A veteran of sifting mining waste for ore missed the first time round, Mic Chua has a face that is mottled from toxic chemicals and tattooed so deeply with dust that it looks like powder burn from a shotgun. His eyes are red, although he tells me that is the wind.
Mic has one earring, and a ponytail faded to the grey of dry dog turd.
All the same, for someone so slight, he handles that shovel like the weapon it isn’t. ‘Used to be one of you,’ he says.
Legion? I almost ask.
But I don’t.
I don’t say Death’s Head either. I just nod, smile, and wonder what the fuck I am meant to do with the O’Cruz prisoners my troopers now guard.
‘We don’t kill them,’ says Colonel Vijay.
Of course he does.
Killing them makes sense. As does killing Mic and the few prospectors left alive. They are going to die anyway; you can see it in their eyes.
‘So,’ says Mic. ‘Where did they scoop you?’
Our conversation is getting weirder by the second. But there are times you stay quiet, and this is one of them. So I hold my tongue and try to look interested, but not too interested. Not like, maybe, I don’t have the faintest fuck what he’s talking about.
‘Us,’ he says, ‘they got us right outside a mine.’
I grunt something. I hope it sounds sympathetic.
‘Used to do asteroids,’ he says. ‘All that suiting up and shit, the stale air and long months in tin cans. Gave it up. I mean . . .’ The upturn of his hands says, come on. ‘Why bother, if you can get rich on the ground.’
‘Legally?’ asks Colonel Vijay.
Mic’s eyes narrow. ‘No problem, either way,’ I assure him.
‘Illegal is quicker.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And if you get high enough to call yourself emperor, or senator or glorious uplift, you can announce it’s not a crime anyway.’
Mic grins sourly.
We agree here. ‘So,’ I say. ‘They scooped you?’
‘Yeah, right outside our mine. All these fucks with guns are standing in a circle glaring at us. It must have been the same for you. All those warnings about not trying to escape . . .’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘I hate that.’
‘So they took us back to the camp. And then let us out in work details to dig their damn trenches and fix their pipes . . . Took me a while to work out what was happening.’
‘And then?’ I say, thinking, give me a clue here.
Something bleak enters Mic’s eyes. ‘When we struck for more food, they killed five the first hour, five the next, five the hour after . . . Chosen at random. So we killed the guards, cut the wire and this is what’s left.’
He gestures to three people, who are all that remain of his group.
They walk towards us slowly. If I were them, I wouldn’t trust us either.
His group turns out to be one woman and two men. Mic doesn’t introduce them and I don’t ask. If anything, they look worse than he does.
We give the ejercito a water bottle and march them into the shade of an overhang. Then, while Shil and Franc keep their rifles trained, Neen walks along the line with a shovel and breaks the left ankle of every one.
‘Here,’ he says, giving Mic back his shovel.
‘My pleasure.’
The colonel’s furious. Since it’s already done, I can’t see his point. ‘It’s barbaric,’ he tells me. He is so cross he insists we have the conversation in private.
‘Your decision, sir.’
He scowls at me.
‘We’ve no cuffs, no rope, and you said I couldn’t kill them. With respect, what the fuck was I meant to do?’
Saluting smartly, I leave him with the question.
The ejercito yell at us as we head out. All the usual insults. There are x million suns and x million planets, yet all you ever get is insults about your mother, your sister and your girlfriend. Well, the first two are dead, and I don’t have a third so I’m not too bothered. But I translate them anyway, just for the pleasure of watching Colonel Vijay’s lips tighten.
As the afternoon goes on, Mic trails further and further behind. Until our only choice is, leave him or make camp and wait. When he finally arrives, Shil has a fire burning, Neen has caught what looks like a dog, Franc has gutted the beast, seasoned it with bark and has a stick stuffed up one end and out the other.
We offer the prospectors meat, and give them the wine from Pavel’s flask. It does little good. One dies in the night. He’s old, with skin that looks like cheaply cured leather.
We find him at first light. Back against a rock and face towards the sun. I know, it’s reflection in a mirror . . . light enters Hekati through chevron safety glass and servomotors in the hub shift huge silvered sheets to create the illusion.
It still looks like dawn to me.
He has stripped off his shirt and lesions disfigure his chest. The skin over his gut is purple as if the corruption set in long before he died. Rachel is not the only one to make a sign against the evil eye. Shil does, when she thinks I’m not looking.
Colonel Vijay says it’s the plague.
‘Radiation,’ says Haze.
The colonel stares at him.
‘Know the symptoms,’ Haze says. Embarrassment stops him. ‘It’s unmissable, I guess.’ He looks at Mic and the other two, and his blush gets worse. ‘If you want me to take a look at you, I might . . .’
What? I think. Be able to save them?
Then I realize it’s possible. Haze has more processing power in his skull than most cities. And Paper Osamu gave him the run of her ship’s library that time we asked the U/Free for help. Mind you, look where that got us - here.
Mic says, ‘Thanks, but it’s too late.’
‘What a choice,’ adds the only woman. ‘Sickness or the Silver Fist.’
Colonel Vijay makes himself unfreeze the moment I glance across. Bits of earlier conversations are coming into focus. Spitting, I grind the spit under my heel.
‘May they rot.’
Grinning, Mic does the same.
It’s an old militia curse. Although these days everyone uses it. I have heard it from militia about Death’s Head, Octovians about metalheads, legionnaires about the ferox, and civilians about all of us everywhere.
‘You should keep moving,’ Mic says.
My look is a question.
‘We’re slow,’ he says. ‘And they’ll be tracking us. If we travel together they’ll get you as well.’
‘Move out,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll cover you.’
He tries to work my angle. Am I planning some trick? Sacrificing him in some way that cuts us free? He’s old and he’s ill and he has a right to be worried, but he’s also wrong. We’ve found our ghosts. All we need to do now is capture one.
Stamping up to Colonel Vijay, I salute.
‘Permission to deploy.’
‘Sven.’
I want this battle. And watching Colonel Vijay, I realize something else. What happened in the hub was disgraceful enough. I want to see how this little shit behaves under fire. A medal for planning Ilseville.
The idea makes me vomit.
‘Rachel,’ I shout.
She jogs over, salutes.
‘Dig in over there.’
We need to cover the floor of this valley from a slope. As Rachel leaves, she begins to pull sections of rifle from slots and pouches on her back and belt, already screwing them together as she jogs towards a scar of red earth.
Now Mic is really staring. ‘What are you?’ he asks.
‘The best,’ says Neen.
There’s best and best. Mic decides we’re renegade militia with five-year-old rifles, used to lording it over new conscripts lucky to have weapons at all. I’m happy to leave it that way.
‘You plan to bury your man?’
‘No point,’ he says. ‘We’ll be joining him soon enough.’ His shrug is that of someone grown used to the idea of his own death. ‘Might as well save our energy.’
With that, he slopes away, weighed down by a pack a six-year-old should be able to carry. I doubt we will see him again and Mic obviously feels the same, because he doesn’t look back and nor do the couple stumbling after him.