Erebus (3 page)

“What the fuck?” I heard Dev cry out.

Finally I managed to switch my HUD off, leaving my visual spectrum naked. It was the first time I’d seen the world without my HUD in years. It was surprising, shocking, and ironically unnatural. I had no constant feed of extra information washing into my brain, no communication windows, not even the damn clock hovering unobtrusively in the corner of my vision—nothing.

The light died…and then I saw him—Mohawk, standing by Dev, a vicious machete glinting in his right hand. And my partner was still on one knee, shaking his head, trying to clear his implants, his own helmet on the floor next to him.

Mohawk must have been a Natural; he wasn’t debilitated by the blast of light. To him, it would be no more than a flare.

Mohawk raised the machete. Dev looked up. I heard him say—not shout, not plead, just say—“No.”

Where the hell was my gun? I’d dropped it in my confusion. I reached into my harness and grabbed my extendable baton, flicking it out to full length. I took a shaky step forward…too slow…

I saw the machete swinging down in an arc of unstoppable force. I saw Dev on his knees, a man about to be executed. I saw the look on his face as he stared up to meet his fate.

The blade cleaved into my partners head with a sickening thud. Mohawk planted his foot on Dev’s shoulder and pushed, pulling his blade free with a sucking noise. The body fell to the ground.

Mohawk charged at me, crossing the distance quickly, and the bloody machete arced toward my own head. By luck, judgment, or instinct, I put the baton up. The blade sparked against it with a crackle of electricity. Mohawk dropped the machete with an agonized cry.

He clutched his stunned hand and looked at me with his bloodshot eyes, his pupils dilated and full of rage. He knew it was over. I pressed the tip of the baton into his chest. Every muscle in his body locked up as the smell of ozone infused the air. He fell to the dusty ground, rigid.

Instinct and training definitely took over. All I wanted to do was go to Dev, but I kicked the machete away, rolled Mohawk onto his front, and pulled his arms into a pair of flexicuffs.

Dev’s body was slumped into the dirt in a fetal position. I ran to him and knelt down beside him. The wound was horrendous, his head brutally cleaved. I doubted his implants could have helped with an injury of that magnitude even had they been functional. With them offline…not a chance.

Against all rational hope, I checked for a pulse. Nothing. He was gone. I saw Dev’s gun lying next to him where he had dropped it. Picking it up, I regarded it for a moment. I flicked the switch from the blue dot indicating incap rounds to the red of lethal and looked over to Mohawk, lying unconscious on the floor. A deep rage filled me. I stood and walked toward him.

“Trent.” I glanced back, but only for a moment. Phillips was in the mouth of the alley. She stood there in a black one-piece underlay suit, rifle in hand. Her armor was a splayed open statue behind her. She’d abandoned it; probably the more advanced systems were just as disabled as our implants. Even her glowing blue eyes were dulled; her HUD was off.

Those eyes flicked between Mohawk, Dev’s body, and the gun in my hand. She cocked her head, slightly.

“Layton, don’t,” she said simply. “We need him.”
      

Mohawk gave a groan on the floor. I wanted to kill him for what he’d just done. For what he did at the hospital. For all the other crimes he had undoubtedly committed.

I clicked the selector switch on my gun to green and lowered my arm. We had a job to do. I was a cop, not an executioner, and Phillips was right. We did need him.

***

The barbed-wire-topped blast walls and rugged but tired old buildings made the local UN base look more like a sprawling medieval castle than the military base it was. I guess that was kind of fortunate as it was called “the Keep” by the contingent running it.

I was watching Mohawk—or Beda Kumba, as it turned out he was actually called—through the observation glass. He sat in one of the interview rooms, still cuffed. One of the peacekeepers had tried to take them off earlier, but Kumba had given them such a fight, he had gotten himself stunned again for his trouble.

The holotank in the corner had CNN playing. The well-coiffured news anchor had an image of Jupiter on the screen behind him. “…It appears to have come from the Jupiter system. Two-way communication will take two hours. At the moment, we have no information as to what has caused the flare; however, it appears to have put out a substantial electro-magnetic pulse. The EM pulse is what caused the temporary disruption to services and implants. The full extent of the damage is still being assessed. Most space and aircraft are now back online and in contact, and reported casualties, for the moment, are light…”

Not light enough
, I thought. The event couldn’t have come at a worse time for Dev. Even now, the young officer’s body was downstairs, preserved in cold storage in the Keep’s morgue along with the other corpses from the Karen Cole Hospital.

The last few days had been a whirlwind—losing contact with the hospital, a reconnaissance flight, the burning wreckage, getting bounced to Sahelia from The Hague, the casualties, the events of the last few hours.

And Dev…

It had only taken a couple of minutes for my HUD to reset, and I had full functionality back. On the VTOL back to the Keep, I had been in touch with a confused Giselle. She had no more information on the event than what was on the news. She had blanched when I had told what had happened to Dev. She knew him as well as I did; she’d recruited him from her old team in Paris, after all.

For now, though, we still had a job to do.

“Judge Thompsen approved the ERP,” Giselle said.

“Thompsen?” I raised an eyebrow. He was notorious among investigators for being overly diligent and tough in granting authority to use intrusive questioning techniques like event response potential mapping.

Giselle nodded. “To be honest, I don’t think he read the request with his usual thoroughness with what’s going on in space.” Her voice became softer. “I must ask, Layton. Do you want off this job?”

“Not a bloody chance.” I looked again at Kumba in the observation room.

“Protocol says you should be. Look, someone has to bring Dev home.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But this is quick time, now. When the rest of Kumba’s group realize he’s missing, they’ll move. We need to get their location out of him and go in fast.”

“Very well.” Giselle’s voice was uncharacteristically uncertain. “Do it. You know the procedure. You have to give him one more chance to answer on his own.”

“Fine.” I opened the heavy metal door and stepped into the interview room. My fists clenched to bottle down the sheer hatred I felt for the man.

“Where are your friends?” I said to him. I almost impressed myself with the calm in my voice. “You know, the ones who murdered fifteen people on a humanitarian mission.”

“Fuck you!” The ball of phlegm that he launched at me in reply only narrowly missed.

I turned and went back into the observation room, letting the door slam shut behind me. “I asked him.”

“And?” Giselle prompted.

“He declined to answer my question.”
There, protocol served
.

“Okay, I’m sending the warrant through now.”

I saw an envelope icon ping into existence on the corner of my visual field, showing I’d received a HUDmail. I looked over at the tech in the observation room and forwarded it onto her. “This is the warrant to ERP Kumba, if you’d be so kind as to look at it.”

She nodded and paused, probably scanning through the document before linking to The Hague to confirm the authenticator code on it.

Before long, Kumba was pinned down and having a cocktail of drugs, scopolamine, barbiturates, and various other things I couldn’t even pronounce pumped into his system. It chilled him out—a lot.

The problem with truth drugs was that, to be blunt, they were useless. Depending on the person and the cocktail, some subjects resisted the drugs outright while others became too eager to please, in which case they simply said what you wanted to hear or, frankly, just talked gibberish. None of those were of any use to us. The beauty of ERPing was that it reduced resistance while raising electrical activity in the brain. That electrical activity was what we were really interested in.

Phillips, Otanga, and I stood in the observation booth watching the tech work. When the drugs had taken hold fully, the tech clamped Kumba’s head into the boxy sensor helmet and began asking control questions. As she worked, she glanced at a monitor showing his brain activity and occasionally nodded in satisfaction.

For over an hour with one eye on the monitor, the tech asked endless questions, some as simple as what day of the week it was or his mother’s maiden name. Sometimes she asked twice. All the while, Kumba answered in a lethargic voice, a vacant smile on his face. I started on some paperwork through my HUD while the two captains with me discussed tactical options and military logistics for when we tracked down Kumba’s group. Eventually the tech stood up, went to the window, and tapped lightly on the glass before giving a thumbs-up. She was ready for the interview proper.

She had a map of Kumba’s event response potentials, the neuroelectrical activity in his brain. Whatever he might say—or in fact not say—was completely irrelevant. It was which synapses were flaring when we asked our questions that we were interested in. By a lot of technical wizardry, we could then convert that activity into answers for what we wanted to know.

I closed down the paperwork I was doing as Phillips and Otanga went silent.

“How many of you are in your group?” The tech asked in a calm, measured voice.

Mohawk stayed silent, his eyes tracking around the bare brick walls of the room with a vague look of euphoria in them. I had no doubt right now he was a happy man. I could only hope the comedown was hard on him. The answer popped up on the screen.

22

Interesting. I guess they had left a couple of guys at home.

“What weapons are your group equipped with?” A trickier question to answer. Sometimes the ERPing got verbal responses like the
22
, sometimes it got images. This time, a series of weapon silhouettes appeared on the screen. Some of them looked vaguely familiar: AK86s like Mohawk had and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It was all fairly low-tech stuff, other than a few they had probably stolen, including the four dead peacekeepers’ weapons.

“Where is your group located?” Again, the equipment interpreted the response in the best way. A satellite map appeared and focused on a small collection of buildings just north of the small town marked
Er Rahad
.

“Were you part of the attack on the Karen Cole Hospital?”

Yes
appeared on the screen.

“Did you kill anyone at the Karen Cole Hospital?”

Yes

Phillips leaned forward in her chair, a cold but hungry look in her eyes.

“Why did you attack the hospital?”

Money

At least the guy wasn’t some fanatic; he was simply a greedy, murderous thief.

War Crimes Investigation at The Hague.
When I’d seen the ad on the Hypernet to do a stretch in War Crimes, I’d spoken to my boss. He got all enthusiastic about it. He thought an attachment, a stint away from my then current assignment, would be good for me. “Go see the world for a couple of years, Layton. Get something on your resume that no one else has, and by the time you get back to the Met, they will practically be begging to give you your third pip.” The first part I’d liked, but I had one little problem with the second bit. I didn’t even like being an inspector that much, let alone going for further promotion. It involved far too much damn admin and not enough actual being a police officer.

War Crimes was different. I got out on the frontlines. I’d managed to stretch my two-year attachment to twice that. Now, I was desperately hoping—beyond making sure someone, somewhere, sorted my pension contributions—the Met would eventually forget about me and leave me at The Hague. It was probably wishful thinking, but so far, so good.

It was a strange business. I spent a lot of time dealing with military types as, by definition, a war crime tended to happen in a war zone. That made it a heady mix of old-fashioned policing combined with sending in the troops to do the dirty work. I didn’t get to feel too many collars. Kumba was an exception, not the rule, but enough to sate my thirst for the simple joy of tracking down some of the nastiest pieces of work on the planet. Sometimes it was nice to be a cog in the machine.

The commando team was all in position around the bandit camp, ready to go. We’d discovered a nasty surprise: a cheap but effective jammer in a building near the center, probably another design from one of the many anarchist sites on the Hypernet. It wasn’t a powerful device, but then, it didn’t exactly take a lot to disable the mosquito drones. We couldn’t simply flood the area with the little buggers and let them tranquilize the targets. We were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

We had flown the Australian commandos’ sleek VTOL low and slow through the mountains in the predawn darkness and landed a few miles away from the squalid collection of wooden buildings nestled in the desert. There, we had met up with Otanga’s company, who had driven to the area in their carriers. All the pieces were in place.

The plan Phillips and Otanga had come out with was, like all good ones, simple. Otanga’s men would set up an outer cordon to prevent anyone from escaping the area. The Australian team would go in and disable the jammer. Then we could tranquilize them with the mosquitoes. It certainly beat getting into a firefight with a group that had proven to be smarter, more brutal, and more resourceful than the average scumbags who operated in the area.

After Phillips had given a quick but through briefing, the eight troops hustled out, the active camouflage of their armor blending seamlessly with their surroundings. They disappeared into the night in seconds, nothing visible of them but a nearly imperceptible figure-shaped heat shimmer.