a girl gallops through the gate about an hour later and heads along the valley floor, with her long dark hair streaming behind her.

She’s riding into the warm wind, I realize.

When she returns, an older woman is waiting. From the way she stands by the gate, it’s obvious the old woman is furious. However, the girl just laughs and tumbles off the pony’s back, revealing a flash of hip.

‘Pavel’s daughter Adelpha,’ says Milo.

‘You know his family?’

Milo snorts. ‘I’m his brother.’ The big man’s eyes never leave the girl as she walks under an arch and through double gates that lead into Pavel’s capital.

The village is large for Hekati.

Thirty houses protected by a wall high enough to need a ladder to climb. Also, the wall is thick enough for a guard to walk its length every fifteen minutes. These are Pavel’s men, members of the O’Cruz ejército. Although they’re better armed than I remember.

‘Snakehead weapons,’ says Milo, seeing my gaze.

He’s right. Milo and I are on a slope and higher than the others. A hundred paces higher, maybe a little more. Just enough to let us look over the walls into a square beyond. Milo knows this place; he grew up here.

‘So which house is Pavel’s?’

I expect him to point at the biggest.

‘And that?’

‘The temple,’ says my gun. That’s the first thing it has said since shutting down on the island.

‘Do all villages have temples?’ I ask Milo.

He looks at me, shocked. ‘This isn’t a village,’ he says. ‘It’s a city.’

It’s probably rude of the gun to laugh.

By the time Franc returns from her hunting, I’ve made sense of the city’s layout. Maps are good, but nothing beats seeing for yourself. The outer wall is thick, the streets narrow; houses look in on themselves. Our main problem is the two gates. These are reinforced with wrought iron. Although the hinges are simple, three metal sleeves that slot over pins fixed to the arch.

We could lift them with a crane. Unfortunately, even Milo and I couldn’t move them between us without a crane. And while there’s always explosives . . . they’d fuck with Colonel Vijay’s wish to do this quietly.

‘Water system.’

When Milo says,
what?
it occurs to me I said it aloud.

Doesn’t matter, and I ignore him anyway; because I’m pulling up an overlay for this valley. It shows a shaft, a tunnel, other shafts and a fat pipe running the valley’s entire length, and straight under the mountain beyond. As I blink, the overlay becomes solid and the buildings transparent.

There is water in the fattest pipe.

Of course there is. I’m looking at a mains system for an off-world habitat. Seven million people were housed here. How the hell did . . . Then advanced schematics feed themselves through.

‘You all right?’ asks Colonel Vijay.

‘Why wouldn’t he be?’ the gun says.

Colonel Vijay looks at the vomit on my boots and remains silent. Seems I’ve lost a few minutes somewhere. Forcing myself to my feet, I follow the colonel downhill. We keep low to avoid being seen from the walls.

The Aux are eating slivers of goat with their fingers. Apart from Franc, who is skewering hers with a knife. Slashing fresh gashes into the animal’s carcass, she rubs herbs, wine and salt into the wounds and turns a crude spit made from a sapling soaked in water. A leather flask sits in the dirt at Franc’s feet. A stale chunk of bread is soaking in wine to make it softer. She must have got it from Kyble, unless one of the fishermen gave it to her.

‘Who built the fire?’

Ajac looks up.

‘Good job,’ I say. It is too. No smoke and plenty of heat.

Just as well: had it been the other way round he’d have betrayed our position, and I’d have been very cross indeed.

‘Colonel,’ I say. ‘If I could?’

He walks with me to the edge of our camp.

A low wall hides us from the city, and Colonel Vijay drops to a crouch when I do. We watch a guard make a trip round the walls. Another two men stand by the gate. They’re carrying rifles and have knives stuck into their belts. One wears an old Uplift helmet, the other carries a pair of field-glasses.

Neither is Silver Fist. Both, however, provide proof that the Silver Fist have been here.

‘See that red roof, sir?’

Colonel Vijay nods.

‘Pavel’s house.’

As mine did, his gaze flicks to the bigger building.

‘A temple,’ I say. ‘One priest, old and blind . . .’
How do I know that?
I wonder, then realize it’s because the temple told me.

The colonel is watching me strangely. Maybe there’s something in my voice. Or perhaps he read up on the
Winter Wind
, my fight against eleven-braid Douza, and the last time I let my mind open. A hundred thousand of us made the drop to Ilseville; two and a half thousand survived. Most of these died when Douza blew up our prison ships. We went into the last battle with twenty-five people, and came out victorious.

None of us has a right to be alive. Not against those odds.

‘Sven,’ he says. ‘I talked to Neen.’

‘Did you, sir?’

‘Yes,’ he says, abruptly. ‘I did. A good man.’

‘A good sergeant.’

Colonel Vijay nods, accepting the correction. ‘Neen says this stuff with the kyp might kill you.’

‘Hey,’ growls the SIG. ‘Who wants to live for ever?’ It’s a good impression of my voice.

The colonel scowls. ‘Can’t you turn that thing off?’

‘No, sir. Not without infringing its rights and liberties.’

Colonel Vijay thinks I’m being serious. ‘Fine,’ he tells the SIG. ‘But he dies when I say. Not before.’ Then he has to tell me to stop grinning.

RACHEL’S ON AN OUTCROP ABOVE, WITH HER SNIPER’S RIFLE. Neen’s hidden on the lower slopes with orders to kill anyone who tries to leave in a hurry. Franc’s with him, and she is sulking at not being allowed into the city.

Iona and Ajac are probably wondering what they’ve got themselves into. As for Haze, he’s crouching over his slab in the afternoon heat. At least, I hope he is. Keeping us invisible from any lenz the Silver Fist might have hovering above us is vital.

And the SIG? It’s locked down, and sulking worse than Franc. I’ve promised it a big battle. Really, really soon. I’m not sure it believes me.

Pulling rank, Colonel Vijay insists on climbing the well first. Handholds help. Milo and I just jab our boots either side of the shaft and walk ourselves up.

We are going to come up just inside the gate.

‘OK,’ I tell Milo. ‘Kill both guards.’

‘No.’ Colonel Vijay shakes his head. ‘I’ll do it.’

What am I going to say? He’s my CO for fuck’s sake.

Rolling over the lip of the well, the colonel finds his feet and sprints towards the arch. A jab takes the first guard in the back. Opening his mouth, the second guard bubbles his life away through a slit throat. A third, who shouldn’t even be there, dies trying to stop blood squirting from his groin.