Veteran

1

I awoke from the dream with a start. My knuckles ached from where I’d tried to extend my blades; I ran my fingers over the domed locks, a compromise to let someone with my capabilities walk free after he’d served his country and his species. A right that had been won in blood and vacuum.

The bruises from last night’s pit fight were now tender memories, thanks to my body’s implanted internal repair systems. As ever I wondered why the same systems couldn’t help me with the white-hot throbbing lance of pain that was a dehydration headache. The pain seemed to live just behind the black polarised lenses that replaced my eyes. Why was it that man could create millions of tons of complex engineering capable of travelling across space but could still not find a cure for a hangover? One of the many skewed priorities of our society.

Too much good whisky, the real stuff made in the distilleries out in the National Park, had caused my hangover. I sat up on the cot in the porta-cube, massaging my throbbing temple with my left arm, the one that was still flesh. The matt-black prosthetic right arm reached for my cigarettes. Like the whisky, the cigarettes were the good stuff, hand-made somewhere in the Islamic Protectorate.

I lit the cigarette with my antique trench lighter, a family heirloom, apparently. Family. What were my parents thinking when they had me? The war was already thirty years old then. Why was anyone having children? Mind you, they’d been patriotic, probably thought it was their duty to breed so their offspring could grow up, get recruited, indoctrinated, chopped, augmented, mangled, chewed up and spat out to be a burden on society. I wasn’t on active duty so I liked to consider myself a burden. I inhaled the first pointless lungful of smoke of the day. My internal filters and scrubbers removed all the toxins and anything interesting from the cigarette, turning my expensive vice into little more than an unpleasant affectation. It’s these little luxuries, I thought, that separate me from the rest of the refuse. When it came down to it, the hustling, the leg breaking, scheme racing and pit fighting was just to make enough euros to augment my paltry veteran’s pension. After all, what’re a few bruises and contusions if it means good whisky, cigarettes, drugs, old movies and music, and of course the booths.

I considered starting drinking again as I had little on that day. A quick scan of the cramped plastic cube that I existed in told me that I had drank more than I thought I had last night. Which would explain the constant pain in my skull.

‘Shit,’ I muttered to the morning. I thought about checking my credit rating but decided that would just upset me further. A search of my jeans turned up some good old-fashioned black-economy paper euros. I’d won them for second place at the pit fight in Fintry. I’d been better than the kid who beat me but the kid had been dangerously wired, dangerously boosted and hungrier than me. I reckoned he had maybe another six months before his central nervous system was fried. He’d probably been fighting with the cheap enhancements to feed his family.

I’d just wanted to get drunk. I counted the money, stubbing the cigarette out in the already-full ashtray. I had enough to spend a day in the booths. Almost mustering a smile at this good luck I dragged on my jeans, strapped on my boots and shrugged on the least dirty T-shirt I could find with a cursory search. Finally I pulled on my heavy tan armoured raincoat. I ran a finger through my sandy-coloured shoulder-length hair; it was getting too long. I tied it back into a short ponytail. Sunglasses over the black lenses that used to be my eyes and ready to face another day. Ready to face it because I was going to the booths.

The Rigs were so poor that we didn’t even have advertising. It had started before the last Final Human Conflict over two hundred and fifty years ago. Apparently there had once been fields of fossil fuels in the North Sea and these huge rusting metal skeletons had been platforms designed to harvest the fuel. When their day was done they had been towed into the harbour to be dismantled at the Dundee docks. When they had stopped dismantling them the Tay had just become a dumping ground. More and more had come until they filled the river and you could walk from Dundee to Fife on them. Provided you knew how to look after yourself.

Quickly they had become a squatters’ heaven for people largely considered surplus by the great and the good. This of course included veterans – vets. I stepped out onto the planks of the makeshift scaffolding that ran between the stacked, windowless, hard plastic cubes that signified my middle-class status in the Rigs. Off to my right Dundee was a bright glow in comparison to the sparse lighting on the Rigs.

Lying on the ground by the door to the cube was a young boy, no older than thirteen. He was unconscious. A victim of the intrusion countermeasures that I’d added to the cube to stop myself from getting ripped off any more than was strictly necessary. I sighed and pulled a stim patch out of my coat pocket and placed it on the kid’s arm. Scarring over the boy’s chest told me that he’d already fallen victim to Harvesters once.

‘Wake up,’ I said, shaking the boy. ‘You want to get harvested again?’ I asked him. Startled eyes shot open and the kid backed away from me so quickly he almost went off the scaffolding and into the liquid pollution that passed for the Tay these days. I watched him as he got up and ran off.

‘And don’t try and rip me off again!’ I shouted redundantly, before wasting some more money and lighting up another cigarette.

It was a hot night. Quickly sweat began to stick my clothes to my flesh. I cursed the malfunctioning coolant system in my armoured coat. I could’ve done without the coat but that was an invitation to get rolled. My dermal armour was good but not a patch on the coat. It covered me from neck to ankle with slits in the appropriate places to allow me access to weapons, had they not all been locked down. I could get the coolant system fixed but I only had just enough money for a day in the booth.

I kept my head down as I ran the gauntlet of begging vets. I tried to ignore the staring infected empty eye sockets, the scarred bodies and missing limbs of the decommissioned cyborg vets who did not have the cash to pay for civilian replacements for the enhancements that had been removed. Head down, collar up, I considered turning on my audio dampeners to filter their pleas out.

‘Not today, brothers,’ I muttered to myself as I strode by. It could just as easily have been me there had I not made special forces. The augmentations and the training I’d been given were just too expensive and bespoke to throw away on a human scrap heap like the other vets. I’d been canny enough to arrange a military contract that had not rendered me a lifelong slave, but even after my term was up they still had the right to call me back as a reserve. Despite the dishonourable discharge I was still on the books (though no one ever really came off) as part of the wild-goose-chasing XI units, but they were largely a joke.

There had once been a disastrous attempt at dumping ex-special forces types into space. This was cheaper than paying our paltry pensions and it meant we couldn’t go home and become really well trained and dangerous burdens on society. However, a change in policy meant we were still considered valuable enough to remain whole, even if that whole was mostly plastic and alloy. Of course all the most lethal stuff was locked down until they needed it.

I glanced down at the locks just behind the knuckles on each of my hands. There was another lock on the shoulder of my prosthetic right arm and I could always feel the inhibitor in one of my plugs at the base of my skull that dampened my wired reactions. In many ways the dampener was the worst. Reactions like I’d had when I’d been in the SAS made you feel like you were on a different plane of existence to the rest of pedestrian humanity. Giving that up had been hard. I still felt like I was walking through syrup sometimes.

Hamish looked after the booths. Hamish was revolting. He had a thick curly beard and a mass of naturally grown, curly, dirty, matted hair. He was naked, filthy and fat; eating some kind of greasy processed confectionery in the armoured cage from where he overlooked the sense booths. I tried hard to suppress my disgust at the man, whose foul odour I was managing to smell through armoured mesh. Nobody ever saw Hamish leave or sleep. He always seemed to be here. His bulk was such that he probably couldn’t leave if he wanted to.

‘Jake!’ Hamish cried enthusiastically. Instantly annoying me. I didn’t like the contraction of my name. ‘How long?’ he asked, wiping bits of the pastry on his bloated hairy torso. I held up the dirty paper euros.

‘A day please. My usual,’ I said with as much pleasantness as I could muster.

‘You sure? No nice virtual snuff orgy? Maybe you want to have sex with the pres? No? Usual it is. Let’s see the readies.’ I pushed the paper notes into the secure box. Hamish scanned them for authenticity, liquid explosives, contact poisons, surveillance and various other things before they slid through to his side. The sense pusher counted the notes, his greedy smile faltering as he did so. I felt panic rising within.

‘Uh Jakob…’ Hamish began.

‘What? What!’ I demanded. ‘There’s enough there!’ I shouted.

‘Guess you didn’t hear I’m putting my prices up. Not to worry. There’s enough here for half a day and some credit for your next trip.’

‘No!’ I said, unable to believe, or at least cope with what I was hearing. In my mind I ran through the numerous ways in which I could kill or cause pain to Hamish. Of course some of them meant I would have to touch him. I lifted my prosthetic arm to punch the armoured cage that protected him. I felt rather than saw the cage’s protective systems activate, weapons unfolding from the walls and ceiling to cover me.

‘Now, now, calm down,’ the still-smiling Hamish said in a conciliatory and patronising tone. ‘I was just joking; a day it is.’

‘Really fucking funny, Hamish,’ I muttered, lighting another cigarette. There was an ever-so-slight shake in my left hand, the one that was still flesh. ‘You do know what I used to do for a living, right?’ I snapped.

‘You and everyone else round here, pal. Booth twelve’s free.’ I turned and stalked into the sense arcade.

Inside was a long corridor lit with dim red lights, many of which were broken. On either side of the corridor were reinforced steel doors. I found booth number twelve and looked up at the lens before the door and gave Hamish the finger, so of course he made me wait another minute. Finally the steel door shot up. Inside, a vet minus both his arms, one of his legs a jury-rigged and botched-looking home prosthetic, was sitting on the foam mattress of the bunk. He was still plugged in though obviously not receiving. He ignored me.

‘C’mon, man. That was never two hours. My daughter sent me the money for this. It’s her combat pay! She fights to keep you safe… I fought to keep you safe from Them, you bastard!’ he screamed into the air. Hamish was as ever deaf to this.

‘You and me both, pal,’ I said and grabbed the vet with my prosthetic arm, my left arm removing the plug. Augmented muscle slung him out the door and across the corridor into the other wall. I tried to ignore the sound of a homemade prosthetic snapping. The metal door rapidly slid down, cutting off the sobbing. The booth was red plastic. It smelled strongly of semen; some users had no imagination. I lay down in the niche that formed the bunk, sinking into the cheap foam mattress. I reached behind my head and inserted the jack into one of my plugs.

I was gone, immersed in the usual, the program that Vicar had written for me. Subtle, beautiful, other-worldly (though not in a way that would induce horrors) music played as one by one my senses were deprived, as I divorced from the self. I faded away. I stopped existing.

Everything that was me, the pain of wounds inflicted and received, the terror inflicted and received, all that I’d seen and done drifted away in a sense of profound dislocation. The things that I didn’t think the human mind was supposed to deal with, acts committed in the war against Them, the genocidal alien other locked in perpetual conflict with humanity, were gone. All that was left was an unfeeling abstract floating in nothing.

And just like that I was yanked back. As ever it was too short but this time something was not right. I checked my internal clock, a mere two hours. Enough was enough. I was going to find a way to kill Hamish; he was taking the piss now. I pulled the jack out from the back of my neck and slid off the bunk towards the door, but it did not slide open. I hit the manual door switch but nothing happened. I was getting concerned. This was beginning to feel like some kind of burn.

‘Hamish, you’re just making things worse for yourself,’ I said evenly. Just the slightest hint of threat in my tone, assuming that Hamish was listening.

On my internal visual display the integral communications link was flashing. Opening it up formed a small split screen in the corner of my vision. I recognised the man on the video comms link, short dark hair neatly trimmed, suave features, a degree of refinement to an underlying feeling of malice and violence. A warm smile belied by the absence of feeling in two very pale blue eyes.

I tried my best to remain passive in the face of the comms icon of a man I hated, a man who’d tried very hard to kill me.

‘Sergeant Douglas,’ the man said. He sounded genuinely pleased to see me. His tones educated and cultured, pure upper class of a vintage old enough to remember a time when breeding actually mattered.

‘Go and fuck yourself. I’m not in the army any more. You and I have nothing to say to each other.’

‘Nonsense, Jakob, mutineer or not you’re still a reservist.’ Major George Rolleston said, smiling again. ‘We have a code eleven, you’ve been reactivated.’ I barely gave this a second’s thought. A code eleven. XI. Xenomorphic Infiltration.

‘A bullshit wild goose chase. Get someone else. Turn my program back on.’

‘Don’t be like that, Jakob. I recruited you especially. After all, who more than I knows your efficiency?’

‘Even if I agreed to be reactivated-’

‘Nobody’s giving you the choice, Sergeant,’ Rolleston interrupted smoothly, breaking the unwritten rule of special forces etiquette again and using my rank.

‘Even if I decide to be reactivated,’ I reiterated through the sub-vocalised equivalent of gritted teeth. ‘I won’t work with you, you piece of shit.’ Rolleston merely smiled.

‘But Jakob, both Josephine and I are looking forward to working with you again,’ Rolleston said, and there was the threat, I thought. Josephine Bran, Rolleston’s pet killer, Royal Marine sniper, SBS with Rolleston and then seconded to Special Operations Command, someone that the other operators feared. A pale, quiet, unassuming girl, a shy girl who enjoyed and excelled at killing far too much, they called her the Grey Lady. She was the perfect servant for men such as Rolleston.

‘You turned on your own men. You tried to dump them; they served you and then you tried to space them.’

‘Perfectly legal and as per my orders,’ Rolleston said and it was true: a vagary of interstellar and colonial law had meant that there was a loophole covering the wholesale murder of a government’s own troops. A loophole that had since been removed in the outcry that followed the British government’s attempt to alleviate the social problems caused by special forces vets.

‘You tried to kill me, you bastard!’ I spat at him, losing my temper. Suddenly the smile disappeared from the Major’s face.

‘And you led a mutiny, a court-martial offence for which you and that journalist should have been executed.’ Then the smile returned to Rolleston’s cold face. ‘That reminds me. Have you heard from Howard recently?’ Suddenly I was even more suspicious. My co-conspirator in the troopship mutiny that had saved our lives and the lives of other special forces and intelligence operators had disappeared shortly after Earth fall. All attempts to find the whereabouts of Mudge had turned up nothing. The last I’d heard from him he said he was trying to find Gregor MacDonald, another disappearance that Rolleston had been involved in.

‘What do you know?’ I demanded. Because Rolleston knew all right: he’d have done something to Mudge. He’d know what happened to Gregor, he knew it all, and he knew I knew. He’d string me along on hope to get me to do what he needed. His smile disappeared.

‘Let’s stop messing around, Sergeant.’ The door to the sense booth opened. ‘You have been reactivated. You are back on full pay, and if you track the XI and bring this matter to a successful conclusion I will award you a bonus sufficient to fund your addiction for a week.’ I stepped out of the booth and looked up and down the corridor, almost expecting to see Private Josephine Bran waiting for me, but the corridor was empty.

‘I though all this XI was bullshit,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think They stood a chance against our system defences let alone Earth’s.’

‘Can you see why we would want people to think that?’ Rolleston asked somewhat patronisingly. I found the idea that They could infiltrate Earth side somewhat disturbing. I really didn’t want to find myself fighting the same war again, except this time unpaid and in the streets of Dundee. A text/picture file appeared on my internal visual display. ‘This is what we know so far. Keep me up to date. Oh, and one other thing,’ the Major said, smiling. I did not respond. ‘We’ll unlock you, but keep the locks; you’ll need them again when this is over. Collect your weapons from your strongbox.’ With this Rolleston’s face disappeared.

There was a faintly audible clicking noise from my knuckles and shoulder. Smiling I looked down and picked the locks off like they were scabs. From thin slits just behind each knuckle four razor-sharp, nine-inch ceramic blades extended slowly, and then suddenly disappeared again at my mental command.

Next I reached up and opened the Velcro-secured concealed panel on the shoulder of my armoured raincoat. On silent servos the shoulder-mounted independent laser slid out and ran through its field of fire. A small screen appearing on my visual display showed what the weapon saw, superimposing a crosshair on where it would hit if it fired.

I lit a cigarette. I’d been putting off the best until last, afraid that they were not going to give me this, let me be this free. Taking a deep breath of smoke, I held it, reaching behind me for the restraining plug wired to my central nervous system inhibiting my boosted reactions. It came away in my hand and suddenly I was alive again. The world slowed down as I sped up, feeling like a razor cutting through a slow-moving and turgid reality.

I passed Hamish’s cage; Hamish was not in it. I walked out onto the rough planks of the jury-rigged catwalks that ran through the Rigs. I finished the cigarette and flicked it into the superstructure. My shoulder laser spun up, tracking it. There was the bang of exploding superheated air as a ruby-red light momentarily illuminated the corroded orange metal of the ancient oil rig. The cigarette butt ceased to exist.