Scratch Monkey Read Free Page A

crawl, crawl; those who can stand, stand. Their hands are upraised, and some of them appear to be looking up, searching for the signs of deliverance: but that's wrong, as I see when I get closer. My stomach gives an odd lurch, something I thought I'd gotten over long ago; The Year Zero Men responsible for this atrocity are nothing if not efficient.
    All of them have recently had their eyes gouged out.
    The bodies of the dead guards lie strewn around the sides of the road. Some of them lie like broken puppets, their limbs bent at odd angles, while others look perfectly healthy. A few have skin the consistency of a pulpy, rotten fruit, and tongues that bulge and glisten gruesomely. Hydrostatic shock kills in a myriad of ways, all of them final but some of them uglier than others. Listening in on the high frequency cellcom bands I can hear a raucous twittering, neural mapping data being uploaded into the invisible, omnipresent Dreamtime. At a conservative estimate, the convoy consisted of twelve guards ferrying five hundred prisoners; less than fifty will survive the wreck, and all will die before they reach civilisation. Which is a small mercy, I suppose, because those who reach what passes for civilisation on this planet will only take longer to die.
    I spot what I'm looking for and give the escaping prisoners a wide berth as I sprint towards the head of the train. One of the guards there has been thrown clear. On infrared I can see the pulse in her throat, the warm breath rising unevenly from her mouth. If I can get to her before the prisoners stumble this far I may have a chance to save her.
    First aid crowds out the questions that clamour in the shadows of my mind as I bend over the guard. She's still breathing raggedly, and appears to be unconscious, but I give her a quick scan with my eyes on active and she doesn't seem to have any broken bones. Possible concussion, then, and maybe some internal bleeding. Well, there's nothing I can do about that. She's almost as tall as I am, skin tanned and tattooed in strange designs -- vortices and death's heads and the more arcane geometries of soft tissue injuries -- and her hair is cropped into a narrow, spiky helmet. Her fatigues are stained and grimy and there's a knife at her belt. I ditch the toothpick and pick her up, somehow roll her across my shoulders, and head for the edge of the road.
    Picking my way through trees and bushes carrying a woman who weighs nearly as much as I do is not exactly my idea of fun, but neither is getting a bullet in the back of the neck. It seems to go on forever, but my chronometer keeps me informed with merciless precision; I spend fifteen minutes and eight seconds pushing through a seething wall of turquoise-streaked khaki vegetation. Frond-like leaves brush my sweat-slick face, and thorny branches whip around after me or catch on my chameleon suit. There are strange rustlings in the undergrowth and all the while a chorus of beetles and arthropods covers the possible sound of pursuit.
    I pitch her down at the foot of a forest giant and stop to breathe. Black spots swim before my eyes; I've pushed half a kilometre into this wilderness just to get away from that ochre killing-ground. The raw, eyeless sockets of the victims seem to stare at me through the jungle, accusing me of ... shit , I think, why couldn't someone else have pulled this end of the stick? Mannanash, or Davud ... anyone? Anyone but me! Maybe it was the Boss's decision. I've never trusted his sense of humour; it's as unhuman as He is. This is just the sort of assignment that would strike him as amusing.
    I blink and tell my eyes to run their power-on self-test. They flash through it in two seconds, sequences of light shimmering on the inside of my eyelids to tell me that all's well and I can see as easily as anyone else. Twenty-two years I've had the ability to see; twenty-two years out of my thirty-four subjective. Distant Intervention gave me my eyes back when they recruited me. I