Africa Zero (16 page)

Soon
we were heading downhill and the grass was becoming lusher and interspersed
with other vegetation. Large cycads had been pulled apart by mammoth and an
acacia pushed over and stripped of bark. In the shade of this acacia a lone
tigon watched us pass, but did not pursue. Unlike their close relatives, lions
and tigers, tigons showed enough intelligence to keep well clear of man. I had
found that increased intelligence was often a result of genetic
diversification.

We
did not catch up with the mammoth, though I guessed we were close when I saw
Pykani roosting on the stubby branches of a vine-swamped baobab. It was shortly
after passing this tree that we heard the droning of a thruster and watched
from cover in the grass as a gun ship rose into the sky and sped away to the
east. Through the grass we crept towards where the ship had risen from. Shortly
we came upon an area where many trails had been trodden through the grass and
concealment was difficult to find. From what concealment we could find we
observed three gun ships at rest in a clearing of trampled grass. There was
probably a number of such bases scattered all across the veldt. Around these
ships was an encampment of the Army of God. There were guards everywhere, and
four-man patrols were being sent out or returning as we watched. I signalled to
Gurt and we moved back into the grass.

“I
need a uniform,” I said to him once we were out of sight and hearing of the
guards.

“Patrol,”
said Gurt, with typical brevity.

We
moved back to the encampment and watched until one of those patrols set out.
Gurt eagerly moved at a tangent to intercept them and I followed, willing at
least in this, to do things his way. We came upon them fairly quickly and it
was only the luck of the tigon’s roar that prevented them seeing us as they all
faced in the direction of that sound. Gurt took position behind a cycad to one
side of the narrow trail and I squatted in the grass. The four men came between
us in a neat and disciplined group. Gurt and I stepped into them
simultaneously. I chopped back into the throat of one man then reached ahead,
put one hand over the front man’s forehead, and one hand between his shoulder
blades, then pushed and pulled simultaneously. I think he was dead before he
was even aware of my presence. Gurt felled his two with sharp and very
effective blows from the butt of his Optek. The two men dropped soundlessly. He
stepped past them even as they fell and brought the butt down on the face of
the one whose throat I had chopped. It caved his face in and he started to jerk
about violently on the ground, bubbling sounds coming from where his face had
been. Gurt looked at him with annoyance, then flipped the man over on what was
left of his face, laid his Optek on the ground, then came down with all his
weight on one knee into the man’s back. There was a crunch, then more of a
crunch when Gurt caught hold of the man’s arms and pulled back hard, putting a
right angle in the man’s back. He lay there quivering, much like his
companions, but more messily. I decided not to use his uniform.

After
I’d stripped the least-soiled uniform from one of the soldiers and placed his
mirrored helmet on my head, I helped Gurt conceal the bodies. He wore no
uniform as none would fit him. When this was done I took up one of their Opteks
and passed to Gurt my APW.

“The
baobab we passed on the way here,” I said and Gurt nodded in recollection.
“I’ll pick you up there,” I said, and headed back to the encampment.

The
three Jungers were without Family markings or any other identification. For a
while I thought that they had been passed on to this Army of God, stripped of
any way of retracing. I then saw a young man in light-blue monofilament overalls
strolling arrogantly across the encampment, a data console under his arm and a
cigarette in his mouth. Whatever corporate Family had provided these gun ships
had provided pilots as well.

I
noted that one of the ships had sections of cowling removed from one arm and
two technicians were working away at an AG motor there. I avoided that ship and
headed for the one the pilot was strolling towards. As I walked one of the
officers noticed me and quickly headed towards me. He was holding out his hand
as if he expected me to stop where I was. I ignored him and kept going.

“Soldier,
stand!” he shouted.

I
stood, not wanting to attract too much attention at that moment. The officer
strode up close to me and thrust his face into mine.

“Where
the hell do you think you’re going?” he hissed at me, a vicious anger in his
face. I thought about making some whining excuse, but suddenly that anger was
replaced by a momentary confusion, then shock. He did not recognise me. I was
not one of his men.

“I’m
going to steal one of your gun ships,” I said, and drove my fingers full force
into his rib cage. The others were too distant to hear the thud as my fingers
penetrated between his ribs and into his heart. I closed my hand into a fist
around a rib, ripping my fingers through his heart, and held him upright in
front of me. Blood gouted from his mouth as he tried to say something more. No
one saw. We just looked like officer and soldier facing each other and
speaking. Unfortunately the pilot was walking in our direction. I was about to
curse Gurt’s tardiness when two soldiers on the other side of the clearing
turned into screaming pillars of flame and smoke.

Abruptly
there was chaos. Soldiers fired at random into the surrounding grasslands, were
running to and fro. I saw the technicians hurriedly closing down cowlings on
the grounded Junger. The pilot broke into a run for the ship to which I was
heading. I dropped the officer, and shaking gobbets of heart-flesh from my
fingers, I ran for the ship as well. No one noticed. The soldiers were too busy
firing at the enemy outside the camp who was intent on frying them all. I
reached the door to the craft just behind the pilot. He hit a palm reader to
one side of the door then turned towards me as the door slid open.

“What
do you think you are doing, soldier?” he asked, every syllable dripping
contempt.

I
straight-armed him through the door and quickly followed him in. The door slid
closed behind me and I drove my elbow into the palm lock, effectively sealing
the door. He lay gasping on the floor and tried to draw his sidearm. I stamped
on his wrist then took his weapon away from him. I didn’t want to kill him just
yet. While he lay there groaning I reached up, knocked out a ceiling panel and
pulled out a ream of optic cable. It was only cable for the computer control
systems so there was no problem there. With this I bound his hands behind his
back and tied his feet to the bottom of one of the rear compartment seats. Then
I stepped into the cockpit.

“What
the fuck are you doing!” he shouted. “You can’t fly it!”

In
the cockpit were three chairs for pilot, navigator, and weapons comp. The
latter two could be slaved to the former so the pilot could run all three. In
front of the pilot’s chair was a touch console with DNA- and fingerprint-coded pads.
All additions and all surplus to requirements. I reached under the console and
got hold of another bunch of fibre optics and pulled. The console was mounted
on a wide pedestal. I got hold of each side of it, twisted and pulled. Metal
ripped and rivets clattered across the decking.

“Jesu!”
said the pilot, perhaps realising then who I was.

Exposed
in the column was the stub of the original fold-down joystick slaved to servo
motors. The joystick was a threedee—in  whichever direction you moved it the
ship moved, the farther you moved it in any direction the more acceleration you
got. It also had a button that put the stick into ‘tilt and turn mode’. This
was usually used when holding position and strafing an area. I pulled it free
of the servos to expose the manual firing button. I had no targeting, but
wouldn’t need it at this range. I sat in the chair, pulled up the joystick,
reached down past it, snapped off two servos and pushed across two levers. The
AG started with a drone and the thrusters rumbled. I looked out through the
screen at the running soldiers and the two other craft. A twitch of the
joystick had the gun ship turning towards the ship nearest. I pressed the
firing button.

The
only things that will stop the blast from a pulsed-energy cannon are powerful
ionic fields, and thick ceramal battle armour (the stuff I’m made of, mostly).
Ionic fields are normally only installed on large stations. Ceramal battle
armour is too heavy for anything that flies. White fire hammered across the
clearing and the men in its path were instantly vaporised. That fire traversed
one limb of the nearest gun ship, slagging one turret and the motors in that
limb, before it hit the cockpit. The cockpit blackened and deformed like a
plastic bottle cast into a furnace, then it exploded. The gun ship tilted, and
slid sideways trailing fire into the grassland. Behind it the other ship was
four metres off the ground with its back to me. Still keeping pressure on the
fire button I brought my ship higher. The second ship tried to pull away on its
thrusters. I hit one of them and the explosion tilted it while the second
thruster drove it round in a circle. Continued fire had it raining molten metal
all about. Then it dropped like a brick as its AG went offline. I slagged both
its turrets then lifted my ship higher. Bullets were pinging off the skin of my
ship by then but I had no fear of them. My worry was of one of those soldiers
using an APW. I tilted my ship and continued firing. Men were blown to ash and
dirty black smoke rose all around. There was no APW fire but that from Gurt. As
instructed he had taken out any soldiers armed with an APW. When I finally took
my finger off the firing button there was little but smoke and glowing ground
below me. Perhaps some of the soldiers had escaped. I could care less.

* * *

Gurt
waited calmly under the branches of the vine-swamped baobab as I brought the
gun ship down on the elephant grass. I walked into the rear section and stepped
over the pilot, who looked at me white-faced and silent. The palm-lock for the
door I had to rip away so as to get at the lever underneath. Gurt quickly
climbed inside after I had opened the door. He looked speculatively at the
bound pilot.

“No,
not dinner. I’ve got to ask him a few questions,” I said.

Gurt
grunted and followed me to the cockpit. The pilot looked at us with stark
terror. I hadn’t needed to say that, but it would help with the questioning
later. I gestured Gurt to the seat for weapons comp and took the pilot’s chair
again.

“Best
we find somewhere secure before some bright spark sends a smart missile or we
get a visit from some more gun ships,” I said. “You ever been in one of these
before?”

“Been
in machines,” said Gurt, eyeing the screen and controls before him.

“None
of that works at the moment. Let’s hope we don’t need it.”

I
lifted the lunger off the ground then and Gurt gripped his arm rests. At an
attitude of a hundred metres I pushed the joystick all the way forwards for
maximum thrust. That thrust had us pressed into our seats for a couple of
minutes until I eased off. It also had the pilot groaning and swearing from the
back. As I slowed the Junger and let it cruise on at a steady two hundred kph,
Gurt chuckled. I looked at him and saw that he was now completely relaxed in
his seat and was looking at the scenery with interest and pleasure.

“It’s
good up here,” he said.

I
had to agree, but it wasn’t safe. Shortly after he said this the radio crackled
to life.

“Seeker
Ten, this is Homeboy, respond,” said a suspicious-sounding individual. I ignored
the voice until it went away, which it did, only to return every ten minutes
thereafter.

It
took one hour to reach my destination. I’d chosen one of my hideaways that was
on route to the JMCC complex. I had considered not stopping at all, but felt I
was pushing things as it was. To get to the complex in this ship would take me
five hours and in that time I felt there was certain to be a reaction from
whoever my enemies were. I needed a little unsubtle up-cannoning to get me
through, and the thing about being as old as I am, is that you’ve had time to
prepare, for just about anything.

I
brought the ship to the base of a cliff that had been shoved up by the Great
Convulsion, and traversed along it. It took another quarter of an hour to find
the section of cliff I was looking for. I’d burnt meaningless but distinctive
marking in the rock. I’d poured dyes in the soil all around and planted the
area with dwarf water oaks. My sense of direction and of place had been as bad
then as it was now, hence these preparations.

With
a thought, I activated a signal device inside my chest as soon as we were in
the area. A round buttress of cliff revolved, shedding trees a couple of
centuries old as it did so. The entrance exposed was sufficiently large to
accommodate the gun ship. I flew it in to the darkness and brought it down. As
I did this the revolving buttress closed behind me and lights came on all
around. I pointed out of the cockpit screen at the object resting only a few
hundred metres away on the stone floor.

“No
more flying?” Gurt asked.

“Too
dangerous,” I said. “It’s a Family I’m up against and they’ll have gun ships
with pulsed energy cannons, and smart missiles. This old girl—” I slapped the
steering column. “—would end up in very small pieces if I was to take it out.”

Gurt
grunted and looked out at the tank. It was an ugly indelicate machine.
Everything about it was heavy and solid. The tracks were three metres wide and
half a metre thick. The tank itself was a boxlike slab twenty metres long by
ten wide and five thick. Its main guns were pulsed-energy, like the Junger, but
it also had a missile launcher, small automatic antipersonnel machine guns, a
nice napalm slinger, and a rear turret that operated on a carousel system so I
could call up any of a selection of eighteen other weapons. All a bit over the
top, but I’d been updating the thing (and its various cousins) for seven
hundred years, and there was little I had not thought of. It also had limited
and a couple of thrusters at the back. It could hop. The best thing about it
was that it was made of ceramal battle armour and had an ionic field projector.