War Machine (The Combat-K Series) (33 page)

“Keenan,” she mumbled, and her left hand moved across him and rested on his hip.

Keenan closed his eyes.

He tried to regain sleep, but it evaded him for a long, long time.

When Keenan awoke he was alone. They were moving and he sat up, groggy, and lit a cigarette. Pippa was hammering the boat across the waves.

“You OK?”

She flashed him a dangerous glance. “Yes.”

“Franco, what you doing?”

“Making breakfast.”

“Is it, by any chance, cheese and horseradish?”

Franco looked amazed. “How the helldid you guess that?”

Keenan chuckled.

An hour later a thin white mist sprung up from the Milk Sea. Much thinner than before, it still, however, slowed their charge across the still white waters. The waves were growing less and less in stature, the sea descending into a steady calm.

“We are getting close,” said Klik.

Keenan nodded. “How long?”

“An hour, maybe a little more. The coast is often shrouded by Milk Mist, and for the eelmarsh it is a constant companion. We say it is the breath of the eels, emitted to entice non-warriors to their deaths. It is said the eels suck you down into the marsh and consume your flesh while you still live.”

“Sounds a funky way to die,” said Franco, looking up from his pan of melted PreCheese.

“Do not mock.” Klik’s voice contained not just awe, but something more, a sense of... reverence
.
His young eyes seemed much older; his young boy’s face a mask of wisdom.

They continued at a modified pace.

“Have you heard from Cam?” asked Pippa, as the mist thickened. It swirled around the two cruising boats; the reverberation of under-stressed stealth engines hissed, muffled as echoes bounced back from the mist.

“No.” Keenan shook his head. He took the PAD and the relays; started to flick through channels. “Cam, frequency 557, come in. I repeat, Cam, frequency 557, this is Private Eye, come in, over.”

Nothing.

“Try another frequency,” said Pippa.

“This is our agreed frequency.”

“Maybe he forgot?”

“No. Something’s wrong.”

“Like what?”

Keenan shrugged. “Maybe he went too far. Who’s to say the Ket-i don’t have advanced electronic systems of their own? In fact, I’m pretty positive of it. That’s the only reason I brought Franco along!”

“Hey!” said Franco, holding up his wooden spoon. Melted cheese dripped like liquid rubber. “I heard that.”

“Just cook your cheese,” said Keenan. He tried again to contact Cam, and spent the next thirty minutes scanning frequencies and sending out PBs—PanicBursts—designed to get a response from the tiny machine. But Cam was silent, either silent... or dead
.

Keenan sat, brooding, contemplating this new twist of events. Cam was—in all reality—going to guide them through the potentially hazardous minefield of electronic high-tech monitoring equipment that was rumoured to guard the Fractured Emerald; without him, success seemed improbable. Franco was good with machines, but more with weapons and bombs, not subtle surveillance mods. Keenan scratched his short blond hair and cursed.

What the hell’s going on? he asked himself. First The City and the Syndicate; then Betezh, the Hornet crash, Betezh’s escape, and now this!

“Shit,” he said.

“You thinking the same as me?”

Keenan smiled at Pippa. “What, that we’re on a cursed mission?”

“Sure feels that way.”

“Don’t worry,” said Keenan with a smile. “We’ve got each other to rely on.”

“Don’t get too friendly,” said Pippa, turning away. “You might end up regretting it.”

The mist was gathering, swirling thicker and thicker, before thinning out into white and grey drifting pockets. The Milk Sea stilled: an eerie opaque platter that eventually levelled into something almost like glass.

As the boat’s engines hummed, all talk ceased. And when somebody had to speak it came as a hushed whisper, as if this place, this still lagoon of severed sea, was a holy place, a place of sanctuary and worship, a place of dangerous reverence.

“There,” said Klik, and Pippa slowed the boat. The following vessel bumped intimately against them, rubber walls mating.

Keenan, Franco and Pippa squinted through the swirling white. And suddenly, a wall of rugged white rock loomed above them, nearly a hundred feet tall. It was a sheer cliff-side, jagged and pock-marked, ridges undulating in radiating spans of bony protuberance, vast and vertical, and rising above them, leaping from the mist to surprise with height and suddenness and sheer bulk.

Pippa turned the boats, and for a while they cruised parallel to the mammoth cliff. They were close, close enough to touch. Keenan leaned over the side of the boat, running his fingers across the abrasive surface.

“Well?” said Pippa.

“It feels like... well, bone.”

“I would say it’s a physical impossibility.”

Keenan glanced at Klik; the boy seemed more subdued, almost as if he were in a trance. Quietly, he said, “Yeah, well, you don’t want to go disillusioning the local ethnic people, especially not about something integral to their faith.”

“Keenan, here, we’re the ones who are ethnic.”

Keenan nodded. “I’ve spent too much time with damn humans,” he said.

“Haven’t we all,” agreed Pippa.

They followed the wall of jagged rock—bone—and high above them the summit began to fall in a series of massive steps, almost mechanical cut-outs that dropped and fell, tumbling towards the sea, until finally the white rock lay at sea level and became a platform over which they could gaze.

“We are here,” said Klik. “Just follow the platform for a hundred metres. There is a place to leave the boats.”

The platform of white undulated gently, a bone desert, and here it was smooth, polished by the still water that occasionally lapped over the shining surface. Pippa turned the boats into a narrow channel and cut the engines. She stepped out warily, and, satisfied the surface was solid, helped the others to disembark.

They stood, staring off into swirling mist in all directions. The silence was eerie, broken by nothing more than an occasional
slap
of lapping sea. The temperature had dropped; was chilly after the recent heat and humidity to which the group had been exposed. Keenan closed his eyes, lifting his face to the blanketed sky.

“Smells like ice,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Franco, loading his pack with ammo and tins of cheese.

“It smells fresh. You know, like after a fresh fall of snow. Or if you travel to an arctic region.”

“There are no arctic regions on Ket,” said Pippa.

Keenan nodded, and took the MPK and the grenade belt from Franco with a smile. “I know that. I’m just trying to figure out this insane climate; the weather has me foxed.”

They packed their gear carefully, aware that although this mission was, officially, under way, and despite its apparent covert intentions, they could soon be heading into the heart of battle. Heavily armed, carrying locked and loaded MPK sub-machine guns, all with loaded twin Makarov pistols in shoulder holsters and grenades on their modified webbing, and dressed in their WarSuits—albeit without CrashHelmets—they shouldered packs and looked to Klik. With a nod, the young boy—his demeanour deadly serious—padded across the bone platform and into the mist.

Keenan glanced at his TuffMAP
^TM
, and patted his Techrim. “Here we go,” he said.

“This is for Freya, and the girls.” Pippa smiled.

Keenan gave a curt nod, and followed the boy.

The bone platform, slick with Milk Sea brine, glistened. Mist swirled, forming esoteric shapes, which twisted and entwined with integral ethereal strands, like the tentacles of some strange air-borne creature. The mist seemed alive, a constantly moving, shifting presence. The Milk Sea lapped with lazy strokes.

An engine hummed, then died, far out and muffled by mist. The prow of a long sleek craft emerged from the cotton white. It circumnavigated the two black boats abandoned by Combat K and bumped gently against the bone shore.

The Ket-i warrior party disembarked with utmost care, weapons ready, eyes narrowed in concentration and fierce challenge. They were huge warriors, heavily muscled, scarred, tattooed, and with long slivers of bone piercing skin and muscle. They had Kevlar armour-pads woven into the skin of their faces, arms, torsos and legs, and huge jewelled Kukri blades—usually diamond, sometimes a deep flashing sapphire—bone-welded to their forearms. They carried automatic weapons, pistols, grenades and Laz-Spears, quite a primitive weapon technologically, but brutal and savage in close-quarters combat.

“The enemy are not far ahead.”

“Yes, but they are a deadly enemy,” said one mammoth, heavily-scarred warrior. He towered above the others, a monument of physical prowess. His eyelids were pierced with diamond shards. His lips were tattooed with military warscript from Helix. He showed teeth in what could have, with a lot of imagination, been a smile.

“JuJu, we will take them, rip out their spines and feast tonight under the Will of the Warrior.”

“Yes,” said the mighty JuJu. He breathed deeply, then moved to the moored boats so recently vacated by Combat K and their guide, Klik. He leapt in, and the boats shifted allowing ripples to slap the bone shore. He crouched, motionless, body gleaming with sweat, then dipped his head and began to sniff the ground.

“Two men. One woman. And...”

His brow creased. The other warriors shifted uneasily. They wanted to be on the move; they wanted the hunt and they wanted the kill and the violence and rending and tearing and bloody ridged spine feast which would follow. Saliva hung like juicy umbilicals from several of the warrior’s open maws... an ecstasy of anticipation.

“What is it, JuJu?”

“There was a Ket here. One of us.”

“Improbable.”

“No. I trace the aroma. I know this family. I know this clan. They were wiped out.”

“Then...”

“It is a child. Escaped. A rogue.” He glanced at the huge warriors; JuJu smiled widely. “Now we hunt
true
enemy, not just Ket-i impostors, alien renegades. We, the KellKet, the Supreme Ket-i, will have our kills tonight. We
will
feast, brothers.”

He climbed from the boat, the scents of the enemy strong in his mind—like coloured patterns, each one individual, a sprinkling of bright shades fading into squares of colour.

The warriors arranged themselves into a tight unit on the bone-platform. Professional. Precise. JuJu sniffed the air; then turned, focused, eyes widening a little, nostrils flaring. Muscles tensed. And with a guttural harsh command more animal than human, led the eight-warrior hunting party after their blood-rich quarry.

The hunt had begun.

As they walked, Klik continually sipped from his bottle of water. Soon the platform became perforated, then broke into a series of narrow bridges and spans, which rose and fell, veered left and right at off-camber slants, making walking difficult. The bridges of bone twisted and turned, arched and bucked like smooth polished ribs, or like strung-out tendons, intertwining and criss-crossing. Tepid off-white water lay below the narrow walkways, brackish and stinking like death. Sometimes the pools were small, narrow little channels or rounded pools; sometimes they were lakes of almost sulphuric intensity, stretching off into the distance and spanned by narrow arches of bone.

After an hour, the group passed an incredibly tight traverse a hundred feet above a mammoth stinking lake of softly bubbling cream. Reeds and rotting grass emerged in clumps and occasional individual strands. They were truly in the marsh, the eelmarsh, a stew of rotting vegetation, a soup of putrefaction.

As the group descended the opposite side of the high arched bridge they came to a group of what looked like boulders moulded from the surrounding bone. They made a temporary camp amongst the rocky outcrop, and Franco got a pan of water boiling to make brews as he crouched by the side of the odorous lake. He peered over it, eyes focusing on the glass-still surface punctured in a million places by what Klik had called Spine Grass.

Then, something moved. It was oily, and glided for a moment, just breaking the surface; then it disappeared. Ripples cast across the platter, and Franco squawked.

“It moved! Bejasus, it moved!”

Keenan scowled at Franco. “Bejasus?”

Before Franco could answer, Klik was crouching beside him. He nodded, then pointed into the fetid lake. “This place, bad place. The eelmarsh filled with eels, many small and harmless, but some—some much larger ones—they eat flesh from your bones quicker than Tenka Clanstrip flesh from body of an enemy.”

“So we’re not to put our feet in for a paddle?” frowned Franco.

“They would eat your feet,” said Klik. He stood, and seemed to sway for a moment. He took a long drink from his water bottle and grinned at the group. “This is a place of high evil,” he said.