Maximum Offence (3 page)

The major’s eyes flick from me to General Jaxx. Then from General Jaxx to Paper Osamu, and some dim understanding of who this strangely dressed woman might be finally reaches his brain. He looks like a man already regretting getting out of bed.

Paper and I go up the steps first.

THE DROP GLIDER IS SO OLD IT COMES FROM A TIME WHEN stealth meant making the edges pointed and painting everything matt black.

Now it just looks dated.

An X73i says the pilot. Then admits he had to look it up, because he’s never flown one before. In fact, he didn’t know any still existed.

‘Great,’ says Neen.

He shuts up when I glare at him.

Our pilot has been jumpy since we began to drop. All he and his co-pilot have to do is sit in their little cabin upfront and steer this thing in controlled descent. So I don’t see their problem. We are five hours out of Farlight and half a spiral arm away. That’s what happens if your general lends you to the U/Free. You present yourself at their embassy one afternoon, sign papers stating you undertake the job willingly, and head downstairs into a shitty little basement.

I think we’re going for a briefing.

Perhaps a medical.

What am I meant to think? The basement door opens on one planet and closes on another? That would be bad enough. Only it doesn’t. It dumps us on board a U/Free ship in low orbit over a planet. The ship’s bigger than most cities.

Well, cities I’ve seen.

Fifteen minutes later, we are dropping towards the planet’s surface in an out-dated glider, dressed as mercenaries but minus any weapons. Clearly, we’re going to be given those later.

‘How much longer?’ asks Rachel.

She’s my sniper, all red hair and attitude. Heavy breasts and broad hips. She has been fucking Haze, my intelligence officer, for the last six weeks. We’ve all been pretending not to notice.

‘Zero one five,’ says the pilot.

There is cold desert below, and if villages exist down there they don’t show on the scans. According to our briefing Hekati is five rocks out from a double star on the inner fringe of a spiral. It lacks oil, minerals and decent agricultural land. I’d ask what we’re doing here but I already know. Destroying a weapons factory.

‘Don’t worry,’ the co-pilot tells Rachel. ‘I’ll get you down safely.’

On screen, which is how we see them, his boss quietly takes a medal of legba uploaded from inside his shirt, and I know we’re in trouble.

‘Actually,’ he says, ‘you won’t.’

Touching the medal to his lips obviously closes a circuit.

As the pilot’s skull explodes, jagged splinters take his co-pilot through the head, and splatter two helpings of brain across a bulkhead. It happens too fast to stop, even if we could get through the security doors to the cabin.

‘Sir?’ says Shil. ‘We’re . . .’

‘Yeah,’ I say.

We are doing what happens when a drop glider loses both its pilots, we’re crashing. The X73i is a thousand feet above the desert floor, and headed for a cliff half a mile ahead. The cliff is a good thousand feet higher again.

‘We’ll have ridge lift,’ says Haze.

Half of what Haze says is nonsense. The rest can sometimes save your life. He might be large, moon-faced and clumsy. But he’s not as large as he was when we first met on a battlefield and I stopped him being chopped up by enemy guns. Although he still sounds simple to anyone who doesn’t know different.

‘Wind hits a cliff, sir,’ he says, ‘it rises. Creates an updraught. The updraught will give us lift.’

‘Not enough,’ I say.

We have about two minutes before the cliff face and this plane get up close and personal. All we’ve got going for us is the fact the desert floor is rising as it approaches the cliff. A thousand years of sifting sand for all I know.

‘Sir,’ says Rachel. ‘The exit’s jammed.’

‘Of course it is. It’s tied to the system.’

‘
One minute thirty
.’

‘Sir,’ asks Haze. ‘You want me to override the glider’s AI?’

As I said, he is my intelligence officer. Only, he’s not an officer and his intelligence isn’t something most people recognize. But he has more shit in his skull than I have and two metal braids one each side of his skull to prove it.

‘No time,’ I tell him.

‘One minute twenty-five.’ He’s counting down to the AI’s internal clock. ‘I can probably—’

‘
Haze
.’

‘Sir?’

‘Prepare to jump.’

‘But sir,’ says Rachel. ‘The exit . . .’

‘Fuck the exit.’

One minute ten
.

Dropping to my knees, I punch my fist through the glider’s floor and rip with my metal hand. Cold wind swirls into the hold and scoops trays from a trolley. The air on this planet is thin and we’re losing the oxygen mix that keeps us comfortable.

‘Help me.’

Ceramic slices at their fingers but they tear anyway. Leaving me to snap the optic fibres that run like veins under the skin of this craft. We wobble. Of course we bloody wobble. You rip holes in a glider it’s going to get upset.

‘Grab what you can.’

When Rachel just stands there, I push her towards the rear of the plane. She wants to protest, but doesn’t dare. She grabs food packs and begins tossing them through the rip in the floor.

‘Just drop the lot.’

She does.

A gun cabinet clings to a rear bulkhead. It’s locked, but one punch takes it off the wall. The cabinet has no back, which makes locking it pointless and gives us our only weapon. A fat distress pistol, with three flares. As Rachel throws out the pistol and tosses flares after it, part of me wonders how we are going to find this stuff.

‘Jump,’ I tell her.

When she hesitates, I push her after the gun, the flares and all that other stuff she has been tossing out. Haze follows, looking shocked.

The others don’t need encouraging.

———

So I hit the ground and roll to put out flames. A split moment later, a second explosion drops fifty tons of cliff on what is left of our glider, burying it. The first explosion might be an accident. The second is intentional. I just have time to think this before rocks begin rolling my way.

‘Incoming,’ I shout.

A small boulder, the size of a three-wheel combat, tumbles past, then a larger one, maybe the size of a house, followed by a cartwheeling splinter as long as our buried plane.

Progression
, I think.

Flinging myself behind a rock, I wait out the landslide. The crawl space is too small, so I jam my legs into the gap and wait it out some more.

A year ago I wouldn’t have known what
progression
meant. Mind you, a year ago I was someone else. These days I’m Sven Tveskoeg, lieutenant with the Death’s Head, Obsidian Cross, second class. What I’m doing out of uniform is a whole other question.

‘Sir . . .’

Haze, from the sound of it.

‘
Sir . . .
‘

‘Over here,’ I call, and he stumbles uphill, Rachel in tow.

She has the distress pistol in her hand, which means she’s already started hunting down the supplies we dropped. I like Rachel; she’s one of my better finds. Haze knows I think this. I am not sure he is happy.

Mind you, I’m not sure I give a fuck.

‘You’re burnt.’

That’s Haze for you, always stating the obvious.

‘Not badly,’ I tell him. ‘Report.’

He looks at me.

‘Rachel . . . ?’

‘Sergeant Neen’s down, sir. Arm broken. Corporal Franc has a broken ankle. I’m OK. Shil’s OK.’

‘And you?’ I ask Haze.

‘I’ve got a headache.’

I am about to say,
of course you have a fucking headache. You just fell thirty feet
. However, something stops me. Haze’s eyes are glazed, his face is sweating. Any minute now, his nose is going to start to bleed. It is a habit of his.

‘We’re being watched?’

‘Think so, sir.’

He might be soft as uncooked dough and have even fewer social skills than I have, but if Haze thinks we are being watched . . .

Mind you. In the middle of a desert?

Satellites are possible. The sky is clear, almost purple. Not a single cloud, although infrared lenzing means clouds don’t present a problem these days.

We’ll deal with the watchers later.

‘Find the flares,’ I tell Haze.

‘Yes, sir.’

To Rachel I say, ‘Take me to Neen.’

‘Franc’s worse . . .’

Rachel adds
sir
, when she sees my face. But it’s too late. As I step towards her, she steps back; and then makes herself stand her ground. Although she twists her head away from the blow she thinks is coming.

‘Sergeants outrank corporals,’ I say, and leave it at that.

We find Neen against a boulder, clutching his arm. His face is tight and he has bitten through his lower lip.

‘You needled yet?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why not?’

‘Thought we might need them later.’

Ripping open a combat pack, I stab a syringe into his neck and feel the bulb deflate as morphine enters his bloodstream. There are better drugs and better ways to deliver them, but morphine is cheap and effective and you can buy it anywhere.

Counting down from five, I let the drug do its job and then reach for Neen’s forearm. The thinner of the two bones is broken. But it hasn’t ripped its way through his skin and the break feels clean.

He is lucky.

‘Find me splints.’

When Rachel comes back, it is with a strip of ceramic from the glider’s tail, and a length of fibre optic that thrashes in her hand like a wounded snake. Seems the rear section of our glider broke free. Must have been that hole I ripped in the skin.

Haze carries a food parcel, two flares and a water bottle.

‘Find the other bottles,’ I tell him.

‘Sir . . .’ Rachel wants to say something.

It’s written on her face and that is an improvement. A few months back she wore her hair over her eyes so no one could see her face at all. After the surrender of Ilseville, a Silver Fist officer put his gun to the back of her head to shoot her and then changed his mind when he saw me watching. Maybe he decided raping her was enough. She got to live provided some idiot agreed to carry her.

That idiot was me.

Snapping the ceramic into sections, I pick two the closest in length and pull Neen’s arm straight. It is probably good that he faints. Lashing the ceramic into place with optic, I make him a sling with the last of the tubing and sit him against a rock.

‘Call me when he wakes.’

Rachel nods.

I find Shil fussing over Franc, who is white-faced and silent. One boot, old, buckled, and worn at the heel, lies in the dirt beside her. Shil is asking Franc to wiggle her toes.

Dropping to a crouch, I grip Franc’s ankle.

As I yank, her other boot clips the side of my jaw. It is a good kick, with massive amounts of power behind it. One of the things I love about Franc is that she has aggression hardwired right through her.

Shil and Neen might be farm-boy thin, but Franc is compact. She’s also shaven-headed and removes her body hair daily with the edge of a knife. Although the rest of us aren’t meant to know that. She once belonged to Haze, some kind of bonded servant.

‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘I’m—’

‘Anyone ever told you the one-second rule?’

Franc shakes her head.

‘Wake someone and they cripple you inside the first second, then tough. Should be more careful how you wake them . . . Also applies to treating wounds. Although you should have known that was dislocated, not broken.’

THE STARS ARE HIGH AND CLEAR, WHICH MEANS THE AIR HERE is thin. What little heat the dunes take up during the day is taken back by the night faster than is safe for any of us. Cold kills as surely as a knife. It creeps up on you. Makes you decide it would be a good idea to lie down for a little while. Perhaps shut your eyes and remember all those interesting times you thought you had forgotten.

Almost froze to death once. If you have to go, it’s probably as good a way as any.

Doesn’t mean I’m going to let it happen here though. Not to me, and not to any of my troopers. I am headed for the plane, or what is left of it. The tail is way behind us, one of the wing tips just ahead. And we are half a mile from the cliff itself. Seems to me the glider broke up far too neatly.

Out to my left a double moon brightens. Then a third. Maybe it is that third moon which wakes whatever beast it is that howls. A long howl, too deep for a sand wolf and too raw for a fox.

Not ferox
.

I’m glad about that. Ferox hunt silently.

‘Sir.’ Neen drops back from walking point.

Yeah, I know . . .

We have a big problem, and a small problem. The small problem is out in the wilderness howling at us. The bigger problem is that where we’re meant to be doesn’t have three moons.

It has two suns.

At least it does according to our briefing.

As I glance to the left, checking on that triple moon, something crests the top of a dune and rears upright. Its howl echoes off a distant cliff and starts other voices howling.

‘Fuck,’ says Shil. ‘What’s that?’

‘A wolf.’

I wouldn’t believe me either.

‘Build a fire,’ I tell her. ‘When we reach the cliff.’

She wants to say there’ll be nothing to burn, but has more sense. I know that, we are in the middle of a desert, for fuck’s sake. She needs to improvise.

‘You know . . .’ says Haze.

‘There’s going to be nothing to burn?’

He nods.

Telling Neen to resume point, I order Shil to move out, then I watch as Franc and Rachel head after her. Rachel is limping, and working hard at not looking back. As I wait for her to leave me with Haze, I break open our distress pistol and feed it a flare.

‘
Why?
‘ I ask Haze.

He steps back. ‘Sorry, sir . . .’

‘No. Tell me why there’s going to be nothing to burn.’

He considers this, his head tipped to one side and still wrapped in bandages. We tell everyone he took a wound that will not heal. The truth is messier. Those two braids budding through his skull make him Enlightened.