Coward Read online

  “Shit,” Mother muttered. She knew she had pushed Martins too hard and this was too public to get rid of him. Martins and the four MPs started to head over to them.

  “What do you want us to do?” Big Henry asked.

  “Let’s see what they’ve got to say,” Mother said.

  “They’re not taking you,” Dog Face growled.

  “Everyone salute and play nice. That means attention,” Mother said.

  “Then they’ll know something’s up,” Dog Face growled. The five of them tried to suppress smiles as Martins reached them. This probably infuriated the Major further. The five of them snapped to attention and saluted as smartly as they could manage. Martins glared at Mother but turned to Tailgunner.

  “Sergeant Harrison,” he said to the MP sergeant. “Place Corporal Ruru under arrest.” Ruru was Tailgunner’s real name. All of the Whanau started to protest, though Strange did it silently.

  “Quiet!” Mother snapped. “What’s he charged with?”

  “Terrorism,” Martins answered. He seemed serious. Tailgunner smiled; Big Henry and Dog Face started laughing. Martin nodded to the MPs. They stepped forwards nervously and suddenly the smiles disappeared.

  “Keep your fucking hands off me,” Tailgunner told the two MPs reaching for him. They hesitated.

  “Come on, Tails, don’t make this any harder than it already is,” Sergeant Harrison said.

  “Are you resisting?” Martins asked.

  “I want to know what you’re talking about,” Tailgunner demanded.

  “We have received a report that you attempted to attack the new computer defences put in place by the Free Earth Government.”

  “Who from?” Mother asked. Martins gave her a look of contempt. Mother resisted the urge to reach out and snap the foolish little prick’s neck. “From the Squadrons? Are they even part of our command structure?”

  “They are our government Sergeant,” Martins said, as if he was explaining something to a particularly stupid child.

  “You’d better keep a civil tongue in your head,” Big Henry told the Major.

  “That’s enough,” Mother admonished, but Big Henry kept on staring at Martins.

  “Look, everyone must’ve tried to attack that thing. It just swept though all our defences as if it didn’t exist. To be honest I didn’t have time to do much. I didn’t know what it was.”

  “So your defence for terrorism is ignorance?” Martins’ tone dripped with sarcasm.

  “No, it’s doing his job, you fucking idiot!” Dog Face spat. Martins swung on him.

  “Arrest the freak as well!” The MPs were still hesitating. “Now!”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Mother said.

  “C’mon, Mother, don’t be difficult,” Harrison was all but pleading.

  “I don’t accept the charge and I don’t accept the authority in this matter,” Mother said.

  “This is mutiny!” Martins was drooling, he was so angry. Mother shrugged.

  “Whatever, but face facts, your people have been drinking for eight hours straight. Mine haven’t.” She leant in close to Martins. He in turn leant away from her. “You lack the ability to enforce your will.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t noticed the Company at my command?” Martins pointed out.

  “Perhaps you haven’t noticed our mechs,” Dog Face pointed out.

  “Besides,” Mother began. “We’ve fought with most of these guys for a long time. I don’t think you’ll find many takers. So why don’t you just fuck off? We can sort this out when we know more about what’s going on.”

  “Sort this out! Sort this out! Mutiny, insubordination, cowardice – they’ll take you out behind the latrines and fucking shoot you!”

  “Cowardice?” Mother was genuinely confused.

  “You disobeyed a direct order and sent in a probe after sanitising the area. You lacked the courage to follow my hard charging orders!”

  Mother, Tailgunner, Dog Face, Big Henry and Strange all stared at Martins and then as one started laughing. Even Strange, though her laughter was eerie and silent.

  “You had us hide in a sea of acid for seventy two hours,” Mother managed through what would have been tears if she had real eyes. “You wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer’s money on a plasma strike…” Mother found herself unable to continue, she was laughing so hard.

  “Fucking arrest that ridiculous tattooed bitch as well!” Martins was practically screaming now. It is not as easy to kick people in the face in 1.5G as it is in lower gravity. Dog Face managed it. Martins presumably had subcutaneous armour like the rest of them but he also had a fleshy face. The reinforced cartilage in his nose held but blood still exploded out of it and the force of the impact made his face ripple. The force of the kick picked him up off his feet, the higher G pulling him painfully to the ground. He was unconscious before he landed.

  Harrison rather gamely tried to draw his sidearm. Mother stepped forward and locked up his wrist, causing Harrison to double over. She took the pistol from his hand with ease. The other MPs started going for their sidearms.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Tailgunner said. They stopped. Dog Face was growling and drooling. Strange started to growl as well. Mother let Harrison go. She ejected the magazine on his pistol, worked the slide ejecting the chambered round and threw the gun back to him.

  “This is on us. Get out of here,” she said to the MP. Harrison gave it some thought and nodded. He and the four MPs turned and headed off. They left Martins where he had landed. Mother turned on Dog Face.

  “What the fuck’ you thinking?!” she demanded.

  “He did the right thing,” Tailgunner said. “They can’t speak to you like that.” Mother was only slightly mollified.

  “What now?” Big Henry asked.

  “Prep the mechs,” Mother said as she started walking away from them.

  “We’ve prepped the mechs already!” Big Henry shouted back.

  “Prep them again! Get them ready to move!” Mother shouted back. She was surprised when Strange joined her. She glanced down at the girl but Strange was just looking ahead, the expression on her pale features unreadable.

  * * *

  Max was sat on his sofa, naked, his head in his hands. It had all seemed so great for a moment. An end to the war, then a long party, and then slowly try to find a life without the conflict. How quickly that ended. He had drunk too much. Sobriety and the hangover had seemed to accompany the bad news from Earth. The headache made him feel like his head splitting open would be a blessed relief.

  Mother all but kicked the door down. Max jumped, he looked around for a weapon before the visual information forced its way through his hangover and he registered that it was only Mother and Strange.

  “What the fuck?” he managed weakly.

  “We’re going AWOL,” Mother announced.

  “That’s nice. What the fuck’s it got to do with me?”

  “The caches.” Suddenly Max was even more and painfully sober.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking…”

  Mother was across the room, yanked Max off the sofa by his throat and rammed him into the wall. She was all but nose-to-nose with him.

  “Don’t fucking insult my intelligence! Everyone knows you’ve been siphoning off our supplies and hiding them through out the T.O.O!” She snarled at him and then looked down. “Why are you naked?” She suddenly let go of him and backed off.

  “We thought it was the end of the war,” he shrugged. Mother was not sure she completely understood the connection. “Okay, let’s assume what you say is correct. What’s it to you?”

  “I want the coordinates.”

  Max started laughing. “Who wouldn’t? So fucking what? Whoa!” Mother had drawn her Personal Defence Weapon, unfolded it and Max had found himself looking down its barrel. “What the fuck are you doing?!”

  “Look, I could beat it out of you, you know I could, but I don’t have much time.”

&nb
sp; “So you’re going to fucking kill me? We’re supposed to be friends!”

  “It’s you or the whanau, Max. I’m sorry. Don’t die for profit you’d never see anyway,” Mother said earnestly. Max looked from the barrel of the PDW to Strange. The girl was leaning against the wall, her head cocked at an angle, watching Max. She had a slight smile on her face. Max knew she would really kill him.

  “Fucking Ngati Apakura, it’s just you guys and fuck everyone else, huh?”

  “For what it’s worth, Max, I’m sorry it came to this.”

  “Fuck you! What, the war’s not over so you’re going to run? Fucking cowards!”

  “Max, the caches.”

  “I’ll text them to you now.” He spat bitterly.

  “No.” Max looked confused. “Write them down. Just the coordinates.”

  “Write them? I can just text them…”

  “Do it.”

  “You’re fucked in the head, you know that?” he snarled, and then started looking around for something to write with and on. Everything was electronic so this was easier said than done. Mother turned to Strange.

  “You stay here with him. When he’s finished, bring it over to me.”

  Strange nodded and then Mother walked out of Max’s office. Max turned to look at the girl. He had a lot of weight and years on her. He had grown up hard like everyone else around here and seen his fair share of combat. Even then he was not sure he could take Strange. She had been taught to fight by Tailgunner and Mother and he had seen her in fights in the mess before – she was an unrestrained psycho. Besides, even if he could take her, he knew that the whanau would kill him. He found a crate marker and some packing material and began to score info down on it.

  “I think you should write the real coordinates down,” Strange whispered in his ear. Max jumped again. She was stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. He had not heard a thing and she never spoke!

  “I was,” he stammered. Max had no idea why he was so frightened. Strange just shook her head.

  * * *

  Mother tried to ignore the sounds of Max’s screams as she made her way across the pa towards the mechs. A number of her fellow soldiers were looking at the prefab where Max’s offices were but nobody wanted to get involved, yet.

  As she made it back to the mechs Martins had just pushed himself up on his arms and was trying to climb to his feet. She put the full force of her body behind the punch. She felt armour crack beneath her knuckles as she contacted and knocked him out again. The sound of the blow seemed to echo around the cavern.

  “We’ll give him brain damage, we keep hitting him that hard,” Big Henry commented.

  “What brains?” Mother muttered under her breath.

  “Where we taking the mechs?” Dog Face asked. “You know they’ll come after us.”

  “I’m hoping they’ll have other priorities, but we’re going down the Dunny.” Dog Face and Henry just stared at her.

  “So we’re not taking the mechs?” Dog Face asked, fearing the answer.

  “We’re taking the mechs.”

  “What are you talking about? Mechs can’t climb down the Dunny,” Henry said.

  “Then we’re going to end up crushed corpses in a pile of crumpled metal at the bottom, aren’t we? Which is no different to what we’ll be if they catch us and court martial us.”

  “We’ll get a nice last meal,” Big Henry said, but went back to his prep after Mother glared at him.

  “Where’s Tailgunner?” Mother found herself asking again.

  * * *

  Tailgunner was in his own personal net. It was largely just a lot of memory space in a solid-state memory cube. He saw it as a large black void. It was empty except for the net that Miru had given him. It was completely cut off from the planetary net.

  Tailgunner floated in the nothingness, looking down on the glowing net. The part of the black wave programme that he had captured looked like a huge, vicious and somewhat demonic, very angry, black eel. It was thrashing in the net, trying to break free, but the net was holding.

  Tailgunner did not want to get too close to the thing, as ridiculous as that was, as if space had any real meaning in here. Tailgunner had also been very careful about analysing the black eel programme. He did not want to be in direct contact with it and risk contamination or assimilation of his systems. He did not want to risk breaking the containment programme that was Miru’s eel net.

  What he had found, however, disturbed him greatly. The programme was incredibly powerful, with an architecture that he did not quite understand, that somehow seemed alien to him. It had been designed to take control of every system it encountered. In short it may be the inoculation programme that the Free Earth Squadrons had described but it also seemed to be like the programme the Free Earth Squadrons had claimed that the Fifth Columnists had used to take control of the Sol System’s net.

  Tailgunner jacked out.

  * * *

  Mother was stood over Tailgunner as he lay on the couch in Apakura.

  “Is it important?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “At this very moment?”

  “Probably, but I don’t think I can figure it right now.”

  “Then we have other things to do,” she said. Tailgunner nodded and sat up, pulling the jacks from the back of his skull.

  “I have a piece of the programme that appears to have taken over the net,” Tailgunner said. Mother stopped to listen but said nothing. “I caught it in a containment programme that Miru gave me. I don’t understand the containment programme and I don’t understand the black wave that took over our net. I do know that Miru wanted us to stay away from it.”

  “Okay. Can we do anything about this now?” Mother asked again.

  “No, but I think that’s the terrorism they were talking about. There’s probably people on the way here now but they control the net, so I can’t check, can’t communicate with anyone else. Can’t use the pa’s automated defences. We’re clean, the mechs are clean, and that’s it. We’re blind, deaf and dumb.”

  “Okay. We’re going down the Dunny,” Mother said. Tailgunner gaped at her.

  “You mean figuratively?” he asked, a worried expression on his face.

  “Mother!” It was Big Henry from outside. Both of them got up and headed for the Belly Hatch.

  * * *

  Tailgunner and Mother slid out of the Apakura’s belly hatch and dropped to the gravel. Big Henry, Dog Face and a number of other people who had been milling around were watching a figure that was moving towards the mechs, staggering as if drunk.

  “Is that Strange?” Tailgunner asked, and magnified his image. Strange was walking towards them, grinning.

  “Is she high?” Dog Face growled. “Jesus.” Strange’s hands were bloody up past her wrists. She reached up to caress her face and smeared blood on it. She reached the four of them. There was murmuring amongst the other soldiers hanging around, looking at Strange’s odd behaviour, blood dripping from her hands.

  Strange walked up to Mother and took hold of one of her hands, smearing it in blood. She put the bloody paper with the coordinates for the caches in them, and something else. Mother looked appalled as she held up a grisly plastic component. Tailgunner stared at it as Strange ecstatically caressed her face with her bloody hands.

  “You cut out his memory chip?” Tailgunner said, aghast. Strange smiled.

  “You killed Max?” Mother said a little too loud. A ripple of conversation went through the other nearby soldiers.

  “You knew that they would get the coordinates from Max’s head when they wanted them,” Tailgunner said. Strange smiled. Mother had known the same thing but she had not wanted to face up to it. She had to now. She wondered if she was the one who had forced Strange’s hand, but she knew the girl had enjoyed it. Something else she did not want to face up to. Just how sick was Strange?

  The grinding noise of the main gate opening echoed around the cavern. They all turned to look.
Everyone in the camp had turned to look. This worried Tailgunner and Mother because it meant nobody had expected it.

  “We need to go,” Mother said before turning to Strange. “Clean off your hands. Don’t gum up the control gloves in Atua Kahukahu.” Strange looked disappointed but nodded. She started wiping her bloody hands on the front of her fatigues.

  Through the widening gap in the huge armoured gates they were surprised to see some sort of airborne craft, bobbing up and down as it hovered. The craft looked as if it was impatient to get inside. A figure walked through the opening in the gate. The figure was making his way straight towards them.

  “You there, stop!” the figure shouted. The man’s accent was English. He was holding a gauss carbine at the ready but not pointing it at them. As he shouted, Martins began to groan.

  “Perfect,” Mother muttered. All of them were edging towards their mechs. The man was closer now. He was a short man, compact but he looked wiry and there was suggestion of coiled power in his surprisingly easy step for an offworlder new to a high G world. His hair was short and he was nondescript in an almost purposeful way. He wore inertial fatigues that bore no insignia.

  As they continued edging towards their mechs, he raised his gauss carbine and pointed it at Mother and Tailgunner.

  “I said stay were you are.” They knew that he probably could not get all of them, but getting one of them was unacceptable, so for the time being they froze. That was except Strange, who was moving away from him as if trying to circle him.

  “Strange,” Tailgunner hissed as the barrel of the gauss carbine twitched between all five of them.

  “Have no doubt I will kill her,” the man said. They only caught the end of his sentence through their audio filters as the craft that had been hovering impatiently outside tilted almost to ninety degrees and flew through the gap and into the pa.

  They recognised it as an assault shuttle but not one they had ever seen before. Whilst definitely human in design it looked somehow futuristic to them, as if it was the next iteration of military hardware. The assault shuttle remained hovering behind the human, covering the mechs. The man turned to point his weapon at Strange. She kept moving.