Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water Read online

  Subjugation was LAW's first order of business, but there were many in the First Lands who had made their peace with the annexation mission for personal advantage. The lure of Periapt's wealth and the threat of its power had co-opted one nation-state after the next, until at last the Broken Country stood alone against the interstellar conquerors.

  But even the Skills were not enough to offset the might of allied Concordance foes backed by LAW military technologies. Eventually even some Ext clan bastions and polities began to sue for peace with AlphaLAW Commissioner Ren-quald. Those who refused to lay down their arms were threatened with the unthinkable: renewed chipslavery. The threat violated certain unspoken principles of the Post-Cyberplague epoch, but LAW felt free to teach that kind of object lesson.

  Even so, the threat had proved a gross miscalculation. Many who had already made a separate peace and been disarmed made preparations for suicide, and the Exts in the Broken Country vowed to hurl the LAWs from Concordance or die trying. What had been localized resistance to the annexation escalated into the most bitterly fought conventional war in LAW history.

  In a way, each became the enemy the other side had not counted on.

  The Exts had their' porcupine strategy, curling up and releasing deadly quills until the foe got tired and went away; LAW, by contrast, accustomed to bringing small powers to heel with nuclear strikes, found itself faced with an allied population that had had an ingrained loathing of nukeweps since the Cyberplague known as HorrOrgasm had detonated four hydrogen Bigtimers on Concordance seventy-five years earlier.

  Rather than risk wide-scale rebellion, LAW had gone in on the ground, using First Lands forces as proxies. And since almost every weapon system on the one side had had its countersystem on the other, finally it had come down to artillery and armor and infantry units slowly and deliberately grinding each other to bits in mud, swamp, and snow. And in the end the last of the Exts had taken to Anvil Tor to make it their funeral bier.

  * * * *

  Daddy D knew better than to try to dissuade Burning from having a face-to-face with Lod. But when he began to call for an escort to see his Allgrave down the mountain, Burning countermanded him.

  "Fiona is the only one I want in on this." The career Lothario Lod had always had an oddly chaste affection for Burning's sister, and she had maintained a filial fondness for him. Burning felt that Fiona's presence could help pry the truth from the family scapegrace.

  He ducked through the blackout curtain, flipping back the cheek pieces of his helmet and half opening the articulated neck guard, which reshaped to cup the sides of his head. By gathering and concentrating the sounds around him, the helmet could provide rough source bearings.

  He made his way through a copse of trees that had been stripped bare and partially flattened by a heavy explosives hit before enemy fire had ceased around noon. The air was thick with the smell of sweet heartwood sap. In a clearing beyond he skirted Daddy D's outdated hardcorps Hellhog assault chopper, which had managed to convey the general, Burning, and several officers to Anvil Tor. A few other grounded aircraft and a number of surface vehicles dotted the mountaintop, but none offered escape. All had been stripped of weapons for the coming Gotterdammerung.

  He passed the rain tarp that served as a MASH, telling himself not to look in but doing so anyway. Warm blood met chilly air and steam curled from open wounds, as if the rent bodies were steam tables in a field kitchen.

  With whole and artificial blood stocks gone, the meds were draining the dead to keep the more hopeful cases on the effectives list. The Exts had had to resort to that before, but on Anvil Tor casualties with E's jetpenned on their foreheads by triage sorters—for "expectants"—were being harvested as well. Much of the blood would transfer diseases, parasites, and other contaminants, but nobody on the Tor was expecting to live long enough for any of that to matter.

  He came close to stumbling over an improvised litter where a woman wearing the patch of the Pissant Estates Bon Vivants lay propped up. The sapper's battlesuit was rashed with bloody punctures, and her nose had been shot away. Burning realized that he was looking through the orifice in her nasal bone into the back of her throat. Blood frothed from the exposed gap as she swallowed and spit to keep her air passage clear. She came around long enough to recognize him, flash a woozy thumbs-up, and mouth something that did not sound human, though it eventually dawned on him that she was saying "Stay staunch."

  He didn't know how to answer but was spared having to when two aides who were themselves wounded came to move her inside for treatment or, more likely, a jetpenned E.

  The gray drizzle turned colder as he double-timed on, certain that his sister had returned to the Discards, who had adopted her as their surrogate matriarch. No other adult was truly safe among them, but Fiona was as secure there as she could be anywhere in the world. Daddy D was holding the kids in reserve for whenever their feral murderousness would be needed.

  Just now two dozen of them, ranging in age from twelve down to eight, were lying doggo in a boscage west of the MASH. They were passing canteens around, along with a sipflask of gin. Some wore wraparounds to hide their eyes; others, war paint. There were necklaces of human ears, ratty dress wigs, and wildchild fetishes of bones, feathers, empty styrettes, and hand grenade pins. Many had fingers that had been gnawed down a knuckle or two, chewed off to kill the raving hunger that had been a near constant in the First Lands POW/concentration camps. The weapons they carried looked far too big for the Discards, but they were cradled lovingly and expertly. Even Daddy D refused to run the risk of forcing these true children of war to strac up.

  They made Burning uneasy. Some commanders had handed captives over to the Discards for interrogation. The kids might have learned the art from the wrong side, but they had learned it well.

  When Burning asked after Fiona, he got little more than blank stares. Eventually, however, a few put their helmets together and spoke in voices too low for Burning to hear, then pointed to the nearby Scrims, Anvil Tor's wind-blasted cliff face.

  He shagged on and finally spied her framed against the darkening gray sky, standing on a rocky prominence that resembled the pulpit of a ship. She had her back to him, and her helmet and boomer were on the ground. Her elbows were clasped in the opposite palms, and she was gazing down at the plain. Even in a battlesuit her carriage was graceful, more like that of a Periapt fashion model or an improbably tall ballerina than like that of an Ext. The winds moaning up from below fluttered her fine blue-black locks and warrior's plaits.

  Fiona heard him and turned just enough to show a quarter profile of her celebrated face and a curve of long, slender neck. "I wonder if the LAWs know the significance of this place."

  From behind her Burning saw flashes through the rain and fog—turncoat railgun artillery being fired from sheer exuberance. "I imagine the Cottswolds or someone would've mentioned it," he answered. "But the LAWs care about Periapt empire, not Ext history."

  From the Scrims, nearly two hundred years earlier, another group of Broken Country holdouts had leapt to avoid capture by allied First Lands armies.

  "I'm glad we won't live to see what becomes of the Broken Country now," Fiona added. "What becomes of Concordance." Her voice was throaty but expressionless.

  "That's what we've got to talk about," Burning said. "Now, come away from there before LAW starts lobbing harassment rounds at you." As he reached for the sleeve of her battle-suit, Fiona turned to him, wearing a tranquil smile. The gloaming offered just enough light for him to see her sloe-brown eyes, extreme cheekbones, purple-red lips, and slight overbite. But when he got a better look, he almost lost his grip on her. Her face was a swirly mask of scars that stood out like raised arabesques, scabbed and already swelhng with fibrous tissue.

  "What've you done to yourself?" he blurted out.

  "I couldn't give them the satisfaction of killing me. So I've beaten them to it, Emmett."

  Her using his birth name put him off his guard. His first thought was
that she had gone tripwire and retreated into some fantasy of the past.

  Then all he felt was weary bitterness. "Fiona—"

  "Ghost!" she said, cutting him off. "You see the scars. I'm Ghost now." Her expression was serene behind the veil of incisions. She had come away from the long drop, but only a step.

  She had voided her living name and marked herself dead for all to see, Burning realized. Her scars said that she considered herself to be beyond grief, pain, fear, or any enemy's ability to harm her. As far as he knew, no one had performed the ritual in three centuries. Studying her face, he recognized Ext ceremonial patterns from the history books: the Talons, Hermes's Footprints, the Strength That Lives in the Flames, Kali Weeps… Judging by the scabbing she had to have dosed her wounds with growth factor like the old-timers used, though where she'd gotten it on Anvil Tor, he couldn't imagine.

  "Ghost, then." He pulled her gently from the edge.

  She had always nursed her private sorrows—both of them had—despite being raised in bastion privilege. Early on Fiona had blossomed into a blithe, witty beauty with a glow to her face and a willowy figure, as different in personality as in looks from her shambling, bookish older brother. Drawing stares wherever she went, she had become the toast of the Broken Country and—for a brief, bright season—a rising star in the Concordance social firmament. About the same time the Sword of Damocles had arrived in-system.

  With LAW had come renewed warfare, and for Fiona the detention camps, where every dignity and decency had been methodically stripped away. She had helped the younger ones—the Discards—stay alive, and they had helped her—but only at the cost of her humanity.

  Liberated, she had refused noncombatant status, and

  Burning—Allgrave by then, part warlord, part political leader—had been, as ever, helpless to dissuade her. She and the Discards had become a detachment unto themselves. And now, mere she stood, watching him through her death scars as he guided her to safety.

  "Lod's at the foot of the Tor," he said in a soft voice. "He claims to have a message from Romola. Hear him out with me."

  Her lips curved sweetly, her angular beauty showing eerily through the self-mutilation. "Why not?" She shrugged out of his hold and went to where her helmet and boomer lay, pausing to search a sleeve pocket. "But this first"

  She brought out a tight, thin braid of tar-black hair interwoven with twists of glittery filament—one of her Hussar Plaits from the palisade of them that hung under the outer layers of her curtain of hair.

  She extended the lock to Burning. "Fiona left this behind for you to let you know she loved you."

  He unsealed and removed his gauntlet to take it. "Then accept a lock of mine to give to Fiona if you see her before I do. And tell her I love her all the more."

  He hit the releases on his collar, lifted his helmet free, and tucked it under his left arm. Then he unclipped his hair and shook loose the copper-red ringlets and Hussar Plaits. By that time she'd pulled her knife—a soot-black dagger that had been their mother's, one of their few mementos of her.

  Burning watched it come to his throat. "Can I still call you sister?"

  The jet blade veered slightly. Fiona barely had to flick her wrist, high up where his plaits were only hair, for a braid to fall into her gloved palm. She opened the torso seam of her battle-suit enough to slip it into a pocket next to her heart.

  "Of course."

  After they had pulled their bone-domes back on, slung the heavy battle rifles, and moved out, it occurred to Burning that the Discards had stood witness to her death name ceremony.

  They were almost back to the C&C bunker when Zone stepped from behind a shot-up weapons carrier and joined them. His gimlet eyes recced Ghost from helmet to toecaps and back. Burning bristled fleetingly but said nothing. Fiona's death scars didn't seem to surprise Zone.

  "They were all you needed to make you perfect," he said.

  Chapter

  Three

  The way Zone took up rote-step alongside Burning and Ghost left no doubt that he was accompanying them to the foot of Anvil Tor.

  Burning didn't object; the guy was a limbic case, but he could smell a midnight ambush coming at reveille. He tried to keep from fruitless agonizing over Romola's safety. Bastion Gilead—one of the clans that had gone over to LAW—had given its word that it would protect Romola when the Exts had elected to continue the fight. Please don't let them have bio-chipped her, he said to himself, almost in prayer. If that was the threat, he would kill her before he himself could be killed.

  With darkness coming on and the rain thickening, the three of them set the battlesuits' phase-change skin to ambient temperature to avoid being picked up by enemy thermal sensors. They kept their visors transparent and, like everyone else on the Tor, used passive detectors and targeting equipment only; nobody wanted to be the juiciest return on the enemy's scopes. The antilaser aerosols had thinned for the time being, and so they left their breathers open. That was fine with Burning, since his had ulcerated the bridge of his nose.

  Employing aloud passwords, field signals, and commo authenticators, they made their way past defensive pozzes and observation posts that camouflage and gathering gloom had melded into the landscape. Zone, on point, wove a path through temporarily deactivated minefields and other kill boxes. If a drone or SAT picked up their movement and the advancing foe used their route as an avenue of attack, there would be some surprises for the turncoats.

  Fiona—Ghost—with her runner's physique had always been a fair hand at fieldcraft, but now she moved with a new assuredness. Any Ext would spot it right away as a heightened affinity for Flowstate. Burning guessed that it stemmed from the death scar ceremony; ritual was a potent avenue of access to the Skills. He accepted her way of ending the anguish, perhaps even envied her a bit.

  They held up in a culvert off the main road to receive a sitrep from the bunker. Opposition forces were moving into new positions around Anvil Tor, but there was no sign of an assault in the making. Enemy surveillance drones had been recalled, which made no sense; remotes were cheap and expendable.

  "Perhaps they've lost their taste for attrition," Ghost speculated. "They'll use standoff weapons or a Bigtimer."

  Burning shook his head. "LAW understands that the rest of Concordance is watching."

  Zone nodded in agreement. He would have relished discomfiting LAW and its client states that way, even if he had to flashfry for it. "Renquald cuts just one tactical nuke fart, all his proxies'll have to be pulled home for riot control."

  Ghost sighed. "How I wish we had even a single little half-K party popper."

  But the Exts didn't. A year before, the Cottswolds had launched a futile Bigtimer attack on the Sword of Damocles. The Periapts not only had knocked out the MIRVed missiles but also had utilized conventional weapons to take out every threat stockpiled on Concordance—if LAW's superconducting superstorage warheads could be said to count as "conventional weapons."

  When they took up their way again, Burning heard the tweedles and wonks of two surviving Wheel Weevils at their training farm a klick or so to the southeast. The owner, jockeys, grooms, and the rest were long gone. A few Exts who were accustomed to handling the giant myriapods had talked of turning them loose, but Daddy D had forbidden it. Better for the time being to leave the native beasts to blunder around the stables—the only home they knew—than to have them tripping booby traps and ambushes.

  For Burning, the plaintive sounds of the animals brought to mind the carefree derby days of his youth, before his life had started going wrong. It was a pity that he was probably going to have to order the Weevils shot

  Turncoat searchlights had come on, sweeping the mountain from all sides. What with the jamming and other kinds of electronic warfare, hardwire commo lines to the listening and observation posts had been a must. The one that led to Lod served an additional function as a guideline. Burning, Ghost, and Zone followed it to where the two-person recce team that initially had spotted Lod was ho
lding its position.

  The reccers were a man and a woman from the Lightning Flats Wetworkers, a SEAL outfit. Reservists, both looked to be in their late twenties, he a sergeant first class and she a lieutenant They had holed up behind some rocks from which they could keep an eye on Lod and pass the time. And to do that they had made creative use of an enemy KIA.

  It was a LAW shocktrooper lieutenant colonel in exoarmor, pintle-mounted steadigun still attached to his torso module. An observer, Burning assumed, who had gotten too close to the action—far too close, because the top of his head had been sheared off by a boomer round.

  The Wetworkers had propped the corpse against a boulder where rainwater had filled and overflowed the open skull and now made tiny splashes on the water and floating brain tissue there. Droplets ran down the cracked face bowl past eyeballs that still bulged in the aftermath of the fearsome hydropressure shock wave the impact had sent through the gray matter.

  Between glances at Lod, the reservists were taking turns winging playing cards at the open-top helmet and the colonel's flooded brainpan. Burning noticed that they were using a dog-eared deck bearing the LAW logo—it had to be the shocktrooper's.

  The Wetworkers put the cards down, and the lieutenant claimed the sergeant's stakes, a pair of dry—albeit filthy—socks. They crawled and duckwalked over to the new arrivals and pointed to the big rock Burning had seen in the holofield at the C&C bunker. Lod had planned ahead. Lod always did.

  He was sitting on a collapsible camp stool, his white bicycle flag stuck into the mud to one side. He held over him a double-size luminous orange umbrella, probably intended to keep the Exts from mistaking him for an infiltrator and, Burning imagined, as a precaution against getting shot by turncoat troops. The bumbershoot explained the Wetworkers' sour expressions: no true reccer would feel easy around a light source like mat