Gammalaw: Smoke on the Water Read online

  But it was keeping Lod so comfortably dry that he could enjoy a perfumed Periapt cigarette in a long gold-plated holder. His mirror-polished knee boots somehow shed the rain and mud completely, and he was wearing a saucer cap with a heavily braided brim and a splendidly tailored dress uniform trench coat lined with phase-change silk, with a white ascot showing from it.

  Burning didn't recognize the trappings, but they were quite a sight on the only man he knew who had been discharged from the student cadet corps on grounds of sexual profligacy. Nevertheless, when war had come, Lod had somehow wangled an Allgrave's direct commission and had served honorably until the Gileads and other bastions had begun suing for a separate peace. Using the technicality of holding a Gilead commission, Lod had soon loopholed himself out of the Ext coalition forces.

  The Wetworkers and other recon teams confirmed that Lod had come alone. Burning told the others to hold fast while he dealt with Lod. The face-to-face had to do with Romola, after all.

  "SOP says we check him out first," Zone said, and before Burning could stop him, he stepped out from behind cover, leveling his boomer at Lod. "On your feet and make an angel, you little suck-ass! Delta-V!"

  Lod hastened as ordered, eyes wide not because of the big battle rifle but because it was Zone drawing dead aim on him. Dropping the umbrella and cigarette holder, he placed both hands behind his head.

  "That'll do," Burning said as he forced the boomer's barrel aside, heading for Lod. "Everybody stand fast."

  He moved into the clear with the rifle slung, raising his helmet visor. Recovering his dignity, Lod retrieved the umbrella, tossed the soggy cigarette aside, and pocketed the muddy holder.

  "How now, Cousin?"

  His looks had not changed in the year or so since Burning had last seen him. Diminutive and blond, he was as neotenic as a ten-year-old, with a head seemingly too big for his body. As for the cousin part, he was distant to Burning and Ghost at best, having more Gilead than Orman in him. Like them, he had spent his youth at Bastion Orman as a peripheral—a dweller by sufferance amid the affluence and the conspicuous pecking order.

  Burning indicated the cap and trench coat, the decorations and aiguillettes. "What's the unit?"

  "Concordance Interplanetary Defense Forces, actually. Diplomatic liaison staff attached to Commissioner Renquald's AlphaLAW headquarters." Lod hurried to change the subject. "Not a very pleasant bivouac spot, eh?"

  Burning exhaled through his teeth. "Love it. Wouldn't swap it for another ten centimeters of dick. Is that all you wanted to know?"

  Lod's expression changed. "Not quite. I'm here to help, and you look to me as if you could use it"

  The hum had arisen in Burning's ears again, and while he couldn't quite tell what expression his face held, he supposed Lod was referring to his NoMan stare. "I've seen people die out here who wanted to live. And I've seen people live who wanted to die."

  "Which do you want?"

  Without warning, Burning's bitterness rose up, and he was too tired to control it. Lod didn't even have time to move as Burning brought the boomer up from where it rested at sling-arms, left hand grabbing the barrel shroud, pulling it forward, and swinging the piece up, right hand to the pistol grip, thumb flicking the selector to semiautomatic. The sling was made taut against his upper left arm—a programmed infantry drill executed with the speed and precision of the Skills.

  The suppressored muzzle pointed between Lod's huge eyes.

  "I might want to bring some scorch on a cousin who's wearing the other side's uniform. Unless he tells me what he's doing with Romola's bracelet."

  Lod held very still.

  "Where is she, Lod?"

  "Not six klicks from here, Allgrave. At LAW field headquarters with Renquald, along with Tonne-Head and some of the other Gileads, a few Cottswolds—"

  "Why didn't she come herself? Have they hurt her?"

  "Upon my mother's soul, no! But there's a new proposal on the table, something no one would tell me about She's unharmed, but they wouldn't let her come here." Lod held up the bracelet again. "It's a sign of good faith—safe passage there and back again if you choose."

  Burning drew closer and worked a release on the boomer's stock. A bayonet that was as nonreflective as lampblack sprang out of the front end to one side of Lod's neck. "And what's in it for you, turncoat?"

  "Personal advantage, what else? MeoTheos, it's the end of an age, only you're too blind to see it LAW's going to take dominion over Concordance, and half the world welcomes it! For me it's just a change of masters, so yes, I look to my own survival. Who else ever has? Now, I've delivered my message, and I need to dry off and seek out a drop of absinthe. My jump-jeep's five hundred meters that way." He pointed east "You can return with me if you like."

  Burning felt muddled. When he'd been e-tooling his grave, he'd had no misgivings left. If it was a trap, surely Renquald and the rest knew that the capture of the Allgrave would not force an Ext surrender. And if it was an assassination plot it was resoundingly unnecessary.

  Through the trees the hoot of a Wheel Weevil drifted down Anvil Tor. What would there be for Renquald to talk about at that late hour with LAW already holding all the cards? Or did it?

  Lod turned away from the bayonet with a swirl of the magnificent trench coat. "If you want to stab me, here's my back."

  Out of curiosity Burning stamped after him by the numbers in the cadence of the drill. Lod stopped but didn't turn or plead; he just stood with his epauleted shoulders up around his ears, nearly lifting his saucer cap off.

  There were other footsteps in the mud; Ghost was advancing from cover. "Allgrave, you call that an interrogation?" she said with a dark chuckle.

  Hearing her voice, Lod swung around with a look of delight. "No, it's just hard to overcome a polite upbringing—"

  He cut himself off and stared at her. The sight of her death scars broke his composure in a way that threats on his life had not. He knocked Burning's bayonet aside and went to lay one hand on her cheek, something she would have suffered no one else alive to do but her brother.

  "You foolish… this is desecration!" He was almost in tears. "Fiona, you had no right—"

  "Fiona's passed away, Lod. I'm Ghost."

  He glared at Burning. "Go on showing how staunch you are, Allgrave, but even the noblest defeats don't keep history at bay."

  Lod set off for his jumpjeep as the Weevil hooted again, and the sound seemed to flick a switch in Burning's head, causing the hum to die away. He caught his cousin by the shoulder and held him while he got Daddy D on the command push.

  "Get some experienced hands over to the training farm to rig one of the Weevils with the biggest saddle they can find." He smiled at Lod. "I'm late for a meeting, and I'll be carrying a passenger."

  "Oh, dear me," Lod said.

  Chapter

  Four

  "If someone down there goes trigger-happy," Lod insisted, "what chance will we have? We'll last about as long as a PFC's re-up bonus in a Costa Hedonia bordello."

  "At least I'll know they don't want me alive as much as you claim they do," Burning pointed out. He'd let his cousin chirp Commissioner Renquald's HQ to say only that he and Burning would be arriving by the Allgrave's preferred means of transportation.

  Burning put his hand out. "Give me the bracelet." Lod handed it over, and Burning slipped it into his pocket alongside the Hussar Plait of Ghost's hair.

  Lod looked at the Weevil that was to bear them. "I've always detested these hideous-smelling hoop snakes."

  Standing outside the training farm paddock on the northeast side of Anvil Tor with Lod and Ghost—Zone having returned to the operations bunker—Burning found that the smells, sights, and sounds of the place were setting off charge after charge of remembrance in him.

  Some of his earliest memories were of the racecourses and the great beasts that rolled across them, memories that included his parents and sister, among others. The odors of the Weevil wallows and the sight of handlers had Bu
rning half expecting his father, Dunhill Orman, to emerge from the jockeys' dressing room in racing colors. Turned out in silk blouse, jodhpurs, riding boots, and helmet, he would cut a dashing figure surrounded by admiring men and women. He would smell of leather, expensive cologne, blowbacco smoke, amp brandy, and traces of one woman or another's perfume. He'd had the size and red hair Burning had inherited but also enough physical courage and brash joie de vivre for three Exts. His field name, Hipshot, had been as well known in casinos and cabarets as on the military freqs.

  He had been a minor Orman peer, but his renown as soldier, sportsman, and rake had drawn him the acquaintance of wealthier and higher-born Exts, women such as Siri Mahfouz Orman, who'd won distinctions of her own in military service. Siri was every bit as breathtaking as her daughter Fiona was to become, though that had not kept Dunhill from a string of infidelities.

  Nor had common sense freed him from the definitive Ext vice, gambling. He'd won and lost fortunes on anything and everything. In the end his luck had gone bad, putting him so heavily in debt that he had lost face and several friends. Yet even those losses hadn't kept him from using his celebrity to front an investment fraud. Dread of dishonor—his greatest fear—had eventually driven him to blow out his own brains with a .50 'baller.

  The Weevil Burning had selected for the trip to AlphaLAW HQ was finally responding to the handlers' stim impulses and shockprods. To him, the creatures had always looked like rows of immense, many-legged stone vertebrae come to life. This one moved with abrupt speed, wrapping herself belly-out around the ring cockpit like a myriapod tire mounting itself on a rim. She clamped hold of her own head with specialized tail grippers, firmly but carefully encircling what her gulled senses informed her was her own egg.

  Her name was Artemis.

  "Burning, there'll be hell to pay," Lod said.

  Burning shrugged and handed his boomer to Ghost. "I've got unlimited credit on hell to pay, Cousin."

  He hadn't been in the saddle in years. Even so, it was liberating to step onto a foot peg and swing aboard. He hoped that by surprising the enemy he could get Renquald to reveal his motives.

  Artemis's banks of closely set, bowed, and immensely strong legs ruffled a bit as Burning's battlesuited leg brushed one of them. Because the Weevil's responses were inhibited by the stim circuitry, she didn't reach out to tear him apart.

  The cockpit scarcely resembled one of the giant eggs. It was a narrow, minimal seat with armrest- and footrest-mounted controls affixed to a circular frame that rode ball-bearing tracks within an outer frame. The frame was greasy with brood secretion that had been loosed when the annuloid had clenched its dorsal suckers. The cockpit's gyros, inner race bearings, and track cogwheels kept it relatively upright, while the outer rails turned with the Weevil's minor shifting steps.

  Burning adjusted the seat harness for maximum slack. "Sit right up here in front of me, Lod, where your new friends can get a good look at you."

  Glumly, Lod accepted the inevitable. It was clear to him, in any case, that the Weevil handlers would have relished an opportunity to rough him up and bundle him aboard.

  As he sat and Burning began buckling them both in, Ghost stepped closer to ask if Burning had checked his 'baller.

  Burning nodded, patting the kilo-and-a-half handgun in a cross-draw holster high up on the front left side of his chest.

  Lod understood what she was verifying: Burning was committed to taking his life if that proved the best option.

  "Stop gibbering like a pair of utter blitzwits!" he snapped. "There's been far too much cranking of toads around here already without you two planning more!"

  Burning almost smiled at that. The Ext slang's origin lay in a German expression, tod-krank, which on Old Earth had meant "fatally ill." In the Broken Country the phrase had come to denote terminal cases in general, and with the coming of the AlphaLAW war, "terminal" had quickly become synonymous with terminated, killed in action, corpsified.

  The handlers and Ghost, a boomer slung on either shoulder, drew away. Stim circuitry or no, Wheel Weevil riding was a perilous sport in many ways. The handlers made the distress hoot of a rolling annuloid, and when Artemis answered it, Burning hit a touchpad tile. Circuitry in the Weevil's senso-rium told her that her egg was in peril. She tucked her legs close, pushed off, and rolled into motion, shoving with her podia whenever they found purchase and rapidly gaining speed.

  Burning steered with his body weight and piloted with the control stick. He didn't quite avoid the paddock corral gate, but the Weevil—evolved to deal with just that kind of obstacle—pushed off it automatically. The cockpit wobbled and, according to the Weevil's surges and split-second decelerations, rode the outer race forward and up or back and up but always returned to vertical.

  They rolled across the training farm's access road and into the bush. Burning had no intention of descending by way of the dirt lanes the Exts had land-mined above and the enemy below. The great plated doughnut of annuloid and cockpit hit rough ground, rebounding from stump and stone. On their first extreme jounce Lod lost his grandiose braid-heavy saucer cap. Both men were thrown against the safety harness and each other.

  Heavier now, the rain blurred Burning's wiperless helmet visor. He concentrated on following the course overlay he'd worked out and downloaded into the beast's mapping memory: between two enormous trees and down a sloppy wash, then along a rocky streambed that descended the tor's side in precipitous steps and low falls. He prayed that Daddy D hadn't missed any orders to secure booby traps, deactivate mines, and stand down snipers and troops at other firing pozzes. It was the kind of run a Weevil was well suited for, though that didn't keep the two men from being lashed by branches, torn at by vines, and swarmed over by every scuttling pest and noxious bug the Weevil shook loose.

  Prompted by the day's events as much as by anything else, Burning thought of his last cross-country run, years earlier.

  After Dunhill's suicide his impoverished widow and children had been taken into the populous household of Bastion Orman, and there Siri, Emmett, and Fiona had grown up as familial charity cases. Siri had suffered the situation in silence for the education and social grooming, the connections and entries she wouldn't have been able to provide for the kids on her own, not to mention physical security from the enemies Hipshot had made in the course of his wild life.

  Eschewing remarriage, she had concentrated on earning her keep and raising her children, only to die tragically and far too young when—as had happened intermittently on every planet with a technoindustrial infrastructure—a long-inactive Cyber-plague vector program had emerged from hiding. The outbreak was a mutated strain of the insidious DoomsData virus, one of the original and most destructive of the lot.

  Despite 'wares scrubbers and phages, DoomsData had infected a First Lands CAD/CAM facility, though how it had lain undetected or penetrated the system, no one could say. Using the machinery, hazardous materials, vehicles, and even climate controls, the Cyberplague had slain more than 2,800 human beings before it had been contained and eradicated. Sin, who had been acting as assistant on an Orman purchasing delegation, had died trying to fight her way to the complex's control room.

  In the wake of her death, Humbert Orman, paterfamilias of the bastion and onetime Allgrave, had shown Siri's orphaned children an even greater measure of the gruff warmth and inadvertent pity he doled out to them. Burning had already been made something of a loner by his lack of status, and Fiona had begun to look for her self-worth in the opinions others held of her. Then had come that day at Bastian Orman's Wheel Weevil stable.

  Burning had been out for a practice ride not because he rejoiced in the sport the way his father had but because he had needed to clock roll time for a cadet Skills qualification. At the stables Humbert had taken a crash that had left him unhurt but furious, and Burning, without thinking it through, had pointed out that the Weevil's belly plates had been allowed to become mite-infested and inflamed. Normally, Humbert would have controlled
his temper. Publicly humiliated and shaken, however, he had instead taken a swagger stick to the groom, a half-feral boy whose own mother was dead and whose father was an abusive alcoholic brute.

  Without uttering so much as a whimper, the groom had taken a thrashing that would have made a grown man cry. Humbert Orman was beyond any revenge, but a month later Burning, out on a solo orienteering exercise, was set upon by a masked assailant who beat him senseless and heaved his body into a crevasse.

  Found by chance, he was brought to intensive care and began a period of recuperation and rehab that lasted nearly two years.

  The attacker had worn a fieldsuit developed by the Bastion Gilead, with which the Ormans had had a long-running and sometimes violent feud. But the Gileads had refused to respond to accusations, and save for Burning's gut conviction, there was no evidence that the abused groom was involved. The long convalescence yanked him off the usual bastion rearing track and set him even more apart from his peers.

  In due time, his body healed and he resumed his pursuit of Flowstate, the Skills, and military training, as all Exts were required to do. But it took the war with LAW to turn him hard.

  By then the father of the abused groom had died under murky circumstances, and the boy himself had left Bastion Orman. Years would pass before Burning reencountered him in the theater of war. The former groom's ferocity, cunning, and combat prowess had earned him nearly legendary status among the Exts, who had given him the field name Zone.

  Chapter

  Five

  "Mother always warned me," Lod screamed." 'Never share a foxhole with anybody braver than you are!' She forgot to say 'Weevil rides, either!'"

  Artemis lofted off a little hummock and bounced through some tall weeds. The annuloid was honking for breath and sloughing a lathery trail of yellow saliva behind her but was still rolling strong.