The Veteran Omnibus

by Gavin G. Smith

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

'an exceptional talent' Peter F. Hamilton My name is Jakob Douglas, ex-special forces. I fought Them. Just like we've all been doing for 60 bloody years. But I thought my part in that was done with. Three hundred years in our future, in a world of alien infiltrators, religious hackers, a vast convoying nation of Nomads, city sized orbital elevators, and a cyborg pirate king who believes himself to be a mythological demon Jakob is having a bad day. VETERAN is a fast paced, intricately plotted violent SF Thriller set in a dark future against the backdrop of a seemingly never ending war against an unknowable and implacable alien enemy. In WAR IN HEAVEN, the high-powered sequel to VETERAN, an unlikely hero makes an even more unlikely return to take the reader back into a vividly rendered bleak future. But a bleak future where there are still wonders: man travelling out into the universe, Bladerunner-esque cities hanging from the ceilings of vast caverns, aliens that we can barely comprehend. Gavin Smith writes fast-moving, incredibly violent SF thrillers but behind the violence and the thrills lies a carefully thought out story and characters who have far more to them than first meets the eye. Never one to avoid controversy Gavin Smith nevertheless invites you to think beyond the initial shock of what you have just read. But in the meantime? Another fire-fight, another chase another flight of imagination.

Release date: February 8, 2018

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 1263

Sample

Prologue

Dog 4

The soldier’s environment is mud. It doesn’t matter where they go. Tundra, woods, jungle, even paved colonial suburbs, by the time a few thousand tanks, walkers and armoured personnel carriers have tramped through it, once the defoliants have been sprayed, all that’s left is mud.

What we terraform we can still destroy. It’s why all the colonies look the same to me. It’s also how I knew I was dreaming; I couldn’t taste the mud, couldn’t smell it. This was more like watching a viz. My dreams were becoming less real than my time in the sense booths, but what was another loss?

It had been a forest once. You could still see the rotted stumps of alien trees pushing up through the plain of mud. Defensive trenches ran across the plain in a way that was probably supposed to be planned but looked utterly random to me. The harsh burning brightness of Sirius A was sinking beneath the horizon; even from the fourth planet it looked huge and too near for a sun to someone who’d grown up on Earth. Behind us the much smaller Sirius B was rising, casting its pale twilight light.

I watched our shadows shrinking and distorting in the changing light. The strangeness of it added to my feeling of being comatose with my eyes open. Four days, no sleep, kept awake by Slaughter and amphetamines. None of this seemed real and it hadn’t at the time. Which was a good thing because what we were doing was thought of as difficult and dangerous, driving through an enemy armoured push.

Off to my left I saw Mudge pop out of a trench as he gunned the armoured one-man scout hover. He was on point. He wasn’t even military, certainly shouldn’t have been out with us. He was a journalist; sense, viz and even old-fashioned print if the heroin made him nostalgic.

Howard Mudgie, Mudge to his friends, a crusader when he started, then a war junkie, now a burn out and as good a soldier as any. That was why he was on point. His scout hover sank out of sight again.

Nobody was talking. Our encrypted comms lines were silent; everyone was too tired. All around us They advanced. Their heavy tanks made out of what looked like chitin and reactive liquid. Their honeycombed ground-effects drives glowing pale blue like Sirius B. They were in a staggered line as far as the eye could see in either direction.

According to the orbital data I had received, this new front was over two hundred miles long. They were just rolling up the joint British, French and Congolese task force as they went. Their troops were still in the tanks; they were big enough to act as APCs as well. Their Walkers policed the gaps between the tanks. Organic mechs with tendrils and rotary shard guns that fired bone-like razor munitions. It was the Walkers that were making the Wild Boys’ life difficult, that and trying not to dump the Land Rovers in a trench. That would’ve been crap as well.

We were covered in mud. It was everywhere, except on the weapons, which had been treated with a stayclean finish. Spinks slewed the Land Rover round a tank. They were ignoring us if we ignored them. Close behind us Ash sent up a similar wall of mud as she followed us in the second Land Rover.

I saw the trench coming but didn’t need to mention it. Spinks was jacked into the jeep. In the weasel-faced Essex wide boy’s head was a 3D topographical rendering of the surrounding terrain. It was as up to date as our orbital support, Mudge’s sparse scout data and the vehicle’s own sensors would allow.

Spinks found the high ground and gunned the Land Rover over the trench. This used to be exciting. In the air, I saw Mudge shoot by beneath us in the trench. We showered him in mud, once this would’ve caused comment. I barely registered the jarring impact as the Land Rover sank into the earth, the independently driven smart tyres biting into the mud for traction.

‘Walker,’ I said quietly as we skidded round another tank. Spinks didn’t show a sign of paying the slightest bit of attention but the Land Rover was suddenly going in another direction. Straight at one of their tanks.

‘There’s not enough ground clearance,’ I muttered, mainly to myself. Spinks was already committed. Shards started coming our way. Something hit my helmet. At first I thought I’d been shot but it was

Gregor folding the heavy plasma gun down and lying on the bed of the Land Rover.

‘Get your head down,’ he told me. If he hadn’t, I doubt I’d have had the presence of mind to do so. Under the tank their ground-effects drives pushed us and the Land Rover down. It was like a warm wind. I heard something get torn off the wagon and we were out the other side. I barely noticed when we hit the second Walker.

Spinks wrapped the front of the Land Rover round the Walker’s legs. We stopped and it had its legs knocked out from beneath it. I was vaguely aware of Gregor bailing out of the Land Rover. I looked next to me to find an alien war machine lying on the wagon, tendrils flailing. It looked like parts of the alien machine were bathing in what used to be Spinks. Flailing tendrils flung bits of him around. I tried to feel something for my friend and squad mate but there was nothing there any more.

I could hear shouting from the rest of the squad. I climbed out of the Land Rover, and then stopped. I’d forgotten my SAW. I turned and went back for the weapon. More shouting. The Walker was trying to right itself. By rights one of its tendrils should’ve torn my head off by now. Then I had the SAW in my hand. The smartlink connected to the palm receiver, and the weapon’s crosshair appeared on my internal visual display. It sounded to me like I started screaming. There was an orange blossom, flickering but permanent at the front of the SAW, it seemed to go on for an age. The Walker’s carapace looked as if it was rapidly distorting as I played the SAW across it.

Things went quiet as my audio dampeners kicked in. Gregor was at my side, his railgun held high on its gyroscopic mount as he fired it down into the Walker. The SAW muzzle flash stopped. At some level I knew that meant I’d fired off the entire cassette. I’d put two hundred rounds into the Walker. I felt a hand on my arm, strong, boosted cybernetic strength pulling me back. It was Gregor. How did he have the strength, always there getting me out of trouble?

Mudge was in front of me. I was pushed pillion onto the bouncing hover scout. I heard the sound of superheated air exploding behind me. Hydrogen pellets heated to a plasma state impacted again and again into the Walker as Bibs fired the heavy plasma cannon on the other Land Rover. I was vaguely aware of the sensation of moving as we began to bob across the mud.

‘Where the fuck’s our artillery! Where the fuck’s our air support!’ Mudge screamed with more anger than I could muster, but he always

had better drugs. He knew the answer, like I did. We were finished here. Dog 4 and the rest of the Sirius system was Theirs now. I just hoped They’d let us get to an evac site.

1

Dundee

I awoke from the dream with a start. My knuckles ached from where I’d tried to extend my blades; I ran my fingers over the domed locks, a compromise to let someone with my capabilities walk free after he’d served his country and his species. A right that had been won in blood and vacuum.

The bruises from last night’s pit fight were now tender memories, thanks to my body’s implanted internal repair systems. As ever I wondered why the same systems couldn’t help me with the white-hot throbbing lance of pain that was a dehydration headache. The pain seemed to live just behind the black polarised lenses that replaced my eyes. Why was it that man could create millions of tons of complex engineering capable of travelling across space but could still not find a cure for a hangover? One of the many skewed priorities of our society.

Too much good whisky, the real stuff made in the distilleries out in the National Park, had caused my hangover. I sat up on the cot in the porta-cube, massaging my throbbing temple with my left arm, the one that was still flesh. The matt-black prosthetic right arm reached for my cigarettes. Like the whisky, the cigarettes were the good stuff, hand-made somewhere in the Islamic Protectorate.

I lit the cigarette with my antique trench lighter, a family heirloom, apparently. Family. What were my parents thinking when they had me? The war was already thirty years old then. Why was anyone having children? Mind you, they’d been patriotic, probably thought it was their duty to breed so their offspring could grow up, get recruited, indoctrinated, chopped, augmented, mangled, chewed up and spat out to be a burden on society. I wasn’t on active duty so I liked to consider myself a

burden. I inhaled the first pointless lungful of smoke of the day. My internal filters and scrubbers removed all the toxins and anything interesting from the cigarette, turning my expensive vice into little more than an unpleasant affectation. It’s these little luxuries, I thought, that separate me from the rest of the refuse. When it came down to it, the hustling, the leg breaking, scheme racing and pit fighting was just to make enough euros to augment my paltry veteran’s pension. After all, what’re a few bruises and contusions if it means good whisky, cigarettes, drugs, old movies and music, and of course the booths.

I considered starting drinking again as I had little on that day. A quick scan of the cramped plastic cube that I existed in told me that I had drank more than I thought I had last night. Which would explain the constant pain in my skull.

‘Shit,’ I muttered to the morning. I thought about checking my credit rating but decided that would just upset me further. A search of my jeans turned up some good old-fashioned black-economy paper euros. I’d won them for second place at the pit fight in Fintry. I’d been better than the kid who beat me but the kid had been dangerously wired, dangerously boosted and hungrier than me. I reckoned he had maybe another six months before his central nervous system was fried. He’d probably been fighting with the cheap enhancements to feed his family.

I’d just wanted to get drunk. I counted the money, stubbing the cigarette out in the already-full ashtray. I had enough to spend a day in the booths. Almost mustering a smile at this good luck I dragged on my jeans, strapped on my boots and shrugged on the least dirty T-shirt I could find with a cursory search. Finally I pulled on my heavy tan armoured raincoat. I ran a finger through my sandy-coloured shoulder-length hair; it was getting too long. I tied it back into a short ponytail. Sunglasses over the black lenses that used to be my eyes and ready to face another day. Ready to face it because I was going to the booths.

The Rigs were so poor that we didn’t even have advertising. It had started before the last Final Human Conflict over two hundred and fifty years ago. Apparently there had once been fields of fossil fuels in the North Sea and these huge rusting metal skeletons had been platforms designed to harvest the

fuel. When their day was done they had been towed into the harbour to be dismantled at the Dundee docks. When they had stopped dismantling them the Tay had just become a dumping ground. More and more had come until they filled the river and you could walk from Dundee to Fife on them. Provided you knew how to look after yourself.

Quickly they had become a squatters’ heaven for people largely considered surplus by the great and the good. This of course included veterans – vets. I stepped out onto the planks of the makeshift scaffolding that ran between the stacked, windowless, hard plastic cubes that signified my middle-class status in the Rigs. Off to my right Dundee was a bright glow in comparison to the sparse lighting on the Rigs.

Lying on the ground by the door to the cube was a young boy, no older than thirteen. He was unconscious. A victim of the intrusion countermeasures that I’d added to the cube to stop myself from getting ripped off any more than was strictly necessary. I sighed and pulled a stim patch out of my coat pocket and placed it on the kid’s arm. Scarring over the boy’s chest told me that he’d already fallen victim to Harvesters once.

‘Wake up,’ I said, shaking the boy. ‘You want to get harvested again?’ I asked him. Startled eyes shot open and the kid backed away from me so quickly he almost went off the scaffolding and into the liquid pollution that passed for the Tay these days. I watched him as he got up and ran off.

‘And don’t try and rip me off again!’ I shouted redundantly, before wasting some more money and lighting up another cigarette.

It was a hot night. Quickly sweat began to stick my clothes to my flesh. I cursed the malfunctioning coolant system in my armoured coat. I could’ve done without the coat but that was an invitation to get rolled. My dermal armour was good but not a patch on the coat. It covered me from neck to ankle with slits in the appropriate places to allow me access to weapons, had they not all been locked down. I could get the coolant system fixed but I only had just enough money for a day in the booth.

I kept my head down as I ran the gauntlet of begging vets. I tried to ignore the staring infected empty eye sockets, the scarred bodies and missing limbs of the decommissioned cyborg vets who did not have the cash to pay for civilian replacements

for the enhancements that had been removed. Head down, collar up, I considered turning on my audio dampeners to filter their pleas out.

‘Not today, brothers,’ I muttered to myself as I strode by. It could just as easily have been me there had I not made special forces. The augmentations and the training I’d been given were just too expensive and bespoke to throw away on a human scrap heap like the other vets. I’d been canny enough to arrange a military contract that had not rendered me a lifelong slave, but even after my term was up they still had the right to call me back as a reserve. Despite the dishonourable discharge I was still on the books (though no one ever really came off) as part of the wild-goose-chasing XI units, but they were largely a joke.

There had once been a disastrous attempt at dumping ex-special forces types into space. This was cheaper than paying our paltry pensions and it meant we couldn’t go home and become really well trained and dangerous burdens on society. However, a change in policy meant we were still considered valuable enough to remain whole, even if that whole was mostly plastic and alloy. Of course all the most lethal stuff was locked down until they needed it.

I glanced down at the locks just behind the knuckles on each of my hands. There was another lock on the shoulder of my prosthetic right arm and I could always feel the inhibitor in one of my plugs at the base of my skull that dampened my wired reactions. In many ways the dampener was the worst. Reactions like I’d had when I’d been in the SAS made you feel like you were on a different plane of existence to the rest of pedestrian humanity. Giving that up had been hard. I still felt like I was walking through syrup sometimes.

Hamish looked after the booths. Hamish was revolting. He had a thick curly beard and a mass of naturally grown, curly, dirty, matted hair. He was naked, filthy and fat; eating some kind of greasy processed confectionery in the armoured cage from where he overlooked the sense booths. I tried hard to suppress my disgust at the man, whose foul odour I was managing to smell through armoured mesh. Nobody ever saw Hamish leave or sleep. He always seemed to be here. His bulk was such that he probably couldn’t leave if he wanted to.

‘Jake!’ Hamish cried enthusiastically. Instantly annoying me. I didn’t like the contraction of my name. ‘How long?’ he asked, wiping bits of the pastry on his bloated hairy torso. I held up the dirty paper euros.

‘A day please. My usual,’ I said with as much pleasantness as I could muster.

‘You sure? No nice virtual snuff orgy? Maybe you want to have sex with the pres? No? Usual it is. Let’s see the readies.’ I pushed the paper notes into the secure box. Hamish scanned them for authenticity, liquid explosives, contact poisons, surveillance and various other things before they slid through to his side. The sense pusher counted the notes, his greedy smile faltering as he did so. I felt panic rising within.

‘Uh, Jakob . . .’ Hamish began.

‘What? What!’ I demanded. ‘There’s enough there!’ I shouted.

‘Guess you didn’t hear I’m putting my prices up. Not to worry. There’s enough here for half a day and some credit for your next trip.’

‘No!’ I said, unable to believe, or at least cope with what I was hearing. In my mind I ran through the numerous ways in which I could kill or cause pain to Hamish. Of course some of them meant I would have to touch him. I lifted my prosthetic arm to punch the armoured cage that protected him. I felt rather than saw the cage’s protective systems activate, weapons unfolding from the walls and ceiling to cover me.

‘Now, now, calm down,’ the still-smiling Hamish said in a conciliatory and patronising tone. ‘I was just joking; a day it is.’

‘Really fucking funny, Hamish,’ I muttered, lighting another cigarette. There was an ever-so-slight shake in my left hand, the one that was still flesh. ‘You do know what I used to do for a living, right?’ I snapped.

‘You and everyone else round here, pal. Booth twelve’s free.’ I turned and stalked into the sense arcade.

Inside was a long corridor lit with dim red lights, many of which were broken. On either side of the corridor were reinforced steel doors. I found booth number twelve and looked up at the lens before the door and gave Hamish the finger, so of course he made me wait another minute. Finally the steel door shot up. Inside, a vet minus both his arms, one of his

legs a jury-rigged and botched-looking home prosthetic, was sitting on the foam mattress of the bunk. He was still plugged in though obviously not receiving. He ignored me.

‘C’mon, man. That was never two hours. My daughter sent me the money for this. It’s her combat pay! She fights to keep you safe. . . I fought to keep you safe from Them, you bastard!’ he screamed into the air. Hamish was as ever deaf to this.

‘You and me both, pal,’ I said and grabbed the vet with my prosthetic arm, my left arm removing the plug. Augmented muscle slung him out the door and across the corridor into the other wall. I tried to ignore the sound of a homemade prosthetic snapping. The metal door rapidly slid down, cutting off the sobbing. The booth was red plastic. It smelled strongly of semen; some users had no imagination. I lay down in the niche that formed the bunk, sinking into the cheap foam mattress. I reached behind my head and inserted the jack into one of my plugs.

I was gone, immersed in the usual, the program that Vicar had written for me. Subtle, beautiful, other-worldly (though not in a way that would induce horrors) music played as one by one my senses were deprived, as I divorced from the self. I faded away. I stopped existing.

Everything that was me, the pain of wounds inflicted and received, the terror inflicted and received, all that I’d seen and done drifted away in a sense of profound dislocation. The things that I didn’t think the human mind was supposed to deal with, acts committed in the war against Them, the genocidal alien other locked in perpetual conflict with humanity, were gone. All that was left was an unfeeling abstract floating in nothing.

And just like that I was yanked back. As ever it was too short but this time something was not right. I checked my internal clock, a mere two hours. Enough was enough. I was going to find a way to kill Hamish; he was taking the piss now. I pulled the jack out from the back of my neck and slid off the bunk towards the door, but it did not slide open. I hit the manual door switch but nothing happened. I was getting concerned. This was beginning to feel like some kind of burn.

‘Hamish, you’re just making things worse for yourself,’ I said

evenly. Just the slightest hint of threat in my tone, assuming that Hamish was listening.

On my internal visual display the integral communications link was flashing. Opening it up formed a small split screen in the corner of my vision. I recognised the man on the video comms link, short dark hair neatly trimmed, suave features, a degree of refinement to an underlying feeling of malice and violence. A warm smile belied by the absence of feeling in two very pale blue eyes.

I tried my best to remain passive in the face of the comms icon of a man I hated, a man who’d tried very hard to kill me.

‘Sergeant Douglas,’ the man said. He sounded genuinely pleased to see me. His tones educated and cultured, pure upper class of a vintage old enough to remember a time when breeding actually mattered.

‘Go and fuck yourself. I’m not in the army any more. You and I have nothing to say to each other.’

‘Nonsense, Jakob, mutineer or not you’re still a reservist.’ Major George Rolleston said, smiling again. ‘We have a code eleven, you’ve been reactivated.’ I barely gave this a second’s thought. A code eleven. XI. Xenomorphic Infiltration.

‘A bullshit wild goose chase. Get someone else. Turn my program back on.’

‘Don’t be like that, Jakob. I recruited you especially. After all, who more than I knows your efficiency?’

‘Even if I agreed to be reactivated—’

‘Nobody’s giving you the choice, Sergeant,’ Rolleston interrupted smoothly, breaking the unwritten rule of special forces etiquette again and using my rank.

‘Even if I decide to be reactivated,’ I reiterated through the sub-vocalised equivalent of gritted teeth. ‘I won’t work with you, you piece of shit.’ Rolleston merely smiled.

‘But Jakob, both Josephine and I are looking forward to working with you again,’ Rolleston said, and there was the threat, I thought. Josephine Bran, Rolleston’s pet killer, Royal Marine sniper, SBS with Rolleston and then seconded to Special Operations Command, someone that the other operators feared. A pale, quiet, unassuming girl, a shy girl who enjoyed and excelled at killing far too much, they called her the Grey Lady. She was the perfect servant for men such as Rolleston.

‘You turned on your own men. You tried to dump them; they served you and then you tried to space them.’

‘Perfectly legal and as per my orders,’ Rolleston said and it was true: a vagary of interstellar and colonial law had meant that there was a loophole covering the wholesale murder of a government’s own troops. A loophole that had since been removed in the outcry that followed the British government’s attempt to alleviate the social problems caused by special forces vets.

‘You tried to kill me, you bastard!’ I spat at him, losing my temper. Suddenly the smile disappeared from the Major’s face.

‘And you led a mutiny, a court-martial offence for which you and that journalist should have been executed.’ Then the smile returned to Rolleston’s cold face. ‘That reminds me. Have you heard from Howard recently?’ Suddenly I was even more suspicious. My co-conspirator in the troopship mutiny that had saved our lives and the lives of other special forces and intelligence operators had disappeared shortly after Earth fall. All attempts to find the whereabouts of Mudge had turned up nothing. The last I’d heard from him he said he was trying to find Gregor MacDonald, another disappearance that Rolleston had been involved in.

‘What do you know?’ I demanded. Because Rolleston knew all right: he’d have done something to Mudge. He’d know what happened to Gregor, he knew it all, and he knew I knew. He’d string me along on hope to get me to do what he needed. His smile disappeared.

‘Let’s stop messing around, Sergeant.’ The door to the sense booth opened. ‘You have been reactivated. You are back on full pay, and if you track the XI and bring this matter to a successful conclusion I will award you a bonus sufficient to fund your addiction for a week.’ I stepped out of the booth and looked up and down the corridor, almost expecting to see Private Josephine Bran waiting for me, but the corridor was empty.

‘I though all this XI was bullshit,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think They stood a chance against our system defences let alone Earth’s.’

‘Can you see why we would want people to think that?’ Rolleston asked somewhat patronisingly. I found the idea that They could infiltrate Earth side somewhat disturbing. I really didn’t want to find myself fighting the same war again, except

this time unpaid and in the streets of Dundee. A text/picture file appeared on my internal visual display. ‘This is what we know so far. Keep me up to date. Oh, and one other thing,’ the Major said, smiling. I did not respond. ‘We’ll unlock you, but keep the locks; you’ll need them again when this is over. Collect your weapons from your strongbox.’ With this Rolleston’s face disappeared.

There was a faintly audible clicking noise from my knuckles and shoulder. Smiling I looked down and picked the locks off like they were scabs. From thin slits just behind each knuckle four razor-sharp, nine-inch ceramic blades extended slowly, and then suddenly disappeared again at my mental command.

Next I reached up and opened the Velcro-secured concealed panel on the shoulder of my armoured raincoat. On silent servos the shoulder-mounted independent laser slid out and ran through its field of fire. A small screen appearing on my visual display showed what the weapon saw, superimposing a crosshair on where it would hit if it fired.

I lit a cigarette. I’d been putting off the best until last, afraid that they were not going to give me this, let me be this free. Taking a deep breath of smoke, I held it, reaching behind me for the restraining plug wired to my central nervous system inhibiting my boosted reactions. It came away in my hand and suddenly I was alive again. The world slowed down as I sped up, feeling like a razor cutting through a slow-moving and turgid reality.

I passed Hamish’s cage; Hamish was not in it. I walked out onto the rough planks of the jury-rigged catwalks that ran through the Rigs. I finished the cigarette and flicked it into the superstructure. My shoulder laser spun up, tracking it. There was the bang of exploding superheated air as a ruby-red light momentarily illuminated the corroded orange metal of the ancient oil rig. The cigarette butt ceased to exist.

2

Dundee

I made my way through the tangle of metal and shanty town back to the stacked plastic cubes where I lived. I clambered up the stairs sending the code to open the door to the porta-cube. Entering, I looked around trying to remember where I’d left the army-issue strongbox. Finally, in a pile of dirty washing and antique, actual paper books I found the supposedly unbreakable composite super-dense plastic box. Touching the lock button it clicked open.

The two matt-black guns lay in their moulded foam surround. I picked up the Tyler Optics 5 first. I slid a battery into the handgrip, checking it manually and then running a diagnostic on the laser pistol. I placed the compact weapon into a moulded holster and attached the holster just behind my right hip. I clipped a battery holder to my belt, and placed a flat recharging cell into a slimline compartment in the raincoat.

Next I took the Sterling .454 Mastodon revolver out of the box. The enormous, solid, old-fashioned revolver felt like a toy in my prosthetic right arm. It was this trusty large-calibre weapon which I’d rely on to put one of Them down, if one of Them had made it Earth side. I stripped the revolver down and cleaned the already-clean weapon. Then I checked the revolver’s action. Satisfied, the Mastodon became a familiar and welcome weight beneath my left arm in its shoulder holster. I clipped speed loaders with different loads to various easy-to-reach places.

I practised drawing both weapons through the conveniently placed slits in the armoured raincoat, checking the smartgun link, ensuring it was calibrated properly; the crosshairs appeared in my line of sight – in theory, where the bullet or beam

would hit. First with one gun, then the other, then both, and finally with both weapons and the independently targeting shoulder-mounted laser. Eventually I was satisfied that all was as it should be.

Holstering the weapons I headed for the secure storage cube I rented to get my bike. After all, the government was going to be paying for fuel for the duration so there was no sense in walking. On my way down to the storage cube I split-screened my visual display and began to read through the information that that piece of shit Rolleston had sent me.

I rattled down the scaffolding steps past various plastic sheeting and cardboard lean-tos. Grubby, scrawny, suspicious faces, illuminated by the flickering flames of foul-smelling trash burners, glared at me. To them I looked well fed and wealthy. I ignored them as I enjoyed the buzz of having wired reactions again. I read through the Major’s report, it was like an old-style UFO sighting. It was full of ifs and speculation.

The crux of it was one of the strategic orbital platforms, part of Earth’s supposedly unbeatable ring of defences, had detected a faint echo in some rarely used spectrum. The echo was regular enough and moving towards the Earth with sufficient speed for the commander to order speculative firing on this ghost. The re