David Gunn - Maximum Offence

He gestures to three people, who are all that remain of his group.

They walk towards us slowly. If I were them, I wouldn’t trust us either.

His group turns out to be one woman and two men. Mic doesn’t introduce them and I don’t ask. If anything, they look worse than he does.

We give the ejercito a water bottle and march them into the shade of an overhang. Then, while Shil and Franc keep their rifles trained, Neen walks along the line with a shovel and breaks the left ankle of every one.

‘Here,’ he says, giving Mic back his shovel.

‘My pleasure.’

The colonel’s furious. Since it’s already done, I can’t see his point. ‘It’s barbaric,’ he tells me. He is so cross he insists we have the conversation in private.

‘Your decision, sir.’

He scowls at me.

‘We’ve no cuffs, no rope, and you said I couldn’t kill them. With respect, what the fuck was I meant to do?’

Saluting smartly, I leave him with the question.

The ejercito yell at us as we head out. All the usual insults. There are x million suns and x million planets, yet all you ever get is insults about your mother, your sister and your girlfriend. Well, the first two are dead, and I don’t have a third so I’m not too bothered. But I translate them anyway, just for the pleasure of watching Colonel Vijay’s lips tighten.

As the afternoon goes on, Mic trails further and further behind. Until our only choice is, leave him or make camp and wait. When he finally arrives, Shil has a fire burning, Neen has caught what looks like a dog, Franc has gutted the beast, seasoned it with bark and has a stick stuffed up one end and out the other.

We offer the prospectors meat, and give them the wine from Pavel’s flask. It does little good. One dies in the night. He’s old, with skin that looks like cheaply cured leather.

We find him at first light. Back against a rock and face towards the sun. I know, it’s reflection in a mirror . . . light enters Hekati through chevron safety glass and servomotors in the hub shift huge silvered sheets to create the illusion.

It still looks like dawn to me.

He has stripped off his shirt and lesions disfigure his chest. The skin over his gut is purple as if the corruption set in long before he died. Rachel is not the only one to make a sign against the evil eye. Shil does, when she thinks I’m not looking.

Colonel Vijay says it’s the plague.

‘Radiation,’ says Haze.

The colonel stares at him.

‘Know the symptoms,’ Haze says. Embarrassment stops him. ‘It’s unmissable, I guess.’ He looks at Mic and the other two, and his blush gets worse. ‘If you want me to take a look at you, I might . . .’

What? I think. Be able to save them?

Then I realize it’s possible. Haze has more processing power in his skull than most cities. And Paper Osamu gave him the run of her ship’s library that time we asked the U/Free for help. Mind you, look where that got us - here .

Mic says, ‘Thanks, but it’s too late.’

‘What a choice,’ adds the only woman. ‘Sickness or the Silver Fist.’

Colonel Vijay makes himself unfreeze the moment I glance across. Bits of earlier conversations are coming into focus. Spitting, I grind the spit under my heel.

‘May they rot.’

Grinning, Mic does the same.

It’s an old militia curse. Although these days everyone uses it. I have heard it from militia about Death’s Head, Octovians about metalheads, legionnaires about the ferox, and civilians about all of us everywhere.

‘You should keep moving,’ Mic says.

My look is a question.

‘We’re slow,’ he says. ‘And they’ll be tracking us. If we travel together they’ll get you as well.’

‘Move out,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll cover you.’

He tries to work my angle. Am I planning some trick? Sacrificing him in some way that cuts us free? He’s old and he’s ill and he has a right to be worried, but he’s also wrong. We’ve found our ghosts. All we need to do now is capture one.

Stamping up to Colonel Vijay, I salute.

‘Permission to deploy.’

‘ Sven .’

I want this battle. And watching Colonel Vijay, I realize something else. What happened in the hub was disgraceful enough. I want to see how this little shit behaves under fire. A medal for planning Ilseville.

The idea makes me vomit.

‘Rachel,’ I shout.

She jogs over, salutes.

‘Dig in over there.’

We need to cover the floor of this valley from a slope. As Rachel leaves, she begins to pull sections of rifle from slots and pouches on her back and belt, already screwing them together as she jogs towards a scar of red earth.

Now Mic is really staring. ‘What are you?’ he asks.

‘The best,’ says Neen.

There’s best and best . Mic decides we’re renegade militia with five-year-old rifles, used to lording it over new conscripts lucky to have weapons at all. I’m happy to leave it that way.

‘You plan to bury your man?’

‘No point,’ he says. ‘We’ll be joining him soon enough.’ His shrug is that of someone grown used to the idea of his own death. ‘Might as well save our energy.’

With that, he slopes away, weighed down by a pack a six-year-old should be able to carry. I doubt we will see him again and Mic obviously feels the same, because he doesn’t look back and nor do the couple stumbling after him.

‘Sven,’ says colonel Vijay. ‘A word.’

‘Sir . . . ?’

‘What’s wrong with that man?’

‘The air, sir,’ I say. ‘He comes from a planet with more oxygen. Hekati’s atmosphere is thinner.’

The colonel considers this. ‘Do his nosebleeds happen often?’

I consider this in my turn. ‘Some months,’ I say, ‘he bleeds more than Shil, Franc and Rachel put together.’

Colonel Vijay decides he wants to be somewhere else.

The Aux are digging a slit trench across a dry river bed and that is where I find Haze. Climbing out of the trench, he wipes blood from his face.

‘I’m fine, sir.’

Trooper Haze hasn’t been fine the entire time I’ve known him. But his softness is going and he causes less grief than before. Of course, he’s always going to be large and he’s always going to look stupid when he runs. Still, he can now hold a rifle and dig slit trenches with the best of them.

‘Sir,’ says Haze, ‘can I ask something?’

‘Depends what it is.’

He wipes his nose again.

‘Ask,’ I say.

There is a famous triple-sunned planet in the northern spiral, but a single sun is more than enough for me. And for Haze, clearly, because he turns his back on the brightness and stares in the other direction.

He’s listening.

Only Haze doesn’t listen like other people. At least, he doesn’t listen to frequencies the rest of us hear. ‘Can you hear it?’ he asks finally.

I shake my head.

‘ Sir . . . ‘

A lot hangs on that word, and I am going to leave it like that. I’m not about to start barking when he’s the dog I keep to do it for me. Plus, I like it when the kyp in my throat sleeps. Food tastes like food and colours look vaguely normal. I can even wake in the morning without my mouth foul with static.

‘So,’ I say. ‘What can you hear?’

He struggles to put it into words. While I struggle to understand the words he does manage. Insane signal to noise ratio. Off scale. Way too much loopback for a habitat that’s on file as deserted .

I ask Haze if he is certain.

He’s certain. This habitat is on U/Free lists as uninhabited. The prospectors qualify as short-stay visitors and the gangs don’t count, being residual and indigenous. As for Hekati herself, she shows clear signs of abulia , with secondary signs of emotional cri du chat . About one word in five of this makes sense.