Hardcore - 03 Read online

  This one's for Sonia, and she alone.

  For inspiring the hardcore... but definitely not the nurses.

  First published 2009 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-238-3

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-237-6

  Copyright © Andy Remic 2009

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  A COMBAT-K NOVEL

  HARDCORE

  ANDY REMIC

  PROLOGUE

  Junked

  They called her Kotinevitch. Vitch... Vitch the Bitch. She didn't mind. She kind of agreed. She certainly lived up to the image of fucked-up aggravated psycho with hardcore in-your-face kick-ass violence. She was First General of Quad-Gal Military's Prime Fleet.

  General Kotinevitch stood on the bridge of the FRAG Bulk Fighter, The Indestructible, as around her marble lights glittered, laser-traces humming hydrogen songs in secondary ears, and her staff rushed about urgent business. She stared into space; deep space, velvet, endless, uninviting, her face bleak as she listened to the bustle of battle coordination.

  This is it, she thought. The moment she'd been waiting for all her life. The battle she knew, from inception into the military, had to come. The utmost test of all military minds. Galaxy-wide War.

  It is a deterrent. But if we must go to war, then we will go to war. If there must be bloodshed, then it will be terrible. She remembered all too clearly her naive words. It seemed millennia since she uttered those childlike sentiments; now, she appreciated the irony. Threat of war was no longer a deterrent. It was real. Big. Bloody. Fucked-up. Violent. And very, very real.

  Vitch's War Machine must live.

  Around her, space seemed to glow black. The System of Xylag was small, and sparsely populated. Googan, its singular star, was old. No, old. Fat, bloated, a sickly crimson casting eerie glows of wrinkled patronage across spinning wards. The four planets under Googan's watchful gaze were Tuton, a black and red veined dwarf planet with a thin crust and consisting of almost permanent seismic and volcanic upheaval; Jekyll, a Jovian planet, mammoth, green, a gas giant with twin rings of heavy-metal infused silicates and selenium; YYK, a small warm terrestrial which would have been perfect for human life if its atmosphere didn't entirely consist of cyanide and nitrogen; and the fourth, Outermost, was a minor, consisting of a body of gas, purple and orange, with twin ruby moons.

  Kotinevitch had moored her FRAG Fighter close to Jekyll, aware that magnetic interference would be greatest here and thus potentially disrupt the enemy scanners and communication. She was also aware of the need she felt within. As if Jekyll protected her WarFleet with its huge bulge, its glowing rings; its sheer bloody mass.

  She had picked the perfect ambush spot. The junks were coming. It was pivotal Vitch hit them hard.

  " Permission for de-LS."

  " Permission granted. Begin the relay."

  Kotinevitch watched the scanners with a practised eye. The blackness of space seemed to distort, and the arriving machines decelerated at an incredible rate. First BULK Attack Crafts, fifty of them, slamming from nowhere to hang suspended in the crimson glow of the bloated Googan star. These vehicles were mammoth, and stocked from port to aft with military-grade weapons. Their single purpose was to destroy. Using Halo Missiles, they had been known to take out entire planets.

  Watching the fifty vessels stabilise on purple jets, and despite herself, Kotinevitch allowed a cold, brittle smile to crease her face. Then her features hardened like frozen hydrogen. She had awesome firepower at her fingertips. Terrible power.

  This time, Quad-Gal outnumbered the enemy, eight-to-one.

  As a politician, Vitch knew they needed a swift end to this expanding, accelerating upstart Empire. The junks were invading, decimating, polluting worlds in their escalating path across the Sinax Cluster. Now it was time for payback...

  Engines howled in silent agony as three thousand Piranha Fighters in a protective D7 Transport shield shimmered from 0.9LS, and banked like a shoal of glittering fish around the manoeuvring, shifting BULKs. In comparison, they were lithe, swift and piloted with consummate skill. Vitch felt pride swell in her breast. She stemmed it harshly. Now was not the time for such matters. The junks would be there in less than an hour. Her preparations had to be perfect. Her ambush had to be precise.

  "I need the magnetic resonance shields online, Kade."

  "Charging now, Lady. Detonation in five, four, three, two..." a huge rumbling emanated from the gas giant Jekyll as Kotinevitch hijacked magnetic resonance from the planet's rings in order to mask her fleet.

  A pulse of serenity surged through the fleet...

  "We are invisible to the enemy," said Kade, voice steady, eyes locked on scanners. "When the junks arrive, they won't know what hit them." He eyed General Kotinevitch squarely. "They'll be canon fodder. Easy-meat spaghetti for our High-Tensile Slayers."

  "Good. They asked for it." Vitch's voice betrayed no emotion.

  She watched as more of her WarFleet arrived, Alligator Mobile Dead-Guns, D5 Transports, the new D9 Transports with Land-Stellar dropLines, swarms of K5 Lancasters, B2 Spitfires and G7 Hurricanes howling through the harsh no-go zones of DeadSpace, to emerge...

  Here.

  Like an artist, Kotinevitch sculpted her craft. Like a writer, she arranged every letter, every word, every perfect stroke of punctuation. Like a musician, she composed; her ships were her notes and she directed them with infinitesimal care in a broad, sweeping arc, with three layers of reserves, one of which nestled on the opposite shores of Jekyll.

  There would be no mistakes.

  They would crush the enemy.

  "Ten minutes. Incoming," said Kade.

  Vitch nodded, nerves starting to nag her psyche. What had she missed? What strategy was overlooked? There had to be something. But there wasn't. The junks were ambling like a fat pig into a trap of spears. Thirty thousand ships. Fifteen million workers of the junk army. It would have been messy, if not for the pure-fire detonation.

  "They're like ants," Vitch told herself. "They feel nothing. Have no emotions. We are cleansing the Quad-Galaxies of an aggressive pollutant. A toxic scourge. It's that simple."

  Fifteen million lives...

  "Game on," said Kade, glancing over to Kotinevitch. She could sense his tension, but knew he would not crack. Kade was a professional, and she'd seen him rise through the ranks with consummate ease. He wouldn't crumble.

  Like processed code, perfect to the binary digit, the junks were cruising across the Xylag System, their armada laid out in a classic spearhead. Kotinevitch found her mouth had gone... dry. She blinked. Felt a tick twitch the corner of her eye.

  The enemy force was big. "I hope to all that's holy we're still invisible," she whispered.

  "We are." Kade's voice was confident, smooth, slick. "Shit," he said. "This is gonna be one huge fucking fry-up. We'll pop up on their visuals in three minutes. General, shall I give the order to attack?"

  Vitch nodded. "Yes. I want twin-layer twenty-five round Krater-Bursts from arrayed FRAGs, with fifteen hundred Piranhas in streamer-formation down both flanks to mop up anything not decimated therein. We'll keep the Lanca
sters in reserve, I don't trust these bastards as far as I can..."

  "Lady." It was something about the tone of Kade's voice that froze Kotinevitch mid-speech and sent her mind spinning through a billion spirals of uncertainty as she analysed stratagems perfected hour after hour after hour, not just by her, but by all the great strategists of QGM, including the legendary General Steinhauer.

  "What is it?" Her voice was cold. But she needed no answer. She could see for herself, on scanners and through real space. The junks had slammed into a sudden halt, huge wings of fighters arcing out like horns from the central core of troop transporters.

  They know we're here, hissed an internal voice. Now we'll have a real fight on our hands...

  "They see us," snapped Kade.

  "Deploy the FRAGs." Her mouth was a desert. They were still out of range. The ambush relied on their magnetic invisibility thanks to Jekyll's generous rings of heavy-metal infused silicates and selenium. Their fleet was supposed to magnetically blend...

  Vitch watched the mammoth FRAGs lurch forward, with twin arcs of supporting Piranha Fighters swaying to either side in formation. But she realised immediately something was wrong -

  The junks had halted. They seemed to be waiting... for something. But what?

  "Are we still clear system-wide?" snapped Vitch.

  "All clear," said Kade.

  "Something's wrong."

  "What are they waiting for?"

  "Fire when in range."

  "Four, three, two, one..."

  Kotinevitch could not hear the build-up of energy, but knew inside the FRAGs their ears would be bleeding. She watched the external coils glow and waited for the thump of awesome firepower - which never came.

  "What the hell is that?" hissed Kade.

  Kotinevitch's head snapped right. Her eyes narrowed. Then her mouth dropped open in total, awe-struck horror.

  In a blur, Jekyll's titanic rings, each 150,000 miles across and five miles thick, spun on their axes and streamed towards Kotinevitch and her vast, encamped War Machine... A trillion trillion tonnes of rock and metal flowed from the gas giant's twisting, eye-beguiling rings as they flowed and powered and sheared and slammed towards the Quad-Gal WarFleet -

  "Sound the retreat!" screamed Kotinevitch but it was too late and it happened so fast Kade didn't even have time to smack the signal. Jekyll's vast rings flowed and consumed the FRAG Bulk Fighters in an instant and sudden flares of fire and detonation signified their immediate destruction, their total annihilation. Vitch turned, to the left, catching a glimpse of the waiting, watching junk ships and felt sour bitterness, and hatred, and cold, cold fury fill her brain and body and soul as she realised with brittle clarity that the junks hadn't wandered into her trap; she had wandered into theirs.

  Jekyll's solar rings ate the WarFleet.

  Explosions roared in a rapid machine-gun concussion which pulsed through the entire system, and out beyond, into the Void, on the screams of a million dead...

  In the blink of an eye, the entire Quad-Galaxy navy was destroyed.

  Combat K: efficient in infiltration, assassination and detonation. Combat K, unsung heroes of the Quad-Galaxy, soldiers of fortune, the Special Forces elite squad who always got the job done. With only one drawback... they hated one another. But now, a directive: from General Steinhauer, of the Quad-Gal Military.

  "Combat K will carry out missions for QGM. All three of you will co-operate, because you have been implanted with spinal logic cubes. If you do not work together, then you die. If one of you kills another, then again, all three die. Horribly. You have no say in this matter. You will work for QGM, you will help bring about the end of the junk invasion, the junk acceleration. Or you will die in the process."

  "I'd rather fucking die," snarled Pippa.

  Steinhauer smiled. "Die, then," he said.

  The Blip, a semi-sentient Monitor-Drone, watched Combat-K uneasily as they cruised through a seemingly endless state of REM sleep. It was a long haul from The City in a cold, cargo-storage SLAM Freighter. In half-stasis pods, Combat K dreamed, and the Blip watched their dreams on linked nerve-spine monitors, searching for... inconsistencies.

  Pippa dreamed of a young girl with her hair in flames. Pippa twitched, crying for her mummy, and was chased by a group of savage snarling children, screaming at her, hurling matches, yelling, "Burn the witch, burn the witch, burn the witch." Tears rolled down her face as she curled into a ball; and her sorrow lasted an eternity.

  Franco, as usual, was dreaming about sex. Only this time it was a forced infection, and he awoke, cold and grey, vomiting and scratching, the beat of the rhythm through his veins carrying strange alien toxins which made his flesh bloat, his internal organs die, and he awoke screaming screaming screaming... into another dream, which simply repeated his frustration, his infestation, his raw and painful agony, of both body and soul.

  And Keenan dreamed of his girls, his young dead girls, and they were beautiful and radiant and they stretched out for him, pleading in their eyes, in their cries, "Come with us, daddy," they said. "Be with us, daddy. We miss you." And Keenan fumbled with his Techrim 11mm, cold shivering hands placing the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. There was a muffled blam and the rear of his skull detonated, skull shards and liquid mashed brain ejecting in slow-mo spirals and he blinked, was normal again, alive again and he dreamed of his girls, his young dead girls, and they were beautiful and radiant and they stretched out for him, pleading...

  All life is a cycle, thought the Blip.

  And all death a fitting end.

  PART I

  SICK WORLD

  CHAPTER ONE

  PARTY BOY

  It waited in the slime, playing with its peroxide-blonde hair, twirling tight curls and bobs between fingers with lacquered, polished nails, and enjoying the feel of oozing mud and rotting vegetation. Cherry-red lips pulled back over crooked yellow teeth as the creature grinned, and it knew, knew fresh meat was coming. It could smell it. And if it waited for long enough, fresh meat always arrived, fresh and plump and wriggling and tasty. Screaming, yes, but that was an inconsequence easy enough to handle. What took real skill was keeping the meat alive. Helping the meat repair. Nursing the meat in getting better. That was the real skill.

  The Titan Pleasure Cruiser Razzle was sixty kilometres long, half a klick wide, a missile-ship crafted from Plutonium Dakkra and humming 0.7LS through hydrogen, methane and vast pockets of carbenes. It was a long dacromet needle piercing the most remote reaches of the Quad-Galaxy... a needle, threading an invisible galactic eye.

  Originally built for the thousand-year Helix War, the Pleasure Cruiser's original objective had been infantry and vehicle transport - on a vast scale. After the Helix War was brought to a violent, bloody and sudden conclusion by the Quad-Gal Peace Unification Army, so the Titan was retired from active military service and forwarded to a tacky pleasure travel outfit named Whoral Pleasure based on the hedonistic corporate hive of The City, and specialising in two-year Sinax Pleasure Cruise deals, with machine sex thrown in for free.

  Now, however, after a recent spate of attacks by the expanding and flowering army of toxic aliens known as junks, Quad-Gal Military - or QGM - had requisitioned the ship as fast transport through Quad-Gal on a very select group of missions. Carrying a vast array of Combat-K and reg. army squads, even as QGM Generals formulated missions and directives, so the craft delivered troops, teams, even whole armies in a vast machine-gun volley of proactive and, unfortunately, reactive missions. Reactive was bad. Reactive meant the enemy had the tactical advantage.

  One of eighty such stellar onslaughts, the Razzle was governed by the recently crippled figure of General Steinhauer, the originator of QGM Combat-K teams and currently in a state of high anxiety. As the Pleasure Cruiser hummed around him, and the orange and black glow of his suite gave him a pounding migraine, so the General pushed himself back from his desk and for the millionth time glanced down at his severance.

  Steinhauer
bobbed on the HoverChair, then gritted his teeth in a caricature of a smile. Bastard, he thought. Bastard. Even with sub-atomic nanotechnology, for reasons apparently unknown to medical science, Steinhauer could neither rebuild nor graft legs in place onto his disabled and savagely severed anatomy. According to top military surgeons, Steinhauer's own body violently rejected any attempt to rebuild his legs, and after the recent horrors of Biohell, the media nickname tagged to the deviant horrorshow that went on down on The City at the hands of corrupted hardware manufacturer NanoTek and its governing AI alien-grown GreenSource Mainframe instigator, so people no longer trusted biomod improvement nanotechnology - in case a person woke as a different damn species.

  "You OK?" came a soothing, female voice. It was the HoverChair's inbuilt Psychosis Monitor. Her name was Jemma.

  "Yes," snapped Steinhauer, irate for no reason. He grimaced again. Actually, he did have a reason. He had no legs. And no genius of science could replace that which he'd taken so much for granted. "Stop asking me the same damn questions over and over again. In fact, stop analysing my mental health - because at this current moment in time, I haven't got any mental fucking health!"

  Steinhauer dropped back to his pit of depression.

  And thought gloomily about the junks.

  Keenan went to step through the doorway to his shared quarters, when Franco dropped his shoulder and barged his way in. Scowling, Keenan followed and watched Franco drop his pack, put his hands on his hips, and beam around the narrow combined recreation and sleeping quarters. The decor was art nouveau, all twisted alloy and bubble-filled glass. The floor was a new type of spongy jewel. Even the sinks gleamed, with swan-head taps. The toilet was a contemporary aero-suck titanium-III model. Advanced.