Gary Gibson - Final Days

‘How many times have you already checked that damn thing?’ Monk demanded, but Naz only grinned as he snapped the feed assembly shut once more and started to reattach the taser just under the Cobra’s barrel. The Faraday mesh, wrapped around the weapon’s targeting systems, glittered softly.

‘Not enough times, Sergeant,’ Naz replied. ‘Knew a guy back in the day got blown to shit when his gun jammed. Ain’t gonna let the same thing happen to me.’ He slid a magazine into place, studying the weapon with the kind of fascinated admiration that most men Monk knew saved for Orlando’s strip clubs.

‘Islamabad?’ asked Monk.

Another sign, so badly rusted that he could barely make out the words, told him they were coming up on what had been a marsh conservation area. Not that anybody bothered with that kind of thing any more; he checked the local network through his contacts and saw nothing about anything getting conserved. The bushes and cypresses lining the road looked wild and unkempt. The traffic was light: most vehicles on the road this close to the Florida Array were either army or supplies, although they had also passed a few private cars belonging to Array staff.

‘Wasn’t the war, Sergeant,’ Naz replied, settling back to scan the horizon. ‘Was back in LA. Dumb shithead I knew got caught th a house full of pharm goods, and thought he could shoot his way out when the cops turned up on his doorstep. His gun had a systems failure ’cause he didn’t take proper care of it. Had a white coffin at his funeral. Priest in white, wife in white, all three girlfriends and his favourite whore in white. Tackiest shit I’ve seen in my whole life.’

Monk sighed. Naz had wound up working for Array Security and Immigration after spending a year riding shotgun on convoys passing through Pakistan and Mexical, and that only because the alternative had been jail. He wasn’t the kind of guy Monk liked having on his team but, then, Monk didn’t get a say in the matter. So he kept an eye on Naz, waiting for him to make a slip, do or say the wrong thing, anything that might give Monk an excuse to file a report or have the son of a bitch reassigned. But Naz never did give Monk the excuse he needed. He was, to Monk’s boundless irritation, what the military TriView feeds liked to call an ‘exemplary soldier.’

They reached the turn-off to the airfield, a private stretch of road owned by the ASI, and stopped for a couple of moments to let an automated checkpoint remotely query their Ubiquitous Profiles. The truck’s wheels kicked up mud as it pulled off the expressway. A sparkle of light several kilometres ahead betrayed the location of the airfield’s conning tower.

The armoured personnel carrier carrying the rest of the squad had already negotiated the turn-off. Monk knew that in the back of the truck he was driving was a sealed containment unit, newly arrived via the Array from some exotic off-world location. Monk had no idea what might be contained within it, and couldn’t care less. More lichen or mineral samples, probably. Scientist shit, at least. All he’d seen was a steel box with fat wheels and a push-handle, with vacuum seals and hazard warnings printed on all sides. It had been wheeled into the back of the truck by two technicians in hazmat suits.

An icon appeared, floating in the air to Monk’s right, indicating a bright-red alert. He touched it with a finger and information appeared, rendered in chrome letters floating in the air.

‘My UP says there’s been an accident up ahead,’ he muttered, glancing forward. Beyond the APC, the road to the airfield looked empty, but it was hard to be sure with all the rain. ‘About two kilometres up ahead. An automated transport.’

Naz pushed himself up in his seat and peered through the windscreen, his weapon clanking against the glossy black of the dashboard. He cleared his throat noisily, wound the passenger window down and spat out into the rain. ‘I can see all the way to the airfield, Sergeant,’ he replied, ‘and, with all due respect, I don’t see shit.’

‘Maybe there’s a glitch in the monitoring systems,’ Monk muttered, turning the wheel to pull in at the roadside. ‘Call the tower for confirmation. We can wait here till we get the go-ahead.’

‘Confirmation?’ Naz’s expression was incredulous. ‘With all due respect, Sergeant, there’s nothing on the road and I also know you ain’t blind. We need to keep going.’

That was the problem right there, thought Monk; Naz didn’t understand the necessity of sticking to the rules. ‘If the systems says there’s an accident up ahead, then the regulations say we don’t move until told otherwise.’

‘Then the regulations are fucked, Sergeant.’

‘We stay here,’ Monk snapped. ‘Whatever’s up there could be carrying hazardous materials or some other poisonous shit. Search and rescue’ll be here in another couple of minutes, anyway.’

Naz twisted around in his seat to look at him more directly. ‘Look out that window, up ahead of the APC. I know it’s raining, but it ain’t raining that heavily. Between here and the airfield, do you see anything?’

Monk had to admit the road ahead looked empty all the way. He glared at Naz, then reluctantly opened the mike to Rosewood, in the APC, and ordered him to drive up ahead. He watched as the carrier pulled back out into the road and accelerated away.

Despite what he’d said about a glitch, Monk knew the ASI’s mapping satellites were near as damn infallible. If they said there was something blocking the road up ahead, then there was something definitely blocking the road. No surprise if an ex-jailbird grunt like Naz was too dumb to understand that, and yet, as he watched the APC retreat into the distance, Monk couldn’t ignore a growing sense of unease.

It wasn’t like the Mexical ’jacking crews worked this far east, after all. In fact the ASI extended their security envelope far beyond the CTC mass-transit facility, and their present convoy was well within the hundred-kilometre exclusion zone. There were only two tightly controlled air corridors, along with aerial spotter drones programmed to hunt out anyone hiding in the swamps and bayous who shouldn’t be there. Monk himself spent three days a week in charge of a manned ground patrol.

He assuaged his nervousness by checking his armour, layers of Kevlar alternating with artificial spider-silk that could absorb the impact from any number of high-calibre rounds.

Naz muttered something under his breath, clicked his Cobra’s safety off and cracked open the passenger-side door.

‘Hey,’ said Monk, outraged. ‘I didn’t tell you that you could—’

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Naz snapped back, jumping down to the roadside and taking a two-handed grip on his weapon. ‘I think we should at least rec—’

Monk saw Naz’s eyes widen, and glanced forward just in time to see the APC, a hundred metres up ahead, come crashing back down on to its roof, bodies tumbling out of its rear like broken dolls. The sound of the detonation arrived a moment later, a flat bass thump deadened by the rain, branches and dirt pattering down all around their own truck.

He turned back to speak to Naz, but the man wasn’t there anymore.

It occurred to Monk, in that same moment, that their truck might very well be next. He kicked open the door next to him and threw himself out of the cabin, hitting the ground with his shoulder and rolling away, before picking himself up and making straight for the cover of the trees on the same side of the road Naz had been on.

He slid down an embankment until he came to a stop against a tree, then yanked the safety off his own gun, wishing with a mixture of regret and aggravation that he’d checked it as thoroughly as Naz had his own. He tried to uplink to Command, but the security channels were all blocked.