War Machine (The Combat-K Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

die.”
     
    Keenan forced sticky eyes open and stared at the spinning room. Shit , he mused. When the room gyrated just as badly as it had the previous night, a man could be sure he’d drunk too much. But then... he had a reason to drink, right? Surely he was allowed that single concession? Every morning the bitter pill of the murders filled his mouth with a taste worse than any second-hand Jataxa.
    Keenan rolled from his bed and moved through the kitchen to the veranda doors, flinging them open and stepping out into early morning Karaya sunshine. Distantly, the sea rolled and crashed against an unspoilt white shingle beach. Karaya was climbing the sky, gold and bright, and her sister Tekana toiled a little way to the right, smaller and fiercer, more red than gold. On the rare occasion when Tekana lit the day alone, the world had a blood ambience—to Keenan’s eyes—that always reminded him of war .
    He groaned. One sun would have been bad enough, but two? Did Nature have no sympathy for a man with a hangover? Keenan took several deep breaths of sea air, hands on hips, unshaved face lifted with eyes closed tight. Something bumped his leg, and he glanced down at Cam, his Security PopBot. Small and round and black, the size of a tennis ball and with no discernible features on its shell except for a few scratches and dents, the PopBot seemed—nevertheless—to be grinning.
    “What do you want?”
    “You’ve got a visitor, down at the office. Been waiting for half an hour.”
    “Kube reception. Tell him to come back tomorrow when I feel more... alive .”
    “Tsch,” said Cam, continuing to float near his knee. It lifted then, smoothly, until it was at face level. “A man in your position can’t afford to turn away business, my friend.”
    “My position?”
    “Bankrupt, gambling debts, heavy drinker. As good with his family accounts as I am at holding a golfing umbrella.”
    “Amusing, but don’t push your luck, Cam. Remember, I can have you dismantled, burned, boiled, magnetised. You get the picture?”
    “Keenan, I think you’ll want to hear what this man has to say. Call it machine intuition. Trust me.”
    “OK. Tell reception I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” He moved inside, to the marble worktop, and lifted his heavy Techrim 11mm pistol, freshly-oiled and with a full 52 round micro-clip.
    “But it better be worth it,” he muttered. “I ain’t in the mood for playing games.”
     
    Shaved, showered, fresh pair of shorts and open, flapping blue and white striped shirt, Keenan strode across the crunching shingle to the edge of the sea, and the TitaniumIII mooring. His black metallic Yamaha SeaWarrior jet ski, 380bhp, three cylinder, two stroke and 1800cc of pure muscle with a 10 blade impeller and Titanium glass-alloy panels, bobbed at its mooring against the warp-planked jetty. Keenan waded in knee-deep, unlocked the Yamaha, climbed onto its rolling platform and fired the engine.
    The jet ski raced at a fast idle. Keenan settled himself down, fixed his emergency cut-out in place and blipped the throttle. The engine raced on a surge of torque, and Keenan turned the jet ski sharply and headed for deeper water; then down the coast bounding from wave to wave towards the city of Dekkan Tell.
    Spray cooled his face. It felt good. And for a little while Keenan could blank out the past.
    Despite its nomenclature as third largest cityon the planet of Galhari—which itself lurked on the quiet and peaceful fringes of Quad-Gal, and the Sinax Cluster as a whole—Dekkan Tell was in fact a low slung scatter of white stone buildings sporting terracotta tiled roofs, orange doors and window shutters, all connected by wide paved highways and a proliferation of greenery and bright orange scatters of the local Dekka flowers, which gave the area its name. It was illegal to build over two storeys high in Dekkan Tell, and so the city had spread outwards rather than upwards . The modest city had a population of only