Veteran

9

It was brown, very brown. It took a while to focus and realise that I wasn’t just looking at a plain of mud, though the only difference was the swell, as far as I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of landmarks to help either. Lincolnshire, although one of the least affected eastern counties after the Final Human Conflict, was pretty much a featureless green and grey.

There was the ruin of the Humber Bridge, two partially collapsed towers, steel, wire and concrete protruding from mudflats. Then there was Hull, the old port overrun with the brown waters of the Humber, not deep enough to cover it, just enough to turn it into an ugly mudlike industrial Venice that nobody wanted.

The submarine had broken the surface and we were walking along the deck to a rickety-looking, plastic-hulled water taxi that, despite the calm water, still looked like it was being too ambitious coming out this far. Morag and I clambered into the unsteady craft and waved at the Russian sub captain, who just glared at us. She knew we were going to cause her trouble. The boat headed away from the sub, towards the east of the city.

If our boatman thought anything strange about his human cargo and their manner of arrival he didn’t say anything; perhaps he did this all the time. Then again perhaps he didn’t say much at all. He was old and quiet, his face craggy and impassive. He seemed to show no sign of cybernetics (possibly he was old enough to have avoided the draft); his clothes were warm and well looked after, if somewhat threadbare.

The old man piloted us through abandoned half-submerged docks. Through streets of deserted factories, probably abandoned years before the waters rose, a testament to a very distant past. Everything was eerily still. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the waters. This was the ghost of a city long gone. It was hard to believe that anyone lived here at all, but then that was the thing about Hull: it gave you a chance to opt out if you didn’t like the way things were going. Come to Hull and you got left alone because nobody wanted it.

We floated underneath the support of an old bridge, its road surface now under the water. We passed an old commercial section and on to what must have once been quite a wide road. Either side of it was a mixture of shops and housing. Now it was all deserted of course. Or almost deserted; on my thermographics I could see human-sized heat sources here and there. Presumably pickets for the Avenues. I didn’t see the point in saying anything. The boatman wasn’t talking and probably knew about them and all it would’ve done was make Morag uneasier.

We headed down the turgid brown water in this wide street for just over a mile and turned right into another similarly wide road, the ghosts of bars and shops on either side. Morag grabbed me by the arm. The people watching us were becoming more obvious.

‘I know,’ I said quietly. The boatman’s craggy face was as impassive as ever. Ahead of us I could see something stretched across the channel/street. I magnified my vision and made out a net of vicious-looking spiked chains stretched across the water, blocking our way. On the right-hand side the chain disappeared into a house that presumably contained some kind of winch mechanism. On the left was a building that looked like an old hotel or apartment complex. Sticking out of that building from a hole cut in the first-floor wall was a rickety-looking jetty.

‘Is this the Avenues?’ Morag asked. The boatman inclined his head once, signalling affirmative. There were figures moving all around the area. Many of them seemed to be going about their everyday lives but a fair few were taking an interest in our little boat.

Off to my right, behind the chain, I could make out an area of open water, broken where stumps of dead trees breached the surface. The water looked cleaner there and it seemed to have been cordoned off with some thin plastic material that formed a wall to keep the dirty water of the Humber out. I assumed it was some kind of farm for fish or maybe kelp.

To the left I could see a water-filled road lined with partially submerged terraced houses. An ancient, battered and rusty sign on the end house read ‘Marlborough Avenue’.

The boatman brought the boat to a halt about ten feet away from the jetty. Stood on it was a kid probably not much older than Morag. He had bad skin, a haircut that looked like someone had torn chunks out of his scalp, a badly decorated armoured leather jacket and a powerful hunting carbine that may have been older than the boatman. There was no sign of any cybernetics on him that I could see. He was unaugmented and judging by his age, a draft dodger. Good for you kid, I thought, best of luck. Up until he pointed the carbine at me. I wondered if there was a place you could go and not get guns pointed at you.

‘That’s close enough,’ he said somewhat predictably. ‘What do you want?’ I decided to let him have some time staring at my polarised lenses.

‘We’re here to see Pagan,’ I finally said.

‘What about?’ Now to be fair to him he may have just been doing his job or he may have been bored, but it seemed to me that I had put a lot of time and effort into getting this far and I couldn’t be bothered with this crap any more.

‘Just go and get him will you?’ I told him brusquely. The kid smiled.

‘No,’ he said slowly, as if talking to someone a bit slow. ‘I said-’

‘I heard what you fucking said, kid. Look, we could have some kind of alpha male competition here that I win because I’m more violent, and then you feel humiliated and have to go and do the thing that I’ve asked you to do anyway. Just fucking tell Pagan I’m here and let him do the thinking for you,’ I told him irritably.

‘Good conflict resolution skills,’ Morag muttered. I thought about the conflict resolution skills I’d learnt at Hereford. I wondered why so many people feel they have to force you to hurt them in order to just get them to be reasonable. Do they think courtesy to a stranger is a sign of weakness? Sadly, maybe it was. To the kid’s credit he didn’t look flustered; in fact he lowered his carbine.

All I really saw were teeth, big sharp-looking steel teeth. I was vaguely aware of the hugeness of the mouth that had broken the water and the power-assisted nature of its jaws. I heard the resounding snap as its jaws slammed shut in a demonstration of power inches away from our boat, showering us all in the brown muck of the Humber. I instinctively scrambled away from it, as did Morag. The boatman tried to make sure we didn’t capsize the craft.

‘Fucking dinosaur!’ I screamed, dragging my pistols free of their holsters. Morag looked shaken; I was too busy with my own panic to register if she’d screamed. The cybernetically augmented alligator, which was so large it had presumably grown up on a steady diet of growth hormones, sank beneath the brown water with the sort of disgruntled dignity of a predator denied its prey.

‘Vicar sent us to see Pagan. Just tell him Vicar sent us, please!’ Morag said to the kid. Many of the people on the Avenues side of the chain who had been watching us were laughing now. I suspected this son of thing had happened before. The kid was speaking to another armed man back in the old hotel on the corner of Marlborough Avenue. Then he turned back to face us.

‘I know it may be galling for you to be questioned by someone of my age, but I live here, so when you come to visit, behave or you will get eaten.’ This kid may not be quite the punk I’d taken him for.

‘It’s a fucking dinosaur,’ I managed again. I watched nervously as another armoured reptilian back broke the surface of the water. There was more than one of those things. The other man nodded to the kid, who turned back to us.

‘Okay, you can come in, but try not to behave like wankers, okay?’ Morag nodded and smiled. I glared resentfully for a bit and nodded. It was going to take a little while for my bravado to return after my run-in with the alligator. It didn’t seem to matter how well trained you are, or how much cybernetics you have, I reckoned, at some level humans are just scared of big lizards. We clambered onto the jetty.

‘I’ll show you the way,’ the kid said and smiled at Morag. I’m not sure if it was some protective instinct, jealousy or just the urge to smack the smug little bastard in his pus that I felt. ‘My name’s Elspeth, by the way.’ Fortunately he’d turned away and didn’t see Morag and I trying to stifle laughter at this.

Elspeth led us through the building that I had initially thought was a hotel. Now I thought it must have been something more institutional. The whole place smelled of damp and the low-tide stink that I was already used to from living on the Rigs. We clambered up some stairs and onto the roof. From there we could see all the way down Marlborough Avenue.

‘Pagan lives on Westbourne,’ Elspeth said as if that should mean something to us.

The water came up to about the halfway mark on the ground floors of the pre-Final Human Conflict terraced houses. Most of the buildings were three or four storeys high, many of them with balconies or large window ledges, almost every single one of which had some kind of garden on it, most growing vegetables to my untrained eye.

I assumed that the majority of these buildings once had attics, but the roofs had been removed, flattened and then used as farms. Some of them were planted with crops and vegetables. Others had chickens, sheep and even a few cows and pigs grazing on them. There was even what looked to be a small orchard on one roof. All the houses had been shored up with material salvaged from the deserted rest of the city.

Between the two sides of the street, over the turgid Humber water. were a series of scratch-built, rickety-looking catwalks. Many of them had solar panelling strung between them. I could also see the smoke of stills and hear the rhythmic thump of alcohol-burning generators, and on some of the roofs small wind turbines added to the electricity generation.

‘We’ve also got some wave-powered generators further out in the Humber,’ Elspeth said. He was obviously proud of his community. Morag was looking around in awe. I saw some more of the clean-water pens fenced off from the dirty river.

‘What are you fanning there?’ I asked.

‘Not sure in that one. We’ve got different ones, a fair amount of kelp, various types of shellfish. We’ve had less luck with fish though.’ I was impressed despite myself. This was quite an undertaking. ‘There’s more pens back in Pearson Park,’ he said, gesturing back to the open body of water that we’d seen on the way in. ‘And more at what used to be the Spring Bank West Cemetery.’

I’d also noticed the trunks of dead trees sticking out of the water, but these had been carved into various shapes and forms. I was looking at one that seemed to be an angel holding a globe. It looked ancient and pitted.

‘Those were sculpted before the FHC and the rivers rose. We’re doing our best to maintain them,’ he said.

‘Why?’ I asked, almost involuntarily. The practical side of me was saying that they had more pressing things to do. Elspeth just looked at me disdainfully as he took us out over the river on a corroded metal catwalk that shook with every step. It probably would’ve bothered me if I hadn’t lived on the Rigs. We passed by a couple of cows that paused from grazing to look up at us with their sombre, watery eyes. We crossed from the roofs of Marlborough Avenue and onto the roofs of what was presumably Westbourne Avenue.

The set-up of Westbourne Avenue was pretty similar only more of the rooftops seemed to be given over to greenhouses and what looked to me to be hydroponic gardens, though again they’d had to scavenge what gear they could find.

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.