Free Line War by Neal Asher Page B

arrival of the seeker bullets, but nothing did arrive.

    Forge?

    ‘We’ve got a problem - there’s something else out here,’ said Kradian-Dave.

    Something in the voice of the man sent a shiver down Yannis’s spine, but he believed in his men’s competence. Let them sort out whichever of this woman’s troops they had missed.

    Harpy, kill the two armed males.

    The particle beam stabbed out twice more and screaming the two men flew apart like fat-soaked rags held before a blow torch. Yannis stepped forward, but abruptly the woman heaved herself upright and drew a gas-system pulse-gun. She fired straight into his chest, sending flames and smoke rising up before his face. Damn, another envirosuit wrecked. He stepped into the fusillade and slapped the weapon from her hand, then grabbed her by the throat and heaved her up off the ground.

    ‘I am very annoyed,’ he said. He would have liked to spend some quality time with her, but the firing of Harpy’s particle cannon might have already been detected, so ECS agents could now be on their way. He began closing his hand, the motors in his armour kicking in as his fingers dug into her neck. She began flailing about and kicking, but that came to a convulsive halt as his fingers broke through flesh, crunching a handful of windpipe, muscle and fat. Ripped arteries sprayed blood, one jet spattering along his arm and on his visor. He discarded her, then shook the mess from his gloves.

    ‘Do you have your problem under control?’ he asked.

    No reply.

    ‘Forge? Kradian? . . . Lingel? Sheila? Prescott?’

    Some kind of com failure? Maybe someone up there had been using an electronic warfare technique?

    ‘Harpy, give me satellite feed,’ he demanded, trying not to get too nervous about this. Even so, he backed up a little way and took up his shooting stick.

    The feed clicked in.

    ‘Close shots of the last locations of my crew,’ he instructed.

    Three of them weren’t where they were supposed to be. Forge and Prescott were . . . well, he assumed that he was seeing Forge and Prescott, but it was difficult to tell with the bits of them spread all around and spattered on the surrounding rocks. It looked like they had been hit by seeker bullets, but they must have been of some new and powerful armour-penetrating kind for the two men had worn the same sort of motorized armour as did he.

    Time to get back to the ship.

    He pulled up his shooting stick, which was an apt description for it also served as a weapon, then quickly headed back towards Harpy, However, just then, a strange sight gave him pause. He aimed at this thing with the stick and tracked its course to the ground.

    A bird?

    In a flurry of feathers it landed amid the smoking and strewn remains of the Zil’s passengers and began pecking up bits of flesh.

    A vulture?

    Yannis vaguely recollected something from childhood lessons on Terran ecology.

    But how was that possible? The air here could not support Terran life, and whatever large life forms survived crawled through tunnels in the ground scraping up rock sulphur and digesting primitive forms of algae out of it.

    Then something else caught his eye and he looked up.

    Standing over by the Zil was a big big man wearing a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. As if Yannis seeing him had been some kind of signal, the man began taking lengthy strides towards him. Harpy gave him an outline which immediately began flashing.

    Golem.

    Yannis read the side display: Golem Twenty-Five prototype, ceramal armour, further modifications unknown. Rescan. Rescan.

    Hit it.

    A text reply nicked up in his visual cortex: You are within target acquisition frame.

    Yannis quickly stepped to one side, but the Golem suddenly moved horribly fast, almost a subliminal flicker, and was then strolling in from a different direction.

    You are within target acquisition frame.

    He moved again.

    The Golem moved again.

    Rescan. Rescan. Rescan. Viral return —

    The display in his