Gavin Smith - Veteran

The boys and girls in the bar were the youngest and freshest, the least damaged. The badly chalked menu above the bar suggested that you could pretty much do to them what you wanted as long as you had the money. I couldn’t see Cassidy but there was a lot of his muscle in the bar. Young crazies with too much cheap ware, bad drugs and weapons they did not know how to use. Most of them would be draft dodgers. Too dangerous to recruit by the time their number came up or, rather, more trouble than they were worth. The rest were clients, mainly the entrepreneurial class of the Rigs. Dealers of whatever they could find to deal – drugs, booze, smokes, medicines, weapons, space and life.

At one table sat a corporate salary man, quite a high-ranking one judging by his retinue of guards. He was slumming. He was probably here to snuff someone. His katana, the badge of office for corporate swordsmen, lay sheathed on the table in front of him. I wondered how many people he had slain with that sword in promotion and tender duels to get where he was today. I had a pretty good idea about how this was going to go down and I resented that I would become anecdote fodder for the slumming salary man. There was the sound of automatic weapons fire from the foredeck. I had my hand on the butt of my laser pistol before I thought about it. I hadn’t been wired this high in a while. Nobody else flinched. Nothing new, just another example being made.

‘Drink?’ I looked up at the barman. He was a vet. One arm missing where they had removed a prosthetic when he had been discharged, the other hugely muscled from illegal boosters, stimulants and overcompensation. His eyes were cheap Coventry-made implants. Probably replacements for the military-grade ones he’d had removed. The angry red scar tissue around the eyes pointed to a botched job. The implants were probably painful with low resolution.

‘Have you got anything nice to drink?’ I asked optimistically. The barman smiled ironically and shook his head. ‘Anything that’s safe to drink?’

‘Not so much,’ the barman answered, his accent broad Dundonian. I put some dirty paper euros on the bar.

‘Have a drink yourself and I’ll have one of whatever you dare to drink.’ The barman gave a snort of amusement and came back a minute or so later with two dirty glasses containing a murky liquid. I raised my glass to him.

‘To slipping standards,’ I said, and tipped the contents down my throat trying desperately not to taste it. I think it was supposed to have been whisky, though the aftertaste of turpentine gave it away a bit. I grimaced and looked at the glass.

‘Takes the edge off, doesn’t it?’ the barman said.

‘It’s an acquired taste,’ I said as politely as I could manage.

‘I know you?’ the barman asked, and he would do. As an unspoken rule when you moved onto the Rigs you had to prove that you were more trouble than it was worth to mess with. If you didn’t you were going to end up spending all your time fending off chop merchants wanting to sell you for second-hand mil-spec ware. So when I moved in there had been a few strategic deaths and acts of violence on my part to ensure I got left in peace. I shrugged off the barman’s question.

‘Cassidy about?’ I asked. The barman started to answer.

‘Who wants to know about Mr MacFarlane?’ a voice that was all street bravado asked from behind me. I glanced round and saw what I guessed would be the first abject example of the night. He was young and had something to prove. I bit back my initial sarcastic retort. The over-revved street muscle was stripped to the waist to display the operation scars for lots of new muscle. He was also high on some kind of combat drug, judging by his jitters, and of course his watching peers were implicitly egging him on. In the waistband of his combat trousers was an automatic of a calibre too large to be of any practical use except to intimidate or hunt big game.

‘My name is Jakob Douglas and I have a very important proposition for MacFarlane.’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ the young muscle asked.

I shrugged but said nothing.

‘Well?’ the muscle said, slightly confusing me.

‘Sorry, I thought the question was rhetorical. I don’t know, is the answer.’ The muscle was not quite sure how to take this. I cursed myself. I’d made this guy feel stupid, which would in turn lead to anger, which would in turn lead to me having to kill him.

‘Look, son, I know your story and I know your life. I know what you’re doing and I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to see MacFarlane and make my offer.’ The muscle looked amused. He turned to his audience of fellow toughs.

‘He’s worried about hurting me,’ he said, laughing. None of his friends laughed. I tried again, desperately trying to keep this boy alive for no good reason I could think of.

‘Let me guess, you’ve got some scary-sounding street name like Razors, Deathboy or Heed-the-Ball.’

‘Cordite.’

‘I don’t want to know what it is. I’m just telling you about your life in an attempt to lengthen it and save myself some trouble.’

‘Listen to him, boy,’ the barman said. ‘He’s special forces, or was.’ I said nothing, just watching, hating the inevitability of this.

‘So what? You vets are all piss and wind…’ Cordite found himself looking down the barrel of the Mastodon.

‘Mine’s bigger than yours,’ I said. ‘Now what you’re feeling is peer-group pressure. You can’t back down because you’re being watched by the people you’re trying to impress, and it will be humiliating if you don’t do anything.’

Though I knew it would be worse than humiliating. This boy’s career was over. He was going from predator to prey in the Rigs’ food chain after this. Somewhere in Cordite’s drug-addled mind he realised this too. I read the movement in body language almost before it happened. I felt the world of the bridge bar slowing down until it was like everyone else was moving through thick mud as my reflexes kicked in. I let everyone see that Cordite was going for his gun. I even let him touch the weapon before I pulled the trigger, already shaking my head sadly as I did. The two feet of muzzle flash scorched Cordite’s dermal chest armour. My audio dampening kicked in, compensating for the deafening roar of the oversized revolver. In what seemed like slow motion to me, I watched the bullet pierce the boy’s armour, enter the chest cavity, pick him up off his feet, and then the explosive charge in the bullet detonated, sending liquefied and scorched parts of his internal organs squirting out of the entry wound.

I lowered the enormous smoking pistol as Cordite hit the ground. Many of the other muscle had their hands on their weapons, including the salary man’s guard. The salary man was just watching me with casual interest. Anecdote fodder. I looked down sadly at the corpse I’d just made. Ignoring the threat of the rest of MacFarlane’s security in the bar, I opened the chamber of my revolver, took out the spent round, pocketed the smoking cartridge and replaced it with a new, loose round from my pocket before holstering the pistol.

I looked around the bar. Changing to low light, I saw the table at the back. The fat-looking guy, ostentatiously sporting his wealth, smoking a cigar, decadent make-up, and wearing fashion ware, the two prettiest girls in the bar with him and guards who did not look like they had their heads stuck up their arses.

‘You have your sacrifice,’ I said angrily. ‘You going to listen to me now?’ MacFarlane took a drag of his cigar. The cherry flaring up illuminated the white-painted skin of his fleshy, bearded face, his red-gloss lips and dark eyes.

‘Natural selection,’ he said, nodding towards Cordite’s body. ‘Thank you for culling my herd.’