And the fury racing towards Anton hesitates. Twitching sideways, it heads for the goat instead. Grabbing the animal, the fury sinks its fingers through muscle and fresh blood begins to trickle from its gut.
The bastard has skeletal arms and legs, a sack-like gut and a focus so tight it can’t do more than one thing at once. Fight or feed, not both.
That’s its weakness.
Maybe it’s used to people backing away. Or maybe I just imagine something flicker behind those eyes.
‘Sven,’ Anton says.
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘Hey,’ says my gun. ‘Always a first time.’
We’re circling, the fury and I.
It lunges and I block its wrist. Like being hit with a steel bar. Next time I’m going to use my combat arm. I step sideways and it steps sideways. Not sure this thing is alive in a sense I understand. But it mimics my steps perfectly.
And it’s going to be a bastard to kill.
It lunges, I block.
When it makes its fifth or sixth lunge, I step into it. And feel the creature’s fist crack open my chest. Bones break and ribs are forced apart as it reaches inside.
Hurts like hell.
That is where the fury comes unstuck. Its skeleton might be metal. But so is my combat arm, which is piston driven and twisted with braided hose. Plus I kill on instinct. Now I might have learnt to keep that under control . . .
. . . But everyone’s allowed a day off.
Gripping its wrist, to stop it reaching my heart, makes the fury raise its head and hiss at me. So I tighten my own fingers and twist. Bones break somewhere under that leathery skin.
‘Earth to Anton,’ the SIG says.
I’m getting there.
Ramming my gun against the creature’s throat, I pull the trigger and watch bits of steel spine, wire and withered flesh exit through the back of its neck. Hollow-point, got to love it.
‘Throat?’ Anton says.
Obviously. I doubt if it has a brain worth shooting.
Man down. Anton kneels at my side as blood pools in a fuzzy-edged circle round me. Darkness is here and the night goggles he’s slipped over my eyes make my blood look almost fluorescent.
‘Sven . . .’
‘I’m fine.’
He stares at me.
‘Go get the buggy,’ I tell him.
Flicking up his own goggles, he examines my face. Not sure what he expects to see without night vision. ‘OK,’ he says. He wants to say something more. Goodbye, probably . . . Idiot thinks I’m dying.
He’s right, of course. Only my metabolism isn’t that simple. Already I can feel flesh closing and bones beginning to heal.
‘Sven,’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘It hurts. Now fuck off.’
He leaves without looking back. Sir Anton Tezuka, armiger and trade lord . . . Walks away, with his head up and shoulders back. Losing himself in the darkness to give his friend space to die with dignity.
Shit, you’ve got to love the Tezuka-Wildeside.
They’re screwed to hell. But they know how to behave.
Reaching into the gash in my chest, I find a cracked rib and pull it straight. The broken ones are trickier.
There are three of these. Two have simply snapped, but the third is smashed in two places so I deal with it first. Feeling for the sharpness of broken bone, I slot the section into place. Hurts like fuck, again.
Always does. Every single time.
That’s why I sent Anton away. Don’t like showing pain, and sometimes, like now, it’s impossible not to. Blood from a bitten lip drips on my jacket. When the ribs are done, I settle myself against a rock and wait.
Anton isn’t getting the buggy. He’s gone to fetch a burial party.
Dumb bastard.
It’s almost daylight before I hear a vehicle in the valley below. It’s not the buggy. An ex-militia scout car to judge from its camouflage. Painted-out numbers are just visible on the turret. A whip antenna flicks in the breeze.
Gears shift and the scout car begins its climb.
Fat-wheels lurch as it bounces over rock and slams down again. The reconnaissance vehicle isn’t fast, but it’s powerful enough to grind its way up this slope.
I can hear it change gear, the wild dog that has been watching me can hear it change gear, and so can the buzzards circling high in the pink sky overhead. Guess Anton reckons that if Horse Hito is out there he’d have attacked already.
First out of the cab is a blonde-haired girl, who runs towards me, loses her nerve and slides to a halt, face twisted with misery. About a year back, the first fifteen years of Aptitude’s well-ordered life crashed into mine.
The stiffness to her shoulders tells me she’s crying.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK.’
‘Sven . . .?’
I’m almost on my feet, when she flings herself into my arms and almost knocks me over. I’m a foot taller, twice her weight and twice as broad. You need to see us together to realize how absurd that is.
‘Dad said . . .’
Aptitude stops. Realizes she’s clinging to me.
She steps back. Probably just as well. Because I’m realizing all the wrong things. Like she smells good and her breasts are firm and her lips are close. She’s sixteen, for all she’s a widow. I’m twenty-nine, maybe thirty.
That’s too wide a gap for either of us.
Of course, her husband was three times my age. But that’s the Octovian Empire for you. ‘Don’t get rid of me that easily,’ I say.
We’re halfway back to Wildeside when my SIG wakes. Its faint shiver has me scanning the horizon for Horse Hito. Looks clear to me. Although I squint out of the window into the sun for a few seconds, because that’s where he’ll be coming from.
Well. It’s where I’d be coming from.
‘What?’ I demand.
‘Sven,’ it says. ‘The good news? Or the bad?’
‘The good,’ Aptitude says.
Anton suggests we start with the bad.
I sit it out. The SIG-37’s locked to my DNA. So mine is the answer it’s waiting for. Plus it wants to tell me anyway. ‘Don’t forget the other furies out there.’
‘That’s the bad bit, right?’
‘No,’ it says. ‘That’s the good. Most died.’
‘What’s the bad?’
‘Debro owns the ship they died in.’
‘OK,’ I agree. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Oh,’ my SIG says. ‘That’s not the bad bit . . .’ It hesitates. ‘Well, not the really bad bit. The ship was travelling on a false certificate.’
‘Oh shit,’ Anton says.
But the SIG’s got more. ‘And its journey wasn’t logged. You know what that means . . .’
All trading journeys in the Octovian Empire must be logged in advance, with cargo given and routes outlined. Once chosen, routes must be adhered to. Failure to log an upcoming journey is treason. The penalty for treason is death.
Round here, that’s the penalty for everything.
Chapter 3
It’s almost noon when we crest a slope to see a shattered cargo carrier on the high plain in front of us. Imagine a giant silver fish, and then smash its spine with a metal bar and that’s how it looks.
Make that a fish with no markings.
‘Poetic,’ says my gun.
Slapping the SIG into silence, I tell Aptitude to stay where she is and Anton to cover me and kill anything that moves. Neither looks happy.
Too bad.
Gun held combat-style across my body, I head down a slope, giving myself cover where I can. That’s most of the time, because the bits of slope not littered with rock have fragments of cargo carrier as big as our scout car.
Of course, that means anyone down there has cover too. Only the gun says the sole life sign inside the cruiser is on the edge of flickering out.
A section of tail fin lies in the dirt. A name stencilled beneath a number, both crudely painted out. The angle of the sun makes the name visible.
Olber’s Paradox.
No idea who Olber was. Not too sure what a paradox is either.
The first casualty lies a hundred and fifty paces from the wreck. The cargo loader’s guts make a pattern in the dirt, what’s left of them. The arrangement looks accidental. His head rests twenty paces beyond.