Use of Weapons (23 page)

'It
stands for a serious fuck-you-too suit.' He grinned.

Sma
made a clicking noise with her tongue. 'Should have known better than to ask,
shouldn't I?'

Two
days later, they stood in the hangar of the
Xenophobe.
The very fast picket had left the GSV a day earlier, slung at the Voerenhutz
cluster. It had accelerated hard, and now it was braking hard. He was packing
the gear he would need into a capsule that would take him down to the surface
of the planet where Tsoldrin Beychae was; the initial stage of his in-system
journey would be on a fast three-person module; it would loiter in the
atmosphere of a nearby gas-giant planet. The
Xenophobe
itself would wait in interstellar space, ready to provide
support if needed.

'Are
you
positive
you don't want
Skaffen-Amtiskaw to come with you?'

'Absolutely
positive; keep that air-borne asshole to yourself.'

'Some
other drone?'

'No.'

'A
knife missile?'

'Diziet;
no
! I don't want Skaffen-Amtiskaw or
anything else that thinks it can think for itself.'

'Hey;
just refer to me as though I'm not here,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.

'Wishful
thinking, drone.'

'Better
than none at all, so above par for you,' the machine said.

He
looked at the drone. 'You sure they didn't issue a factory-recall on your batch
number?'

'Myself,'
said the drone, sniffily, 'I have never been able to see what virtue there
could be in something that was eighty per cent water.'

'Anyway,'
Sma said. 'You know all the relevant stuff, yes?'

'Yes,'
he said tiredly. The man's tanned, smoothly muscled body rippled as he bent,
securing the plasma rifle in the capsule. He wore a pair of briefs. Sma - hair
still tousled from bed, for this was early morning by ship time - wore a
jellaba.

'You
know the people to contact?' she fretted. 'And who's in charge and on what
side...'

'And
what to do if my credit facilities are suddenly withdrawn? Yes; everything.'

'If
- when you get him out - you head for...'

'The
enchanting, sunny system of Impren,' he said tiredly, in a sing-song voice,
'Where there are lots of friendly natives in a variety of ecologically sound
space Habitats. Which are neutral.'

'Zakalwe,'
Sma said suddenly, taking his face in both hands and kissing him. 'I hope this
all works out.'

'Me
too, funnily enough,' he said. He kissed Sma back; she pulled away eventually.
He shook his head, running his gaze down and up the woman's body, grinning.
'Ah... one day, Diziet.'

She
shook her head and smiled insincerely. 'Not unless I'm unconscious or dead,
Cheradenine.'

'Oh.
I can still hope, then?'

Sma
slapped his backside. 'On your way, Zakalwe.'

He
stepped into the armoured combat suit. It closed around him. He flipped the
helmet back.

He
looked suddenly serious. 'You just make sure you know where -'

'We
know where she is,' Sma said quickly.

He
looked at the floor of the hanger for a moment, then smiled back into Sma's
eyes.

'Good.'
He clapped his gloves together. 'Great; I'll be off. See you later, with any
luck.' He stepped into the capsule.

'Take
care, Cheradenine,' Sma said.

'Yes;
look after your disgusting cloven butt,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.

'Depend
on it,' he said, and blew both of them a kiss.

From
General Systems Vehicle to very fast picker to small module to the lobbed
capsule to the suit that stood in the cold desert dust with a man encased
inside it.

He
looked out through the open faceplate, and wiped a little sweat from his brow.
It was dusk over the plateau. A few metres away, by the light of two moons and
a fading sun, he could see the rimrock, frost-whitened. Beyond was the great
gash in the desert which provided the setting for the ancient, half-empty city
where Tsoldrin Beychae now lived.

Clouds
drifted, and the dust collected.

'Well,'
he sighed, to no-one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky.
'Here we are again.'

VIII

The
man stood on a tiny spur of clay and watched the roots of the huge tree as they
were uncovered and washed bare by a gurgling wash of dun-coloured water. Rain
swarmed through the air; the broad brown swell of rushing water tearing at the
roots of the tree leapt with thrashing spray. The rain alone had brought
visibility down to a couple of hundred metres and had long since soaked the man
in the uniform to the skin. The uniform was meant to be grey, but the rain and
the mud had turned it dark brown. It had been a fine, well-fitting uniform, but
the rain and the mud had reduced it to a flopping rag.

The
tree tipped and fell, crashing back into the brown torrent and spraying mud
over the man, who stepped back, and lifted his face to the dull grey sky, to
let the incessant rain wash the mud from his skin. The great tree blocked the
thundering stream of brown slurry and forced some of it over the clay spur,
forcing the man further back, along a crude stone wall to a high lintel of
ancient concrete, which stretched, cracked and uneven, up to a small ugly cottage
squatting near the crown of the concrete hill. He stayed, watching the long
brown bruise of the swollen river as it flowed over and ate into the little
isthmus of clay; then the spur collapsed, the tree lost its anchorage on that
side of the river, and was turned round and turned over and transported bodily
on the back of the tumbling waters, heading into the sodden valley and the low
hills beyond. The man looked at the crumbling bank on the other side of the
flood, where the great tree's roots protruded from the earth like ripped
cables, then he turned and walked heavily up towards the little cottage.

He
walked round it. The vast square concrete plinth, nearly a half-kilometre to a
side, was still surrounded by water; brown waves washed its edges on every
side. The towering hulks of ancient metal structures, long since fallen into
disrepair, loomed through the haze of rain, squatting on the pitted and cracked
surface of the concrete like forgotten pieces in some enormous game. The
cottage - already made ridiculous by the expanse of concrete around it - looked
somehow even more grotesque than the abandoned machines, just because of their
proximity.

The
man looked all about as he walked round the building, but saw nothing that he
wanted to see. He went into the cottage.

The
assassin flinched as he threw open the door. The chair she was tied to - a
small wooden thing - was balanced precariously against a thick set of drawers,
and when she jerked, its legs rasped on the stone floor and sent chair and girl
sliding to the ground with a whack. She hit her head on the flagstones and
cried out.

He
sighed. He walked over, boots squelching with each step, and dragged the chair
upright, kicking a piece of broken mirror away as he did so. The woman was
hanging slackly, but he knew she was faking. He manoeuvred the chair into the
centre of the small room. He watched the woman carefully as he did this, and
kept out of the way of her head; earlier when he'd been tying her up she'd
butted him in the face, very nearly breaking his nose.

He
looked at her bonds. The rope that bound her hands behind the back of the chair
was frayed; she had been trying to cut through the bindings using the broken
hand-mirror from the top of the set of drawers.

He
left her hanging inertly in the middle of the room, where he could see her,
then went over to the small bed cut into one thick wall of the cottage, and
fell heavily into it. It was dirty, but he was exhausted and too wet to care.

He
listened to the rain hammering on the roof, and listened to the wind whining
through the door and the shuttered windows, and listened to the steady plopping
of drops coming through the leaking roof and dropping onto the flagstones. He
listened for the noise of helicopters, but there were no helicopters. He had
no radio and he wasn't sure they knew where to look anyway. They would be
searching as well as the weather allowed, but they'd be looking for his staff
car, and it was gone; washed away by the brown avalanche of river. Probably, it
would take days.

He
closed his eyes, and started to fall asleep almost immediately, but it was as
though the consciousness of defeat would not let him escape, and found him even
there, filling his nearly sleeping mind with images of inundation and defeat,
and harried him out of his rest, back into the continuing pain and dejection of
wakefulness. He rubbed his eyes, but the scummy water on his hands ground
grains of sand and earth into his eyes. He cleaned one finger as best he could
on the filthy rags on the bed, and rubbed some spit into his eyes, because he
thought if he allowed himself to cry, he might not be able to stop.

He
looked at the woman. She was pretending to come round. He wished he had the
strength and the inclination to go over and hit her, but he was too tired, and
too conscious that he would be taking out on her the defeat of an entire army.
Belting any one individual - let alone a helpless, cross-eyed woman - would be
so pathetically petty a way of trying to find recompense for a downfall of that
magnitude that even if he did live, he would be ashamed forever that he had
done such a thing.

She
moaned dramatically. A thin strand of snot detached itself from her nose and
fell onto the heavy coat she wore.

He
looked away, disgusted.

He
heard her sniff, loudly. When he looked back, her eyes were open, and she was
staring malevolently at him. She was only slightly cross-eyed, but the
imperfection annoyed him more than it should have. Given a bath and a decent
set of clothes, he thought, the woman might almost have looked pretty. But
right now she was buried inside a greasy green greatcoat smudged all over with
mud, and her dirty face was almost completely hidden; partially by the collar
of the heavy coat, and partially by her long, filthy hair, which was attached to
the green greatcoat in various places by glistening blobs of mud. She moved
oddly in the chair, as though scratching her back against the chair. He could
not decide whether she was testing the ropes that bound her, or was just
troubled by fleas.

He
doubted she had been sent to kill him; almost certainly she was what she was
dressed as; an auxiliary. Probably she had been left behind in a retreat and
had wandered about too frightened or proud or stupid to surrender until she had
seen the staff car in difficulties in the storm-washed hollow. Her attempt at
killing him had been brave but laughable. By sheer luck she'd killed his driver
with one shot; a second had struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head,
making him groggy while she threw the empty gun away and leapt into the car
with her knife. The driverless car had slid down a greasy grass slope into the
brown torrent of the river.

Such
a stupid act. Sometimes, heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to
the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning
decisions based on experience and imagination; the sort of unshowy soldiering
that didn't win medals but wars.

Still
dazed from the bullet-graze, he had fallen into the car's rear footwell as it
pitched and yawed, caught in the swollen force of the river. The woman had
nearly buried him in the voluminous thick coat. Stuck like that, head still
ringing from the shot that had grazed his skull, he'd been unable to get a good
swing at her. For those absurd, confined, frustrating minutes, the struggle
with the girl had seemed like a microcosm of the plain-wide muddle his army
was now embroiled in; he had the strength to knock her out cold, but the
cramped battleground and the hiding weight of her enveloping coat had muffled him
and imprisoned him until it was too late.

The
car had hit the concrete island and tipped right over, throwing them both out
onto the corroded grey surface. The woman had given a little scream; she'd
raised the knife that had been caught in the folds of the green greatcoat all
that time, but he had finally got his clear punch, and connected satisfyingly
with her chin.