Another ghost and the praying mantis thing had a long blade sticking out of its skull. Merle had jumped up and stabbed it through the top of its head. The crack of armoured chitin breaking under the bowie knife-like point of the machete was fiercely audible. The thing shook for a moment and then dropped to the ground.
The others were having less luck. They were all carrying knives that weren’t really up to dealing with things like this in hand-to-hand. Of the three of them only Pagan really had the training for this sort of fight. That left them with their handguns and the 10mm rounds were no match for the chitinous armour.
Superheated air exploded as one of the remaining mutated Berserks fired its black light projector from its spiked and twisted weapons gauntlet. I heard Morag cry out and felt a moment of panic. I kicked out at the Berserk’s knee joint. I heard a satisfying crack and the thing lurched down on one knee and I drove the four knuckle blades on my right hand into its face, warping its horrible facial features further. I twisted the blades and then pulled them out. Letting it slump to the ground.
There was a burst of laser fire and one of the two remaining Berserks hit the ground, its head transformed into dirty black steam. A longer burst of gauss-boosted fire from Mudge’s converted AK-47. The final Berserk shook with every hit as it staggered back and then hit the ground.
We were now well and truly compromised.
Red steam floated into the air through Morag’s reactive camouflage.
‘You okay?’ I sub-vocalised over the tac net.
‘Fine. We need to move,’ she snapped.
We ran forward, stealth abandoned in favour of speed. Weapons sweeping left, right, up and down as we went. Anything moving got shot. We didn’t stay to see whether or not our fire was successful.
Where C&C should have been we found a solid wall of what we thought was new growth. We were taking shard and black beam hits on our backs. My shoulder laser was out searching for targets. Occasionally its red beam would stab out but mostly they were staying hidden.
We took cover behind the rib supports in the corridor and laid down suppressing fire. It was a waiting game now. Waiting for Rolleston to turn up and kill us, or more likely turn up, hurt us, torture us for a long time and then possess us so we could become part of his brave new world. I was firing the SAW and the shoulder laser. The corridor shuddered as white plasma fire ate away part of it. Morag caught the Black Squadron guy who’d fired with a three-beam burst from her laser carbine. Part of his superheated flesh was blown off but he ducked back around a corner leaving black steam hanging in the air behind him.
‘Jakob!’ Pagan snapped at me. He was a series of fractal images as his malfunctioning reactive camouflage tried to make him blend. Angrily he pulled the gillie suit off. He was hunkered down over by the new-growth wall gesturing at me to join him. I knew what he wanted.
‘I’m not a fucking jack!’ I snapped. It was just fear and selfishness.
‘Do it!’ Morag demanded.
Mudge glanced over at me and then returned to firing.
I fired a long burst up the corridor as I moved sideways towards Pagan. The return fire intensified and a beam and two shards tagged me. Part of my inertial armour was a blackened and smoking mess and the shards spun me around. I landed by Pagan’s feet. He just pushed a jack into one of my plugs. I felt the flesh on my face become something else. A foreign body moved inside me. The flailing tendrils of transformed flesh grew out of my face. I would never get use to this. It still horrified me. I had to fight against the panic. I wanted to throw myself away from them but of course they were part of me.
I touched the flesh of the new-growth wall. I felt the tendrils burrow into the warm moist membrane, like maggots through dead flesh. I felt something monstrous notice me and breathe my name. I heard it inside my skull.
The jack came out of the plug in my neck and I pushed myself back from the wall as the tendrils started to grow back into my flesh. The membrane covering the entrance started to dissipate like it was being eaten by invisible parasites. I was vaguely aware of our return fire intensifying as I crawled into the room.
Two grenades exploded behind me as the others bought themselves time and backed into the room. I was trying to get up, trying to deal with the body shock, when Pagan grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me towards a biomechanical, honeycomb-like growth. I’d seen it before. It was the Themtech-derived memory structure.
‘Move!’ Pagan snapped again. He was not being gentle. I was too disoriented to fight him off. I noticed that one of the walls in the room was transparent and supported by a biomechanical skeletal structure. Children floated in liquid behind the wall.
‘What …?’ I managed.
‘They’re children,’ I heard Morag say in horror.
The jack slid into my plug and again my flesh was transformed. It grew out to mate with the honeycomb.
‘Just for a moment,’ Pagan said. I touched the honeycomb. It was like the skin of a blister. Beneath it I felt Demiurge raging, trying to break through and touch me, consume me again. There was black fire and hatred beneath the skin. Then free again.
‘I will fucking kill you if you do that again!’ I screamed at Pagan when my face had the rudiments of a mouth again.
Pagan was standing over me looking cold and angry. Mudge, Merle and Rannu were at the new door I’d made, firing into the corridor.
‘You see that, what you felt? That’s where we’re going,’ Pagan told me. I stared at him. Knowing what they had to do and catching a glimpse of it were two different things.
‘You’ll both die,’ I said. I wasn’t thinking straight – we were all going to die – but they were going to be consumed by hate. They didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t understand that I knew what it was like to drown in the filth of Demiurge, of Rolleston’s mind. What had we been thinking? We should have run. Given him the planet.
I looked over at Morag, who was staring up at the wall-sized fish tank of children. They had no eyes, mouths or nostrils. They were hooked up to IVs and catheters and had wires coming from the plugs in the backs of their necks. Some of them were obviously dead. I guessed from biofeedback.
I tried to take in the room around me. It was an enormous space, like a cathedral made of biomechanical flesh. The domed roof was transparent and looked out into space. It was illuminated by the constant strobing flashes of the ongoing battle outside.
‘That’s the angels,’ Pagan said distractedly. He was studying the two ports he’d had me make in the skin of the honeycombed biological memory structure. He didn’t look happy. I could understand why. They looked more like an orifice than any ports I’d ever seen.
‘Jakob!’ The voice echoed down the corridor. I was only able to pick it up over the gunfire because of the quality of my audio filters. I went cold. Even after all this she still frightened me.
Morag gave me a look I couldn’t read. She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. Pagan was staring at me, grinning. The grin was cold and completely humourless; it looked like a rictus. I realised how gaunt he had become. He was just taut skin stretched across a skeleton. Both of them sat down and then slumped forward as they tranced into hell. They had to. We had no choice. They had to go after Demiurge in here, protected from God in an isolated system. For any of this to work, Rolleston had to be completely shut off from Demiurge.
The gunfire had stopped. I glanced over at the doorway. Rannu and Mudge were on either side of it. Merle had his plasma rifle at his shoulder and was checking all around the cathedral-sized room.
‘Jakob!’ the Grey Lady shouted again.
‘What?’ I found myself asking almost involuntarily.
‘We need you to surrender,’ she said.
Mudge and Rannu took turns to look over at me. Rannu had a raised eyebrow and Mudge was actually smiling.
‘Have you got a fag?’ I demanded.
‘Fucking get your own,’ Mudge told me. Merle was just shaking his head.
‘Oh
yeah. I’ll just pop down to McShit’s and get a pack,’ I said. I was a long way from Dundee now.
‘You know it was the smell of cigarettes that gave us away, don’t you?’ Merle told his lover. Mudge just shrugged.
‘Jakob?’ No impatience there. She was calm, just waiting for an answer.
‘Okay, we surrender. You can come in and get us now!’ Mudge shouted. Even Merle laughed.
The motion sensor strapped to my webbing just behind my left shoulder picked up movement above me. I raised the SAW and saw Merle doing the same. I immediately zoomed in on it, not quite sure what I was seeing. It had a long, chitinous armoured body and six legs ending in sharp sword-like bone blades. The torso of a human woman stuck out of it. Her arms also ended in bone blades. Growing from the back of the thing was a gristly, multi-barrelled, rapid-firing shard gun.
She was descending towards us like a spider dropping down its web. Except the thread was made of flesh and looked something like a long intestine. As it lowered towards us the walls seethed, as all around us things began to grow out of it.
On the guncam feeds from Mudge and Rannu I saw weaponised Black Squadron things sprint at them firing. Their gun arms were either gauss or plasma weapons. Rannu fired his gauss carbine and Mudge his AK-47. They had to hose them down, keep firing at them, let the bullets chip away at their flesh. The mutated Black Squadron guys were still running as they died.
I dived to the side and rolled onto my back as shards impacted all around me. It was suppressing fire. I couldn’t work it out – this thing could have easily killed me. There was no cover. I returned fire, the comforting kick of the SAW against my shoulder. Every third round in the cassette was a tracer. I could tell I wasn’t having any effect on this sword-legged thing because I could see the tracers ricocheting off its carapace and bouncing into the wall.
I switched targets to fire at the things growing out of the wall. Anything that looked well formed got hit. The tracers and the armour-piercing, explosive-tipped, long, nine-millimetre rounds tore them apart. I was finding my targets because they were hitting me with shards or black beams. Pain, track the source and fire till it came apart.
‘Merle, take that spider thing out!’ I said over the tac net. I couldn’t work out why he hadn’t done it. He was taking hits as well. ‘Merle!’ he was ignoring me. Fuck it! I aimed my grenade launcher.
‘Don’t fucking fire!’ Merle shouted at me like he meant it. There was something new in his voice – emotion. On my IVD I could see from the window for Merle’s guncam that it was aimed at me.
‘What are you doing?!’ I shouted at him and staggered forward from more shard fire hitting my back.
‘It’s Cat!’ I looked again. I magnified in on her face. Some of it was new-growth biomechanical flesh over where the Grey Lady had blown Cat’s own flesh off. It was her as a reanimated corpse. Her pallor reminded me of Sharcroft. She didn’t even have the expression of agony on her face that the Black Squadron guys did.
I swung round to fire at more of the things crawling out of the walls as more shard fire hit me. I felt the integrity of my inertial armour start to give. I was knocked back but my subcutaneous armour held.
I caught a glimpse of the net feed. The viral eclipse that was eating the sun was almost done. Then the sun disappeared. God disappeared. Flames surged across heaven. Even though they were just icons, I could see the panic in the vagabond army.
Lying on the honeycombed memory structure, Pagan’s body began to buck and spasm. Smoke was pouring out of his plugs now.
Mudge was spun round as gauss fire from one of the mutated Black Squadron troopers caught him in the side. He hit the ground still firing but the trooper made for Morag and Pagan’s tranced-in bodies. I aimed and kept the SAW on him, pouring fire into him; at the same time my shoulder laser was blowing steaming chunks of superheated meat off him. He hit the ground. Mudge was back up by the door firing into the corridor. More doors were beginning to open in the walls. It was hopeless.
In the net Morag’s icon looked like her. It wasn’t Annis or the Maiden of Flowers, just Morag. She was standing in a circle of skull-topped poles, the ghost fence protection program. All around her Demiurge was like a black storm. Her hair and clothes were whipped around by the fury of it.
In front of the poles ghostly figures appeared: Buck, Gibby, Balor, Vicar, Dog Face, Big Henry, Tailgunner, Mother and Cat. Not vanquished foes, but a manifestation of the program written in by Morag, her tribute to the fallen. They were virtual spirits of the dead to protect her. Even if the body of one of them was here trying to kill us. The ghost fence protected her ritualistic summoning program. Except it wasn’t a summoning program; they came and went as they pleased. It was a series of complex protocols for contact. It had been set up to drive home the mysterious and superior nature of the gods in the net. Morag didn’t want to play that game.
I would have like to have shot and killed Cat’s transformed body, but the new doors appearing in the wall were keeping me a little busy.
‘Mudge, get to one of the other entrances! Rannu, stay were you are. The Grey Lady’s going to be coming through that door any moment!’ I shouted over the tac net.
Mudge ran towards one of the other holes appearing in the biomechanical flesh, firing at anything that moved. Nearly everything moved. I ran towards Morag and Pagan’s prone bodies. They’d both been hit multiple times. Parts of their inertial armour suits were blackened and smoking. But they were still alive, and that was all they needed to do their job.
‘Merle, if you’re not going to fucking shoot her, can you shoot everything else, please!’ I shouted. Brilliant. The ultimate killing machine chooses now to become sentimental and shut down.
As Mudge sprinted towards the other door Cat fired from her position above us. I saw shards tear through Mudge’s back and blow one of his metal legs off from the knee down. He went sprawling across the floor.
‘Listen, you bastards! Listen to me, all you fake-scary frightened cowards who feed us cryptic bollocks in return for worship! Listen to me, gods of the net!’ I heard Morag scream into the storm of Demiurge. She was angry. ‘Join us here! Now! Or we will show Demiurge where you live!’ The resolve in her voice made real the threat.
If they were as powerful as we thought, then they would also know about the experimental array linked to a physics lab on a science ship in orbit on the other side of the planet. She would feed that information to Demiurge if she had to. That would take the fight to them. It had been Salem along with a friend of his, a physics professor at Moa City University, who had worked it out. Salem had been a man of faith. He had never believed in the gods in the net. If I hadn’t been busy I would have been proud. Even in that icon she looked like the high priestess of an ancient and terrible religion. Gods were just another weapon to her.
‘Reloading!’ I shouted. As if anyone had time to care. I ejected the cassette from the SAW. My shoulder laser spun on its servos firing rapidly, but it wasn’t enough. I got shot. A lot. My armour gave up the ghost, and I watched black beams appear through my side and shards impact into my chest and legs. One of them dented my metal right arm as it bounced off. I collapsed to my knees. Red warning icons sang their familiar boring song in my IVD. I closed them down – all they did was tell me the fucking obvious.
I managed to ram the cassette home as weaponised Black Squadron troopers came sprinting into the room through the new doors. I fired, taking them down one after another. Each one was getting a little closer to me. I tried to place my body between them and Pagan and Morag. Absorbing more hits. Concentrating on the ones with the plasma weapons for arms. I couldn’t let one of them hit me.
I didn’t understand their tactics. These guys had been recruited from special forces of every nationality but they were acting like Them.
Cat landed in front of Merle.
In the net there was light in the darkness of Demiurge. I saw Pagan wearing his Druidical icon. Head bowed, stooped gait as he tried to walk aga
inst the howling windstorm of Demiurge. The glow was coming from him. Inside him. White and steel blue. It seemed to be engulfing his insides. Then he stood up straight, his clothes and hair torn at by the black wind. Pagan became something else: a holy terror. His eyes became lightning, his mouth became lightning, his internal organs became lightning, shining though his skin and clothes.
‘Cat?’ Merle asked. He sounded like a little boy. Oh for fuck’s sake.
I tried to resist the urge to think, I told you so, when Cat put both her sword-like arms and her two front legs through Merle’s torso and legs. She reared up on her back four legs. The blades piercing the screaming Merle manipulated him like a puppet.
I heard the flat thump of a grenade being launched and then another. Two large holes appeared in Cat’s torso, or possibly thorax, and then exploded. The front part of the Cat hybrid lurched forward. Her skull exploded as a long burst tore through it. I’m pretty sure that a couple of rounds hit Merle as well. What was left of Cat collapsed to the floor, dead. Again. Unfortunately Merle was still impaled on the ground.
‘I got you, lover,’ Mudge said over the tac net as he crawled towards Merle taking hits every inch of the way, the barrel of his AK-47 still smoking.
On the net the glow around Pagan became bright. It whited out the window momentarily, like the flash from a nuclear weapon I’d seen in vizzes about the FHC. Then it came back. White light and lightning was pouring into Pagan and then back out of him, striking out all around him. The ship shuddered beneath my feet. I could see something rise from Pagan like a ghost of blue energy. I could just about make out the shape of Ambassador as I’d first seen him so long ago on board the Forbidden Pleasure being protected by a terrified Morag. Now it was Demiurge’s turn to scream as white fire and steel-blue lightning purged him out of his own isolated system.
The ship bucked and shook. All the things trying to grow through the walls and the ceiling thrashed about and screamed inhumanly. The honeycombed bulge in the floor cracked and glowed beneath it. Pagan’s body spasmed so hard it actually left the ground and then burst into flames. This was what had been planned for Morag.
War in Heaven Page 64
