Free Halfhead by Stuart B. MacBride

and landed on the grubby carpet—little red lights chasing each other round and round the ends.
    ‘Oh shit…’ Will punched his throat-mike and braced himself. ‘Hard D. Now!’
    The Dragonfly leapt away from the building, yanking them out of the living room window. The scanning canister caught the frame side on, glass and twisted aluminium spraying everywhere. Someone screamed, the sound whipped away as the gunship rolled into a tight turn, accelerating hard.
    The explosion tore Allan Brown’s apartment to shreds.
    The sun hangs in the dirty blue sky like a jewelled furnace. It’s blurred around the edge, a faint shimmer of chemical fog that grows thicker as she watches. The wind must have shifted, bringing with it the firestacks’ industrial perfume.
    She’s been wandering the streets for hours, drifting through her own personal smog. Faces swim in and out of focus: colleagues, patients, victims…
    Something flashes overhead and she turns to watch it roar across the sky. Small figures dangle beneath it, slowly being drawn up into its belly. The shape is familiar, haunting: like a bad dream only half remembered. But right now everything is like that.
    She doesn’t even know who she is.
    Her stomach rumbles and she flinches, startled by the sound. It’s been six years since she’s felt anything as profound as hunger. She knows this because one of the city’s big, floating Scrubbers carries a flickering advert with today’s date.
    Six years.
    Six years since she’s been able to feel anything at all.
    Hunger. Love. Anger. Pleasure. Revenge. Lust. Pain. Seven perfect words, much hotter than a mere ball of burning gas ninety-three-million miles away. Pretty words: shiny like the blade of a knife.
    She drifts on, ignoring everything but the growing hollow in her belly, unable to do anything about it; she can’t feed herself, they saw to that on the operating table.
    Six years of intravenous nourishment. Nil by mouth.
    They took it all away…
    But she’s going to get it back. Oh yes. She’s going to get it all back.
    ‘One, one-thousand—two, one-thousand—three, one-thousand: breathe.’ Private Dickson straddled Stein’s scorched body in the darkened drop bay, pumping away at his heart. Every time she said ‘breathe’ Private Rhodes pinched Stein’s noseand blew into his mouth. Then they would wait for his lungs to deflate and the whole pattern would repeat again.
    ‘One, one-thousand—two, one-thousand—three, one-thousand: breathe.’
    Sergeant Nairn was up to his armpits in the resuscitation unit mounted on the drop bay wall. Cables snaked out from it, lying in coils at his feet, little sparks fizzling away in the depths of the circuit boards, adding the smell of hot plastic to the harsh tang of burnt hair and burnt flesh.
    ‘One, one-thousand—two, one-thousand—three, one-thousand: breathe.’
    Beaton sat on the mesh floor of her cubicle, head back, face pale, clutching her left wrist where it had caught the flat’s windowsill on the way out. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Stein since they’d laid him out on the central walkway like a fish for filleting.
    ‘One, one-thousand—two, one-thousand—three, one-thousand: breathe.’
    Will lurched back along the walkway to where Private Floyd was slumped against the bulkhead. The drop bay was baking hot, but Floyd was shivering, his forehead glassy with cold sweat. The front of his battle dress glistened with blood, but at least his heart was still beating.
    ‘One, one-thousand—two, one-thousand—three, one-thousand: breathe.’
    Will knelt in front of him and peeled away the sticky fabric surrounding the wound. When Sergeant Nairn said the trooper had been shot, Will had expected some sort of flesh wound, not a gaping hole. It looked as if someone had welded a dozen nails onto the business end of a sledgehammer and then pounded merry hell out of Floyd’s shoulder.
    ‘What on earth did you stand in front of? A truck?’
    Floyd hissed a