As the cell-mates squatted or stood together in one corner of the room with their backs to the remains of the pitted, charred plasboard walls, facing the imaginary enemy should he infiltrate, Mallet tossed Bedlo the lasrifle end-over-end. The boss caught it in his right hand, and then dropped it vertically through his grip to check the balance. It was better, and there were no dodgy sounds when he caught the housing in his fist. He turned and shot a round. The bang sounded closer to a krak, but not close enough.
Bedlo tossed the weapon back to Mallet.
‘If that’s the best you can do, we need a more reliable weapons supply,’ he said.
Mallet started to strip the las down, again, squatting on his haunches. The boy closest to him, Tilson, shuffled sideways, widening the gap between them. The movement wasn’t lost on Bedlo. Trust wasn’t at a premium, it was non-existent.
Mallet didn’t listen as Bedlo went through the motions.
‘Command,’ he said, raising his index finger as the two new boys watched. ‘Disperse,’ two fingers together, the way a child might make a finger-pistol. ‘Attack,’ a flat hand thrust forwards. The instructions weren’t complicated, but new recruits were always a liability, whether they were young and keen or young and scared, and they were always young.
The perimeter check only took Wescoe a matter of a couple of minutes. There was only one entrance/exit point a couple of hundred metres from the room where the boys were being put through their paces, and a couple of blind corridors to the left and right of the practice room. She was good in the dark, used to it, and didn’t resort to using the lamp-pack that she carried in her webbing. She very soon wished that she had.
Wescoe checked the entrance, ducking to left and right, her long-las raised at her shoulder. There was nothing. She turned, hugging the left-hand wall to her back, the first blind corridor coming up twenty metres away on the right. Then she saw it, a narrow, intermittent beam of grey light. Her hands tensed slightly around the las, and her pupils dilated a fraction as the corridor darkened again. There was just a chance that a glow globe had flickered spontaneously, but the building had been disused and derelict since it had come under heavy fire during the war, years ago, and it seemed unlikely to Wescoe.
‘Voi shet–’ she heard, cut off, and followed by a scuffling sound and a series of thuds. Someone else was in the building. Her cell was not alone.
Wescoe let out the breath that she realised she had been holding, and switched to the right-hand side of the corridor, as the light seemed to have come from the dead-end on the left. She knew that the passage was barely ten metres long before it was cut off by an impenetrable barrier made of the rubble that was all that remained of that wing of the old building. If she had to engage, she had better be fast and efficient. The enemy was right on top of the cell; only a few metres and a bad plascrete wall separated them. A split second later, she was aiming her las into the dark mouth of the blind corridor.
Mallet lifted Bedlo’s lasrifle to check its heft, and thumbed the sight.
They all heard the noise on the other side of the wall. Tilson winced at the sound of the alien tongue as the enemy shouted out, and they heard the scuffling thuds of clumsy bodies. Mallet knew that the enemy was no longer imaginary. He didn’t speak, but he was off his arse and onto one knee, braced in the entrance to the room, almost before they heard the shots fired, and well ahead of the boys properly registering that they were under attack.
He had Bedlo’s weapon in his hand, so he fired it.
Brak!
Even after stripping it down several times, Mallet didn’t trust the las-rifle, so he kept firing it, wild in his right hand while his left went straight to a pistol at his hip. Before Bedlo had turned to shout an order or find a weapon, Mallet was already letting loose an uneven volley of mismatched shots.
Bedlo dropped, flat to the floor, stalling for time he didn’t have.
Tilson, squatting next to him, was staring at him, eyes wide, a hole in his throat. Bedlo listened for a split second to the odd brak of his second-hand, twenty-second-hand, lasrifle. Mallet was doing a job covering them. Then he looked up to see the other boy, Shuey. The little pute had found a gap behind Mallet and was bracing himself against the rock-hard mercenary, using the older man’s shoulder to steady his aim. They half-stood like some bottom-heavy, two-headed creature, three weapons between them, firing at an enemy that Bedlo still hadn’t seen.
Bedlo rolled onto his back and took hold of the improvised flamer that had been assigned to Tilson. He rotated and flipped, and, still flat on his belly, opened up with a splutter of fuel that had begun as promethium, but which had been spent and then filtered, cooled, refined back to low-grade, secondary-use liquid fuel, before being spent again, filtered, mixed with the bio-pute that came off the old hops and rehashed as semi-demi domestic fuel-oil. He didn’t hold out much hope.
The flamer spat a spray of greenish, cloudy liquid, but didn’t catch. Bedlo triggered the igniter, but it was out of synch with the fuel delivery system, such as it was, and clicked uselessly.
Bedlo took a moment, and listened to the weapons discharging. He could hear Mallet’s side arm and the distinctive sound of the old lasrifle, and he could make out the slower, but steady report from Shuey’s weapon, an old Guard-issue las that had belonged to some uncle or other; contraband from a long-lost war that they all still seemed to be fighting, and his passport into the cell. There was no other sound.
In the moment that Bedlo was taking to assess their situation and gauge the danger they were in, Mallet shifted his aim by precisely sixty-two degrees, and ignited the semi-demi with a round from the gakked las.
Bedlo stood, faster than he thought was possible, and then felt like a fool when the ignited fuel produced only a dull yellowish flame and a slow trickle of blackening smoke. It’d leave a scorch-mark on the floor if it was allowed to burn for long enough, but not much else. In any case, it was too little, too late. The battle was already over, and the flamer had played no part in it.
Bedlo held his closed fist in front of him: the signal for cease-fire.
Mallet and Shuey held their weapons, but did not fire again, and the dingy space was quiet. Whoever, whatever, had started the firefight had stopped almost before Mallet had engaged.
Mallet looked at Bedlo.
‘Boss?’ he asked.
‘Where’s Wescoe?’ asked Bedlo.
‘The broad?’ asked Shuey.
‘The broad,’ said Bedlo, crossing to the threshold to check out the results of the attack.
He returned a moment later, carrying the long-las that had belonged to Wescoe, arguably the most useful member of the cell. He’d never called her ‘the broad’ to her face, but that’s what she was, a dangerously efficient killer old broad with more experience than they’d ever live long enough to rack up between them, except perhaps for Mallet. In his other hand was the autopistol belonging to the excubitor that Wescoe had taken out right after he’d shot Tilson in the throat.
Bedlo and Mallet examined the scene. She had died defending them, but had taken at least one of the three enemy guard with her. Their bodies lay beyond the entrance to the practice room and scattered in the mouth of the blind corridor. All the bodies were riddled with shots, and it wasn’t clear who was responsible for the kills, but it didn’t matter. A trail of blood led out towards the exit point, and it was clear that at least one guard had retreated, wounded. Bedlo gestured at the dark stains.
‘She dealt with the immediate threat,’ he said, ‘but he must’ve had a buddy.’