War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Na zdorovye!’ Vladimir shouted and downed his drink.

  ‘It means “For health”,’ Mudge told me, leaning over. For some reason I found this very funny.

  The Vucari downed their drinks. Then as one they all threw their glasses against the wall. The other special forces types in the bar did not appreciate glasses exploding close to their heads. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if it was going to hurt any of us. We were on our feet trying to apologise. It was a night of firsts for me. I had not been expecting what looked like a company of military police to make their way through the mess towards us. Everyone was so surprised that it momentarily defused the situation. It got very quiet in the mess.

  ‘Oh you’ve timed this well,’ Gregor commented dryly.

  ‘Extensive suicide bid?’ I asked.

  The head of the company of MPs was clearly part of their Cyber-SWAT unit. He at least had the courtesy to look very nervous. Most of his men and women looked like they were shitting themselves.

  ‘Sergeant Douglas?’ he asked. Shit! I racked my brain trying to think of what I’d done. How much alcohol had we stolen? A text message started blinking in my IVD: ‘You have orders to accompany me to the field hospital to hand over your arm.’

  That made sense. Presumably the officer who it was meant for wanted it. Must have a lot of pull and no patience to arrange this.

  ‘Yeah, I can’t see that happening,’ Gregor said, moving next to me. Ash, Bibs, Brownie and Shaz did the same. ‘Mudge, get up,’ Gregor told him.

  ‘Can I not show support from a comfortable reclining position?’ Mudge asked. Gregor glared at him. Mudge got up.

  ‘You sicken me!’ Vladimir roared from where he was standing on the table. ‘He is a fighting man! A good man! He lost his arm well, and you come here to do this to him! I will feast on your flesh and crack your bones to sup the marrow!’ I felt he was going a little over the top. All the cyber-dogs were up on their feet and looked as if they were growling despite not making any noise. The MP commander looked like he wanted to cry. I could see Vladimir crouching as if he was readying himself to pounce.

  Just before it started I saw Vicar staring at me from the bar. Vladimir pounced. There was a massive fight.

  I awoke confused as to where I was. Then I remembered as I looked around the bloodstained bed. My wounds were healing, the small ones mostly gone. The more serious ones would take longer. I should probably get the spine checked out.

  What was going on? Had Vicar been on Sirius? I hadn’t known him then. I hadn’t met him until I was on the Santa Maria. But then when I met him he hadn’t been wearing his dog collar; he’d been in fatigues. There was always a chance he’d been there that night. Operation Spiral had taken place in the Sirius system but rumours pointed to it being run from an NSA-controlled frigate in orbit, not on the ground. Why had I seen him there?

  I got up and headed back to the room that Kenny had first shown me to when we’d arrived. I wondered briefly where Fiona had gone but found that I couldn’t care less.

  The whisky headache that I once again so sorely deserved was significantly augmented by being hit on the head with a spiked ball that I had deserved less. I’d had enough of these fucking crazy people and I was leaving. I just needed to get my stuff and then I was heading back to my campsite. I’d sort the rest of my wounds out when I got there.

  This was tainted for me now. The beauty of the landscape couldn’t outweigh the sickness of the people living in it. Maybe that included myself. I couldn’t stay here and I didn’t think that they would leave me in peace if I wasn’t going to play their game. I needed to talk to God.

  5

  Heading South

  Learning to play the trumpet versus being a gunman. I guessed it just wasn’t meant to be. I was heading south again. Not sure where I was going. The sun had chased the rain away. It was a crisp day but very cold.

  Did I belong anywhere? Could I settle? I hadn’t really tried. I couldn’t stop thinking about Morag and her imminent suicide bid.

  ‘God?’ I asked after switching my internal comms back on.

  ‘Yes, Jakob?’ Did God sound sad or was I reading that into all those tones because of our previous conversation?

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked. There was a long delay.

  ‘Little has changed.’

  ‘Morag?’

  ‘She is beyond my sphere of influence.’ Did God sound hurt? I wondered if he was upset at being ignored by his creators.

  ‘God, how did Vicar die?’ I was thinking back to my dream and Vicar being where he shouldn’t have been, in the never-ending replay of all the shitty and dangerous parts of my life that was my sleeping subconscious.

  ‘I have no information on William Stuttner’s death.’ So that was his real name. But that didn’t make sense.

  ‘Rolleston could keep it that hidden?’

  ‘I do not think that was the case.’

  ‘Vicar’s alive?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘I cannot say for sure but that is what the evidence suggests.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘The energy demand on the MI5 interrogation facility is commensurate with the power required to sustain both life-support equipment and a sense booth. Also I have no information that would suggest that he has been taken anywhere else or that anyone else is currently being held at the facility.’

  ‘And that is where he was taken when they got him in Dundee?’

  ‘Again, the evidence I can gather points to that being a near-certainty. Would you like to review it?’

  It made a degree of sense. They would want to interrogate him first. He would have had a lot of information. Not just on Ambassador but also on the God Conspiracy that he had been part of along with Pagan, Big Papa Neon and others.

  ‘Are they still interrogating him?’ I asked.

  ‘Evidence would suggest that they are not doing so actively. If they are running a sense booth, however, there may still be ongoing automated interrogation. If this is the case then the information is not being transferred through any means of communication I have awareness of.’

  ‘If they have everything – and nobody holds out this long – then why is he still alive?’

  ‘I suspect that the people involved became so busy that nobody got around to killing him.’

  Suspect? ‘God, did you just speculate?’

  ‘Yes, but based on 2.4762 terabytes of supplementary information.’

  I wasn’t an expert but I was wondering if God had started exceeding his program. Would he make a bid for freedom? Or, more frightening, try to ‘fix’ what he saw was wrong with us.

  ‘Where is this facility?’ A file transfer icon appeared in my IVD. It had the address and images of the facility, which looked like a small warehouse in a run-down industrial area, as well as other information God had managed to find. This included footage of Vicar being bundled out of an aircar. He was hooded and his hands were secured behind his back. Josephine Bran had hold of the wrist restraints and was using them to steer the much larger man with ease. She passed Vicar on to some out-of-shape-looking types in suits who I reckoned ran the facility. Then she turned and looked straight into the lens shooting the footage.

  I was travelling at sixty miles an hour on one of the less badly maintained Highland roads watching the footage on a small window in my IVD. I knew that this was just the Grey Lady’s instinct telling her where she was being surveilled from. I knew that she was in a different star system to me. Even knowing all this, I still jerked my head back up into the bike’s slipstream. Her nondescript features and lack of expression were somehow frightening. It was like she was watching me across the months. Which was of course bollocks. I still shut the footage down quickly.

  The facility was in Coventry, on the edge of the Birmingham Crater. Coventry was another unwanted place. It was easy to hide things in unwanted places.

  I had no option but to go after Vicar. He had been taken trying to buy Morag and me ti
me. I cursed my stupidity for not checking before. I had assumed he was dead. Rolleston was thorough, Josephine more so, but we’d kept them jumping. I guess they had been forced to leave the system before they could tie up that particular loose end.

  I wondered if this was what Big Papa Neon had meant about the dead wanting to talk to me. If it was, he could have been a bit clearer and we would have come and got Vicar. Maybe this was the price of God – messages all had to be cryptic now. But then how would Big Papa know? I suppose he could have just asked God.

  Vicar’s guest spot in my dream had been my guilty subconscious telling me to check. At least I hoped that it was.

  I was reasonably sure of my whereabouts, though I was still trying to keep comms use, including the GPS, to a minimum. I was riding through a small gully, a short cut, trying to save time. It was close to Pitlochry in Perthshire. There were steep rock cliffs on either side of the narrow road.

  I passed a dirt lay-by and saw an ancient bus parked up. More wannabe settlers from the cities, I guessed. There was more than one family and they were all on their knees, hands laced behind their backs facing the bus. Parked in front of the bus, blue lights flashing, was a police APC. Two police covered the settlers. Another two were dragging a pregnant-looking woman out of the bus. She was struggling with them.

  I drove by. Not every problem in the world was mine. I was going to go and get Vicar. I owed him. I didn’t have time for this.

  I jammed on the Triumph’s brakes and looked back. They threw the woman on the ground. I kicked down the stand. They started beating her with shock sticks but they weren’t putting any current through them. I climbed off the bike. The woman was curled up trying to protect her unborn. Two of the settlers, a man and a woman, tried to get up to help the pregnant woman. They were kicked in the spine so hard their heads were battered against the side of the bus.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted. The two cops beating the woman looked up. One of them pressed the sole of his boot down on the woman’s head. The other started towards me.

  ‘This is none of your business. Move on or you’ll get some,’ he ordered, his voice full of assumed authority. This tosser wasn’t even from Scotland. I kept walking towards him.

  ‘Did you fucking hear me?!’ He sent current through the shock stick. I closed with him and he swung at me. I ducked under his swing and hooked a punch into his chest, knocking him back. He tried to backhand me with the stick. I ducked again and it left him wide open to a side kick to his face. He staggered back. I walked after him and kicked him in the face again. He swung at me again. I spun under the blow and delivered a spinning kick to the head that cracked his helmet. The force knocked him sideways into another kick. He tried to stab me with the shock stick and I sidestepped, grabbed his arm and broke his elbow.

  He was screaming now. I took the stick off him and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and groin with it. I took out every bit of my frustration and anger at Calum, Alasdair and pricks like these on this guy. He was a lump of bleeding pain masquerading as human when I let him fall to the ground.

  I was breathing hard. It wasn’t the exertion; I had underestimated just how angry I was. I was also being covered by the other three police, two pointing shotguns and the third an assault rifle.

  ‘Lie down and place your hands behind your head!’ one of them shouted.

  ‘Given that I’ve just beaten the shit out of one of you, I can’t think that would end well for me.’

  ‘We will shoot.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it for a second.’

  I squared up to them. My shoulder laser pushed its way through the break-open flap on my raincoat.

  The people knelt by the bus were getting up. Two of them ran to the pregnant women. The others were slowly edging towards the police. They looked nervous, angry but nervous. The cheap replacement implants suggested that they were veterans. They must have hated being outgunned by the police.

  ‘Stay out of my way,’ I said to the settlers. They froze and then backed off. I turned to the police. ‘I am much better at this than y—’ I started but one of them was pulling the trigger.

  The red beam of the shoulder laser stabbed through the shotgun, superheating the metal. The laser went straight through the weapon and into the policeman’s leg, blowing off a steaming chunk of flesh. The ammunition in the shotgun cooked off and exploded. The policeman was blown back onto the ground, the front of his armoured uniform a charred mess.

  I was moving to the left, the heavy Mastodon revolver in my right hand, the TO-5 laser pistol in the left. The policewoman with the assault rifle was firing at me, trying to track my movement. To me the muzzle flashes of the weapon seemed to happen in slow motion. It was the same for the enormous muzzle flash of my revolver. The bullet caught her in the upper arm. The massive round penetrated her armoured uniform and any subcutaneous armour she might have. The hydrostatic shock of the large-calibre round blew her arm clean off. It went tumbling into the air. Her finger was convulsing round the trigger firing the assault rifle as the arm spun.

  This was me trying hard not to kill them.

  I aimed for the third and final officer’s leg with the TO-5. All I succeeded in doing was blow off smoking parts of his armour. His shotgun blast caught me in the side and spun me round.

  He made a run for the APC. If he got there I was in trouble as he would be in an armoured vehicle and have access to its weapon systems. On the other hand I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed anyone yet and I wanted to keep it that way. I fired both pistols at the ground between him and the APC. He changed direction. He was now running up the road away from the lay-by. He let his shotgun drop on its sling, drew his automatic pistol and started firing it blindly behind him. A couple of the 10mm rounds flattened themselves against my armoured raincoat. There was a cry as one of the settlers took a ricochet in the leg. Right. Fun over.

  I walked over to the assault rifle, removed the fingers of the severed arm from the grip and picked it up. My palm interface connected with the weapon’s smartlink. The magazine was empty but it still had grenades. I tutted when I saw what kind of grenades. I put the stock of the weapon to my shoulder, aimed and then fired the launcher. The grenade hit the running policeman on the back of his helmet with enough velocity to pick him up off his feet and sending him sprawling face down. He wasn’t moving. White gas was pouring out of the grenade.

  ‘Tear gas!’ I shouted at the policeman’s hopefully unconscious form. ‘Who the fuck uses tear gas?!’ Most vets had filters to survive gasses and their tear ducts were removed when their eyes were replaced. Tear gas was only really of use on children. Still I hoped I hadn’t killed him – for my sake, not his. The police could be vindictive.

  I dropped the assault rifle and headed back towards my bike. The policewoman whose arm I’d blown off was alive enough to scream. The one whose shotgun I’d blown up was crawling. I kicked him in the head as I walked past.

  The two families of settlers were just staring at me.

  ‘Next time, come mob-handed and bring media,’ I told them.

  Now I was in trouble. There was some chasing, some hiding. The police were not very happy with me and God was helping them find me. I made one more contact with the net. With God’s help I downloaded the most detailed and up-to-date maps of the area I could find as well as details of police roadblocks and static surveillance lenses. Then I went comms dark.

  I sat in the back of the freight container heading south. I didn’t dare drown out the clanking of the train with music because I was in working conditions.

  I’d spent several days making my way to Glasgow, avoiding police patrols actively searching for me. In Glasgow I’d made my way to an old freight yard and stowed away on a cargo train. It was nothing like the Mag Lev Mudge and I had taken from America; in some ways it felt more luxurious. I was out of the rain and the wind. I’d got my stove going and had a brew. My clothes were drying and I’d bribed enough to get the bike into the container.

  This w
as a very old-fashioned train. I think it was electric, completely automated. It ran on a network of tracks that delivered slow-moving but heavy cargo all over the UK and was much cheaper to operate than a Mag Lev. It would take me into Coventry, where I had a whole new list of problems to deal with. Chief among them was if the police checked with God then they’d know I was interested in the warehouse where Vicar was being held.

  More of a certainty was that MI5 would know I was coming. It would have been easy for them to ask God to alert them if anyone took an interest in any of their holdings and operations. Also I can’t imagine that MI5 were very pleased with me, as releasing God into the net must have fucked up a lot of their operations and may even have got some of their operatives killed. I would also imagine that they’d lost more people through corruption purges and involvement with the Cabal. I struggled to see how I wouldn’t just be walking into a whole load of trouble.

  I wrapped my coat around me and tried to get some sleep. The heating cells that ran through the coat almost managed to keep out the cold and wet. The rhythmic movement over the rails was almost soothing.

  Aldershot, eleven months ago

  It was a farce. Normally the court martial would have been at Hereford and I would have been taken out behind the bogs and shot, but Mudge had kicked up such a shit storm in the press that they had to do it publicly. Mudge had also arranged for us to be lawyered up, which was technically legal under military law but a career-destroying social faux pas if you tried it. Fuck it, what career?

  Most military towns are shitholes. Aldershot had made an attempt to outdo them all. It was like the rotting corpse of a military town that had been revived just long enough for this circus. On the other hand, a lot of vets lived in the area and many of them were protesting outside the ugly concrete building. I say protesting; they were going to riot if the verdict went against us. I think they probably did more to get us dishonourably discharged rather than shot for mutiny than our lawyers did.