‘Modular, sir,’ says Haze.
‘What?’ I look at him.
‘This whole ship,’ he says. ‘Each section is a mirror of a bigger section. Boxes inside boxes. The design reflects Uplift theories of the hive.’
I’ll take his word for it.
Using a porthole, Neen checks the corridor beyond.
It’s empty in one direction. In the other, two guards wait outside General Tournier’s cabin. As he watches, two guards become four. A Silver Fist nods, another laughs. And then the first two head towards a bank of elevators.
‘Changing shifts,’ Neen whispers.
We wait some more.
A few minutes later Rachel blunders through the outer emergency door, and stares around her. She does a good impression of a woman lost. Also drunk, and slightly dishevelled. Shaking out her hair, she turns back and both guards take the bait.
‘Wait,’ says one.
‘No way,’ Rachel gives another shake. ‘Wrong floor.’ She looks at the expensive carpet. ‘Very definitely the wrong floor.’
‘Where do you want to be?’
‘On a water bed,’ says Rachel. ‘In a hotel overlooking a blue lagoon. With flying fish breaking through the waves and a double sun rising and setting.’
Who knew she could be so poetic?
‘You and me both,’ says one of the Silver Fist.
To follow Rachel through the door is a misdemeanour in anybody’s army; although being on a charge is the least of his worries. Yanking him inside, Franc stabs him through the heart and kicks his twitching body down the stairs. It tumbles as far as a half-landing and jams against a bulkhead.
‘What was that?’
Rachel returns to the corridor.
‘What?’ she asks, walking towards the second guard. ‘What was what?’ Her knife takes him under his chin and enters his brain. The smile she gives Franc when the rest of us reach her makes me glad she is on my side.
Chapter 49
‘On my count,’ I tell Neen. ‘Five . . . four . . .’
When I hit zero, Neen turns the handle and I kick open the general’s door, sliding myself inside, gun combat-ready. Staff officers look up, and the general spins round; over in one corner Vijay’s eyes widen.
He’s holding a glass. As is almost every other officer in that room.
‘Entering emergency shut-down,’ announces my gun.
The SIG-37 and I really need to talk about this. It’s as irritating as its bloody whirring, and several times more inconvenient. ‘Don’t you fucking . . .‘
Diodes die before I can finish the sentence.
A dozen Death’s Head officers nod, and a handful of them smirk. I’m glad; it lets me know who to kill first. After the Silver Fist, obviously. There are six of these, three on either side of the door. All are armed. And all have guns pointing at my head.
‘Sven,’ says the general. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ Waving vaguely towards the middle of his cabin, he adds, ‘Come in. And bring your friends.’
So in we troop.
Although that is not entirely true, because when I glance back Haze is missing and Rachel is shutting the door carefully behind her.
‘Sir,’ says the little ADC. ‘Perhaps we should disarm them?’
The general considers this.
‘Why,’ he asks. ‘Would it make you feel safer?’
The boy blushes.
Returning my SIG to its holster, I fumble the catch and then unbuckle my belt, dropping it to the deck. At least fumbling is how it’s meant to look. One throwing spike now rests in the palm of my hand. At my nod, the Aux put down their guns.
‘Search them.’
The boy finds a knife in my boot.
‘Anyone else hiding anything?’ asks General Tournier. ‘If so, you might want to give your weapons up.’ There is a drawl to his voice, and a smile on his face that would disgrace a cat. He’s obviously hoping we’ll ignore his suggestion.
‘Lose the lot,’ I say.
The Aux do as they’re told.
Rachel has a knife inside her shirt, Neen a blade in his boot that the general’s ADC missed first time round. Shil just shakes her head. Trooper Emil, our ex-Ninth captain, has a tiny pistol tucked into the back of his belt. Not sure how he expected to get away with that.
‘That’s it?’
Everyone nods.
‘And again,’ the general says.
Only this time he is talking to a Silver Fist.
The man starts with me and finds nothing, because the throwing spike is now buried deep under the flesh of my good wrist. Hurts, but then it would. Neen goes next and he’s clean. As expected, the man spends more time than necessary on the women.
Stony-faced, Franc waits while he runs his hands over her hips and up the inside of her legs. He misses the blade between her shoulders, but to find that he needs to focus less on her breasts. Rachel just stands there. Shil is less forgiving.
In fact, her slap rocks the Silver Fist on his heels. She is savagely punched for her trouble. As she crawls to her feet, she glances at Neen, who nods. One of the knives on the deck a second before is now missing.
Emil turns out to have a cosh in his boot. When he picks himself up, he sneers at the Silver Fist who hit him and has to pick himself up all over again.
‘Just leaves your arm,’ General Tournier tells me.
I’ve been wondering when he would get round to that. When the arm arrived, the screw designed to hold it in place was crusty with rust. Now it’s crusted with a mix of new rust and dried blood from the Vals. That makes it damn near impossible to shift without the right tools. When I point this out to the general, he suggests I try using a discarded blade. So polite these Death’s Head senior officers.
We might as well be discussing the weather.
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we’ll kill your troops if you try anything stupid. And after that we’ll kill you, obviously.’ Two Silver Fist point their rifles at me as I bend to pick up a knife.
Don’t show any surprise, sir . . .
Haze is inside my head. And yes, I told him to stay out of there, but I’m still glad to hear him. Listen, I say. My fucking gun’s dead again.
Faking, sir.
It can do that?
‘Sven,’ the general’s voice is abrupt.
Looking up, I find the whole room staring at me.
‘Anything wrong?’
History is made of questions asked and roads taken . . . So Haze tells me, but he talks shit about stuff like that. What will happen happens, and anything that doesn’t happen wasn’t meant to happen in the first place. This is our glorious leader’s definition of historical determinism.
So it is unquestionably right.
All the same, there seems more than one answer to the general’s question. And I’m not sure which is right. Presumably, if I say it, then that is what I’m meant to say, and I was never going to say anything else anyway.
‘Fuck,’ I say.
‘What?’ General Tournier demands.
‘Thinking,’ I say. ‘Makes my head hurt. Always has done.’
Looking round his room with its carpet and bowls of fruit, and staff officers chatting to each other because this has lasted so long it’s become boring, I realize the obvious. ‘Should have killed you,’ I say. ‘Should have just killed the fucking lot of you the first time we met . . .’
He stares at me. ‘You’re not really a colonel, are you?’
‘What the fuck do you think? ‘
Now I have his officers’ attention back. And I am actually beginning to enjoy myself, because facing death does that for me. Then there’s our glorious leader’s law . . . You know, the one that demands ex-NCOs announce their status, so trouble-makers can be identified early.
‘I’m an ex-sergeant,’ I say. ‘From the Legion.’
‘Jaxx sent a sergeant after me?’
‘An ex-sergeant,’ I remind him. ‘A Legion ex-sergeant.’