The Last Enemy Read online

  In memoriam:

  My Sanity

  Emergency Hat

  AAR: TCS Resilient

  The Marriage of Mikkel

  Incursion Report

  Fixed Points of Reference

  Fallout

  Spork Included

  Drugs on Tap

  How to Make Fires and Immolate People

  The Art of Pyromaniac Gardening: an Excerpt

  Memento Mori: Redux

  Rewind

  Out of Order

  Incursion Specialists External Memo

  Incursion Specialists Internal Memo

  Emergency Hat

  Sergeant Gormley was expecting a Very Busy Day. In preparation for that day, he had gone to bed last night at exactly 10:00 Local Relative Time, expecting to wake again at exactly 06:00 LRT and thus achieve the optimal eight hours of sleep. From then, if he had been the type of person to make detailed plans, he would have penned out a simple itinerary: 06:00—wake, shower. 06:30—having showered, breakfast. 07:30—report for duty to the outbound ship that was taking him and a few of his men to collect evidence from a small fixed orbit fuel station that was one of a group orbiting Fifth World’s moon.

  Evidence collection was not in Sergeant Gormley’s wheelhouse, nor did he feel comfortable leaving the fixed orbit evidence station that slowly circled Fourth World, but he had been ordered to go, and go he would. He would merely make sure to fortify himself against the rigors of the coming day by sleeping appropriately.

  So when he was woken instead at 05:45 LRT, Sergeant Gormley felt a sense of betrayal toward his body, which had never before so served him. Nor did he dare to roll over and try to sleep again for those lost fifteen minutes, because if he couldn’t trust his body to wake him at the exact time today, he certainly couldn’t trust it not to oversleep itself.

  Instead, he stared grimly at his dark ceiling, and wondered if it was just the grogginess of that lost fifteen minutes that made him see things on the ceiling.

  Only then the ceiling said, “You awake or wot?”

  Sergeant Gormley yelped and tumbled away as quickly as a man of his bulk could do, alighting on his feet beside his bed and leaping backward from there with his weapon in his hand and pointed at the mass of shadows on his ceiling that was now…gone.

  “Reckon you’d know better by now,” said the same sharp voice in a conversational manner, from behind him.

  The Sergeant whipped around, but his weapon was already sinking—much like his heart. He knew that pinched little voice; he also knew the little person it belonged to, and the habit that child had of wriggling through any possible crawl space and quite a few that weren’t possible.

  “Flamin’ rude!” said the child now in front of him, looking accusingly at him through a black fringe that was just a bit longer than usual but just as ragged as last time he’d seen it, the edges of her bob likewise longer than usual. Her light armoured stockings hung loosely on her skinny legs, which were visible through a small ladder that must have been achieved via something in the region of a light discharge weapon or something even heavier. They had been like that last time he saw her, too; he wondered why she still wore them. Over the stockings, she wore a flowered dress that was likewise too large, and a knitted jumper that fit her just slightly better than the last one he’d seen her in.

  She added, “I come visit you and you point yer zapper at me!”

  “I didn’t ask you to come visit me,” pointed out the sergeant, rather hopelessly. “And if it comes to that—”

  That made her grin, which worried him.

  “Yeah, but ain’t it fun!”

  “Not usually,” he said. “Were you crawling around in the vents again?”

  “Close enough,” she said, which was even more worrying. If it was just the vents, he could have fixed that up right and tight, but Kez had other ways of getting around that were quite frankly impossible; moreover, to him it sounded as though she was trying to soothe him.

  He asked painedly, “What do you want?”

  “Came to give you a present,” she said.

  “No, thank you,” said Sergeant Gormley. She had given him a lunchbox with explosive in it once, and he had been wary of gifts ever since.

  “You’ll like it.”

  “I bet I won’t.”

  “Got a real ’ang dog attitude, ain’t you?” she said. “Well, suit yerself, but I reckon you’ll regret it if you don’t take it.”

  And there it was. Sergeant Gormley very much disliked everything he had yet received from Kez—up to and including several knocks on the head—but he was quite well aware that he would have liked still less the things that would have happened if he had not been the recipient of said gratuities.

  He sighed; a big, deep thing that could only be achieved by someone with a chest the size of the sergeant, and Kez, apparently taking that for assent, fished in the pocket of her flowered dress and pulled out a fat square of material.

  She tossed it at the sergeant and he caught it, only to find himself unfolding a fabric hat of the sort that was still worn occasionally by armed forces on principally human-occupied planets.

  “What’s this?” Sergeant Gormley asked. He felt rather faint and completely out of his depth, which was nothing unusual when it came to dealing with Kez. He had an awful presentiment that Something was About to Happen, and he very much didn’t want for Something to Happen.

  “Emergency ’at,” Kez told him, grinning that awful, gleeful grin at him. “For when stuff goes wrong, see? When everyfink goes wrong, pop that on yer noggin.”

  “What will it do?”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “You drunk?”

  Sergeant Gormley, who had never yet taken the smallest drop of alcohol on the job, much less at 05:45 before work, protested, “What? no!”

  “It’s an ’at,” Kez said to him, slowly and clearly. “It don’t do nuffink. You wears it.”

  “I know it’s a—can’t I speak to Marx?”

  Kez’s crabbed little face grew pinched and stormy. “No, you can’t! Uncle Cheng’s sorted that out an’ I’m gunna kick ’im in the shins fer it. Just flamin’ do as you’re told.”

  “Are you—are you alone?” he asked her tentatively. Kez was certainly feral, but she was usually at least a hard, certain kind of feral; in Sergeant Gormley’s far from expert opinion, she had achieved a kind of security with the short, angry man she travelled with, and if Marx wasn’t inclined to be less angry with her around, at least that anger had a very narrow focus. In a strange way, they seemed to do each other good.

  Today’s Kez was more feral and brittle, and the sergeant wasn’t at all sure he wouldn’t end up being bitten if he didn’t tread carefully.

  Her eyes very shiny, Kez said vehemently, “You gotta wait! Ain’t nobody seein’ Marx until I do! Everyfink’s gorn wrong and I’m tryin’ to fix it so you better do what you’re told!”

  “Why—why should everything go wrong?” he asked, rather weakly. He was afraid to ask, because if he asked, she would tell him, and then Sergeant Gormley would have to do something about it. He was very well aware that he didn’t have the kind of nerves required to live life as Kez and Marx lived it, and he would very much prefer not to get caught up with them at all. “What’s supposed to happen?”

  “That’s the point, innit?” she muttered darkly, as if to herself. “Stuff wot’s s’posed to ’appen.”

  If he had before been afraid that she would tell him what she was up to, Sergeant Gormley now began to be afraid that she would immediately flit off and leave him with the heavy weight of something to be done without giving him the means of doing something about it until it was too
late, and it had happened.

  “Yes, but you said you want me to stop it. What is it you want me to do? What’s going to happen?”

  “All you gotta do is stop it ’appenin’,” she said. “Don’t matter ’ow, so long as you get it done.”

  Sergeant Gormley sat down on the bed, gripping her shoulder comfortingly, and said in his most kindly tone, “I know that you think you’re explaining it. But if you want me to stop something, you’ll have to tell me exactly what it is you want me to stop.”

  Kez stared at him for a brief, furious moment, then at the large, comforting hand that entirely swallowed up her shoulder, and he saw the flash of feral rage in her eyes just a moment too late to pull his right shin out of reach of her steel-capped boots.

  Having thoroughly kicked that shin and released herself from his hand in one shot, Kez retreated back across the room in the flicker of an eyelid. Sergeant Gormley was quite sure she hadn’t walked.

  Clutching his shin, he tried to be grateful that she hadn’t bitten off one of his fingers, as he had momentarily been afraid that she might. This version of Kez was feral and scared and angry; raging alone and hitting out in all directions without caring who got hurt. Who had done this to her—the Uncle Cheng she had mentioned?

  His voice was more breathless than kindly as he said, “I need to know what to look out for if you want my help.”

  Her face pinched in a bit more, and her eyes grew black. “Ain’t your business,” she said. “You just do what you gotta do, yeah?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know what it is you want me to do!”

  “You gotta stop something from ’appenin’.”

  “All right, but what something?”

  Her eyes became even more pebbly. “Can’t tell you what. Not ’zactly.”

  “Can you tell me where? Can you tell me why?”

  “You’re goin’ on a bit of a trip today, ain’t you? That’s when it’ll ’appen. You gotta stop everyone from dyin’, see? If they dies, then—then—”

  Sergeant Gormley said, very gently, “What happens if I can’t save everyone?”

  “Summink real bad,” she said quietly. “If they dies, summink real bad ’appens to me, and then summink real bad ’appens to the universe.”

  “If I stop it?” he asked apprehensively. He had never been quite sure of where Kez and Marx’s loyalties lay, other than to themselves; but then, he had never seen Kez quite this scared and feral, either. “What happens then?”

  “Nuffink,” she said. “An’ that’s what we want to ’appen.”

  She disappeared without warning and then reappeared briefly in a flutter of floral print, to stab a small finger at him violently. “In case of emergencies, see? Use yer ’at.”

  Sergeant Gormley still desperately wished to know exactly what the hat would do in an emergency to fix the situation; he did not consider it overreaching to want to know what situation was likely to occur, either. In fact, he was left in a situation of general unknowing that would have pleased him greatly if it wasn’t for the fact that he knew there was something he ought to know. Sergeant Gormley preferred not to know what he shouldn’t know, but he was quite as settled in his preference to know everything if he had to know something.

  He must save everyone—but exactly where was it that everyone was going to be in danger? And what was it that was going to happen? When? How was he to save the everyone Kez had mentioned if he didn’t know what he was doing? What if he saved only some of those in danger? He remembered Kez’s strained face, and his jaw set: he mustn’t let any of them die, or something—something so bad that even Kez couldn’t say it—would happen. It was evident that something bad had already happened, or Kez wouldn’t be alone. What had happened there, he didn’t know, and he would almost rather not know. Sergeant Gormley was a man who preferred not to have too many thoughts wandering around in his head to disturb him. It prevented him from being able to do what needed to be done; and he was quite sure that whatever it was he had to do, he would need to be as little distracted as possible in order to get it done.

  Several things occurred to Sergeant Gormley as he ate his breakfast. Several more did not. For instance, it did not occur to him that if he simply failed to report for duty, or applied to have his men taken off today’s roster, he could avoid the distinct possibility of dying horribly today. It didn’t occur to him that if he reported the appearance of a wanted criminal to the Time Corp, they would take care of both Kez herself and the prospective interference with a fixed orbit fuel station.

  It did occur to him that if Kez was without Marx, it was better for all concerned if he did what she asked him to do. Kez with Marx was unpredictable, savage, and inclined to bite, but anecdotally, Kez without Marx was frightened, savage, and inclined to cause the implosion of whole worlds. And if there was a question of people dying and worlds imploding, there really wasn’t any other choice: Sergeant Gormley would do what he was told, even if he was being told what to do by a minor with rage issues and a single, incoherent directive.

  He would have done so anyway, of course, but it did leave him with an added incentive to make sure that he did the job well.

  He found himself jumpier than he liked as he boarded the transport skip with seven of his men. It was bad enough to be leaving the station to collect evidence like a beat sergeant; to be walking into goodness knew what and charged with saving everyone on the station from certain death was very nearly too much for his nerves. Sergeant Gormley liked following orders, but he liked his orders to make sense, and he liked having someone above him to take the blame if things went wrong.

  Still, the sergeant was well respected these days, and it wouldn’t do to startle too visibly whenever one of his men unexpectedly addressed him, so he pulled himself together and began to think of all the things that could possibly go wrong on a fixed-orbit fuel repository. The first thing, of course, was the possibility of accidental explosion; something that could happen naturally on a fuel station if someone didn’t observe all the safety protocols. Sergeant Gormley was gloomily sure that anything involving Kez and Marx wouldn’t be as simple as an accident, but it was a possibility. Secondly, it was possible that someone wanted to make a statement by ostentatiously blowing up a station and all hands on deck; it would certainly be spectacular, and the amount of staff who would be lost was significant.

  Barring that, the only other option seemed to be the possibility of war beginning, and Sergeant Gormley refused to think about such a possibility at all. He refused to allow it to exist, and therefore turned his mind toward the more likely of his two options instead.

  If Kez and Marx were involved, it was unlikely that his mission pertained to anything so purposeless as an accidental explosion on a fuel station: no, it was far more likely that someone was deliberately trying to blow up the station, and the sooner he discovered why, the closer he would be to finding out who was trying to do such a thing, and stopping it in time.

  “Who else is coming to the station today?” he asked his second in command as they stepped into the cargo deck, still shivering from the cold blast of airy disinfectant at entry and decontamination.

  The corporal was new to him; a thin lad who looked like he’d just graduated school. Still, he was quick with his work and took only a moment to log into the station’s system.

  “Just us, sir, and two small dockings to refuel. They’re pretty quiet here.”

  “There are a lot of staff here for a day as quiet as that,” the sergeant observed. There would be more people up on the next level, the passenger deck, but not too many more. “Do they usually have days with nothing happening?”

  “They train new fuel monkeys here,” the boy explained, and looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and respect that Sergeant Gormley still wasn’t quite used to from his men, despite the popularity he had recently gained. “Is there something wrong, sir?”

  “Yes,” said the Sergeant, h
is gaze running over the staff who were de-greasing the vents on one side of the vast deck, and the ones who were repairing one of the airlock hatches that led to space and not much else. “But I don’t know what, yet. What are the two dockings?”

  “One’s a Time Corp sloop that just came back from recon at Fourth World and needs a top-up to get to home base; the other’s a privately owned cargo-runner.”

  “What’s the paperwork look like?” Sergeant Gormley asked. He didn’t trust privately owned cargo-running ships—nor, to his great surprise at the discovery, did he particularly trust the Time Corp fully any longer.

  “For the cargo-runner?”

  “For both,” said the sergeant, a little grimly. “And did the cargo-runner drop anything, or is it just picking up fuel?”

  The corporal made a few swipes and tapped the screen twice. “First glance, everything looks fine. They’ve both completed a docking bill that shows where they’re coming from, and they’ve both submitted logs to prove where they’ve been. The sloop hasn’t allowed itself to be connected to the main system, but the cargo-runner didn’t put up a fuss; they dropped some supplies here for the crew this morning…and it looks like they’ve just left.”

  “It’s not unusual for Time Corp to skip out on the connection,” the sergeant said slowly. There was sensitive information on more than one Time Corp vessel, and there were risks inherent in connecting to another online system. Not connecting meant that you had to approve everything the other side did to your ship manually, but it also decreased the likelihood of anyone infiltrating your ship’s system.

  “Not unusual,” agreed the corporal. He took another look at his sergeant and added, “So why are you still suspicious, sir?”

  “That’s the point,” said the sergeant gloomily. “I don’t know. Prod at the cargo-runner’s records a bit more, there’s a good lad: the rest of you get going with the evidence collection. I’m going to take a walk up to the passenger deck and swap greetings with the TC sloop.”