Coward Read online

  This story takes place between the events of Veteran and the events of War in Heaven.

  With thanks to Ceri Williams for proof reading. The mistakes remain mine own and are no reflection on Ceri’s ability.

  Tailgunner screamed. He howled up at the wooden roof of the Marae. The carved faces of his ancestors leered down at him. Tailgunner’s bare foot slammed into the wooden planks as his chant began. He made the ritualistic movements, slapped his own flesh and stuck out his tongue, making his ta moko, the sacred tattoos that showed his identity through his lineage, covered face as grotesque and frightening as he could.

  He moved through the sacred meeting place of the Marae, performing the complex haka, making mock strikes with his taiaha, a wooden bladed club. His feathered cloak billowed with each violent but carefully-choreographed movement. The cloak was a sign of his station as his whānau’s, or family’s, tohunga, shaman.

  He stamped down his foot and thrust the wooden spear point of the taiaha forward, tongue stretched down as far as it could go, eyes wide in apparent fury.

  “Ssssshhh.” The voice sounded like the crackling of dried leaves. Despite the fact that Tailgunner had mana, that he was one of the toa, the warrior class, he still felt his blood run cold. It felt like a dead snake had just wound its way up his spine. Slowly he turned round and looked at the hole in the floor of the Marae that had not been there a moment before. He saw the rope that lead down into the darkness.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it?” the cold, dry, dead voice asked. This shouldn’t, couldn’t be happening here, Tailgunner thought. Not in his sanctum. He swallowed several times, and had to remind himself who he was and who his people were, before he stepped towards the hole and took the rope.

  * * *

  Call sign Mother wondered if she was going to drown in her own mech. Hermetically sealed my arse, she thought as the highly corrosive salt acid liquid that could only laughingly be referred to as water dripped into the cockpit of her Bismarck-class heavy mech.

  Mother was old for a soldier, which pretty much meant old for anyone these days. She was in her mid-thirties and was the matriarch of their whānau. She, along with her lover, call sign Tailgunner, led the family, or cavalry patrol as the mainly pakeha, or white, officers in the army preferred to describe it.

  Mother was like most of the people on Lalande: she had the squat, powerfully-built endomorphic body type that came from living on a high-G world. Her skeleton and musculature were all cybernetically enhanced to help with the added strain from the 1.5G. There was little if any fat on her powerful frame, and her face, once pretty, was lined and aged more than it should have for her age.

  Her complexion was a mix of the light brown of her Maori heritage and the sallow tones of the permanent subterranean dweller. Half her face and most of the skin that was visible on her arms and hands were covered in the complex, intricate and beautiful spiral and plant like patterns of her ta moko tattoos. They told the story of who she was, for those who could read them.

  Her thick, wavy dark brown hair was tied back in a ponytail just above the four plugs in the base of her neck that hardwired her into the quadruped heavy mech. Her eyes were the matt black lenses of all serving soldiers and veterans.

  Mother propped herself up from the body-formed couch she was strapped into to look back at Tailgunner’s massive, powerful form lying almost head-to-head with her in his own couch. He was hardwired into the mech as well but his main job was sensors, comms and weapons – when he was here. At the moment her lover was somewhere else. He’d picked a great time to disappear into the net, or maybe go to his sanctum.

  Mother sucked air in between her teeth angrily as she glanced over at the small stream of water that was running through the armoured roof and dripping down onto the floor. She would need to speak to Dog Face about this. They might not have used biological or chemical weapons yet; that didn’t mean they wouldn’t in the future.

  In her Internal Visual Display she brought up a three dimensional topographical representation of the bottom of the cavern sea they were currently submerged in. The representation was formed with information gathered from the thermal imagers and the various other passive scans they were running. She could make out call sign Dog Face’s mech about a hundred feet off her left flank. Dog Face called his bipedal Landsknecht mech Kopuwai. It was named for a dog-headed monster from Maori myth, or history, depending on your perspective.

  A similar distance off her right flank was Dog Face’s street brother, call sign Big Henry. Whether they were related or not was irrelevant: they’d come up together. Big Henry was the most endomorphic of the endomorphic. He was very short and squat. His braided goatee beard did nothing to dissuade people from comparing him to creatures from old earth pakeha fairy tales. His Landsknecht mech was named Whakatau, after a tiny but vengeful warrior.

  Call sign Strange’s Steel Mantis class scout mech was harder to make out. It was in the shallow water closer to the shore of the cavern sea somewhere in front of Mother and Tailgunner’s mech.

  Strange was the most tragic member of the whānau. They’d found her nearly feral on the streets of Moa City, traumatised, and judging from the scars on her body she had been a victim all her life. Maori or pakeha, it didn’t matter; she was whānau, one of the Toa, and to harm her one would have to kill the rest of the family. Strange never spoke except to Tailgunner, and the only thing that bothered Mother about that was that she could not get Strange to talk to her. People had died messing with Strange, at her hands and at the hands of the rest of the family.

  Strange had named her mech Atua Kahukahu. It was the name of the malignant angry spirit of a dead child.

  All of them had been street kids, orphans of the war and mining accidents. They’d done what the needed to survive – theft, dealing, hurting people, killing them when they had no choice. As soon as they could pass they had gotten jobs in the mines, providing the raw materials for the war against Them. A war they practically lived on the front line of.

  The mining mechs they piloted had been stripped down to provide components for the fighting mechs. Dog Face had worked out that they’d lost almost as many to mining accidents as they had in the war after they had been drafted. The Darwinian environment of the mines meant that they either got good at piloting mechs or they got dead.

  By the time they got drafted they knew their way round a mech. The Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles were the obvious choice, or would have been if they’d had a choice. The Rifles were an armoured cavalry regiment within New Zealand’s colonial self-defence force, or Ngāti Tumatauenga, the Tribe of the God of War, as the Maori called it.

  Tailgunner had used his share of the whānau’s ill-gotten gains to get himself some rudimentary ware, so that when they had been drafted he was able, along with some bribery and threats, to hack the system to make sure they stayed together. The command structure was probably aware of this but chose to turn a blind eye, as Mother and Tailgunner ran a tight unit.

  With a thought Mother changed the position of one of the sensor fins; the tip of it just broke the surface of the salty acidic almost-water. She enlarged the window in her internal visual display for the viz feed from the makeshift periscope and scanned the enormous cavern.

  Ahead of her she could make out the barren rocky shore and the darkened, arch-like cavern entrances that she knew lead to New Dunedin. New Dunedin had been lost two months ago to Them. The whole place should be crawling with Them. Their Berserk bioborgs had submarine capability, as did their Walkers, the biological equivalents of the mechs, but where were They? And where was Tailgunner? If he was playing virtual Rugby again she would kill him. Mother knew he would not be, but shouting at him for something would be quite cathartic.

  * * *

  This should
not be happening. This hole should not be here, Tailgunner thought as he climbed down. The simulation was so real that the earth all around him felt and smelt like actual earth. Or at least how he imagined it would feel and smell like back on Earth, in Ao Te Aroa, the Land of Long White Clouds, or New Zealand as the pakeha had renamed it.

  As amazed as he was by the programming, the most frightening thing was that his secure and hidden sanctum had been hacked, violated on a huge scale. What he did not understand was why he was not sending bad makutu, attack programmes in the form of violent sorcery, down into the hole. Why was he climbing down, he wondered, and what was that smell, animal-like, but he couldn’t place it?

  Tailgunner’s second question was answered first. At the bottom of the hole was an earthen passageway of hard-packed dirt. Torches pushed into the ground provided a flickering orange light. Tailgunner realised that the whole scene did not have the high-end animation look of most of the net, including his own sophisticated sanctum Marae site. The tunnel, the flickering flame looked photo-real, felt, smelled and even tasted very real. Fear, curiosity and excitement warred within the normally calm mind of the powerfully-built Maori.

  The passage was dry, which seemed to contradict the cold, clammy feel of the atmosphere. Tailgunner could see his breath. An impressive bit of programming detail, he thought. He felt lighter here, as if he was moving through Earth-standard gravity. He wrapped the Kahu Huruhuru feathered cloak tighter around himself and walked forwards.

  He could make out some sort of house, the sort of wooden A-frame that had been used in Maori villages a long time before the Final Human Conflict. Standing in front of it where two huge and inhuman shapes. He readied his taiaha and crept forward like a warrior. A very cautious warrior.

  They looked like nine feet tall, powerfully-built Maori warriors, their godly whakapapa, or genealogy, carved into their mahogany like flesh in grooves of spirals and patterns of ta moko. Their bodies were not endomorphic in any way; they were tall, strong and proud, for they had grown up free of the oppression of heavy gravity. Their heads were the heads of fearsome crested lizards. They hissed angrily at his approach and shifted weapons that looked like handsomely carved, mighty two-handed versions of wahaika clubs.

  They bared their fangs. Venom dripped from them. Their hissing was a non-verbal challenge. Tailgunner readied his makutu programmes and his taiaha, itself a manifestation of a powerful attack/defence programme. He knew them and he knew where he was and who had violated his sanctum.

  * * *

  Mother could not make up her mind if it was psychosomatic, or if the acrid smoke coming from the corroding metal in the cab was actually making her throat sore despite her inbuilt filter system for poisonous and hazardous gases and chemicals. Whether she could breathe it or not, she was not enjoying the stench of living in the acrid air of the Mech’s cramped cab.

  The resolution on the sensor fin was not up to much, despite her trying to beef it up, but she could make out the multihued strata of the smooth hard rock that made up the cavern. The cavern had been formed millennia ago by the now receding salt glaciers.

  New Dunedin was closer to the Night Side than the Sun Side in the habitable Twilight Strip of the tidally locked Lalande 2. Temperatures were often cold enough to freeze liquid with even a very high salt content.

  They attacked from the Night Side. Them bioborgs, after all, had been known to operate in vacuum. Sub-zero temperatures were no problem to them. That was how they had taken New Dunedin, an armoured push out of frozen caverns that humans had to take a lot of technology into just to survive, let alone fight in.

  Nothing, nothing at all. Mother knew that a passive scan was nowhere near as comprehensive as active scans, but if They were still here she should be able to see something. Where the fuck is Tailgunner, she thought angrily, resisting the urge to turn around in the couch and glare at him pointlessly? Making sense of the sensor information was his job.

  She did not feel Them. Instinct was a long way from infallible but she had gotten use to the anticipation of combat and she, like many vets, got to know when they were about to get into a firefight. This did not feel like one of those times.

  “Mother to Bossman,” she sub-vocalised over the secure tacnet. As always she mentally added the word prick after the word Bossman. “Everything we’re seeing says that they’ve pulled out.” Because you use your mech element for scouting, she silently added sarcastically. It was probably something that Major “Arsehole” Martins thought passed for innovative military thinking as opposed to what it was: a new and interesting way to rust major military assets.

  “This is Bossman,” Of course he had chosen his own call sign – let the grunts know where they stand. “Maintain comms discipline. Where’s Tailgunner? I thought he was running the net?” Brilliant, Mother thought. Do you want me to answer or maintain comms discipline?

  “Can we send in a remote?” Mother risked reprimand by asking. She was aware of Strange non-verbally keying her comms. It was Strange’s way of letting Mother know that she was happy to go and scout on dry land. Mother texted a negative reply back.

  “Sergeant, this is Bossman. You are jeopardising this whole mission with poor comms discipline.” Mother shook her head scornfully. “Why is Tailgunner not running comms?” Bossman asked. This time Mother did glance behind her. Because apparently he’s got better things to do, she didn’t say.

  “But can we send in a remote?” Or just sit here until we finally corrode away, she silently added.

  “Negative, sanitise the area. Rain fire down on it,” the Major ordered. Mother wished she could have been surprised but she was not. At a time of war, when resources were at a premium, he wanted to fire the most expensive payload in the most expensive munitions they had. Sure, “rain fire” sounded dramatic, but it was expensive drama that could be better spent when they actually had something to aim at. Mother wondered how this guy had got the job and why he had not fucked off back to Earth and just become a Fortunate Son.

  “Is he fucking kidding?” Dog Face growled over the patrol’s tacnet.

  “That’s enough,” Mother said over the patrol’s tacnet before switching back to the company tacnet. “Confirm orders,” she requested. She knew she was going to have to get Tailgunner to hack into Command and make sure the actual conversation was not changed when Major Martins’ superiors reamed him out and he decided to play cover-arse.

  “I said sanitise the area, Sergeant,” Bossman’s more insistent sub-vocal command came back. Mother used her thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of her nose. She had been using mild amphetamines for the seventy hours she’d had her mech stood on the bottom of the cavern sea. Not enough to turn her into a jittery, claustrophobic mess but enough to make her feel like hot knives were being pushed into the nerve endings behind her machine-filled eyeballs.

  “Acknowledged,” she muttered. She knew she was going to take this out on Tailgunner later on.

  As she thought this he started to thrash in his couch. Startled, Mother’s cybernetically-wired and drug-enhanced reactions almost had her out of the couch before the straps reacted to the sudden movement and tightened up. Mother calmed herself down. Tailgunner continued to thrash; blood seeped out his ears and at the corner of the black, hardened plastic lenses that replaced his eyes.

  Mother had seen this before. He was fighting – and getting a kicking – with someone else in the net. Who and why she did not know. Mother considered unplugging him, but annoyance aside, if he had done this then he had done it with a reason, and she had to trust that he knew what he was doing and could handle himself. That was hard; she wanted to make sure he was safe and then bawl him out.

  * * *

  His fight with Moko-hiku-waru and Tu-tangata-kino, the two lizard-headed guardians, was not going well. Tailgunner reflected on this as he hit the ground bloodied and broken. Again. He spat out blood. This was a hell of a site, he thought as he tried to cope with the pain and climb to his feet. Before he could
he felt powerful, clawed hands wrap around his tattooed biceps and lift him. He struggled – that was his nature – but he could not break their grip. For an epiphany, a religious experience that all hackers and signal people both want and fear, it was proving very painful.

  Moko-hiku-waru and Tu-tangata-kino picked him up and carried him into the A-frame house. There was only a small amount of pale light in the house. It smelt old in a way that Tailgunner did not quite understand. There was also the smell of the earth, but wrong somehow, as if he could smell the corruption of decay underneath it.

  Things hung from the ceiling. Tailgunner did not want to investigate too much, as the shapes looked faintly human and were hung like the pictures of drying meat he had seen on history sites on the net when he and the rest of the whānau were trying to find out who they were.

  He was flung to the ground again, which elicited more blood-spitting and pain. He found himself looking at two bare feet with paper-like pale skin stretched over them. He looked up at the Maori who stood over him. He was gaunt and cadaverous. The contrast of his nearly-white skin and the black of his somewhat sinister, Tailgunner thought, ta moko gave him the look of a tattooed corpse.

  “It’s not necessary to win,” came the voice like dry leaves. “It is necessary to fight.” Miru, the Ruler of the Night, looked down at Tailgunner. “Somehow it always seems to be a surprise to you people when your summons works.”

  * * *

  Mother’s Bismarck-class heavy mech was called Apakura, the Woman Who Urged Revenge. When there had been more of them, when they had been a gang rather than a whānau, they had called themselves Ngāti Apakura the Tribe of the Woman Who Urged Revenge. They wore patches on their jackets, worked the mining mechs and ran wild in the streets of Moa City. They still wore the patches, but most of the tribe was dead now.

  Tailgunner was lying still now. Still breathing. Mother tried to put him out of her mind as she plotted a firing solution for the missiles, which strictly speaking should have been his job. Schematics from the smart link to the weapons system showed her where the missiles would impact with the greatest spread.