Sam Cane: Hard Lessons (Sam Cane 2) Read online

  SAM CANE: HARD LESSONS

  T.Q. Chant

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 Tim Chant

  Cover illustration copyright © Daniel Rhodes

  The right of Tim Chant to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  CHAPTER ONE – LESSONS IN DISAPPOINTMENT

  “Well, shit.” Cahaya flicked the datawindow closed, sat back with his arms folded over his chest. “I really thought she'd made it.”

  “You're just sore because...” Miller started to crow, before Kora kicked him in the shin and pointed skywards meaningfully. “Girl had stones, anyway,” he mumbled.

  The cool distance in the voice that emerged from the Argos Field Intelligence Unit (Snoopy to the squad) had nothing to do with the fact that the speaker was in orbit. “Years since you left the DisUS, Miller, and still an unreconstructed caveman. And I trust you four weren't running a sweepstake on her survival?”

  Dirchs froze, caught in the act of holding his hand out for his winnings (having come closest to the final survival time of fifteen days). “Ummm... no, Chief...”

  “Good. Because if you were, and you were in the process of determining a winner, I would point out that we have as yet no confirmation of death, only that the field intelligence unit has not been able to find her within the local habitable zone.”

  “Yeah, but Chief, that probably just meant she was taken, and her head was off not long after they took her.” Yvgena was looking up as she spoke – she was the one who always spoke to the sky, beyond which the unit’s inoffensive little cutter orbited. The others spoke to the pick-up in the FIU bot, which they agreed had about the same emotional content as speaking to the Chief in person.

  “No.” Williams' laconic Austral drawl got attention simply because she rarely spoke. She and the team's field leader, Ortuz, never took part in the macabre sweepstakes. “They wanted her for something.”

  “Agreed. Proceed with the sweep. Whoever took her, and everyone else here, must have left a trace. No-one just vanishes.”

  The link with the cutter went dead, and Cahaya switched Snoopy into power-saving mode, the dog-sized bot folding in its holoprojector and display screens before hunkering down on its six legs with a gentle hum. The team had improvised a briefing area by laying a charred tabletop between shock-crates filled with 1g pellet clips for the coilguns they carried. Miller had found a half-intact foamform chair somewhere while the others sat on the ground or squatted.

  “They're probably offworld by now. Probably just raiders anyway,” Kora offered, once she was reasonably certain the Chief couldn't overhear them. She was in her usual place, leaning up against the low-profile, sinister form of Medusa, the state-of-the-art GED multi-aspect multi-vector combat bot that was her charge and weapon. She virtually never touched her issue 5.5mm caseless sidearm outside the range. “She probably just lost it here, by herself, and wandered out into the desert to die.”

  “Lot of probablies there, Kora-san,” Ortuz said, returning from his perimeter patrol. He gestured to the not-quite night of IGC-187 and the skeletal, burnt-out remains of the colony site, ghostly in the pale light of the system's distant secondary star, currently in ascendance. “Let's turn them into certainties.”

  **********

  The face in the mirror wanted to tell her something, of that she was sure. She'd wiped away the condensation and now stood naked in front of it, examining her slight body in the reflection, trying to work out how she’d been so badly hurt. Her skin was pulled tight over bone, and those areas not covered with the purple and gold of fading bruising had an unhealthy pallor. An angry purple line across her leg was, apparently, the result of a high-energy burn. Scarring, a line of puckered pale flesh, ran from her temple back into her hairline above the ear – the scar was new but the bruising surrounding it appeared more faded than most of the other injuries.

  She looked back at her face, and was struck again that somehow she knew it was hers, but at the same time did not recognise it. At least the dark bags under her eyes and the bruising around her reset nose had gone down. Her hair, raven black, seemed too long, though she could not remember wearing it any other way.

  “My name is Samrit Kokhani,” she told the face, almost as though she was trying to convince it. Convince herself. “I have been saved by the Brightness, and am a Sister of the Raptured.”

  Only one of these things is true, and then only half true, the dark eyes said to her.

  Sister Bethany emerged from the shower stall, already wrapped in a coarse robe, and condensation obscured the reflection. Samrit grabbed her own robe and pulled it about her narrow frame.

  “Tell me again, Sister. What happened to me?”

  Bethany smiled at her. She had the patience of a saint, a warm and giving woman who had been given charge of Samrit while she recovered. Samrit had lost count of the number of times she had asked this question, and did not know why it was so important to her.

  Rule twenty.

  “You were in an accident, Samrit. When we found you, out in the desert, you were almost dead. You begged us to go into the Brightness so that your soul would be saved.” Bethany gave her a radiant smile. “Many consider your survival to be a miracle granted by the Bright Ones.”

  “But why was I out in the desert? Do I come from here?”

  “You came from beyond, from the human worlds that have not yet been saved. You came on a pilgrimage to us, to be saved.” Bethany laid a cool hand on her arm. “Part of your salvation has been the washing away of your old life, just as your old sins have been washed away. Perhaps one day the knowledge of who you were before will come back, once you are stronger and able to understand your path here without reverting to your sinful ways. Until then, do not worry yourself overly. You have much happier things to think about!”

  Bethany's sweet, happy nature was infectious. Samrit found herself smiling back at her. “I am glad to be alive, certainly, and that my injuries are healing.”

  “But you have so much more to look forward to! Now that you have been saved, you will begin your journey to be fully Raptured. And there is your wedding to come!”

  Samrit blinked at her. “Wedding? Marriage?”

  Bethany's smile grew wider, if that was possible, smile lines appearing at the corners of her deep blue eyes. “Blissful matrimony, the first step to achieving Rapture, to ensure that if you do manage the final step that other souls with have the chance to follow you!” The hand slid to the inside of Samrit's arm and she allowed herself to be steered from the washroom; Bethany's touch sent an odd thrill through her that she did not fully understand and which made her uncomfortable. “And the Near-Raptured have picked out a wonderful husband for you.”

  The voice in her head mumbled something, but Samrit pressed down on it and let Bethany's chatter wash over her.

  **********

  The team had been onplanet for two days, and it had taken most of that time for them to even start piecing what had happened together. They'd hit what should have been the main population centre first, the dropship putting them down beyond the colony's limits before dusting off for orbit; visual inspection confirmed what orbital pix had indicated.

  Complete and deliberate devastation.

  It had been Security Specialist Cane Kokhani's message pod to Polaris that had brought them here; intercepted by a Commonwealth Navy patrol frigate and passed up the chain of command to Navy Intelligence and from there into the hands of the Chief's department. And no-one was entirely sure which agency that was, not even the Intelligence Support Command team that did the fieldwork.
<
br />   “What do you think, boss?” Williams asked Ortuz quietly. The two of them lay side-by-side on a low dune, observing the jSpace array that was the day-two objective, now that they had confirmed that the colony was deserted. The primary sun was hot enough and high enough that Williams was sweating despite her all-environment, climate-optimised combat rig. Semi-rigid shockgel plates were backed by flexarmour that covered pretty much her entire body, the whole thing threaded through with a range of materials designed to minimise her profile. The fully enclosed helmet was blowing cooled air over her face.

  The team leader took his eye from the optics of his specops-optimised FN-7 Engager coilgun, glanced across at her and shrugged. He at least didn't seem to mind the heat. “I don't know.” Another expressive shrug. “Could be Kora is right and everyone just went mad here, our girl included.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  Ortuz smiled at that, pearly whites in a deeply tanned face, below a moustache that was just starting to go salt and pepper. His 'gut' was famous, had been since his Special Aerospace Ops unit had been the only one to walk out of the Proxima Situation, and Williams knew he hated that rep. “It's telling me I'm hungry. And that Cane and whoever took her is still onplanet.”

  They slid back down the dune and Ortuz checked that his coilgun was combat ready. Williams knew what that meant.

  “Kora, set up. Cahaya, send in the eyes. The rest of you on me.”

  “Honestly, boss, I don't know why you bother going in yourself. Snoopy can do all of this for us.” Cahaya worked as he talked, feeding target zone and instructions for a standard subterranean/hazardous environment search into the field unit's recon drones and hitting execute. The tiny drones barely made a sound as they rose on fans from the housing that opened in Snoopy's broad composite back, circling the group and then zooming off on their allotted tasks.

  “And I don't know why you ask that question every time,” Miller said. “And why you then go on to complain why we can't have fully AI systems to do all this while we enjoy a mai tai on the ship.”

  “Well, it would make life a lot easier...”

  “Right up until the point we get a Cloud event and it's game over for everyone,” Yvgena grunted, checking the scattergun she carried in case of close encounters.

  “The Cloud's a myth,” Cahaya muttered petulantly as he punched in the final commands.

  “Is that right, little man?” Miller's usual bonhomie vanished briefly. “Is that why the ruins of Boston are still NoGo?”

  Williams ignored them – she'd heard all this before, every time the unit deployed. She spent her time more fruitfully, examining the holo that Snoopy had started projecting of the facility's interior, composited from the darting drones. “Looks tight in there.” She collapsed her own coilgun and clipped it onto the rear plate of her body armour; drew and checked her Mauser flechette pistol.

  “We go in because standard operating procedure, as laid down by the Chief on high, is to scope with Snoopy's eyes and then go in and confirm ourselves,” Ortuz said patiently. “Kora, good to go?”

  Kora – slim, hard-eyed and coldly efficient – was their support specialist. She was sitting cross-legged on the slope of the dune while Medusa deployed on the crest, setting up under a canopy of sand thrown up by a field generator. She had the bot in direct-fire mode, the barrel of a heavy railgun protruding from a low profile that was all curves and reactive camo. She watched the whole thing on a pad screen, the view split between the feed from Snoopy and Medusa's systems. Her fingers were poised over the control keys – she didn't need to see something directly to kill it. “Ready.”

  Williams went over the top first, because she always did, rolling over the crest so as not to skyline herself. Ortuz, Miller, Dirchs and Yvgena followed in the same fashion, all of them following strict combat protocol despite no sign of hostile activity. So far.

  “Stack up at the door,” Ortuz ordered quietly as they advanced the short distance to the old jSpace comms facility, weapons at the ready.

  **********

  Samrit had lost track of the days she had only known the inside of the hospice, its mellow cream walls and clean sheets, the hot showers that she relished (how long could it have been since she had had one, in the time before her salvation?).

  There were a few other people in the hospice, but they had given Samrit a private cubicle so she could adjust gradually to her new home, the home she had apparently travelled between stars to find.

  Apparently.

  She had started to spend more time in the hospice common room, a broad airy open space with windows that looked out over a small garden under a pearlescent, sunless sky. “What world is this?” she asked Bethany, staring out into the garden. It was evening, the light dimming.

  “Our world,” Bethany said patiently. Samrit wondered if she dealt with a lot of people who had just been into the Bright Place and emerged with their memories, their selves, fractured. She seemed to be a good choice for the role of carer and mentor. “Oh, I should have said. You're going to have visitors in a bit. I'd better fix your hair.”

  There wasn't much fixing to do, in all honesty. As Bethany worked on tidying up the messy bob, Samrit couldn't help noticing again that having that much hair felt wrong.

  Other brothers and sisters were putting out cups of the thin, acrid stuff they called tea and a tray of plain, flavourless biscuits. Samrit eyed the mug in front of her, willing a memory of what tea should be to come to her, but was distracted by the arrival of her visitors.

  There were two, one older and obviously a figure of some authority, the second a young man –

  - painfully beautiful –

  with an obvious resemblance. Father and son? Both were dressed well, in matching dark tunics, trousers and ankle boots. Definitely a cut beyond the simple tunics or robes that those in the hospice wore.

  The older man settled in a chair opposite Samrit while the boy hovered by his shoulder, shifting from one foot to the other nervously, never taking his deep dark eyes from her.

  “So. You are our new arrival. I am so pleased to see you up and about, and beginning to learn the ways of your new life. My name is Jonathon, caretaker to the newly Saved.” A broad smile split his kindly, lined face as he extended one hand. She took it, nervously, feeling both the strength and the callouses. “I understand I am also to be your father-in-law. This is my son, Okafor, who is to be your husband.”

  Samrit looked again at the boy. Couldn't be more than 20, probably in his late teens, with large but oddly un-expressive eyes. Samrit realised with a start that she could not even remember how old she was. Realising the surprise on her face could be taken as displeasure or something negative, she made herself smile at Okafor.

  Jonathon gestured, slightly impatiently, for the boy to sit. He smiled nervously at Samrit as he slid onto the seat next to her. She repressed a sudden urge to recoil from him – she didn't know why, at first glance he seemed nice enough and was certainly handsome, just as Bethany had promised. Something scratched at the back of her brain though, a memory perhaps of her previous life, which wanted her to be wary of him.

  “Hello,” he said, with a shy, diffident smile that dispelled that wary feeling. “I understand you've been to the Bright Place. I went there a few weeks ago – maybe I can help you readjust?”

  *********

  “This is just plain weird,” Cahaya said to no-one in particular – mostly himself but on the squad channel. He'd brought Snoopy in for more detailed work, swapping out with Dirchs and Miller to spot for Kora now that the facility had been checked and secured. Yvgena hovered protectively over him, the full immersion headset he used for this detailed work making him mostly oblivious to what was going on around him.

  “What's up?”

  “This is definitely where it went down, boss. Helmet pix that Sam included in her transmission confirm it. But they haven't sanitised the area, not like they did with the settlement.”

  “If you call looting
and torching the place sanitisation,” Williams muttered. She was crouched by one of the heavily decomposed bodies, the one just up the corridor from the ruined launch chamber. She wasn't squeamish but had the helmet's filters in place to keep out the stench of rotting flesh. “This fellow definitely got torn up by the launch. Took his legs clean off.”

  “DNA will confirm it, but I think that's Fassetti.”

  Williams keyed the brief bio on the colony security specialist, displayed it on her helmet visor. Cahaya had put together dossiers on all of the key actors ID'd by Cane in her message, but Williams didn't believe in overloading on data and only accessed things when she really needed to know.

  “Seems like a charming piece of work,” Ortuz commented, obviously doing the same thing. “Too violent for the Marines, too smart for street crime, so colonial security was the perfect fit.”

  “Yep. Borderline dissociative with a distinct sadistic tendency. Surprised IGC's screening didn't pick that up.”

  “They probably did, Caha, but they wouldn't have cared.” Williams kept her voice patient. Cahaya was the only civvy on the team and, despite being a field intel specialist, often seemed painfully naïve. “Nothing in the file about cranial implants or similar surgery.”

  “What's that?” Ortuz's voice was distracted as he examined something on the wall of the chamber, so Williams shunted her eyecam pickup onto his helmet display.

  “Look at the cracking around the eye sockets and ear canals.” She pulled out her ceramic Fairbairn Sykes dagger and used the tip to push away some of the leathery flesh that hung in strips from the skull. “And pretty neat holes in the temples. Looks like something forced its way into his brain.”

  “That's fucked up.” An icon flashed red in the corner of her own display, indicating Ortuz was shunting his own feed to her. She blinked at the icon, expanding it – his target display, scanning slowly across a line of bullet holes in the toughened ceramplus of the launch chamber. “Nothing in Cane's transmission about a firefight in here, and these two goons obviously died when the pod was launched.”