Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  He began to protest, as did some of the other prisoners.

  ‘Shut up!’ Pagan shouted. He still sounded scared. I didn’t have time to think about what had happened in the net.

  ‘Do it now!’ I shouted at the scientist and swung the dart gun around to point at him. He stood up and scurried over to a control panel. Some of his fellow prisoners were shouting at him not to do it. Pagan screamed at them again. Gregor had watched the scientist move over to the panel and had in turn stalked expectantly over to the door of his containment chamber. Balor turned and watched him go but thankfully stayed out of our field of fire.

  ‘Rannu, if you’re finished I could do with another shooter here,’ I said.

  ‘I’m taking Morag out of here,’ he told me. I wished I’d thought of that. There was the hiss of the door’s seal breaking and then it swung open. Gregor’s twisted silhouette stood in the doorway backlit by the harsh strip-lighting of his cell. He stepped over the lip of the door. I took an involuntary step back. He opened his mouth and screamed. It was like the sound of the spires in my dream, except he wasn’t singing, he was angry, and it was mixed with a very human scream of rage. Mudge and I fired. We both hit. Gregor didn’t seem to register the twin impacts. Both of us dropped the dart guns and moved back, bringing our own weapons to bear. The prisoners screamed and heedless of Pagan’s laser carbine began scrambling over each other to get to the door.

  I think Balor thought it was Christmas. His trident extended, snapping into place as he moved purposefully towards Gregor. Gregor swung towards him. Even his movements were inhuman, his strange gait more like Them than us. Balor stabbed forward one-handed with his trident. The three-pronged weapon pierced Gregor’s chest though he gave no indication of noticing it. Balor forced him back into the corner by the open door. Roaring, Balor leapt into the air, his free hand swinging back as he prepared to claw the pinioned hybrid.

  I saw Gregor’s black fingernails grow and solidify until each of them was an eight-inch-long black blade. With his right hand Gregor grasped the shaft of the trident and pushed it back, tearing it out of his flesh. His left reached up, moving with the sort of speed I’d only ever seen once before, on the night Gregor had been taken. He caught Balor’s wrist with his left and letting go of the Trident swung upwards with his clawed right hand. The blow tore into Balor’s heavily armoured stomach and chest, halting and then reversing his trajectory. Gregor clawed him with so much force that Balor went crashing back into the operating table.

  Immediately Balor was up as Gregor closed on him. He swung with one clawed hand and then the other. He tore rents in Gregor’s skin, revealing black liquid below the surface that immediately started to knit the torn flesh back together. I think that was when I stopped believing that my friend was alive and that I was looking at anything other than an alien wearing the distorted and tortured flesh of Gregor’s body. I felt like he’d been hollowed out. I dropped the shotgun, letting it hang on its sling as I drew my Tyler, stretching it out in a two-handed shooter’s stance for maximum accuracy. I was going to kill this mockery and then kill every fucking person who worked here. I didn’t care if I was still here when reinforcements arrived; I’d kill as many of them as I could as well.

  Balor was slammed against the stainless-steel wall. He howled as alien claws pierced his side, pinning him to the wall. I was about to fire when the pistol was forced up and Mudge was suddenly in front of him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted.

  ‘It’s not him!’ I screamed in Mudge’s face, trying to break free.

  Gregor staggered back for no good reason I could see. Balor used the opportunity to push him back further while repeatedly clawing him in the face. Each time Gregor’s distorted features were torn off, the black liquid began re-knitting the flesh and then Balor’s claws tore them open again. Gregor sank to the floor. I lowered my pistol, sure that Balor would do the job for me, but suddenly Gregor struck out. The blow sent Balor flying back into the air so high he broke through one of the hanging strip lights and slammed into the ceiling, before bouncing off the wall and landing on the ground.

  Gregor stood up but swayed as his facial features reformed. Balor pushed himself to his feet and began striding towards Gregor. As Balor closed with him he swung out with his left with surprising speed. He caught Balor firmly on the face and picked him up off his feet again, sending him over a table and into the wall, hard enough to make a significant dent.

  Balor threw the metal table aside and stood up. Gregor swayed again and then sat down hard. His eyes were still black pools but the expression on his face was one of confusion. Balor made for him again, presumably intent on finishing the job. Mudge let go of me.

  ‘No!’ he shouted at Balor. I wondered why Mudge had his AK-47 in his hands. Balor was ignoring Mudge. I watched in horror as Mudge shouldered the AK-47 and fired a three-round burst, staggering the pirate. Balor stopped and turned to Mudge. He looked furious. He looked inhuman. Gregor’s eyelids flickered and closed over the black liquid pools of his eyes as he slid to the ground. Mudge lowered his smoking AK-47. I saw him swallow before he turned and fled. Balor charged after him but I knew he had no chance of catching Mudge’s cybernetic legs.

  I moved to stand over the inert body of the hybrid, the Tyler still in my hand. I pointed the laser pistol at him. Unconscious as the last of his wounds knit shut, he looked almost peaceful. More like my friend.

  ‘We’ve come a long way just so you can shoot him,’ Rannu said from the doorway. I lowered the pistol.

  ‘Morag?’ I asked.

  ‘She can move,’ he said.

  ‘Right, you go and calm Balor down, share some brotherly warrior shit with him or something. Get Mudge back here; I need a hand bagging Gregor.’ He nodded and left the room. I could hear him sub-vocalising over the net, trying to reach Balor. I turned to Pagan, who still did not look right.

  ‘Pagan, I want you to junk whatever’s left of their comms and security, okay?’ He nodded. We needed to leave here and we needed to do so quickly.

  Exfiltration wasn’t exactly easy but it was less violent. Morag was up and moving, most of the blood cleared away, though her eyes were completely bloodshot. After making sure they had no way of communicating we pretty much left the surviving lab staff to it.

  We put Gregor in a survival bag, gave him an air supply and a heat source - if indeed he needed either - and vacuum-packed the bag. Mudge and I slung it under a collapsible pole. We’d carry it between us.

  We moved through the facility until we came to the place that Morag had predicted was the weakest part of the superstructure over a place least likely to be populated. Balor had the canister. The canister had been the real cost. Not the transport, the weapons, the intel or even the Wraiths. The canister he held in his hand was the really expensive thing and contained one of the most proscribed substances in human space. Unlicensed possession was normally enough for a substantial jail sentence; using it in a terrorist act like we were doing was worthy of the death sentence in most states and all Spokes.

  Balor sprayed the programmable concrete-eating microbes on the concrete floor at the back of the loading bay. I watched as a sizeable circle of the concrete turned to liquid, becoming a deeper and deeper pool until it cascaded out of the hole it had eaten. Balor quickly sent the microbes their destruction code before he and Rannu jumped through.

  We moved through the maintenance level below. Pagan tricked out the sensors and sent fake images to the cameras, sending ghost images of us in all the wrong places and making sure everything looked empty and normal where we actually were. Morag was supposed to be helping, but she did not want to enter into the net again and we didn’t have time to deal with that now.

  There was activity from Spoke security and their emergency services but nobody was quite sure what was going on and they didn’t have the surrounding layers secure yet. They’d probably been warned off by Rolleston’s people and were waiting for their response. We slipped through.


  Another three storeys down we found an abandoned maintenance shaft that Morag had discovered during her research. We used what was left of the microbes to eat their way into the abandoned shaft. We set up a winch mechanism. Rannu went first, then I followed and Mudge lowered the bagged form of Gregor down. We had no idea how long the sedative would last, though we had brought more of it with us. If he woke up en route we could all be fucked.

  At the bottom of the shaft was a tunnel that led to one of the maintenance airlocks for the Mag Lev tunnels. In the tunnel we unrolled our lightweight vac suits and assembled the helmets. The Mag Lev tunnels were designed to be flexible as they were bored into tecton-ically unstable rock. They were also vacuums to limit the air resistance the high-speed train would have to push against.

  Pagan hacked the airlock mechanism and sent false data to the Spoke’s systems to make it look like it hadn’t been opened. We entered the cavernous dark tunnels of the Mag Lev system. It was a twenty-mile tab via flashlight, Pagan again having to trick out cameras and sensors on his own, as Morag wouldn’t help. It was sometimes easy to forget how good Pagan was when you saw Morag’s capabilities. Spokes and the Mag Levs have some of the toughest security on Earth as they are seen as huge terrorist targets. What he did was an amazing bit of hacking, but I could see it was taking a toll on him.

  In the tunnels Rannu had point. Balor was at the rear. Mudge and I were carrying Gregor; Morag and Pagan were flanking us. There were no Mag Levs. I reckoned Rolleston’s people must’ve shut them down.

  I didn’t think twice about a twenty-mile tab, even post-combat. That’s why it came as something of a surprise when my helmet filled with bloody vomit, almost choking me, and I collapsed.

  I found out what happened later on. They managed to evacuate the sick from my helmet into the rest of the suit. Apparently when they took it off me, back onboard the Mountain Princess, it was pretty disgusting. Embarrassingly I had to be carried the rest of the way by Balor.

  When we reached an external airlock Pagan again hacked the lock and sent false information to the security systems. In the airlock our suits injected us with a stasis-inducing drug that lowered our heart and respiratory systems. Balor then attached us all by safety line and with Magantu acting as scout towed us in a line to the surface, avoiding the submersibles, cybrids and exo-armour patrols that were presumably looking for us. A heavily coded comms burst brought Buck and Gibby in the transport back to find us. Balor sent Magantu back to New York. It was going to be a long swim for the shark.

  Buck and Gibby flew us back to the Mountain Princess, the ore transport ship we were using as our base of operations. Fortunately Gregor did not wake up from the sedative and they were able to secure him in the recently installed containment chamber on the ship.

  The chamber was in one of the ship’s concealed smuggling holds. They were well hidden but would not stand the determined and well-equipped search of the ship that presumably Rolleston and his people would begin in the near future. How long we had depended on what resources they were prepared to throw at the problem. They also had to factor in the risk of exposure, as the people doing the searching had a chance of finding Gregor, who could be difficult to explain. They would also have to be capable of dealing with him.

  24

  Atlantis

  Okay, this was different. I was in an exceptionally well-rendered pub. It was very old-fashioned. They had proper untreated wooden tables and a bar that wasn’t made out of scrap and driftwood. I was sitting at one of the tables, a whisky in front of me. I tasted it. It wasn’t quite right, but then again it never was whether it was virtual, Irish, Japanese or pre-war Sirian. There was music playing, soothing with a slightly jagged undercurrent to it. I think it was pre-FHC, but it wasn’t jazz so I didn‘t recognise it.

  The icon I was wearing was quite a good naturalistic interpretation of me as a natural, unaugmented human - no prosthetics, no plugs. I wondered what colour my eyes were and then realised I couldn’t remember.

  I couldn’t be sure whether or not the other person in the bar had been there since I’d opened my eyes or not. I just sort of became aware of him. He sat several tables away and he was a Laughing Boy, a Smiler. One of the nastier gangs, they started off in the reclaimed zones in London and were one of the Smoke’s less pleasant exports. They portrayed themselves as a kill-for-thrills franchise. If you wanted someone done at street level you got one of these little sadists to do it.

  I’d had my run-ins with them in the past, before I’d joined up, when I’d lived in Fintry. Rumour had it that in order to join them you had to kill someone for no reason. Their members tended to be the genuinely unbalanced, the wannabe hard and the desperate for attention. I wondered which this one was.

  He had on the corpse paint; he had the scar tissue at the corners of his mouth, where it had been cut up into a wider smile, the shades, the mock-crushed-velvet frockcoat, presumably with an armoured lining, the shell suit and running shoes. He looked to be in his mid-teens. He sat there playing with a long scalpel-like knife and drinking a black-coloured pint that was presumably supposed to be real Jamaican Guinness. He wasn’t staring at me, so much as studying me.

  He didn’t jit in a place like this. Neither did I. These sorts of places were for people with money - wage slaves or officers on leave - but those were all real-world considerations; I was weighing them up out of habit. I was about to speak to the Smiler when the door opened and a bright-blue light poured in, silhouetting a tall slender female figure as she entered.

  I held my hand up, shading my eyes, but the light went when she closed the door. The icon was tall, classically beautiful with pronounced cheekbones. She had pale-blue skin and long black hair that seemed to blow in a non-existent wind. Her dress was ankle-length and looked like it was made of some blue fibrous material with living flowers on it. Her eyes were pools of solid black. As she entered the Smiler took off his shades. His eyes were surrounded by intricate eye make-up that seemed to move of its own accord; his eyes were the same pools of black as the woman’s. Suddenly I felt like the only human in the room.

  ‘Morag?’ I asked the woman. This icon was different from Annis. I saw the icon sigh with irritation. That was good programming.

  ‘It’s Annis, or an aspect of Morag said. Of course, I’d ignored netiquette by not using her icon’s name. The Smiler just watched us.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You’re unconscious, again,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘Some things never change,’ the Smiler said. He had a broad Scots accent that sounded familiar. It was of course obvious when I placed it. Who else would it be?

  ‘Gregor?’ I asked tentatively, and beneath the make-up and the leering scar I began to make out a teenage version of my friend.

  ‘Hasn‘t been that long,’ Gregor said and then he smiled, making the scar utterly grotesque. So you used to be a Smiler, I thought. He‘d kept that quiet and even had the scar tissue removed before joining the Regiment.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked. It was going to take me a while to formulate a response to yet another unfamiliar incarnation of my old friend.

  ‘It’s an intuitive program,’ Morag, sorry Annis, the new sweeter-looking Annis, began.

  ‘You can write intuitive programs?’ I asked. It was pretty high-level stuff. I don’t know why I was surprised.

  ‘With help, and besides Gregor’s neuralware or biology is very compatible with Ambassador,’ she said. I didn’t like the sound of this.

  ‘Am I in an alien?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Don’t start,’ Morag said testily.

  ‘Hi, how are you, Gregor? How’ve you been since I last saw you? Oh fine, just kidnapped, held against my will and experimented on. Yourself?’ Gregor said, smiling in a way that made me surprised his face didn’t split.

  ‘Just give me a moment,’ I said.

  ‘Because you ‘re the one who needs time to readjust,’ Annis said.

  ‘The ba
r?’ I asked.

  Annis shrugged. ‘He made it,’ she said.

  ‘It was a peaceful moment for me. I was waiting for a client who wanted a slice job doing. I was let into the bar. It was the middle of the afternoon, it was peaceful. I guess my subconscious just produced this moment.’

  ‘You’re dressed like a twat,’ I pointed out. He started laughing.

  ‘I was young, I was foolish,’ Gregor said. It was him, it was slowly beginning to sink in, it was really him.

  ‘So what happened to me?’ I asked.

  ‘You fainted,’ Annis said. There was another grotesque smirk from Gregor. ‘Overexertion and a nasty cocktail of drugs.’ There was something in her voice, coldness, a distance. I looked up at her. I remembered her in tears at the carnage. I remember my contempt, how much I enjoyed doing what I did. I also remembered Morag bleeding from her ears and eyes and not wanting to go back into the net.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked. She nodded, her icon’s features an impassive mask. ‘Sure?’

  ‘We all need to talk about it later. Sergeant MacDonald is our main problem at the moment,’ she said.

  ‘Just Gregor,’ Gregor said.

  ‘ Where are we at the moment?’ I asked. ‘We made it to the Mountain Princess?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Annis sounded a little pissed off.

  ‘And?’ I asked expectantly.

  ‘We’re docked at Atlantis,’ she said.

  ‘What! Why?’ I asked. Had we been captured?

  ‘Because it makes sound tactical sense. They would never think of looking for us here,’ Morag said, using a tone of voice that suggested she was quoting someone.

  ‘This was Balor’s idea?’ I asked resignedly, and I supposed it made a degree of psychotic sense. The problem was sooner or later they would put a smart enough program or a smart enough image analyser on their satellite info and they‘d work out what had happened and trace us to the Mountain Princess.