War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Try and remember you’re talking to a bunch of squaddies,’ I suggested.

  ‘There is only me,’ Mudge said as if it was a revelation.

  ‘We are all playthings of your imagination,’ Morag said to him with mock earnestness.

  The levity wasn’t working. We’d fractured their world too badly.

  ‘Okay, so I’ve got a question,’ Mother said. We looked at her. ‘So what?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Pagan said. I didn’t either.

  ‘What difference does it make? The Cabal pulled our strings, made us fight for sixty years. Nothing we can do about it now.’

  ‘Utu,’ Tailgunner said quietly.

  Mother turned to him. ‘Really? How’s that going to work then? Look, I agree with you about our ancestors, our spirituality, but the fact is we’re not mythical heroes out of the past. We don’t have anything like the resources to fight, and doing it on principle is a shitty reason for us all to finally get killed.’

  ‘Because it’s the right thing to do.’ I was surprised that I said it. And after I said it I realised how hollow it sounded.

  ‘Well, I congratulate you on being able to afford such a keen moral compass. Again, I don’t want to die for a principle. Particularly as I don’t think it matters to us what war we’re fighting or who’s in command. It’s not going to change things for us and the end result is exactly the same,’ Mother said.

  ‘But we changed things,’ Morag said. There was almost desperation in her voice. ‘People can see what’s going on now. The Cabal can’t do those things any more.’

  ‘Really? Is anyone trying to subvert your god yet?’ Mother asked. She read the answer in Morag’s miserable expression. ‘Things getting better for the poor?’

  ‘These things take time,’ Pagan told her.

  ‘The powerful and wealthy are always going to fight for what’s theirs. You expose them and they find another, more subtle way to get what they want.’

  ‘So why fight them?’ Merle asked.

  Mother flashed him a look of contempt.

  ‘Survival. I grew up in Moa City. For more than half my early life the place was under siege. Now I found out we did this to our-fucking-selves? And now we’re scrapping over the wreckage of humanity. Fuck that. This has got nothing to do with us. We’ll sit this one out.’

  ‘And starve to death,’ Merle pointed out.

  ‘And do what we have to,’ Mother continued. ‘Because when the smoke clears I’ll bet my left tit it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to any of my people.’

  ‘That’s what they want us to think and do. To give in, to forget about our personal responsibility …’ Mudge surprised me, but it was similar to what he’d said on Atlantis. Underneath the drugs and lust for adrenalin Mudge actually believed this stuff.

  ‘I guess it’s more comfortable on Earth?’ Mother asked rhetorically. ‘Because here idealism is pretty much a luxury. We have other priorities. Democracy’s been a joke for years. Why should I care which fucking faceless military dictatorship I live under? I’m still fighting and dying for some other fucker. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’

  ‘We were doing something,’ Morag said. Again she sounded desperate.

  I could see where Mother was coming from to a degree, but I think we’d pulled her world down around her ears and now she was going to do the same with our accomplishments, if you could call them that.

  ‘Really? Get here on your own? Finance your own gear? Or were you sent? Who sent you? Because I’m willing to bet it was just a different flavour of government or military power broker, playing another version of an old game.’

  ‘What if it’s not dictatorship this time?’ Pagan asked. ‘What if it’s slavery?’

  ‘Are you just saying that or have you got any evidence?’ Tailgunner asked.

  ‘It’s a suspicion. Operators sent before us returned brainwashed and you said yourself that when you lose people you get compromised almost immediately.’

  ‘That’s a reason to hide –’ Mother started.

  ‘And starve.’ Merle wasn’t getting off that point.

  ‘– not fight.’

  ‘Well that’s your choice, isn’t it? You either fight, hide or surrender,’ I said.

  Big Henry and Dog Face bristled at the word surrender. These guys might be street-bred scavengers, brawlers, thieves and survivors, but they had pride.

  ‘I’ve known Rolleston for a long time. You surrender, you’ll get used or killed. You hide, you’ll starve, or if you raid for supplies then sooner or later he’ll get round to hunting you down when you become a big enough pain in the arse. Besides, if you’re going to fight for supplies you may as well just fight. You ask, why fight? Survival. The rest is window dressing to provide a little bit of hope for motivational purposes,’ I said.

  Mother stared at me. Finally she gave a humourless laugh.

  ‘See, that’s a language I understand,’ she told me.

  It looked like I’d found a way to motivate her.

  Strange walked out of the darkness and lay down next to Mother, her head in the older woman’s lap. Mother started stroking the girl’s long dark hair.

  ‘So can we see the fragment of Demiurge?’ Pagan asked.

  Tailgunner opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘Not so fast,’ Mother said. ‘What do we get?’

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you not been listening?’ Merle demanded angrily.

  I was smiling. I liked this woman. Her survival skills were keenly honed. I could see why they looked to her.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘Help,’ she said. She had not liked saying that.

  ‘Supplies?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’re taking her seriously. We can take this bit of Demiurge any time we—’ Merle started.

  I turned on him. ‘That’s enough. If we can take from the enemy, deny them supplies, fuck with their infrastructure, than that’s part of our remit here. We also need more intel. You don’t like that, you think you’re better off on your own, then fuck off.’

  It was a gamble. He could just leave, and we needed him, but I couldn’t have him questioning everything like this. Chinese Parliament or not, he was proving disruptive. Not to mention it was fucking wearing. He was angry. I could see that. Bruised pride. Politics was so tiresome. I was a little worried he might try and kill me. There was more than a possibility he was capable of succeeding. I could see his point. We weren’t the well-oiled machine he was used to; also he was a solo act, used to doing things his way. But we were making this up as we went along, out of necessity. The whole thing was a juggling act and he needed to help or leave.

  Mudge turned to him. ‘Merle, I think you need to wind your neck in a bit or this just won’t work.’

  Merle opened his mouth to respond angrily.

  ‘Merle,’ Cat said.

  I turned round to look at her. She was still on guard, cradling her gyroscopically supported railgun. Merle didn’t say anything. He just nodded and relaxed.

  ‘You help us; we’ll help you,’ Mother said.

  13

  Moa City

  The cable car was heavily armoured with a number of weapon systems sticking out of it like spines. Most of them were for point defence. The cable was carbon nanotube in an armoured sheath. Even allowing for this, the cable looked very vulnerable. Tailgunner had confirmed that during the twenty-year-long, on-off siege of Moa City, the cable car normally didn’t last long when They came calling. The locals had only just got this one up and running again.

  We were sharing the crowded car with grubby, drawn, exhausted-looking miners coming off shift. I hoped the crowd was enough to hide us from the ever-present surveillance but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we stuck out. We were wearing clean clothes and looked healthy. I could feel the security lens burning into me, scrutinising me. It was as if Demiurge was staring at us. Which it would be as it ran our features
through various facial recognition programs.

  The cavern that Moa City occupied was the largest yet. It was more like a large alpine valley with a roof of stone. The cavern walls close enough to see were cut into terraces where they’d been extensively mined. This made me uncomfortable. It was like chipping away at the walls of your own house and then wondering why the roof fell on you.

  Enormous geothermally powered strip-lighting rigs hung from the cavern roof among the stalactites. It was supposed to be daytime but the harsh light was more institutional than daylight. It wasn’t total either. Many of the lights had been destroyed or damaged. Some hung down from the rock; others flickered on and off intermittently. At ‘night’ the lights would go UV, providing what little modified vegetation was left with the band of light it needed.

  The floor of the cavern was supposed to be a lush carpet of vegetation broken up by plantation-style mansions cut out of the rock itself. Big Henry had told me that it had been fashionable to have a seam of precious metal run through the wall of your own house. The problem with the Garden District was that the New Zealand colonial forces hadn’t been able to defend it when They had swarmed in from Nightside.

  ‘I remember during one of the attacks – the first one I saw – I looked down from the city and it looked like the whole place was crawling. It was like a carpet of insects on a nature viz. You could barely see the ground,’ Tailgunner said as he saw me gazing down at the cavern floor.

  We’d used some of the morphic compound to change his features. His tattoos – they were called ta moko apparently and told his story – had been covered with foundation. The whanau were nothing if not pragmatic. A bandanna covered the computer tech protruding from his skull.

  ‘There’s people down there,’ I said. In some places huge bonfires were burning and by magnifying my optics I could just about make out large groups around the fires. There were large, oddly shaped statuary near some of the people.

  ‘They call themselves the End,’ Tailgunner said. I could hear the contempt in his voice. ‘They’re deserters. Part of some suicide cult. They use their religious beliefs to justify their cowardice. They moved into the Garden when They moved out.’

  I had always been somewhat impressed with conscientious objectors. I was less sure how I felt about deserters. It was too much like running out on your mates when they needed you.

  ‘Who are the guys in the civvy-looking APCs?’ Cat asked.

  There were wheeled armoured vehicles moving around far below us.

  ‘Probably salvage teams and private bailiffs,’ Tailgunner told us. ‘When They came the first time the Garden was overrun. Those that had the chance evacuated. The thing is, They don’t loot – no interest in what we have, just in killing us. In some of the houses there are still valuables left. Not to mention that some of the ostentatious bastards had veins of precious metals running through their homes. So the old owners, if they still have money, send teams in to clear out the squatters and see what’s left. Others are private concerns, looters.’

  Far below us I saw muzzle flashes and the strobe of a laser in the streets. Much of it was already rubble, the abused ghost of a wealthy neighbourhood. The same could be said for almost all of the rest of the cavern. Moa City had been under siege for almost half of the war since Lalande 2 had been invaded fifty-five years ago. The story of the siege was written in craters, scars, gouges, blackened and melted stone almost everywhere you looked. No part of the enormous cavern was more heavily damaged than the city itself.

  One of the greatest engineering feats of the pre-war era, a great deal of survey work, modelling and experimentation had gone into the city’s planning. An enormous stalactite hung from the cavern roof. It was about three miles high and its tip hung about half a mile above the Garden District. Engineers had decided that the stalactite could support habitation, and the city had been cut out of the stone and existing caves with lasers and microbes. It was designed to be a dormitory city for the mineworkers, while those who could afford it lived in the Garden, among the lush vegetation below.

  After They had attacked, the wealthy who survived moved up into the stalactite. Initially thought to be a weak point in the planet’s defences, the giant stalactite proved to be a veritable fortress and much of it was given over to the military. The rest of the people were pushed into already crowded parts of the city and left to fend for themselves, particularly when the mines were abandoned by the human forces.

  The stalactite filled much of the view through the scarred and pockmarked armoured-glass windscreen of the cable car. It looked like there was not a single inch of it left undamaged. Some of the rock was covered in a patchwork of armour plate. The plates looked thick enough to have come from mechs, or cavern-sea battleships; much had rusted due to the environment. Wart-like artillery, anti-aircraft and point-defence batteries grew out of the stone in numerous places.

  ‘Was the siege as bad as they say?’ I asked.

  Both Tailgunner and Merle laughed humourlessly.

  ‘Mother’s first memory was of her mother cooking meat from her father’s corpse for the children to eat. He’d killed himself to provide food,’ Tailgunner said and then turned to fix me with his lenses. ‘Yeah, it was bad.’

  I swallowed and nodded. It sort of put into perspective what we’d been through. We’d grown up in an impoverished war economy on Earth but it was way worse on the sharp end. Just trying to live long enough to be an adult was a challenge and meant you had to do bad things just to survive. And this had been done to them on purpose. I was pleased that Mudge was back with Pagan at the whanau base. I wouldn’t have liked him to remind Tailgunner about the proud cannibal heritage they’d claimed. I was also wondering why my world had suddenly become all about cannibalism. Morag was staring at Tailgunner, appalled. She was still sporting cuts and bruises from the FAV chase. I wasn’t; I’d healed quickly.

  The cable car took us high up towards the cavern roof, towards the thickest part of the stalactite. We passed a broken lighting rig hanging down from the cavern roof. The light was flickering on and off, sending sparks cascading down. Just past the lighting rig we docked with the fortified gatehouse that was the cable car station. We tried not to move too enthusiastically as the mass of exhausted miners plodded off the car. I ignored the sense of vertigo as I stepped from rocking cable car onto stone platform.

  To my heightened senses it seemed like there were lenses everywhere and all of them were pointed at us. Regular soldiers with the bored disinterest that came from garrison duty checked the fake IDs we’d fabricated in Limbo and let us through.

  What got me most about Moa City was how quiet it was for a place so crowded. They may not have been starving, but the inhabitants looked hungry, drawn and exhausted. Hard times were etched into the lines on their faces.

  The streets were smooth tunnels that seemed to always spiral down. The houses were cut out of the stone itself, but everywhere I looked I saw lean-to huts and other shanty-style dwellings. Off the main thoroughfares this part of Moa City was a densely crowded, tangled warren of alleyways. Like the outside of the enormous stalactite, the inside showed extensive battle damage.

  ‘What’s that humming noise?’ Morag asked.

  A pair of armed surveillance drones floated by over the crowds of people.

  ‘The catapult is just above us. This was the scene of some of the worst fighting in the last ten years,’ Tailgunner said once the drones had passed.

  The enormous mass-driver catapult was used to throw heat-shielded ore cargoes into orbit for collection by tugs before being loaded into freighters for export.

  I felt a stab of anger as I walked past a holographic projection of Cronin. I could see his enormous bodyguard Martin Kring just behind him. Kring looked more metal and plastic than man. The headline on the news piece was FREE EARTH GOVERNMENT WARNS OF POSSIBLE FIFTH COLUMN TERRORIST CELLS. I wondered if they meant us specifically. I wondered how many more operators had made it to the ground and were still f
ree.

  A patrol went by in a six-wheeled light combat vehicle. They were more alert than the guards in the cable car station as they scanned the crowd. I felt their eyes on us but they showed no sign of suspicion or recognition as we moved away from the main thoroughfare and deeper into the warren of alleyways.

  ‘This is the Rookery,’ Tailgunner said. ‘I grew up here.’

  I was worried that despite his disguise he’d be recognised, but he kept his head down and avoided eye contact. Cat, Merle, Morag and I got stared at a lot. We were obvious outsiders. The deeper we went into the Rookery, however, the less surveillance lenses and remotes we saw.

  When I had to run the gauntlet of a line of begging vets who’d had their implants removed, I almost felt at home. Everything was so cramped. Sometimes it felt like I was walking through people’s homes. We got more hard stares from men and women carrying weapons and wearing gang colours. They were mostly older vets. Younger gang members would be serving in the military. I guessed something about the way we carried ourselves made them leave us alone.

  ‘Do you know anything about this Puppet Show?’ I asked Merle.

  We’d reached the external wall of the stalactite and were working our way up on narrow paths cut out of the stone.

  ‘I’ve had a few dealings with them. They’re different. Seem to be reasonably trustworthy in a scary, don’t-fuck-with-us kind of way,’ he said.

  I was trying to hide that I was gasping for breath. Merle could have been out for a stroll despite having spent the last six months in a hole.

  Tailgunner disappeared into a gap in the rock just above us. Morag followed and then I reached it. I had to crawl through into a small cave. The cave mouth looked out over the cavern, giving us a view of the cable car run we’d come in on. We were above the lighting rigs now and I could see clusters of smaller stalactites, many of them with windows and entrances. Below us on the lighting rigs I could see tents and houses made of packing crates and other scavenged materials. Connecting them all was a web of strong-looking metal cable.