‘Right,’ I say. ‘Racta heads them off. We come up from behind.’
Racta’s about to insist he comes up from behind, when he realizes heading off the prospectors is exactly what he wants to do. So he nods, as if doing me a favour, and slams the clip back into his rifle.
A minute later, I hear a gunshot up ahead.
‘What’s that?’ demands the colonel.
He must know.
Unholstering my own gun, I start running. All thoughts of coming up behind the prospectors are gone. We keep low, weaving from instinct. Shale skids beneath our boots, but we keep moving. On a mountainside that is all you can do.
Cresting a small ridge, we look down in dismay.
Well, the colonel’s dismayed.
I’m just fucking angry. Most of the prospectors are dead. One is still standing and a couple are on their knees. As we watch, Racta uses his rifle as a club and one of those kneeling hits the dirt.
A tracker has a woman on the ground with her skirt round her hips. Another searches the pockets of a dying man. A thin scream from the woman ends when her attacker loses patience. He wipes his knife on her skirt.
‘Permission to finish this, sir?’
‘Sven . . .’
‘Take that as a yes,’ suggests the SIG. ‘Now, let’s take the fucking lot to their knees.’ It rotates clips, selecting overburst. I’d love to, but my gun knows it’s impossible. We are behind enemy lines.
Well, we’re in Uplift Space.
Holding the SIG steady, I walk downhill.
Not one of the O’Cruz doubts I’ll kill them if needed. As we pass Racta’s man going through the pockets of the woman he killed, Neen clubs him. As the man falls to his knees, Rachel walks up behind him and kicks him hard between the legs. There’s no need for Shil to stamp on his fingers as she goes past.
‘We agreed capture.’
Racta scowls. ‘They fought back.’
‘Of course they fucking did,’ I say. ‘You attacked them.’
‘This is our valley,’ he tells me. ‘You’re here because we allow it.’ He spits at a body at his feet. ‘They deserved to die.’
‘What did he say?’ the colonel demands.
‘They deserved to die . . .’
Colonel Vijay looks around. And has trouble dragging his gaze from the splay-legged woman with the severed throat.
‘Animals,’ he says. ‘They’re animals.’
What the fuck does he expect? Battles that start at noon and carefully considered last words from the dying?
‘Tell him we don’t approve of this.’
‘Sir . . .’
‘Just tell him.’
So I do. And guess what? Racta doesn’t give a shit.
‘We’re done here,’ the colonel tells me. ‘Tell him this is where we part company. We’ll find the ghosts for ourselves.’
Racta isn’t happy about this. He wants his five gold coins. So I point out it was for finding the ghosts, not for killing old men and raping women. And since he hasn’t found the ghosts, he doesn’t get the money. This makes him unhappier still.
Unhappy enough to jack the bolt on his rifle.
Wait, I tell myself.
The moment he raises his weapon will be the moment I kill him.
A step to reach him, a single flick of my blade . . . Should be easy enough.
I’m still edging my knife from its sheath when someone beats me to it. A shovel is as good a weapon as anything else if thrown hard enough. And I know it’s luck that makes the shovel break Racta’s rifle arm. But sometimes luck is all you need.
Stalking towards Racta, the prospector picks up his shovel and smashes the blade sideways into Racta’s knee.
‘My woman,’ he says.
We know who he’s talking about.
As Rachel, Neen and Shil keep their weapons trained on the other trackers, the partner of the dead woman drives the edge of his shovel into Racta’s throat.
The screaming stops.
Chapter 14
A veteran of sifting mining waste for ore missed the first time round, Mic Chua has a face that is mottled from toxic chemicals and tattooed so deeply with dust that it looks like powder burn from a shotgun. His eyes are red, although he tells me that is the wind.
Mic has one earring, and a ponytail faded to the grey of dry dog turd.
All the same, for someone so slight, he handles that shovel like the weapon it isn’t. ‘Used to be one of you,’ he says.
Legion? I almost ask.
But I don’t.
I don’t say Death’s Head either. I just nod, smile, and wonder what the fuck I am meant to do with the O’Cruz prisoners my troopers now guard.
‘We don’t kill them,’ says Colonel Vijay.
Of course he does.
Killing them makes sense. As does killing Mic and the few prospectors left alive. They are going to die anyway; you can see it in their eyes.
‘So,’ says Mic. ‘Where did they scoop you?’
Our conversation is getting weirder by the second. But there are times you stay quiet, and this is one of them. So I hold my tongue and try to look interested, but not too interested. Not like, maybe, I don’t have the faintest fuck what he’s talking about.
‘Us,’ he says, ‘they got us right outside a mine.’
I grunt something. I hope it sounds sympathetic.
‘Used to do asteroids,’ he says. ‘All that suiting up and shit, the stale air and long months in tin cans. Gave it up. I mean . . .’ The upturn of his hands says, come on. ‘Why bother, if you can get rich on the ground.’
‘Legally?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
Mic’s eyes narrow. ‘No problem, either way,’ I assure him.
‘Illegal is quicker.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And if you get high enough to call yourself emperor, or senator or glorious uplift, you can announce it’s not a crime anyway.’
Mic grins sourly.
We agree here. ‘So,’ I say. ‘They scooped you?’
‘Yeah, right outside our mine. All these fucks with guns are standing in a circle glaring at us. It must have been the same for you. All those warnings about not trying to escape . . .’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘I hate that.’
‘So they took us back to the camp. And then let us out in work details to dig their damn trenches and fix their pipes . . . Took me a while to work out what was happening.’
‘And then?’ I say, thinking, give me a clue here.
Something bleak enters Mic’s eyes. ‘When we struck for more food, they killed five the first hour, five the next, five the hour after . . . Chosen at random. So we killed the guards, cut the wire and this is what’s left.’
He gestures to three people, who are all that remain of his group.
They walk towards us slowly. If I were them, I wouldn’t trust us either.
His group turns out to be one woman and two men. Mic doesn’t introduce them and I don’t ask. If anything, they look worse than he does.
We give the ejercito a water bottle and march them into the shade of an overhang. Then, while Shil and Franc keep their rifles trained, Neen walks along the line with a shovel and breaks the left ankle of every one.
‘Here,’ he says, giving Mic back his shovel.
‘My pleasure.’
The colonel’s furious. Since it’s already done, I can’t see his point. ‘It’s barbaric,’ he tells me. He is so cross he insists we have the conversation in private.
‘Your decision, sir.’
He scowls at me.
‘We’ve no cuffs, no rope, and you said I couldn’t kill them. With respect, what the fuck was I meant to do?’
Saluting smartly, I leave him with the question.
The ejercito yell at us as we head out. All the usual insults. There are x million suns and x million planets, yet all you ever get is insults about your mother, your sister and your girlfriend. Well, the first two are dead, and I don’t have a third so I’m not too bothered. But I translate them anyway, just for the pleasure of watching Colonel Vijay’s lips tighten.
As the afternoon goes on, Mic trails further and further behind. Until our only choice is, leave him or make camp and wait. When he finally arrives, Shil has a fire burning, Neen has caught what looks like a dog, Franc has gutted the beast, seasoned it with bark and has a stick stuffed up one end and out the other.