Day of the Damned Read Free Page A

crashed into mine.
    The stiffness to her shoulders tells me she’s crying.
    ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s OK.’
    ‘Sven . . .?’
    I’m almost on my feet, when she flings herself into my arms and almost knocks me over. I’m a foot taller, twice her weight and twice as broad. You need to see us together to realize how absurd that is.
    ‘Dad said . . .’
    Aptitude stops. Realizes she’s clinging to me.
    She steps back. Probably just as well. Because I’m realizing all the wrong things. Like she smells good and her breasts are firm and her lips are close. She’s sixteen, for all she’s a widow. I’m twenty-nine, maybe thirty.
    That’s too wide a gap for either of us.
    Of course, her husband was three times my age. But that’s the Octovian Empire for you. ‘Don’t get rid of me that easily,’ I say.
    We’re halfway back to Wildeside when my SIG wakes. Its faint shiver has me scanning the horizon for Horse Hito. Looks clear to me. Although I squint out of the window into the sun for a few seconds, because that’s where he’ll be coming from.
    Well. It’s where I’d be coming from.
    ‘What?’ I demand.
    ‘Sven,’ it says. ‘The good news? Or the bad?’
    ‘The good,’ Aptitude says.
    Anton suggests we start with the bad.
    I sit it out. The SIG-37’s locked to my DNA. So mine is the answer it’s waiting for. Plus it wants to tell me anyway. ‘Don’t forget the other furies out there.’
    ‘That’s the bad bit, right?’
    ‘No,’ it says. ‘That’s the good. Most died.’
    ‘What’s the bad?’
    ‘Debro owns the ship they died in.’
    ‘OK,’ I agree. ‘That’s not good.’
    ‘Oh,’ my SIG says. ‘That’s not the bad bit . . .’ It hesitates. ‘Well, not the really bad bit. The ship was travelling on a false certificate.’
    ‘Oh shit,’ Anton says.
    But the SIG’s got more. ‘And its journey wasn’t logged. You know what that means . . .’
    All trading journeys in the Octovian Empire must be logged in advance, with cargo given and routes outlined. Once chosen, routes must be adhered to. Failure to log an upcoming journey is treason. The penalty for treason is death.
    Round here, that’s the penalty for everything.

Chapter 3
    IT’S ALMOST NOON WHEN WE CREST A SLOPE TO SEE A shattered cargo carrier on the high plain in front of us. Imagine a giant silver fish, and then smash its spine with a metal bar and that’s how it looks.
    Make that a fish with no markings.
    ‘Poetic,’ says my gun.
    Slapping the SIG into silence, I tell Aptitude to stay where she is and Anton to cover me and kill anything that moves. Neither looks happy.
    Too bad.
    Gun held combat-style across my body, I head down a slope, giving myself cover where I can. That’s most of the time, because the bits of slope not littered with rock have fragments of cargo carrier as big as our scout car.
    Of course, that means anyone down there has cover too. Only the gun says the sole life sign inside the cruiser is on the edge of flickering out.
    A section of tail fin lies in the dirt. A name stencilled beneath a number, both crudely painted out. The angle of the sun makes the name visible.
    Olber’s Paradox.
    No idea who Olber was. Not too sure what a paradox is either.
    The first casualty lies a hundred and fifty paces from the wreck. The cargo loader’s guts make a pattern in the dirt, what’s left of them. The arrangement looks accidental. His head rests twenty paces beyond.
    Blowflies rise, furious at being disturbed. Only to resettle. There’s a stink to the air. The heat isn’t being kind to the corpses.
    This is nasty.
    A crew member stares at the sky. Her eyes poached white by the sun. Her pistol is in its holster. The handle of a dagger juts from her boot. Although her neck is broken and the back of her head pulped, the blood on a rock behind her says her death is an accident.
    ‘Still getting life signs?’
    ‘They’re fading,’ the SIG says.
    It directs me towards a middle section. This obviously