Bedlam by Christopher Brookmyre Read Free Book Online

troops, sent skittering clear by the impact. He picked it up and examined it, deciding to try it
     out and make sure he knew how to use it now rather than when he was facing some amped-up roid-raging space marine.
    There was no safety catch and no trick to firing it. You just pulled the trigger and it sent a short, controlled and, frankly,
     rubbish blast of energy towards its target. It didn’t even make a very impressive noise, just this embarrassingly squeaky
     sound like a car ignition failing to turn.
    All those years of devouring sci-fi shows, fantasising about futuristic firepower: now he had finally got his first ray-gun
     and it was pants. It reminded him of the first time he ever got to feel a girl’s breast: Melanie Sangster had finally removed
     her protectively positioned elbow from her left tit only for him to find it indistinguishable from any other part of her upper
     body through the bra, blouse and Arran sweater she was wearing. Then, as now, what really piqued his sense of disappointment
     was the acute awareness that the real goods were there to be had somewhere.
    How could he have this reaction unless those memories were his and unless he was shaped by them? This wasn’t just background
     detail; this was who he was, surely. Unless his disappointment was born of being a cyborg trooper, used to far more impressive
     killware, and the virus meant that his mind couldn’t help but supply points of reference from its false cache.
    Kamnor had said fighting the enemy would help bring back his real self, but he didn’t fancy fighting off an angry wasp with
     this little tadger of a gun.
    As he picked his way through the wreckage of the corridor, he spied something more imposing. It was a long and sturdy rifle,
     humming with latent energy, blue diodes pulsing on its stock and an ammo display reading max. When he bent down to lift it,
     he found that it was still gripped in a severed flesh-and-metal arm, and no amount of effort could prise it from its owner’s
     proverbial cold dead fingers. He tried hefting it along with the arm, but could barely move the latter as it weighed so much.
     He found another one, its come-and-get-me diodes blinking from among the tangle of twisted steel. This one wasn’t gripped,
     but it wasn’t going anywhere either, having become welded to its owner’s chest in the crash.
    Lumpen bum-nuggets. They were lying there dead but he couldn’t take their weapons. And why did this frustration feel familiar?
    Bottom line was that Kamnor was right again: he had to find his unit. That was the answer. They would have proper weapons.
     They were called Rapier squad, after all, not Chinese burn squad or twirled-up dishtowel squad.
    Ross ventured cautiously through the twisted gash in the corridor and on to the arid ground beyond: his first steps on the
     surface of another planet or his first steps towards recovering his true identity. He wasn’t sure which was the more intimidating.
     The former would leave him lost in space with no answer to his predicament, while the latter was just as big a step into the
     unknown. What if the ‘real’ him was a complete arsehole? Some sadistic killing machine that lived for atrocity, a convicted
     psychopath fitted out like this and made to serve in the military as an expedient form of punishment? What if he was a quivering
     shitebag of a conscript who was just as scared and unaccustomed as he felt now?
    No, that couldn’t be right. Something inside him had felt oddly positive about this place. Warm, even, and that was an emotion
     that ruled out both of the above.
    He ran for the cover of a broken wing embedded in the dust, constantly surprised by how natural his movement felt. He stillhad no sense of being burdened by the weight of all this metal, which was confusing given that he hadn’t been able to lift
     that poor dead bugger’s arm.
    He scurried between rocks and wreckage, looking out for movement at ground level, and listening