by Gavin Smith
Below us in the water-filled avenue an off-white monument of some kind stuck out of the water. It looked to me like a giant chess piece, like a bishop or something. Two people standing in a boat seemed to be cleaning it. The monument or whatever it was stood in a circle of houses with a flooded road leading off opposite from where we stood.
Elspeth took us towards a house just past the little circle, which had presumably once been a roundabout. We climbed down a metal ladder bolted to the side of the house and through the remains of a window. As well as the ever-present smell of damp and the Humber there was a strong earthy smell here. The roof garden above was supported by a reinforced ceiling and further shored up by supports made from scavenged steel beams. There were cracks where dirt had spilled through.
‘These things ever collapse?’ Morag asked, half joking.
‘Every so often, though nobody’s died in over a year in a collapse,’ Elspeth answered in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Actually the main problem is salvaging the earth afterwards,’ he added as we headed down a flight of stairs to the house’s first floor. It seemed that the house had at one point been converted into separate flats.
‘Huh?’ I said intelligently. Once again Elspeth gave me a look of condescension that only cocky teenagers are truly capable of giving.
‘Good soil is actually quite difficult to find,’ the precocious little sod said. ‘We had to search quite far and wide for it - we even sent out raiding parties.’
‘Outstanding,’ I said. Elspeth and presumably the rest of the inhabitants of the Avenues seemed very proud of their community, and grudgingly I could see why.
We came into a hall that had been extensively decorated with a mural of some kind. I couldn’t really make it out, but it seemed to be a series of interconnecting spirals bordered with knotwork. I could hear raised voices on the other side of the door. I probably could’ve tried to listen in if I’d boosted my hearing but I decided against it. Elspeth hammered on the door and the voices stopped. He turned and raised his eyes at us and took one last lingering look at Morag, which caused my blood to boil. She smiled nervously back at him and he left as the door opened.
If someone was going to call themselves Pagan I would pretty much expect them to look like Pagan did. The face that greeted us from the door was old, tanned and leathery. His features were pinched and angular but the half-smile beneath the black lenses that replaced his eyes went some way towards softening the hardness of his face. Half his head sprouted fiercely orange dreadlocks. The other half was the restructured ugly military tech of his integral computer. Tattooed on his face and disappearing into the neckline of the tatty, dirty T-shirt were spirals of knotwork. I later found out that the knotwork was made from implanted circuitry.
He wore a leather biker’s jacket that I assumed was armoured, and some old combat trousers. In his ears were the rather predictable multiple piercings, though he didn’t have any others that were visible at least. The biggest and most obvious affectation was the gnarled wooden staff held in his left hand, various fetishist objects hanging off it. It was tribal but had an old look. It reminded me of Buck and Gibby, the two cyberbilly Night Stalkers on Dog 4. My initial impression was: trying too hard.
He looked us both up and down, nodded to himself and opened the door wider. His expression had become worried.
‘You Pagan?’ I asked. He nodded.
‘Tea?’ Behind him I heard what I could only assume was cursing in German.
Morag and I followed Pagan into a lounge area. The damp and earthy smell mixed with the pungent aroma of burning incense. The room looked like a museum: it was filled with clutter, old armchairs and a suite with its stuffing spilling out. Books, actual real paper books and a lot of them, lined one wall. Pictures of fantastical landscapes and creatures covered another. Lying around was a mixture of high-tech and what I could only assume was ritual paraphernalia. My second impression was that this guy was pretty far gone.
Stood in the middle of the lounge glaring at us was a tall, raw-boned, athletic-looking, black woman with a Mohican. Her eyes were polarised lenses like mine. She wore a leather top and I could see she only had one breast. The other, presumably, had been surgically removed.
‘This is Jess,’ Pagan said politely and then looked expectantly at us. While I tried to decide whether we had anything to lose by telling them our real names, Morag introduced us both. Pagan smiled and disappeared into the tiny kitchen and began making tea.
‘Where you been?’ said Jess, asking the standard vet question. She had a thick German accent.
‘Around,’ I said. ‘Spent some time on Dog 4.’
‘Special forces?’ she asked. I told her yes by not saying anything.
‘You?’ I asked.
‘Luftwaffe. Proxima, a little in Barneys.’ Barneys was what the military fraternity called Barnard’s Star.
‘Jess was one of the Valkyries!’ Pagan said from the kitchen, an unmistakeable hint of pride in his voice.
‘That was your crew who took down one of Their dreadnoughts?’ I asked. I’d heard of the Valkyries. They were a hardcore all-female fighter wing that flew off the Barbarossa, one of the German carriers.
‘Lost more than three quarters of the wing doing it,’ she said.
‘You on that?’ I asked. She nodded. She was still looking at me with outright hostility. Pagan bustled out of the kitchen with four radically different steaming mugs of brew.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. Morag and I cleared away enough strange debris to sit down together on the slowly exploding settee.
‘Where you been, Pagan?’ I asked.
Pagan smiled. ‘Mostly Barneys.’
‘Signals?’ I assumed. Pagan shook his head, his dreadlocks flailing.
‘RASF, combat air/space controller.’ I was impressed. RASF combat controllers were one of the few units in the British military alongside the SAS, the SBS and one of the intelligence units that got special forces pay. With a similar skill set to signalmen and -women, they tended to be attached to special forces patrols and used as forward observers to call in air and orbital strikes. They also tended to be first on the ground during an assault from orbit to guide in the shuttles. It was a hairy job. I tried to fit what I knew about combat controllers with this oddball in front of me. Of course he could’ve been lying. Some people tried to claim what they saw as the glamour of special forces work for themselves but I didn’t really get that from this guy. I didn’t think he could care less what I or anyone else thought of his war record. I guessed that like most hackers he’d got religion in the end.
‘This Vicar who sent you,’ Jess said. I guessed there were no secrets in the Avenues, which bothered me. ‘He’s in Dundee, yes?’
‘Not any more.’
Pagan looked up sharply from his tea. ‘Dead?’
I nodded. I saw the momentary grief of a soldier who had lost yet another of his friends cross his face before he did what we all had to do, put it to one side and get on with the task in hand.
‘Lot of trouble in Dundee,’ Jess said. I nodded again.
‘Who killed him?’ Pagan asked.
‘He killed himself,’ I said. ‘He didn’t want to fall into Major Rolleston’s hands.’
‘Who is this Rolleston?’ Jess asked.
‘SBS, intelligence, black bag, dirty ops type.’
‘This Rolleston after you?’ Jess asked dangerously.
‘There’s a day at the most before he catches up with us.’ Jess started swearing again. I sat there and let her.
‘The orbital strike, that was to do with you,’ Jess said. I nodded again. More German swearing, then she rounded on Pagan. ‘Christus! An orbital weapon, that’s too much trouble. We cannot have them here.’
‘It’s too late,’ I told them. ‘They’re going to come here whatever. You need to just cooperate and tell them what they want to know.’
‘And what if they just hit us with an orbital weapon?’ she asked.
‘They
’ll want to come in and make sure first. They need to confirm we’re here.’
‘Besides,’ said Pagan, ‘the political fallout from the stunt they pulled in Dundee will make it difficult for them to do that again.’ Jess glared at us and stood up.
I held up my hand. ‘Where’re you going?’ I asked her.
‘I’m going to warn people.’ The operational security element of what we were doing was a real mess but I couldn’t find it within myself to stop her. This was after all their place and it was Morag and I that’d brought the trouble. She walked past me.
‘Why is this Rolleston after you?’ Pagan asked. Suddenly I found I was going to have real trouble explaining this, especially to another vet. Like me he’d spent the majority of his adult life fighting Them, and to all intents and purposes I had just betrayed my entire species by aiding one of the things that had probably been responsible for the deaths of many of his mates. For all I knew, I could tell him what I was carrying and he could just shoot me and destroy the memory cube.
Pagan was looking at me expectantly.
‘You may as well tell him,’ Morag said. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose and they deserve to know why we’ve brought all this shit down on them.’
It took over an hour and one more cup of tea, but we told Pagan everything, finishing with Vicar’s message.
‘He actually said that, did he?’ Pagan asked, examining the solid-state memory cube. ‘That this was the path to the one true God?’ I nodded. Pagan smiled to himself.
‘Vicar was always given to the melodramatic,’ he said, sounding slightly sad. ‘Was he still quoting Revelations?’
‘Until the end,’ I told him. Pagan was taking the news that we were carrying a downloaded one of Them, and in doing so committing high treason, quite well.
‘Never quoted another part of the Bible, you know,’ Pagan mused.
‘It’s a big book. Maybe he didn’t memorise anything else,’ I suggested.
‘He had it in his memory; he downloaded it onto his visual display when he was preaching. Probably had sub-routines set up to find appropriate quotes for any given situation.’
I just said nothing.
‘What does it mean?’ Morag asked. Pagan looked at her and smiled benevolently.
‘I’m not sure yet. May I?’ he asked, holding up the cube. I looked at Morag and she shrugged. I nodded. Pagan grabbed his stick.
‘What’s that for?’ Morag asked. To me it just looked like a sturdy dead bit of tree. I’d assumed it was an affectation or possibly for support.
‘I cored it and filled it full of solid-state memory not unlike the cube Vicar gave you,’ Pagan said as he began wiring in his plugs to Vicar’s cube. ‘Lot of memory in there. Some of my more sophisticated software, stuff that would take up too much room up here.’ He tapped the ugly military cyberware that stuck out of his skull in a way that put my teeth on edge. ‘There’s also some backup for some of my other software. I’ve run sensors all the way up and down the staff for an instantaneous link,’ he said, holding up his left hand, which had a palm link embedded in the centre of it. Not too dissimilar to the smartgun links on both my palms. ‘Between that and the upgrades I’ve made to what the RASF have put in my head, I’m just about managing to stay ahead of the game.’
‘Have you got a ware doc here?’ Morag asked. Pagan looked up frowning. I turned to look at her too.
‘Why?’ he asked. I was interested in knowing as well. Morag began to pull items out of the grey canvas bag that Vicar had given her. They were small vacuum-packed items. I recognised them as cyberware: she had plugs, neural interface, CPUs, visual display - everything needed to cut and chop your brain and become a hacker. By the look of it, it was top of the line. Most of it had come from the equator, high-end designer stuff from the Spokes. If she used it her head wouldn’t end up looking like Pagan’s and Vicar’s, with their ugly military tech protruding from their skulls. Pagan looked up at me. I wanted to object. I wanted to stop her from polluting her real flesh, but at the end of the day it wasn’t my decision.
‘We’ve not come here for this,’ was the best I could manage.
‘I can pay,’ Morag said.
‘With what?’ I asked.
‘The money Vicar gave me.’
‘Oh, gave you now, is it?’ I asked. ‘I thought it was so we could deliver this.’ I nodded at the cube.
‘Why do you think he gave me the ware?’ she asked me.
‘Look, you don’t understand ...’ I began, sounding just like I was about to give Morag the same kind of pompous adult lecture that pissed me off when I was her age. On the other hand, if I had to be honest I should’ve listened to a few of them, especially the ones about draft dodging.
‘It’s not your decision. It’s not your business. In fact it’s got nothing to do with you.’ And once again I could see the resolve in this quiet, apparently shy girl. Pagan was looking between the two of us nervously. He actually cleared his throat before he spoke.
‘She’s not the only one who should see the doc,’ he said, looking at me. I reached up to touch the burnt ruin of my face. I’d kind of forgotten about it.
‘I’ve got a wound in my leg as well and I need my transponder removed,’ I said, searching for the aching reminder of the Grey Lady’s playful warning among the other aches and pains.
Pagan was smiling. ‘We’ve become quite good at removing transponders.’
‘Look, whatever we do we’re going to have to do quickly,’ I said, conscious of how little time we had.
‘We’re a poor community. You’re going to have to pay your way,’ Pagan said.
‘Speak to my accountant,’ I said nodding towards Morag, who glared at me. Pagan held up the cube. ‘Do whatever you want,’ I said.
‘What’re you going to do after this?’ Pagan asked. And that was a good question. What were we going to do? Run until they caught us? Find a place to die? Kill ourselves in such a way to avoid pre-and post-mortem interrogation? I glanced at Morag; again I felt the urge to protect her. The last thing I wanted was for her to fall into Rolleston’s hands.
‘Run,’ I heard Morag say.
Pagan looked at the pair of us thoughtfully.
10
Hull
Morag went under the knife, or more likely the laser. She was kind enough to pay for someone to clean and knit new flesh to my face. They also sprayed on new skin and saw to my leg wound better than I’d been able to back at Vicar’s place. While we were doing this Pagan had an audience with Ambassador.
The ware doc worked from what looked to me to be a stainless-steel cube assembled in a larger room on the ground floor of one of the terraced houses. It was watertight and you entered it through a hatch in the ceiling. You could hear the Humber lapping against the side of it. When I opened my eyes and felt my new tender flesh, Morag was lying on the other operating chair next to me, still under the anaesthetic. Her head was shaved and covered in a network of fresh scar tissue. I could just make out a couple of new plugs in the back of her neck. It was the girl’s down payment on her humanity as she tried to become something more than she was. It seemed a waste as we were probably both dead soon anyway.
The ware doc loomed over me. He had ancillary arms sprouting out of his shoulders that ended in various surgical tools. It made him look like a surgical-steel preying mantis.
‘Pagan wants to speak to you,’ he told me.
I hated the net. Maybe that’s strange coming from someone who spent so much of their time in the sense booths. The technology was similar, total sensory immersion hard-wired through a neural connection, called a sense link, directly into the brain. This made the sensory input seem real to the extent that you could die from neural feedback, and thousands of hackers did every year. As did other users who got caught in the crossfire.
The vast majority of people at one time or another accessed the net, either through education or if you didn’t get education then through military training. If you wanted to communic
ate with anyone who didn’t live within walking distance then one way or another you used the net. You also had to access it for much of your entertainment.
I could see its uses but I still didn’t like it. In terms of virtual geography you could interact with through your icon, the net was supposed to be potentially infinite. To me it always looked so crowded and jumbled. Maybe it was because as a casual user I’d only ever been to the popular bits. Virtual architects didn’t have to conform to the laws of physics, so sites could look like anything from a normal building to a giant mushroom to a huge, constantly galloping alien horse. The highways, the equivalent of their city streets, ran at all angles to each other. Often you would look up and see a highway with its sites inverted above you or shooting away at a disorienting angle, and of course, because its main users were hackers there was a huge amount of garish religious iconography. Maybe it just offended my almost ordered atheist mind, but I never wondered why hackers were so weird. What really got me was that the net was our dream world. It had the potential to be an uplifting counter to the painful realities of humanity’s ongoing conflict, but instead it was just as garish, crowded, unpleasant and mercenary as the real world.
Dinas Emrys almost made me rethink my views. I’d found Pagan in an immersed trance, a note scrawled on sub-paper asking me to join him; it was taped around a plug attached to an independent CPU/ modem unit. With some reluctance I plugged myself in.
It took a while for me to enter the site; I assumed that this was due to the heavily encrypted transport program that took me to my destination. I appeared in a curved stone corridor that looked like something out of a medieval sense program or media, except it had the trademark net look of well-rendered animation rather than being completely naturalistic. The corridor had a low ceiling and was lit by atmospherically flickering burning brands. I looked down and found myself in the bland mannequin icon of the casual net browser, an androgynous vaguely human form with the most basic of facial features.
