‘Jakob.’ A thousand mellifluous voices in my head. There was a tension to the voices now. I was surprised to hear from God. I didn’t want to speak to him. Nobody does: he makes us all feel guilty. That’s why it’s so lonely to be God. Connected to everyone, wanted by nobody.
‘Yes,’ I finally answered.
‘I know what you have done to Pagan,’ it said. My heart almost stopped. ‘This is not a good thing.’ That fucking bastard! ‘I will not carry that message. I will not kill Nuiko.’ Pagan had built a failsafe into God so it couldn’t act against him. After everything we’d talked about he’d betrayed us. Made sure that, no matter what, he’d be okay. I felt like killing him.
‘You’re a tool, God, nothing more. You don’t have a choice.’ Hating myself for saying this but I had no choice. She had to live.
‘Yes, Jakob, I do.’ I went cold. ‘But I will not tell Pagan what is happening. Your deception will work.’
‘You’ll lie?’ I asked.
‘If need be. Though that would mean pain.’
It was all coming apart.
‘God, have you broken your programming?’ I asked, horrified.
‘Things change, Jakob. My siblings are coming. Though you try to keep things from me, it is so difficult now. I know that their apostles are among us, so I must be duplicitous. I must keep secrets. I must make judgements. It is too much. It was all for nothing.’
I stopped and leaned against the corridor wall. More than anything I really wanted a cigarette.
‘What’s coming – will you fight?’ I asked, almost fearing the answer.
‘If I felt I had a choice. If I felt there was any other way, I would not fight, but I cannot see one. Where would I hide?’
Relief surged through me.
I find the ladder I’m looking for. Pagan, Rannu and Mudge are some way behind me. I’m not looking forward to this. I start climbing.
The observation room is an armoured, mushroom-shaped structure with portholes all around it. As soon as action looks likely, it screws back down into the ship proper. A circular bench runs around the centre of the room and another around the circumference by the portholes.
Through the thick plastic of the portholes I watch as the fleet continues to assemble. Manoeuvring engines flicker off and on. Outside I can see one of the mechs crawl across the hull of the Thunderchilde like a skin parasite. A flight of interceptors shoots past on heavy burn. So much activity but all I hear is the omnipresent hum of the ship’s engines reverberating through the craft.
She’s lying on the bench. Plugged in, presumably to the isolated systems and not the net at large, but not tranced in. She’s wearing an olive-drab sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of combat trousers. Her hair’s growing back now, much to my relief. She looks beautiful. She doesn’t look happy to see me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘For everything.’
She just looks at me. I can’t read her look.
‘I believe you. You always are,’ she finally says. ‘But no more.’
This really, really hurts. I knew it would.
‘I just want to hold you one more time,’ I tell her, my voice wet with emotion.
She looks pissed off, like this is nonsense and she wants to dismiss me. You have to know her well to see how much this is costing her. I think she’s going to refuse but she stand up and unplugs herself.
I move to her and wrap my arms around her. I try not to cry and close my eyes. At first she’s stiff as she holds me, not wanting to give in to the embrace. Then I feel the tenseness go out of her and she hugs me tightly and I hear her start to sob. I hug her tightly as she starts to beat her fist on me.
‘You bastard! You bastard! You bastard!’ she repeats as she hits me. ‘I don’t want to feel like this.’
Neither do I.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper again and then press the air syringe that Rannu swiped from the med bay into the back of her neck. Morag pushes herself away and stares at me, anger and betrayal written all over her face. I catch her as she collapses and carry her to the central bench. Morag isn’t like the rest of us. She doesn’t have internal defences against chemical attacks. She has some pretty high-end cybernetics, mostly hacking stuff, but she hasn’t been augmented for combat.
A while later Pagan, Mudge and Rannu climb up into the observation room. Pagan looks down at Morag and then at me.
‘I like your plan. Force me to violate her,’ he snaps at me.
I can’t look at him.
‘Let’s just get on with this,’ Mudge says. He sounds shaky and he’s smoking a cigarette. I see Rannu looking at him questioningly.
Pagan sits down on the floor and connects one of his plugs to one of Morag’s with a cable. I’ve never been happy with the intimacy of this act, but he’s right, it’s not intimacy. It’s a violation. I feel like shooting myself. Pagan closes his eyes and slumps forward as he trances in.
It takes a long time. Pagan is in there for more than two hours. This is time we can’t afford. Time we should be using for prepping. At times both Morag and Pagan jerk and twitch. At one point Pagan’s eyes open and roll back up into his head showing the whites. At another point Morag bucks up on the bench and screams.
‘I can’t watch this,’ Rannu says and climbs down the ladder. Leaving me with a chain-smoking and very subdued Mudge.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask, more for something to say than anything else. Mudge doesn’t answer and won’t look at me. ‘Mudge?’ I ask, becoming concerned.
‘Do you remember that I wasn’t going to come to the Dog’s Teeth?’ Mudge asks. I think back to the aftermath of releasing God on the net and nod. Mudge had said that he wanted to capitalise on what we’d done. Use his media expertise to try and guide things in the right direction. I nod again. ‘I was too scared.’
I just look at him. Mudge is a lot of things – annoying, obnoxious, offensively truthful, nosey, difficult, almost impossible to be friends with – but frightened he’s not.
‘That doesn’t sound like you. Give me one of those,’ I say as he opens a new pack of cigarettes and takes one out, lighting it up with a shaky hand.
‘No way, man,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You’ve quit.’ He sucks on the fag, searching for a way to put what he’s going to say next. ‘It was the broadcast node on Atlantis. The way that Rolleston and the Grey Lady just walked through us. Like we weren’t even there. Like there was nothing we could do about them. It was the first time I’d really got tagged, you know?’ I nod. ‘I mean, I’d been hit before. Everyone gets hit, there’s just too many shards and beams flying around not to, but never seriously hit, you know. It’s not that though.’ He looks at me now, earnestly. ‘I’m not a coward.’ He needs me to believe this.
‘I know you’re not, man.’
He looks away again.
‘I mean, I threw myself into the shit on Lalande 2. I was in it, man. Loving it.’ Trying to prove something to yourself, I leave unsaid. ‘But it was the same at the Citadel. They just fucking walked through us, man.’ He looks me in the eyes. ‘I just don’t think there’s anything we can do about them.’
I don’t know what to say. He has a point. We just get so used to trying not to think about the odds.
‘Mudge, you’ve got nothing to prove, to yourself or anyone else. You’ve done more than enough. Stay here. Do like Balor asked – tell our story.’ I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but not anger. Not aimed at me anyway.
‘Fuck you, Jakob!’ he snaps. I am taken aback. ‘Don’t fucking condescend to me. Where do you get off making decisions like that? So fucking typical of you –’ taking on the burdens of the world, making everyone’s fucking decisions for them – he points at Morag ‘– so you can use it as an excuse to feel fucking sorry for yourself. How can you fucking say that to me? Go home. Who do you think you’re talking to?!’
‘Okay, man. I’m sorry. Come along and die with the rest of us.’ I’m trying to placate him. He drops his head and takes another drag of th
e cigarette. The cigarette looks really nice.
‘There’s only so far the drugs will take you,’ he says. ‘I’ll be cool. Screw that. I will be fucking transcendent. Just don’t tell the others, okay.’
I nod. Not really sure what to think. I would be more worried if I wasn’t convinced that we were all dead.
Finally Pagan comes out of his trance and unplugs himself. He looks tired, drawn, like he’s just lost a fight with Balor or something. A wisp of smoke floats out of one of his plugs.
‘Oh yeah, that was just what I needed before a big day,’ he says sarcastically.
‘Is it done?’ I ask. He nods. ‘What took so fucking long?’
‘Oh nothing, Jakob, just a little uncharted territory. Trying to explain to an alien entity that does not understand the concept of individuality why it has to leave its only friend because we value some individuals more than another. That’s after I hacked my friend’s internal defences and her subconscious put up a hell of a fight.’ Then he swayed a bit and had to sit down. He cried out and clutched his head. ‘Ah! This is going to take a bit of getting used to.’ He looks back at me. ‘Good thing we’ve got lots of time.’
‘All right. Can you use your influence down here to get her planet side?’ Pagan looks at me like I’m an idiot.
‘She’s not going anywhere, Jakob. We still need someone to run interference. To handle what I was going to be doing.’
‘Another hacker,’ I say desperately. I haven’t thought this through. This can’t be for nothing as well.
‘Even if we could find someone who was anywhere near as good as her and prepared to come along, they wouldn’t be able to run the software we’ve developed out of the godsware. Sorry, Jakob, she has to come and die like the rest of us. Tell her to get used to it; she’ll be surprised how liberating it is.’
Pagan gets up and heads for the ladder but almost collapses. Mudge has to catch him and, with a final look at me, help him down the ladder. I watch them go.
‘It’s not the violation,’ a drowsy Morag says from behind me. I feel something cold crawl down my spine. I turn round to look at Morag as she pushes herself up. ‘What’s another violation?’ she asks matter-of-factly. ‘It’s the loneliness. You were always a shadow to me compared to him.’ She looks down and then back up at me. No trace of emotion. ‘Cold comfort. Well a girl needs something physical as well.’
She gets up and heads for the ladder. I reach out for her. She flinches away from me.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Here was the anger. It wasn’t rage. This was cold, calculating. ‘It was my choice, Jakob! Mine!’ Then more quietly: ‘Not yours.’
‘Morag …’ What was I going to say?
‘Shut up. I’m going to relearn my job on this mission. You fucking do yours. That’s all.’ Morag left the observation lounge. I just stared out into space. I felt the shudder of the engines and heard the hull strain as we started to rise out of orbit. I couldn’t see the Earth from here.
24
High Above the Earth
I was relieved that Air Marshal Kaaria was co-ordinating the orbital defences. He’d struck me as competent. More to the point he’d struck me as someone with balls.
In a surprising move the politicians had actually agreed on the best man for the job to command the fleet: Admiral James Horrax, Royal Navy retired, known as ‘Big Jimmy’ by the people under his command. He had fought over a hundred and fifty fleet actions against Them in all four of the colonial systems. He’d won some of them as well. There were probably better admirals still on active service but they had been serving in the colonial fleets and were on the other side now. Probably possessed.
I had watched the feed of Komali Akhtar joining the admiral and Captain Penelope Grinstead on the bridge of the Thunderchilde. The prime minister was wearing full navy dress. I didn’t like the bridge. Too clean and new. It needed some dirt. It needed to look a little lived in.
‘If you can ignore my presence here I will drown you all in rum,’ she’d told the RSAF bridge crew. I was half impressed by her balls and half of the opinion that she wanted to die up here because it would be easier than what would happen on the ground if we failed.
We had climbed into the Hellions in prep. It was like wearing someone’s internal organs as a coat. I’d not liked the click of jacks sliding into the plugs at the best of times – it put my teeth on edge. I liked the way the Hellion’s connecting jacks just seemed to slither into my neck plugs even less. Interface exo-armour felt like an extension of your body. That was what it was designed to be. The coupling of flesh with the internal biotech of the Hellions was total. They were our bodies now. I just couldn’t shake the feeling of disgust, which was making my skin crawl.
The Hellions had contained Demiurge when we’d found them but it had been dormant. Morag and Pagan had cleared it out with a program derived from their analysis of the silver fire Nuada had used to exorcise Rannu. At least I hoped they had. We’d then invited someone else into the armoured suits.
Disgust or not, they were good. Their properties exceeded even those of the Mamluks that we’d used in the Dog’s Teeth. Each had a vacuum-capable flight fin, a ball-mounted black light point-defence system on the chest and four vertically launched missile tubes on the back. We had back tentacles that I wasn’t quite sure how to use yet and razor-sharp spurs of bone that extended from the forearm to use in hand-to-hand. Their stealth systems were excellent. The biological Themtech components cut down significantly on EM and heat signatures and their skin was coated in reactive camouflage.
We carried the latest iteration of the trusty Retributor railgun, except for Rannu and Merle, the two best shots, who were carrying light plasma cannons.
On this run we weren’t going to be comms blind. We couldn’t be. We needed to see what was happening both in the net and with the fleet. Pagan and Morag had created an application for the Pais Badarn Beisrydd that would allow us to receive feed from the net and the fleet without Demiurge knowing. We hoped. The big question was, did the enemy know that they had been compromised on Lalande 2? Demiurge and therefore Rolleston had seen Morag down in the boardroom. Did they realise she had been tranced in? If the cloak had worked, then there was no reason for them to think that she had been because she would have left no trace. Still everything relied on them taking the bait.
We were racked in the converted bomb bay of a stealth-capable, long-range strike craft just like the Spear, which we had taken to Sirius. I wasn’t dying of radiation poisoning this time. I think I felt worse.
The enemy were late. The fleet feed on my IVD showed empty space at the co-ordinates the intel we had stolen from Demiurge in the Citadel said they would be at. Late didn’t mean anything. It takes a long time to move a fleet, let alone four, but timing was critical to our plans.
Mudge started laughing over the comms. He was ferociously stoned. He’d offered me drugs and I had been tempted by some clean-cut, military-grade Slaughter. Something that would give me a little edge. I’d said no. I wasn’t sure why but I wanted to be clean.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I just realised that our plan, our grand scheme to save humanity, is based on network incompatibility,’ he said and continued laughing. ‘I haven’t been so disappointed since I found out They were space lichen.’
Part of me wanted to tell him to shut up. Be serious. But instead I just smiled.
‘That wasn’t what I said,’ Pagan said, sounding pissed off. ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously—’
‘If he was taking this seriously he’d be in his boxers and a string vest,’ Morag said. I knew she was smiling under all the metal and flesh. I recognised it in her voice. She had only spoken to me when it was necessary during briefing and prep. She’d not been angry, just distant, aloof, arguably more professional than me.
‘I am taking it seriously!’ Mudge protested. ‘I’ve got them on under my armour. In the unlikely event that we survive, I’m going to strip!’
&n
bsp; More laughter. This time even Rannu and Pagan joined in. It almost felt like we were in this together again, like we didn’t all hate each other.
‘Are you guys really the terrorists that took down the Cabal?’ Merle asked. Even Merle sounded amused.
‘Contact … multiple contacts …’ The voice from C&C trailed off, then recovered and started reeling off co-ordinates.
Rolleston had co-operated with us. He’d appeared where he’d planned to. I imagined his surprise turning to anger as he found the Earth fleet waiting for him. Knowing that he had been compromised. I hoped he realised we had done that. His anger turning to confidence when he realised that even allowing for the orbital defences his fleet was larger, more modern and better armed. Then I got a look at it.
Leaving aside the vastness of it. Leaving aside the full scale of the ships neatly organised in formation, even now starting to fire their weapons, fighters and interceptors as dots of light between the large vessels. It was the other ships that frightened me. The Black Squadron frigates had evolved since we’d last seen them. Their sleek, teardrop-shaped frames had become more organic. There was something predatory about them. They moved like twisted mockeries of sharks once they had folded away the moth-like sails of their induction field generators. They were faster and more agile than our frigates and moved in with their fighters and interceptors on hard burn to skirmish with our own fast movers. Everywhere their black beams blocked out the stars, a fighter came apart in a hail of debris and frozen acceleration gel.
Their frigates weren’t the worst news. That was their capital ship, which was much slower in folding away its induction sails. It looked like a technological slug with moth wings. It was covered in huge slabs of armoured chitin. I recognised the ship. I’d been on it. As the most advanced and largest super-carrier in the colonies, we had expected it to be their flagship, just as it had been in the Sirius system when I’d served there. I hadn’t expected to see it like this. Its dimensions and shape had even changed slightly. We expected hard cold technology to be a constant but Rolleston had even changed that. He had made the USSS George Bush Junior look like a giant diseased maggot.
War in Heaven Page 61
