thrills, Mudge.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘And Trace’s office? That would have been a shitty way for us to die after doing the things we’ve done. What were you thinking?’
‘I don’t know that I was. I wanted to see if we could get away with anything. Somehow I knew we’d be all right.’
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Caution was as much a part of these operations as risk, if not more so.
‘Look, man, I’ll be all right. I’ll reign it in. Take the right drugs to calm it down, okay?’ I nodded.
Mudge got up, belched loudly and scratched himself before nicking another bottle of beer and leaving my compartment. For the first time ever I found myself unable to trust him.
Still he’d left his white-noise generator, which gave me the chance to practise the trumpet without being assassinated.
By day six we’d almost managed to get rid of the smell of the anti-corrosion treatment. Day six was mostly going over weapons and personal loads that we’d already gone over on Earth. We were just trying to maximise what we took while staying under the weight allowance.
I don’t know about the others, but I was becoming tenser as the drop got closer. There were just too many unknowns and the drop was so dangerous that it would be easy to die before we even got planet side. Tempers seemed only a little more frayed. That may have been helped by half of us being loved up. Morag still wasn’t talking to me. She seemed a little less hostile, however.
Before we left the Freetown Camp Merle had kicked up a huge fuss about getting his gear back. Cat had brought some stuff for him with us but he’d insisted on getting his own gear back. There had been some violence involved. When he got his stuff I could see why.
Merle was down on the cargo bay cleaning his weapons on top of one of the crates. He was obviously aware of my presence but was ignoring me. All his gear was custom and expensive. Like Cat he had a Void Eagle set up in a Tunnel Rat configuration with the Tunnel Rats’ insignia on the handgrip.
He also had a CEC plasma rifle. Most plasma weapons are big and heavy and tend to be used as squad support weapons by military units from countries that can afford to equip their people with them. I didn’t like them because they were semi-automatic and, particularly for a support weapon, I preferred something that could lay down a lot of fire, like a railgun. Still their one-shot kill capability was impressive. Similar to the weapon that Rolleston carried, the CEC was only slightly heavier than most standard assault rifles. It was also very expensive.
‘Those what I think they are?’ I asked, pointing at two ten-millimetre pistols lying next to the Void Eagle. I climbed down from the catwalk to get a better view.
‘Twin Hammerli Arbiters. They were our grandpappy’s. Cat was pissed when I got them but I was always a better shot. I’m pretty sure he stole them. He certainly took enough lives with them.’ He spoke without looking up at me.
The Arbiters were supposed to be the most accurate and were definitely the most expensive fully automatic, production ten-millimetres ever made. I’d never seen one before, let alone two. Their grips were moulded to the shooter’s hands and the barrels seemed to slant forward, which was something to do with their recoil compensation.
‘Can I handle them?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, still not looking up from the somewhat archaic-looking rifle he was cleaning. I was a little put out but could understand why he didn’t want anyone touching them. Had they been mine I certainly wouldn’t have been parachuting into a corrosive environment with them.
‘That’s a hunting rifle, isn’t it?’ Again the rifle looked expensive. Parts of it were made out of wood. It also looked slightly oversized.
‘It’s a gauss rifle version of an old Mauser customised by Holland amp; Holland of London,’ he said, still not looking up.
‘Never heard of them.’ I shrugged.
‘No, you wouldn’t have. I never fancied lugging around one of the bigger rail sniper weapons for accurate work. This nearly matches their range and is more accurate. I can fire it semi-automatic or single shot for accuracy with a secondary electronic reload mechanism.’
‘Why?’ I may not have liked being in the military, despite what Mudge thought, but we all liked the toys and I was intrigued.
‘Because a self-loading system will always knock you off slightly. Obviously its smartlinked but it also has an on-board gyroscope. I can switch between hyper and subsonic for silent kills and it fires a. 465-calibre penetrator round which will put most people and Them on the ground. The wood furniture is cut from Lalande ghostwood, which is very dense, hard-wearing and of course resistant to the corrosion. It’s also got a smart trigger.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said. Smart triggers enabled you to fire a weapon with a thought. They required an awful lot of discipline to avoid negligent discharges and were highly illegal. Still there had always been rumours of them being used by the darker black ops types. Merle held the weapon up. It didn’t have a trigger.
‘The very action of pulling the trigger can affect your aim. Your Grey Lady’s a sniper. She’ll have a smart trigger on her weapon, I can almost guarantee it.’ I started to ask him something. ‘No, you can’t handle it. It’s probably worth more than all the money you’ve made in your life. You didn’t come here to talk about my guns. What do you want?’
‘Well I didn’t, but they’re still pretty impressive.’
He finally looked up at me. ‘Have you come to ask about my intentions regarding Mudge? I’ll still kill him if he fucks us up.’
‘Fuck that. He can look after himself. How’d you hijack that ship?’ I asked. He regarded me impassively just long enough for his strangely intense implant eyes to start making me feel uncomfortable.
‘Why?’
‘Curiosity.’
‘I’m a very private person, your intrusion the other night notwithstanding.’
‘Yeah, I get that. You don’t like playing with others, do you?’
‘Nobody else around, then you’ve less chance of getting killed over somebody else’s stupid shit.’
‘Or have someone dragging your arse out of your own stupid shit. But my question?’
‘Is it relevant to anything? See, I can’t think of a single good reason to tell you.’
‘You want and need our trust,’ I said.
He leaned back and studied me a bit more closely.
‘This a price?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘Okay. I had an automated program that I could plug into the ship’s systems. It would crack the security and remote-pilot the ship to… somewhere else.’
So he’d been working with others. That made sense.
‘How’d you get in? Because you didn’t do it in the camp – the security’s far too high for EVA.’
‘Maybe if I’d had the best stealth stuff, but yeah, the camp was more trouble than it was worth. Just outside the camp’s security perimeter I had another craft match acceleration and trajectory.’
‘Okay. Difficult flying but okay. So how’d you get on board?’
‘I compressed-gas-squirted ship to ship,’ he told me.
‘Bollocks.’ Space was extremely big; it only needed the slightest variation in speed and he would have missed. The maths alone involved in something like that was staggering. The margins for error were tiny. He shrugged again, giving the impression that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.
‘Spacesuit set up for stealth. I had the maths on a program in my internal systems.’
‘What distance?’
‘Fifteen thousand metres.’
‘The slightest miscalculation,’ I said. I had absently picked up one of a pair of punch daggers and was toying with it. It looked like it was made from black glass. It had some kind of channel leading to the point of the blade.
‘So I didn’t miscalculate. Don’t touch that; it injects a pretty virulent neural toxin.’
For fuck’s sake, I thought, who was this guy? There was no doubt about it – if he played with us then he’d be
