The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (56 page)

“Hoo, little Helmuth wants his own girlie friend to keep his bed warm,” Landschein gibed.

“Landschein, I—” Helmuth began, clenching his right hand into a ridge of knuckles.

“Shut it off!”

“But, Sarge—”

“Shut it off, boy, or you’ll have me to deal with!” roared the black. Helmuth fell back and rubbed his eyes. The noncom went on more quietly, “Landschein, you keep your tongue to yourself, too.”

Both big men breathed deeply, their eyes shifting in concert towards Margritte who faced them in silence. “Helmuth,” the sergeant continued, “some units take women, some don’t. We’ve got a few, damned few, because not many women have the guts for our line of work.”

Margritte’s smile flickered. “The hardness, you mean. The callousness.”

“Sure, words don’t matter,” Counsel agreed mildly. He smiled back at her as one equal to another. “This one, yeah; she might just pass. Via, you don’t have to look like Landschein there to be tough. But you’re missing the big point, boy.”

Helmuth touched his right wrist to his chin. “Well, what?” he demanded.

Counsel laughed. “She wouldn’t go with us. Would you, girl?”

Margritte’s eyes were flat, and her voice was dead flat. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t go with you.”

The noncom grinned as he walked back to a window vantage. “You see, Helmuth, you want her to give up a whole lot to gain you a bunkmate.”

“It’s not like that,” Helmuth insisted, thumping his leg in frustration. “I just mean—”

“Oh,
Lord
!” the girl said loudly. “Can’t you just get on with your ambush?”

“Well, not till Hammer’s boys come through,” chuckled the sergeant. “They’re so good, they can’t run a convoy to schedule.”

“S-sergeant,” the young soldier said, “she doesn’t understand.” He turned to Margritte and gestured with both hands, forgetting the weapon in his left. “They won’t take you back, those witches out there. The … the rec girls at Base Denzil don’t go home – they can’t. And you know damned well that s-somebody’s going to catch it out there when it drops in the pot. They’ll crucify you for helping us set up, the ones that’re left.”

“It doesn’t matter what they do,” she said. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

“Your life matters!” the boy insisted.

Her laughter hooted through the room. “My life?” Margritte repeated. “You splashed all that across the field an hour ago. You didn’t give a damn when you did it, and I don’t give one now – but I’d only follow you to Hell and hope your road was short.”

Helmuth bit his knuckle and turned, pinched over as though he had been kicked. Sergeant Counsel grinned his tight, equals grin. “You’re wasted here, you know,” he said. “And we could use you. Maybe if—”

“Sarge!” Landschein called from his window. “Here they come.”

Counsel scooped up a rocket launcher, probing its breech with his fingers to make finally sure of its load. “Now you keep down,” he repeated to Margritte. “Backblast’ll take your head off if their shooting don’t.” He crouched below the sill and the rim of the armour shielding him, peering through a periscope whose button of optical fibres was unnoticeable in the shadow. Faced inwards towards the girl, Landschein hunched over the other launcher in the right corner of the protected area. His flechette gun rested beside him and one hand curved towards it momentarily, anticipating the instant he would raise it to spray the shattered convoy. Between them Helmuth knelt as stiffly as a statue of grey-green jade. He drew a buzzbomb closer to his right knee where it clinked against the barrel of his own weapon. Cursing nervously, he slid the flechette gun back out of the way. Both his hands gripped reloads, waiting.

The cars’ shrill whine trembled in the air. Margritte stood up by the door, staring out through the windows across the hall. Dust plumed where the long, straight roadway cut the horizon into two blocks of forest. The women in the fields had paused, straightening to watch the oncoming vehicles. But that was normal, nothing to alarm the khaki men in the bellies of their war-cars; and if any woman thought of falling to hug the earth, the fans’ wailing too nearly approximated that of the imprisoned children.

“Three hundred metres,” Counsel reported softly as the blunt bow of the lead car gleamed through the dust. “Two-fifty.” Landschein’s teeth bared as he faced around, poised to spring.

Margritte swept up Helmuth’s flechette gun and levelled it at waist height. The safety clicked off. Counsel had dropped his periscope and his mouth was open to cry an order. The deafening muzzle blast lifted him out of his crouch and pasted him briefly, voiceless, against the pocked inner face of the armour. Margritte swung her weapon like a flail into a triple splash of red. Helmuth died with only a reflexive jerk, but Landschein’s speed came near to bringing his launcher to bear on Margritte. The stream of flechettes sawed across his throat. His torso dropped, headless but still clutching the weapon.

Margritte’s gun silenced when the last needle slapped out of the muzzle. The aluminium barrel shroud had softened and warped during the long burst. Eddies in the fog of blood and propellant smoke danced away from it. Margritte turned as if in icy composure, but she bumped the door jamb and staggered as she stepped outside. The racket of the gun had drawn the sallow faces of every woman in the fields.

“It’s over!” Margritte called. Her voice sounded thin in the fresh silence. Three of the nearer mothers ran towards the storage room.

Down the road, dust was spraying as the convoy skidded into a herringbone for defence. Gun muzzles searched: the running women; Margritte armed and motionless; the sudden eruption of children from the dugout. The men in the cars waited, their trigger fingers partly tensed.

Bergen, Delia’s six-year-old, pounded past Margritte to throw herself into her mother’s arms. They clung together, each crooning to the other through their tears. “Oh, we were so afraid!” Bergen said, drawing away from her mother. “But now it’s all right.” She rotated her head and her eyes widened as they took in Margritte’s tattered figure. “Oh, Margi,” she gasped, “whatever happened to
you
?”

Delia gasped and snatched her daughter back against her bosom. Over the child’s loose curls, Delia glared at Margritte with eyes like a hedge of pikes. Margritte’s hand stopped halfway to the child. She stood – gaunt, misted with blood as though sunburned. A woman who had blasted life away instead of suckling it. Delia, a frightened mother, snarled at the killer who had been her friend.

Margritte began to laugh. She trailed the gun three steps before letting it drop unnoticed. The captain of the lead car watched her approach over his gunsights. His short, black beard fluffed out from under his helmet, twitching as he asked, “Would you like to tell us what’s going on, honey, or do we got to comb it out ourselves?”

“I killed three soldiers,” she answered simply. “Now there’s nothing going on. Except that wherever you’re headed, I’m going along. You can use my sort, soldier.”

Her laughter was a crackling shadow in the sunlight.

THE RHINE’S WORLD INCIDENT

Neal Asher

The Polity holds sway across human space, but not everyone embraces the human/AI alliance at its heart. Some choose to hit back against the system. What happens when a terrorist strike you’re involved in goes inexplicably wrong? You start to doubt your colleagues and closest friends; you grow suspicious and increasingly uncertain, until fear is your only reliable companion.

Neal Asher lives sometimes in England, sometimes in Crete and mostly at a keyboard. Having over eighteen books published he has been accused of overproduction (despite spending far too much time ranting on his blog, cycling off fat and drinking too much wine) but doesn’t intend to slow down just yet. His fiction is famed for containing fast-paced action delivered with the sensibilities of cyberpunk. Neal can be found online at:
theskinner. blogspot.com
and
freespace.virgin.net/n.asher.

T
HE REMOTE CONTROL
rested dead in Reynold’s hand, but any moment now Kirin might make the connection, and the little lozenge of black metal would become a source of godlike power. Reynold closed his hand over it, sudden doubts assailing him, and as always felt a tight stab of fear. That power depended on Kirin’s success, which wasn’t guaranteed, and on the hope that the device the remote connected to had not been discovered and neutralized.

He turned towards her. “Any luck?”

She sat on the damp ground with her laptop open on a mouldering log before her, with optics running from it to the framework supporting the sat dish, spherical laser com unit and microwave transmitter rods. She was also auged into the laptop, an optic lead running from the bean-shaped augmentation behind her ear to plug into it. Beside the laptop rested a big flat memstore packed with state-of-the-art worms and viruses.

“It is not a matter of luck,” she stated succinctly.

Reynold returned his attention to the city down on the plain. Athelford was the centre of commerce and Polity power here on Rhine’s World, most of both concentrated at its heart where skyscrapers reared about the domes and containment spheres of the runcible port. However, the unit first sent here had not been able to position the device right next to the port itself and its damned controlling AI – Reynold felt an involuntary shudder at the thought of the kind of icy artificial intelligences they were up against. The unit had been forced to act fast when the plutonium processing plant, no doubt meticulously tracked down by some forensic AI, got hit by Earth Central Security. They’d also not been able to detonate. Something had taken them out before they could even send the signal.

“The yokels are calling in,” said Plate. He was boosted and otherwise physically enhanced, and wore com gear about his head plugged into the weird scaley Dracocorp aug affixed behind his ear. “Our contact wants our coordinates.”

“Tell him to head to the rendezvous as planned.” Reynold glanced back at where their gravcar lay underneath its chameleoncloth tarpaulin. “First chance we get we’ll need to ask him why he’s not sticking to that plan.”

Plate grinned.

“Are we still secure?” Reynold asked.

“Still secure,” Plate replied, his grin disappearing. “But encoded Polity com activity is ramping up, as is city and sat-scan output.”

“They know we’re here,” said Kirin, still concentrating on her laptop.

“Get me the device, Kirin,” said Reynold. “Get me it now.”

One of her eyes had gone metallic and her fingers were blurring over her keyboard. “If it was easy to find the signal and lock in the transmission key, we wouldn’t have to be this damned close and, anyway, ECS would have found it by now.”

“But we know the main frequencies and have the key,” Reynold observed.

Kirin snorted dismissively.

Reynold tapped the com button on the collar of his fatigues. “Spiro,” he addressed the commander of the four-unit of Separatist ground troops positioned in the surrounding area. “ECS are on to us but don’t have our location. If they get it they’ll be down on us like a falling tree. Be prepared to hold out for as long as possible – for the Cause I expect no less of you.”

“They get our location and it’ll be a sat-strike,” Plate observed. “We’ll be incinerated before we get a chance to blink.”

“Shut up, Plate.”

“I think I may—” began Kirin, and Reynold spun towards her. “Yes, I’ve got it.” She looked up victoriously and dramatically stabbed a finger down on one key. “Your remote is now armed.”

Reynold raised his hand and opened it, studying with tight cold fear in his guts the blinking red light in the corner of the touch console. Stepping a little way from his comrades to the edge of the trees, he once again gazed down upon the city. His mouth was dry. He knew precisely what this would set in motion: terrifying unhuman intelligences would focus here the moment he sent the signal.

“Just a grain at a time, my old Separatist recruiter told me,” he said. “We’ll win this like the sea wins as it laps against a sandstone cliff.”

“Very poetic,” said Kirin, now standing at his shoulder.

“This is gonna hurt them,” said Plate.

Reynold tapped his com button. “Goggles everyone.” He pulled his own flash goggles down over his eyes. “Kirin, get back to your worms.” He glanced round and watched her return to her station and plug the memstore cable into her laptop. The worms and viruses the thing contained were certainly the best available, but they wouldn’t have stood a chance of infiltrating Polity firewalls
before
he initiated the device. After that they would penetrate local systems to knock out satellite scanning for, according to Kirin, ten minutes – enough time for them to fly the gravcar far from here, undetected.

“Five, four, three, two … one.” Reynold thumbed the touch console on the remote.

Somewhere in the heart of the city a giant flashbulb came on for a second, then went out. Reynold pushed up his goggles to watch a skyscraper going over and a disk of devastation spreading from a growing and rising fireball. Now, shortly after the EM flash of the blast, Kirin would be sending her software toys. The fireball continued to rise, a sprouting mushroom, but despite the surface devastation many buildings remained disappointingly intact. Still, they would be irradiated and tens of thousands of Polity citizens reduced to ash. The sound reached them now, and it seemed the world was tearing apart.

“OK, the car!” Reynold instructed. “Kirin?”

She nodded, already closing her laptop and grabbing up as much of her gear as she could carry. The broadcast framework would have to stay though, as would some of the larger armaments Spiro had positioned in the surrounding area. Reynold stooped by a grey cylinder at the base of a tree, punched twenty minutes into the timer and set it running. The thermite bomb would incinerate this entire area and leave little evidence for the forensic AIs of ECS to gather. “Let’s go!”