Gavin Smith: Veteran

‘I have already given you my clearance, now go away,’ I said. Larry looked me up and down, sizing up his chances and not really liking them.

‘I’m sorry sir,’ Larry wheezed, trying to recover his breath from the run to the apartment, ‘but we are contractually obligated to protect the inhabitants. I’m going to have to ask you-’ Then I was holding Larry’s shotgun.

‘You did the best you could, Larry, now fuck off,’ I said, beginning to lose patience. Larry turned and left with one final apologetic look at Rayment and Sverdlof. I turned to the pair of them.

‘Where is it?’ I asked, my eyes drifting to the large bundles of cash on the table.

‘Where’s what?’ Sverdlof replied. I sighed.

‘Look, I am going to find out what I want to know anyway. The only real question for you guys is how hurt or dead you get in the process.’

‘Maybe, but what if whoever took it from us is a bigger bastard than you?’ she asked.

‘Is he a more immediate problem?’ I said. ‘Look, you’ve got your money; you can do a bunk. Though chances are whoever has the thing is not going to be a problem for much longer.’

‘For fuck’s sake tell him,’ Rayment whimpered.

‘Why don’t you tell me, Morton?’ I asked.

‘What’s it worth?’ Sverdlof asked.

‘Why don’t I beat it out of your boyfriend?’ I said.

‘Ex-boyfriend.’

‘You’re leaving me!’ Rayment said and burst into tears.

‘Hard to see why,’ I said, looking at the park ranger with mild bemusement. Sverdlof nodded. She seemed to be weighing up her options, and like Larry she did not like the conclusions she was coming to.

‘We sold it to Cassidy MacFarlane,’ she finally said. This confused me.

‘The pimp? Why?’ Sverdlof shrugged. ‘What sort of state was it in?’ I demanded.

‘Pretty messed up, leaking, not moving much, not making any noise. Difficult to tell with those things. It didn’t seem very threatening.’

‘How long ago?’

Sverdlof shrugged again. ‘Maybe an hour.’

‘Know where he was taking it?’

‘No,’ she said. I was pretty sure she’d told me as much as she could. So I nipped back into their bedroom and came back with a small sports holdall and began filling it with their black money, the Mastodon still levelled at Sverdlof.

‘What are you doing?’ Sverdlof shouted.

‘Taking your money,’ I told her, feeling like a total bastard. I was secure in the knowledge that official business or not there was nothing they could really do. Reporting it meant incriminating themselves. Not that I really cared one way or another. Let the Major sort it out.

‘What am I going to use if I have to run from MacFarlane?’ Sverdlof demanded. I ignored the question. Finally with all the money packed I backed out of the tiny apartment, Sverdlof glaring after me.

‘Come after me and I will have to kill you, you know that,’ I told her. Sverdlof just continued to glare at me with undiluted hatred in her eyes.

I left the apartment, closing the door behind me. As the door clicked shut Sverdlof started screaming, berating Rayment for cowardice. Not that there was much he could have done, except maybe not wet himself or burst into tears. I smiled and then spun round bringing the revolver up.

Leaning against the wall a few feet away from me was Josephine. She looked as drab and nondescript as normal. Rumour was that she had had herself surgically altered to look as uninteresting as possible. She was difficult to describe because nothing stuck out about her appearance. Even her clothes were drab.

‘Losing your touch?’ she asked, not looking me in the eyes. She always avoided eye contact. I lowered the gun and then holstered it.

‘Oh, hi, Josey,’ I said sarcastically, trying to mask my fear. The Grey Lady had always unnerved me. She was right though. Josephine was good but she should not have snuck up on me that easily. She shook her head.

The Major wants you to do it,’ she said. I knew exactly what she meant.

‘And if I don’t?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said awkwardly, examining her nails. ‘He’ll just make making you miserable his hobby.’

‘He’s not doing that already?’ I asked.

‘Give me the money, Jakob,’ she said shyly. I sighed.

‘This is fucking petty even by his standards. You turn up to rob me?’ I asked. She shook her head.

‘Give me the money and go and kill them.’ She sounded quiet and meek. I dropped the bag of notes at her feet and tried to walk past her. She held a hand out. It just touched my chest but I stopped.

Til cover for you just once,’ she said and looked me in the eyes. My mouth went very dry and I swallowed involuntarily. She dropped her hand, letting me past. As I went down the steps the muzzle flashes from inside the apartment illuminated the car park briefly.

I rode through the superstructure of the Rigs. Moving just a little faster than was safe for the rickety wooden boards and metal sheets that passed for roads. I wanted to stop, return to the cube, start drinking and maybe listen to some music. Try not to think about the two poor fuckers I’d just got killed for doing what we all have to do to survive. I knew, however, that if I did that Rolleston would keep on hounding me.

Now I’d seen the Grey Lady I had a sense of urgency. I wanted this wrapped up and forgotten. I also needed the promised week in the sense booths, being fed by a drip, getting bedsores, my muscles atrophying and most importantly achieving a total loss of self, to forget about all this.

Although I’d never been a special forces operator who enjoyed his work particularly, I also had to admit that the feeling that came from my enhancements, the feeling of moving like lightning when everyone else was mired down, was something I never grew tired of. So I was going to kill some stupid people and take out one more of Them. Big deal, another tiny step in a conflict that seemed to consume everything.

They were the only other life that we’d ever encountered in space and we were at war with Them. This had to be a tiny drop in the ocean to the universe. Yet sometimes, when space was filled with bright beams burning across the night. When I was waiting in an assault shuttle for a drop, my life in someone else’s hands. When I was watching other shuttles tumbling towards planets to burn on entry. Sometimes it looked and felt like the entire universe was at war.

The Forbidden Pleasure was neither all that forbidden nor pleasurable. It had once been a container ship. Most of the containers had been scavenged long ago to create what I liked to think of as the upper-class neighbourhood on the Rigs. The remaining containers of the horribly corroded three-hundred-year-old craft had been sectioned off with cardboard walls and turned into a production-line-style knocking shop. This was the place where the inhabitants of the Rigs came to experience the meat.

The bridge had been stripped out long ago, non-supporting bulkheads cut through and the whole deck converted into some impoverished idea of what a lounge bar was supposed to be. It was a sick joke. A taunt to the people forced to live on the Rigs. I climbed up the metal stairs to the bridge deck. I dampened my enhanced hearing to drown out the grunts, sighs, the faked orgasms and the screams of pain. I was trying not to think about how working here or in one of the other flesh parlours in the Rigs was one of the few chances to make a living the young on the Rigs had. Though they were used up quickly.

I tried to slip into the bar on the bridge deck as inconspicuously as possible, but my long coat and the way you move with reflexes as wired as mine gave me away. I eased into one of the high chairs at the bar, aware of eyes burning into my back. The bridge bar was for the high-rollers, by the standards of the Rigs. The rest just took their turn at the turnstiles in the lottery-like system on the foredeck. The security was violent young men and women with cheap ware and assault rifles.