David Gunn - Maximum Offence

Out on the harbour, jet boats skim the waves like flying fish. They don’t seem to be actually doing anything except looking pretty. Apparently, that is enough in this city.

Paper dragons ride the updraught beyond Paper’s window.

Kids, I think. Until I look closer. Adults hang below their vast paper wings, swooping and turning above the promenade. The more daring of the kite riders skim close to the walls of Paper’s building or navigate the gap between where we are and the building beside us.

It’s a narrow gap, and I don’t get it.

No other civilization is this rich. Yet they live in quarters half the size of a kitchen cupboard at Golden Memories, and waste their days playing with children’s toys. If they are so rich, why don’t they give themselves more space, and do something interesting?

They have two thirds of the galaxy to explore. Unless it’s three quarters. General Jaxx told me once, but I wasn’t listening. The end of one spiral is split between the metalheads and us. The U/Free own the rest. Apart from a handful of minor systems claimed by maniacs, cargo cults, and self-anointed messiahs. No one pays them much attention until things get out of hand. Then the U/Free go in and we suddenly have one less star.

I ask Paper how much the U/Free rule these days.

She tells me they rule nothing. They are simply a commonwealth. So I ask her how much of the galaxy they’re busy not ruling and she laughs.

Rolling onto her stomach, she wiggles her bottom at me.

‘Five sixths.’

‘That’s more than three quarters?’

She sighs. So I slap her arse.

And when it’s pink enough, I spit on my fingers and watch her nod in a mirrored headboard. If I don’t want to watch her in that, there is a looking glass on each of the side walls and one glued to the ceiling overhead. She looks good in all of them.

‘Slowly,’ she says.

I take this as proof she is OK with what I have in mind.

A strange way for her to say sorry; but then Paper Osamu is a strange woman. She’s a strange person, full stop. In a city full of strange people. If getting naked is how she wants to say sorry who am I to complain?

‘Shit,’ she says.

Actually, she says it three times.

By then I am almost inside, and she’s begun chewing the back of her hand. So I pull out and she swears at me, tells me no way am I going to put that in there again. She’s wrong. A while later, she looks round.

‘Have you thought more about what I said last time?’

Something about asylum? She doesn’t mean that. ‘Not really,’ I say, because this seems best.

Paper Osamu sighs. ‘It’s dangerous,’ she tells me. ‘It’s going to kill you.’

Ah, got it now.

The U/Free don’t like soft tek. At least not when someone else builds it. I wait for her to repeat her earlier warning. This she does, word for word. It’s dangerous. It’s going to kill me. I haven’t been trained to use it.

Basically, a kyp has set up home in my throat. A kyp’s an illegal symbiont. It can be used to talk direct to AIs, bend a few physical rules. A short cut to the voodoo shit Haze does.

Paper tells me it is lethal.

‘So remember,’ she adds. ‘We don’t want you using it.’

On this mission is what she means. She’s leading up to something. Talking about our mission would be the obvious thought; but that is way too obvious, although it takes me a while to realize that. She’s talking around the mission.

We start with where .

Hekati.

This isn’t a planet at all. It’s a small ring world. Once, it belonged to an asteroid cult. Currently, it’s deserted. When Paper says deserted she means of anyone who matters. Descendants of the original miners still scrabble through slag heaps; also squatters, freeloaders, exiles and illegals.

My kind of people. I’m glad Paper mentions this. I thought she meant empty .

‘When are we leaving?’

A scowl says she is getting to that bit. ‘Within the week . . . You’ll get two days’ warning.’

‘And what are we going to be doing when we get there?’

‘I haven’t been told,’ she says.

Paper’s lying.

So I pull out, stand us both on the tiles and press down until she begins to bend at the knee. Later, as she scrubs her lips with the back of one hand, she looks up at me with her perfect eyes and does that smile.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘Morgan believes you’re a psychopath.’

‘You brought him back?’ She must hear something in my voice. Because her face tightens.

‘Of course I brought him back.’

‘Before Franc?’

‘He still has to approve your mission,’ says Paper. ‘If he doesn’t, there’s no point bringing her back at all.’

As the doors open, the small lake beyond parts in time to stop water flooding the elevator’s only occupant to the waist.

That’s me.

Fuck knows what holds the koi pond back. Perhaps a force field produced by the elevator itself. A path winds between strategically placed rocks, white flowers and huge green leaves. It wanders gently, so I ignore it.

Taking the direct route, I climb three steps at the pond’s edge and ignore a woman in a silk dressing gown hand-feeding crane-flies to a fish the size of my arm. Something about her smile annoys me.

‘Good afternoon,’ she repeats, as if I didn’t hear first time. ‘Will we see you at tomorrow’s party?’

I ignore that too.

‘It will be fun,’ she says. ‘Parties always are.’

Stopping, I turn to stare; then nod at an insect wriggling in her hand. ‘Isn’t that cruel?’

As if I care.

‘Oh no,’ she says, sounding shocked. ‘Of course not.’

‘Must be.’

She looks at me.

Maybe she is trying to work out if I’m simple. Alternatively, maybe she’s wondering if I’m mocking her. Unless she’s wondering if I belong in the atrium of Paper Osamu’s building after all. In which case, we both know the answer to that.

‘They’re not sentient,’ she says, smiling when I scowl. ‘No feelings,’ she explains. ‘No thoughts.’

‘Maybe not in the sense you understand.’

‘Oh no.’ She shakes her head firmly. ‘Not in any sense at all.’

I leave the woman feeding brain-dead insects to fat fish and stamp the hundred paces between Paper’s building and the tower where we’re based. Our building is not as grand as hers. Nevertheless, it is still taller than any building in Farlight.

‘Your ears,’ says the lift. ‘Can I recommend . . . ?’

‘Seventy-sixth floor,’ I tell it.

‘Yes . . . Now, about your ears.’ Apparently, most U/Free wear grommets . It can order these for me now.

‘Just take me up.’

‘But you have a headache.’

‘And you’re making it worse.’

When it starts again on the ear modification, I punch a fist-shaped bruise in its shiny metal side, then threaten to rip open its service panel, snap the wires and piss in its fuse box.

The lift tells me violence never solved anything.

Shows what it knows. And that reminds me why I miss my SIG-37. You can get a decent argument going with that gun. Only, the SIG’s back at Death’s Head HQ. There are good reasons. At least, that is what the general says.

Paper Osamu thinks the gun encourages my tendencies.

Since, presumably, she is employing me for my tendencies , I cannot see the problem. Kicking the elevator on my way out makes it blink. All the lights go out, come back on, go out and come back on again. It occurs to me that maybe no one else kicks machinery round here.

‘Violence never-’ It starts to say.

So I kick it again. ‘Go,’ I tell it. ‘While your fuses still function.’