Demons were thrown into the air as the new army joined the fight and nasty tactics were used. Groups of hackers who knew each other ganged up on targets, took one down and moved to another. The vagabond army may not have had the training, discipline or technology of the attacking hackers, but they had the numbers and they’d seen huge parts of the Earth destroyed in the bombardment. They had anger on their side. Anger is always a good motivator.
Pagan sent us feed from the surface of the black glass plain. An angel towered over the vagabond hackers and the remnants of our fleet’s military hackers and signal personnel. It was sweeping multiple hackers aside with every stroke of its spear of white fire, leaving them corpses with smoking plugs back wherever they were tranced in. I saw Papa Neon charge the angel, throwing every dirty little hex program he had at it. He distracted it, parried a spear blow with his shining staff, slid under the angel’s guard and tore a lump out of its flesh. Papa Neon shot into the air above the angel and bit into it. The angel lurched like a puppet. Its own bones pierced its skin. The white flames went out of its eyes.
Elsewhere the fight wasn’t going as well. Few of the hackers were a match for the angels. Columns of black fire joined the plain of glass to the four black suns, burning lines of icons regardless of whose side they were on. Above the plain the sea of fire began to roil and surge angrily.
The fighters from the Barbarossa came into view on heavy burn. One of them came apart and started tumbling as a thick red beam of laser light superheated its hull until it exploded.
The fighters fired their nose railguns in a constant stream of tracers all around us and launched all their missiles as one, as close as they could to the screening drones.
The screen of drones fired back. Space was filled with a grid of red laser light. Missiles burst into multiple submunitions. Warheads exploded in space; some of them even reached their targets. In front of us drones exploded in rapid succession. Now cross hairs appeared on our IVDs as we targeted the survivors.
There were explosions on the hull of the ship as gristle-like point-defence systems were destroyed.
I fell up towards the Bush, firing short bursts from the Retributors at the surviving drones in my path. Some of the drones were burning as plasma fire ate through them. Black light from return fire scored the Hellion’s armour. I launched one of the missiles off my back at a surviving black beam point-defence system. The missile was destroyed before it got close, but one of Morag’s missiles hit the growth-like system.
None of the fighters made it. They were torn apart by the remotes before their first missiles hit.
We were now taking light fire as we plummeted up towards the Bush’s hull. Through the windows on my IVD I could see Mudge and Pagan firing their Retributors at its hull. I magnified the Hellion’s optics and saw Walker-like biomechanical constructs growing out of the ship’s flesh. I joined the firing. Then I realised I was coming in too fast. I tried a back burn on my flight fin. It slowed me but I hit the hull hard. The impact was hard enough to make me spit blood over the plastic visor of my helmet. I bounced. The Retributor flew out of my hands but it was still connected to the ammo pack on the Hellion’s back by its chain feed.
With the help of the suit’s systems I managed to regain control and make it back to the hull. The six of us grouped together in a rough circle, everyone facing out.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Merle said. ‘The architecture’s all off. The plans we downloaded are meaningless. I didn’t even see an airlock on the way in.’ It was as close to panic as I’d ever heard from Merle. It wasn’t very close but he was less than happy.
‘Plan B?’ Mudge asked.
‘You want to do it?’ I asked as I fired off a burst at something that looked like it was growing out of the hull.
‘I think it’ll have more impact coming from you,’ he said.
‘What’s plan B?’ Pagan asked suspiciously.
‘Wild Boys to Rolleston, over,’ I said over an open comms link.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ a furious Morag demanded. Merle turned to level his Hellion’s light plasma cannon at me.
‘What is it, Jakob? I’m a little busy right now,’ Rolleston asked impatiently. His voice sounded the same but now hatred outweighed fear when I heard it. The others went quiet.
‘Don’t be a cunt. Let us in and let’s get this over and done with.’
There was a long silence. Or at least there would have been if Morag, Pagan and Merle hadn’t started screaming threats and demands for explanations at me again.
‘Okay, Jakob,’ Rolleston finally said.
25
The USSS George Bush Junior
A lot of our plan was based around Rolleston’s arrogance. On the surface this might seem risky but you’ve got to think that if a guy wants to be a god then there’s going to be a degree of arrogance involved.
It looked less like an airlock and more like a blister as it grew out of the hull and enveloped the Hellions, blocking out the dangerous light show below us.
On the other side they were waiting. The Black Squadron troopers weren’t soldiers any more; they were just weapons. They were bent over, covered in thick, overlapping chitinous plates. Reinforced bone pierced their armoured skins; one of their arms was a long sharp curved blade of blackened bone and the other was some kind of ranged weapon. It was their mouths that got me though. They were locked open in a fixed silent scream. You could see the pain etched across their still-human faces. You could read the desperation in their eyes. They were all linked to Rolleston through Demiurge. I think he liked to feel their pain. I think he fed on it. Among the transformed soldiers were twisted and deformed versions of the Berserks, like we’d seen in the Citadel, and with them similarly twisted versions of Their Walkers.
A missile flew from the back tubes of each of the Hellions. Unlike Them, these constructs and mutations screamed when plasma burned flesh and bone. The plasma fire formed a rough circle, a bit of breathing room.
Marching forward firing railguns and plasma cannons at anything that moved, just another target-rich environment. The railguns turned whatever they hit into moist fragments. The plasma cannons left little in their wake but burning puddles of flesh and bone. Rannu’s Hellion and mine took the lead. A corridor was chosen at random. Any movement was met with overwhelming fire. They tried growing through the roof, through the walls, through the floor, but that took them too long. The whole ship was flesh now, writhing all around us.
When their numbers became too much, when they were about to overwhelm us, then missiles were used just to clear a little space. Plasma flame cauterised the flesh of the ship. Each time we could feel the ship react a little beneath us. It was in pain from the fire. The Hellion’s armour started to run as they marched through liquid fire. We couldn’t afford to hang around until the plasma flames burned themselves out.
Targets everywhere. The whole ship seething but the Hellions held their own. Anything that got close was ripped apart by their back tentacles. The armoured suits were soon covered in gore.
Overwhelming firepower or not, there was a limit to our ammunition, and the whole ship was trying to kill us.
Then he came. He didn’t look like the calm and contained professional bastard I’d known from Sirius. He looked like fury. The madness in his mind hadn’t so much leaked as flooded out. He was naked and had transformed himself to look like an ancient Greek statue, like the type Mudge had shown me in a museum in London. As railguns and plasma cannons were pointed towards him, the whole front of his body blackened into what looked like living metal. Surely he couldn’t withstand concentrated plasma cannon fire?
Repeated plasma fire wreathed him in a corona of white flames. The railgun fire hammered into him, blowing chunks out of his flesh, which regrew almost immediately.
It was over quickly. He reached Rannu’s Hellion first and just reached out a burning hand, snapped his plasma cannon and threw the exo-armour into the wall. Root-like tendrils of biomechanica
l flesh grew around Rannu’s Hellion holding it still. Rolleston turned to my Hellion all but ignoring the constant fire from the railguns. He reached up and his hands grew into claws. He dug into the front of the armour and tore it open.
It was empty. There was a limit to our stupidity – I hoped. Rolleston started to sink into the floor. We triggered the charges in the armour. The feed from the Hellions went down.
It would be nice to think that the charges had taken care of Rolleston, but I just knew we weren’t that lucky. Besides, by that point we were inside. We heard his screams of rage echo through the vein-like corridors.
A few minutes ago
‘Shit,’ I said. There was a conspiracy to force me to relive two of my most unpleasant experiences simultaneously. The technology-transformed-into-flesh of the Bush was forcing us to rethink our entry strategy. Maybe strategy’s a strong word. We had some contingencies but once again we were making this up as we went along.
Only by reconfiguring the flesh insides of the Hellions had we managed to fit the spacesuits inside the exo-armour. Even then it had severely hindered movement and we’d had to use very lightweight suits. They had no armour and I was freezing. God was controlling the Hellions. We had successfully made the first fully functioning robots. God-driven robot devils. They were the diversion but we still had to get in ourselves.
All around us the battle still raged but we were so small compared to it all. We were less than bacteria in the big scheme of things.
I felt Pagan push a jack into one of the plugs in the back of my spacesuit, which in turn fed into one of my plugs.
‘You ready?’ he asked brusquely.
‘No,’ I said. I was shit-scared and hated this plan.
I barely had time to close my eyes and exhale all the air out of my lungs. The tendrils grew through the flesh of my face and cracked the thin plastic visor of the shit spacesuit. Cold. Then burning inside as my blood boiled. I felt my skin stretch and distend as my body swelled. It was agony. The tendrils reached down and touched the skin of the Bush and connected me to something awful. I opened my mouth to scream, except now I had no mouth. We were swallowed.
Flesh, awful and surrounding me. My mind touching it, assaulted, bombarded with information and images either too complex or horrific to process. It passes in a moment. It feels longer.
We fall through the ceiling. I hit the floor with blood running out of my ears. My joints are agony. Frost coats my nostrils. My skin is red from burst blood vessels and despite my internal air supply I’m panting for breath as the tendrils recede back into my flesh and I have a mouth again.
When something approaching conscious thought returns, when the theatre of atrocity that is the images downloaded into my skull stops dancing in front of my eyes, when the pain becomes manageable with the help of a lot of painkillers dumped into my blood, I use what Demiurge taught me when he possessed me. I get the bio-nanites that swarm through my body to heal the damage caused by hypoxia and ebullism. It can’t stop me shaking from the cold. Maybe it’s not just the cold.
Pagan unplugs himself from me and looks down at me with contempt. I resist the urge to shoot him. Then I catch a glimpse of Morag. She’s not quite quick enough to mask the look of concern. The others are down on one knee, weapons at the ready watching all around us.
Warm air runs through the corridor of biomechanical flesh we find ourselves in. It’s like something huge breathing on you. We take turns stripping off the shitty spacesuits while the others guard. We’ve got on inertial armour suits, the only armour we could fit under the spacesuits.
‘Well?’ I asked Pagan as we change.
‘I ran the spoof program, snuck it in using the cloak so it would be undetected. It’s adapted from one I’d use on normal tech but I’m unsure of the interface with the biotech,’ he said coldly.
‘Very clever, Pagan. What does that mean?’ I demanded.
He stopped and looked at me.
‘Either we’ll be hidden from whatever detection systems they’re using or we won’t. Shame we couldn’t get Morag to do it.’ In other words, either we’d be hidden from Demiurge and therefore Rolleston or he’d have us torn apart. We needed Rolleston to turn up, just not yet.
‘Drop the attitude,’ Merle said quietly to Pagan.
Pagan glared at him for a moment and then nodded. He was just frightened. Well that and he hated me, which was reasonable. I did after all kill him.
We pulled the reactive camouflage gillie suits on over our inertial armour and moved out.
We’d downloaded the plans for most of the flag-capable ships in the colonial fleet. We’d been pretty sure that Rolleston would choose the Bush because it was the best but it paid to have contingencies. The plans we had for the Bush were very different to the ship/organism we were now presented with, but Pagan quickly adapted an intelligent navigation program he’d used as a combat air controller. It was mapping the terrain and trying to reconcile it with the plans we had.
We were moving quickly through the corridors, hiding if we saw movement and watching the last moments of the Hellions on our IVDs. We could hear the firefight in the distance. We watched Rolleston walk through some of the best firepower that modern weaponry could provide. The footage was not doing much for morale.
Like the boardroom in the Citadel, the ship was diseased human technology, except in the case of the Bush it was total. We didn’t see much in the way of movement initially and quickly found out why. The humans needed to run the ship had become components, stripped of unnecessary parts, formed into more practical, useful shapes – if you were a psycho – and melded into the biomechanics of the craft. Morag had to stop to throw up. I couldn’t blame her. I wished I still had that reaction to atrocity. That said, it was still seriously fucking with my head.
The feed from the Hellions went down. Then we heard the screaming. It seemed to echo through all the corridors. It was rage. It was unmistakably Rolleston. As much as I wanted to think otherwise, there was no way we could have killed him. The floor didn’t so much shake as quiver beneath us.
We were heading deeper into the ship. We needed to find the isolated Demiurge system. We had hoped for a more normal layout but C&C was still our best hope. However, Rolleston must know that we were inside and Demiurge was compromised. Now he would start to hunt us. The moment we were found we would be back to fighting the whole ship, except this time without the help of sophisticated exo-armour.
Outside, Rolleston’s fleet had consolidated. Whoever was commanding the colonial fleets knew what they were doing. With most of Earth’s orbital defences down, its fleet stood little chance. Rolleston’s fleet was advancing, concentrating fire on one big ship until it was cracked open and then moving to another. Their fighters and incredibly fast and manoeuvrable frigates were mopping up the smaller vessels. Already Earth ships were fleeing. The Thunderchilde was still there, however. It didn’t look so clean and new; it was a scarred and burned behemoth taking fire all over its armoured hull. All of the Thunderchilde’s own weapon systems were constantly lit up. A lot of its fire was aimed at the Bush. We weren’t even feeling the impacts.
On the net the battle was going a little better. Through sheer force of numbers the vagabond army of Earth hackers armed with godsware had taken out most of the enemy’s rank and file hackers and some of the angels. However, the four black suns of Demiurge were forcing them back with columns of black fire that turned anything they hit into ribbons of simulated black skin floating in the virtual air.
More than three quarters of the red sun was black now as the viral eclipse continued trying to eat God. I didn’t even notice God screaming any more. It was ambient noise.
We ducked into side corridors and hid behind rib-like supports when we detected movement ahead. We had motion sensors and tiny rotor remotes, also with motion sensors, feeding information to our IVDs, but in an environment like this their range was severely limited. The reactive camouflage helped, as did the heat- and EM-masking properties
of the inertial armour suits.
That he couldn’t find us must have been making Rolleston furious. I wondered if he was worried now that he knew Demiurge was compromised. Though he must have had an idea when he saw us waiting for him when he turned up in-system.
We were deep inside the huge ship now. The absence of doors had made this possible. I don’t suppose they mattered so much when you controlled everything on board and you could grow a new wall if you needed to shut areas off. I still sweated. A lot. It was reassuringly human after I’d had the alien part of my flesh driven home again.
I leaned against a corridor wall hoping the reactive camouflage was sufficient cover as a patrol passed. I was desperate for a fag and wished that I’d made Mudge give me one back on the Thunderchilde. The patrol consisted of one of the weaponised Black Squadron members, four mutated Berserk-like bioborgs and something that looked like a cross between one of the Berserks and a praying mantis. It had downward-pointing, sword-like bones for forearms. I’d slowed down my breathing, supplementing it with air from my internal tanks.
The Black Squadron guy stopped. He sniffed the air. You have to be kidding. He turned to look at the wall. Rannu was little more than a pixelated ghost as his reactive camouflage tried to keep up. He looped his new monofilament garrotte around the guy’s neck and pulled it tight. His head popped off.
I was behind one of the Berserks. I pulled its head back with the metal of my right hand. Four blades extended from just behind my knuckles on my left hand and I punched them repeatedly and quickly into the back of its skull. It nearly knocked me over as it fell to the ground.
War in Heaven Page 63
