‘Sir?’ says Leona.
‘What?’
‘You think Anton will get through?’
How the fuck would I know? He’s wearing an armband, and he’s carrying a ring and a half-decent rifle, and he’s got enough rounds to start a small war . . .
But the city’s rioting.
At least, the bit south of the river is. No idea what’s happening across the river. Maybe nothing at all for all we know. But on this side, we have a mob on the streets, unprotected by armbands, but loaded for bear with kitchen knives, iron bars, broken bottles and anything else that looks like a weapon.
They freeze when the furies appear.
Sometimes that is enough.
Other times they die. The furies kill anything that runs. Unfortunately, the instinct to run when faced with something more dangerous than you overwrites common sense. Doesn’t matter how many times their friends scream, Stay still.
People don’t.
A few of the doubters being slaughtered are high clan. Slightly more are merchants or bankers, the kind of people who own houses along the river or around that square we left behind us. But most are poor, little different to those killing them. And the shout in the streets around us is changing.
At first it was Death to the doubters. Now it’s Death to the general.
The mob works to a pattern. Having watched the militia break down doors, they wait for the furies to go in, and then loot the place when the furies are done. Jewellers, bakers, chemists, computer stores. Doesn’t matter, the pattern is the same.
1) Steal anything valuable.
2) Destroy everything too heavy to move.
3) Burn the shop back to a shell when that is done.
Ash falls like rain around us. Already warm, the wind from the river grows hot as it takes heat from the fires and is sucked into new fires to heighten the flames.
We see a woman carrying an oil painting.
A man pushes a wheelbarrow full of painted china plates. One girl wears a priest’s hat. Another, a senator’s cloak joined at her neck by a silver chain. Both grinning and both blind drunk.
‘This way,’ someone shouts.
Excitement hisses through the crowd around us.
I follow, with Leona behind me, drawn by the word Jaxx. Our group streams into a bigger one, which joins a bigger one still. When the movement stops we’re standing in front of a huge house overlooking a small square. The coat of arms above the door is one I recognize. It’s carved on the general’s pinkie ring.
Two Death’s Head NCOs guard the steps.
Black uniform, silver braid, three stripes on each arm.
Their faces are impassive. They know they’re going to die. All the same, their pulse rifles are ported across their chests as regulations demand.
When they smell vinegar, they know how it’s going to happen.
The crowd freezes as a fury enters the square, herded by militia who wear armbands, and carry rags on sticks to stop the beast from attacking. The creature’s leathery skin reflects searchlights and torches as it approaches the door.
Another follows.
Both are puzzled by the stillness of their prey.
Away to the side, a looter claws a stone from the cobbles, and weighs it in his hand as his friends split their faces into grins. Opening her mouth to shout a warning, Leona shuts it again when I shake my head.
What will happen will happen. Legba’s rule.
Plus, I’ve no plan to get killed before I find Colonel Vijay. Actually, I’ve no plan to get killed after that either. Although that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Drawing back his arm, the man hurls his stone.
He’s dead, bullet through his skull before the cobble even lands at his killer’s feet. But the guard’s movement gives the fury its next target. As the creature lurches forward, the other guard sights his pulse rifle. The blast burns through the fury, fries a hole in the guts of a militia corporal behind and sets on fire the hip of a woman beyond.
Makes no difference.
Closing on the Death’s Head NCO, the fury reaches for his heart.
Blood pumps up the creature’s arm and pisses from the hole burnt in its gut. Staring death in the eyes, the NCO thrusts his rifle under the fury’s chin and pulls the trigger.
They fall together.
Scooping out the first guard’s guts, the other fury plunges its fingers into his ribcage and reaches for his heart. The man dies in silence. But he still dies.
Job done, the creature turns and the crowd falls back as it exits the little square. Pot belly protruding from under silver ribs as its minders with their armbands and rags on sticks lead it away.
‘Fuck,’ Leona says.
A corporal beside her nods.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t want their job.’
He’s noticed Leona’s ferox-skull armband, for all that she is out of uniform.
‘Which battalion?’ he asks.
Leona looks at me. The wrong thing to do.
‘Let it go,’ I say. ‘You don’t have the clearance.’
Those magic words. He nods reluctantly, checks out my coat and weapons. Probably without even knowing it. Not sure what he sees. A blood-splattered, one-armed ex-Legion sergeant clutching a hunting rifle, a dagger at his hip, an oversized abattoir revolver in his belt, and an official band wrapped round the arm he does have?
Maybe.
Alternatively, he hears the warning in my voice. Who knows how other people make their choices? Well, maybe you do. I don’t give it much thought.
At the top of the blood-slicked steps, a militia sergeant catches a crowbar, rams it between the door and its frame and dies nastily. A thousand darts dicing him down to chopped meat. What did he think? That the house of General Indigo Jaxx would be undefended?
‘Use explosives,’ someone shouts.
The militia corporal who likes Leona grins.
Pulling a grenade from his belt, he yanks the pin and hurls it at an upper window. I’m out of there, dragging Leona behind me, before his grenade has time to bounce from the bombproof glass and roll back to his feet.
A trooper next to him loses everything below her knees.
The corporal loses his balls. And they both lose their lives shortly afterwards, as their blood spreads out in little rivers from the cobbles beneath them. The crowd’s night of happy looting has just turned sour.
Can’t say I’m upset.
I’m waiting to see if anyone else has a bright idea, when the sound of a battle tank comes from behind us. That obvious rattle of ceramic treads, and the low rumble of an engine designed to grind its way across pretty much anything.
The crowd scatters.
That’s just to give the tank space.
‘Old-model Tusker,’ Leona tells me. ‘RR52-MBT. Heavy plating, fully rotating turret, two main guns, five LMG . . .’
I’ll take her word for it.
Main battle tanks combine heavy and medium capacity. Their plate is thick enough to survive a direct hit. But the chassis is light enough to allow them reasonable manoeuvrability and distance, supposedly.
Never used them at Ilseville. There were no powered vehicles on Hekati. And something that clumsy wouldn’t last many minutes in the sands round Karbonne. Can’t see the point of tanks myself.
Slowly, the Tusker halts.
Its turret begins to swivel. Inside, someone turns a dial or taps a touchpad or whatever the RR52 needs to raise its gun. The barrel steadies, quivers and then drops slightly.
The first shot blows off the door.
Actually, it blows the door’s frame out of the wall, takes a hundred bricks with it and reveals a spider’s web of pipes powering the needle gun. It also demolishes three internal walls and leaves a hole in the back of the house you could drive the tank through.
OK, I’m beginning to get tanks now.
As the crowd cheers and the hatch flips on the Tusker’s turret, allowing the gunner to take his bow, dust billows from the doorway and settles to reveal a man standing halfway up a flight of stairs holding a side arm.
His first shot drills the gunner through the head. And the crowd’s cheers turn to anger.
‘Jaxx,’ shouts a voice.
‘Get him,’ someone screams.
They’re shocked by their own courage. It’s the courage of crowds.
Everyone is shouting and no one wants to make the first move. Even the senior militia officers look stunned as General Jaxx descends broken stairs towards his missing front door.
None of them raises his own side arm.
That’s going to prove temporary, of course. All the same, it’s impressive to see the whole square still and watch General Jaxx’s sheer presence reduce the crowd to silence. This is the general after all.
He’s tall and thin.
Wire-framed glasses are his only affectation. And his uniform is immaculate. Even the silver and black dagger at his hip looks recently polished. From his neck hangs an Obsidian Cross, with oak leaves and extra crown. The general has dressed for the occasion.
Right down to a ferox-skulled armband.
‘Back,’ someone shouts.
As the crowd scatters and then freezes, three furies enter the square, herded by half a dozen militia with their rags on sticks. Red eyes watch us, snub noses wrinkle at the smell of blood. Needle-like teeth grin from narrow jaws.
The vinegar stink is unmissable.
I seem to be the only person to recognize the cylinder strapped to the general’s back and the nozzle that juts from his hand. A braided hose stretches from cylinder to nozzle. Although the hose is nearly invisible in the dust, shadows and darkness. The hose is black, obviously. Like the general’s boots, his uniform, his cap and the pressure tank on his back.
General Jaxx smiles. A cold, brutal and brilliant smile.
As he steps into the doorway I tell Leona to move. She doesn’t obey quickly enough. So I push her in front of me as I force my way towards the edge of the crowd. A militia colonel watches us leave but breaks eye contact when I glare at him.
The general’s attack comes without warning.
A flash of ignition that lights sticky liquid pumped from the high-pressure cylinder strapped to his back, and then a dripping hose-length of flame. I’ve faced it before, dropped from planes and poured down shafts to burn out underground bunkers.
Most of these people don’t even know flamefire exists. The furies have obviously never met it. Wrapping their leathery skin, it burns so fiercely that skin peels like tissue paper to reveal burning flesh and melting machinery beneath. Steel bones twist with the heat and joints rupture themselves.
The general achieves this without appearing to move.
When a militia NCO goes for his gun, General Jaxx redirects his nozzle, incinerating the NCO, the men either side of him and half a dozen of those behind. The furies died silently. These die screaming.
‘You can surrender,’ he tells the crowd. ‘Or we can play some more.’
‘We’re going to kill you.’
The voice is rough. Too rough. Like someone pretending to be campesino. The general sneers. ‘You think I don’t know that? I knew my time was up the moment our glorious leader decided to cancel his meeting.’
He glares at the crowd. And laughs harshly when they cringe as he twitches the flame-thrower nozzle. Ice-blue eyes sweep over us.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Surely one of you rabble has the guts.’
I’m not sure he can see our faces, because the searchlight on him must put most of us in darkness. We can see him, however. And no one can miss the contempt in his face. Until tonight, General Indigo Jaxx, Duke of Farlight, was the most powerful man in this city. What’s more, he’s held my life in his hand and opened his fingers more than once. I owe him my membership of the Death’s Head and my promotions. For all that he now wants me dead.
An order is given.
Five militia rush the door and burn like candles, falling in flames at the general’s feet. Having kicked the closest down the steps, he searches for the colonel who gave the order and smiles.
‘Guido,’ he says. ‘You can do better than that.’
A cobblestone is thrown, then another. Neither hits, and the general doesn’t react. He is looking over the throwers’ heads to what is behind them. Eight furies and a dozen minders, appearing out of a side street and hesitating at the opposite edge of the crowd.
Seeing this, the crowd moves back and freezes.
The general’s smile widens.
God, you’ve got to love this man.
He might be a murderer, commander of a regiment feared on a thousand different planets, as unremitting as thirst in the desert, and implacable as a blizzard or ice closing over a lake, but his bravery is beyond question.
As the furies advance, he steadies himself.
The rest of us are irrelevant. He sees only the silver-skinned creatures moving towards him with their loping gait and sloped faces. Their fingers flex as the hunger takes them and they head for the kill only to hesitate when they sense his armband.
Three turn to writhing pillars with his first blast.
Another two attack and he flames them as well. All die in silence. No one doubts the intensity of their pain or the depth of agony that drops them to their knees, before leaving them blackened and stinking husks on the cobbles.
‘Sven,’ he says suddenly.
People turn to see who he’s addressing.
‘Come to see me die?’
I shake my head. That’s not my reason for being here.
The general shrugs, and says something too quietly for me to hear. Guess he’s talking to himself. As a fury shambles forward, General Jaxx sets his feet, twists his body, and steadies the nozzle again.
Flame streaks from his hand and bathes his attacker in fire, dripping in molten splashes around its feet.
‘Fuck,’ says Leona.
She’s not talking about the fury.
The general must have known this would happen eventually. The flamefire that roars from the nozzle suddenly splutters, splutters again and begins to weaken. In all, he’s killed nearly fifteen of the creatures.
‘You ready?’ I ask Leona.
‘Always, sir,’ she says.
Reminds me of myself, that girl. ‘Right, then cover my back if needed. And be prepared to fall back when I give the word.’
A dozen militia watch me drag the revolver from my belt. Officers, NCOs and men. Only their colonel, the man General Jaxx called Guido, looks as if he might react. He doesn’t say anything, however, or issue orders. The light machine gun Sergeant Leona points at his guts sees to that.
Turning to where General Jaxx stands, I hold up the piece. I don’t give a fuck that he was intending to have me killed. Hell, I’d have had me killed if I were him.
‘Sir,’ I shout.
He almost stumbles under the gun’s weight.
‘Sven,’ he says, ‘what is this?’
‘An abattoir pistol.’
He breaks it open, counts the rounds and flicks it shut again. Then he stares round at the dead bodies, the burnt furies and the waiting crowd. ‘An abattoir pistol? How apt. And Sven . . .’
I wait.
‘It’s an abattoir pistol, sir.’
Who knows how the general thumbs the oversized hammer while ducking an attacking fury’s first blow? Maybe his muscles are boosted. Takes General Jaxx two shots to kill the leading fury. A single shot to kill the one behind. Two rounds left and three furies to kill. He lived a bastard and will die a hero.
He’ll be happy with that.
I don’t stop to watch it happen.