They’re loaded for bear.
Pulse rifles across their backs, double holsters at their hips, knives in both boots, and grenades around their waists. Every semi AI and self-loading armament is up there. Doesn’t matter what they hit at this stage. So long as they make a noise and keep the enemy occupied.
‘Sven.’
‘Sir?’
Vijay sighs. ‘You don’t need to salute every time.’
‘You’re the emperor.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’ve been meaning to mention that.’ His face screws into a look of deep worry. ‘Is it true?’ he asks. ‘OctoV really said I was to replace him?’
‘Yes, sir. That was the plan.’
We stand in General Luc’s hall. Battle honours hang from the walls. Oil paintings of past campaigns mix with portraits of OctoV. In most, the emperor wears a green cavalry tunic.
In one, a Wolf Brigade jacket, with a pelt tossed over the shoulder.
I think I can see the faintest shadow of breasts. And then I decide I can’t. Although it’s hard to miss the softness of those hips.
Most of the Wolf Brigade have gone ahead to prepare for Vijay’s arrival. Marching in pairs to the gate, they vanish as they step through. Only Aptitude, Debro and the Aux remain with the new emperor.
Plus those troopers on the walls.
They’ll die, because that is their job. Make a noise, look like twenty times their number, make every rocket, grenade and round count and leave this world like men when the moment comes.
Turning to Neen, I ask, ‘You understand your duties?’
‘Sir, yes, sir.’
He recites the list back to me.
These are the new rules. ‘Protect the emperor first, Aptitude second, her mother third. Die if necessary.’
I slap him on the shoulder. Neen looks surprised, then steps back and grins.
For a second he’s the floppy-haired farm boy I met outside Ilseville. ‘Never thought we’d get this far, sir.’
‘Nor me. Thought I’d be replacing you months back.’
His grin widens.
Hugging his sister, he checks that Ajac’s clip is full, Iona carries medical supplies and food, and Rachel has her rifle ready. Then he salutes Vijay.
‘Sven goes first, sir. You go next. We follow . . .’
None of us knows what we’ll find on the other side. The hex has ten thousand settings, according to General Luc. Who knows which one Leona chose?
Chapter 56
‘Youknow what a singularity is?’
Do I look like someone who knows what a singularity is? More to the point, do I look like someone that gives a fuck?
Pulling the pin from a grenade, I lob it high and hit the dirt, before rolling into a crater filled with stinking gas. Weak gravity hangs my grenade at the top of its arc, before dropping it over a broken wall. Regolith rains down in slow motion. Not sure there was anyone to kill. But the bang makes me feel better.
Choking on the gas, I crawl free and Leona’s voice follows. Of course it does, it comes from the SIG-37. OctoV’s avatar is making her final speech.
At least, I hope it’s final. It’s muddling as fuck to have your side arm switch personalities. Worse still, when everyone around you is being massacred.
‘Do something useful,’ I suggest.
‘Like what?’
‘Tell me where the fuck we are. Better still, tell me how to get to somewhere else . . .’
The bitch laughs.
‘Sven,’ she says. ‘Take a look around you. What do you see?’
What does it think I see? A violet sky and the ruined, ruptured surface of a planetoid mined half bare for the water frozen under its dirt.
‘Fuck all.’
Not a star in sight. A couple of ghostly smudges, but that’s it. The air is cold enough to hurt when we breathe, and so thin the deepest breath scrapes barely enough oxygen.
General Luc is dead and Colonel Nswor, so is Major Whipple, and the captain whose jaw I broke, and the boy who showed me to the H-pad to meet Aptitude. I don’t know his name, but then I don’t know most of the frozen corpses around me.
It would be easier – and a fuck of a lot quicker – to count the living.
The Wolf Brigade never retreats. The Death’s Head would rather die than surrender a single step. The Legion dies where it stands. The boasts infest my head like song lyrics as I find myself putting them to the test.
Vijay suggests we scavenge ammo.
If we do, he says, we’ll have enough to prevent our attackers from uncoupling their mining ship from this planetoid.
Our new emperor’s lie doesn’t even convince himself.
At our back is a low run of stonefoam buildings with broken roofs. An explosion blew out the windows, bent girders and ripped the walls like paper. Judging from the ice dust in drifts against the walls it happened a long time ago.
Inside the biggest hangar is a machine that cracks water into oxygen. That hangar was where we came out.
‘Who opened fire first?’
‘Does it matter?’
Aptitude shakes her head. ‘Just wondering.’
‘Neen,’ I bark.
‘Sir?’ he snaps me a ragged salute.
‘Get her out of here now. Fifty paces back . . .’
My sergeant disappears with a protesting Aptitude in tow.
Slamming a fresh power pack into his pulse rifle, Ajac levers the pre-charge, waits two seconds for a diode to turn green and sticks his head over a wall, aiming for a rusting buggy that carries cutting equipment for the ship’s anchor wires.
Oxygen tanks explode with a satisfying bang.
‘Good shot,’ Rachel says.
She is half immersed in purple gas, her Z93z wrapped in a strip of grey cloth to camouflage it as she hugs the ground near a break in Ajac’s wall. An arse, broad shoulders, red hair, a rifle. She’s killing our new enemy with grim determination.
You wouldn’t think a mining ship was that dangerous. But this one is the size of a small city and armed with the kind of laser intended for cutting asteroids in half and freeing mile-square blocks of ice from planetoids like this.
It’s been making short work of us.
‘Singularity,’ repeats the SIG. ‘You know what that is?’
‘Of course I fucking don’t.’
‘Know why it matters?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Still, I’m pretty certain Leona’s ghost intends to tell me.
Realizing her power pack is empty, Shil reaches for another and discovers she hasn’t got one. So she grabs a Kemzin from the dirt, drops out its empty clip, and rifles its owner’s body for more rounds.
Cartridges splash into a puddle of gas around her knees, making swirls in its purple surface as they fall. Her clip blips out in seconds.
Oxygen starvation makes her breathless; the cold wind purples her skin, unless that’s the thin air again. Somewhere in the last half hour she has lost her helmet, her flak jacket, her pack and her scowl.
Her grin is altogether more terrifying.
The ghost of OctoV, once guardian of the true faith, is preaching heresy. This is no stranger than most of the things to happen today. So I say nothing and keep listening, although I steal ammunition from a corpse as I do, and swap my cracked helmet for an unbroken one.
‘A few of you decided to become us. A few of us decided to be you. One of me decided not to be me. So it became someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘This me,’ she says. ‘As opposed to that me.’ She means Gareisis, the hundred-braid, because once OctoV and he were parts of the same. Leona’s ghost sounds sad.
‘Vijay is the answer,’ she says.
Anything else makes no sense. I just don’t know what the question is. Since Leona’s ghost claims not to know either, I’m going to have to work it out for myself.
‘Sven . . .’
Vijay is calling me.
Turning round, I see what he’s pointing at.
A spear of stars juts at forty-five degrees into the sky behind us and climbs and climbs, until it becomes a fat slash of stars and planets and local clusters that keeps climbing as our planetoid turns.