War in Heaven

10

This was weird. Apparently they used to have houses just for tea. This wasn’t like the sort of brew-up I was used to, either in a foxhole or on the bonnet of a Land Rover with your mates on watch. It was taking a fuck of a lot longer for a start. But then we weren’t expecting to be torn apart by Them at any given moment. While we may have had a boiled sweet before a cuppa, we didn’t have fancy sweets to ‘prepare our palates’ either.

I’d like to have dismissed this all as bollocks but the programming was superb. It was the detail. The sweets tasted like sweets and good sweets. How had they coded that? I could smell the blossoms on the air, which was fresh and clean and maybe a little thin, like we were actually on a mountain in the virtual environment. We could smell the tea as it was being prepared. I could feel the rough texture of the straw mats through the silk of the dressing-gown thing I was wearing. I think it was called a kimono, and while I’d protested at having to wear it, even virtually, I don’t think I’d ever felt silk before. You had to look hard to see the edges of this fantasy.

A lot of time, effort and probably money had gone into this program. It made sense, I guess. Michihisa Nuiko was a chimera. She had been born severely disabled, but luckily for her chimerical technology and her own inherent piloting ability meant that she could still join the war effort. It must have been nice for her to be part of such an inclusive society. Everyone gets used.

She wasn’t talking about her war record much. In fact beyond being the single most polite person I’ve ever met, sort of an anti-Mudge, she wasn’t saying much of anything. Judging by the craft that the Yakuza set her up with, her record must have been pretty good, and judging by the type of job she was recommended for and was prepared to take, her career must have been on the sharp end. Itaki had put us on to her. Despite his trigger-happy people and the weird thing with having everyone cut to look like him, he’d proved to be an okay guy for a mobster and a pimp.

Pagan had been excited that the Yakuza had the vice franchise in Camp 12 because he had worked with them before. While most organised crime operations had to live up to their word to a degree, otherwise nobody would ever deal with them, Pagan was of the opinion that the Yakuza were the least likely to sell us out. As long as they were properly paid that is.

Nuiko lived in a womb-like life-support cocoon in an armoured compartment in the centre of the ship. We would never see that. All our interaction was through the beautifully crafted sense programs in her personalised net realm. Like the tea room made of lacquered wood and paper looking out over a dramatic snow-capped mountain vista.

Her ship was called Tetsuo Chou, which Pagan told me meant ‘steel butterfly’. It was a small, heavily modified system clipper, which are pretty much the fastest ships available outside the military. Nuiko’s backers had paid for an induction sail to be added for FTL travel. The streamlined, distended-teardrop shape was covered in green/black energy-dissipating acoustic tiles to lower its energy signature. The ship had top-of-the-line navigation systems to minimise the use of manoeuvring engines, which in turn would further lower its energy signature. Internal power was kept to a bare minimum as well, which meant a cold ship. Its electronic countermeasures system was also state of the art, making it very stealthy. Which was just what we needed, and virtual Nuiko hadn’t batted a virtual eyelid when we mentioned an OILO entry. I think she’d done orbital insertion before.

BPIC decided not to slave us in the end. Partly because Itaki vouched for us, partly because we were fully armed by the time they regained control of Freetown 12, but mainly because they had their own problems. Itaki’s people had convinced enough ships’ captains to let the part of God that lived in their systems join the fight against Demiurge and Demiurge had finally been destroyed.

There had only been the eight Vucari and one had been destroyed by automated security systems while sabotaging the fusion plant. They’d come in on a long-range strike craft, the same one they’d left on when they returned to Sirius on a similar job to ours, I guessed. The LRSC had come back radically different, however.

When we finally managed to break into the craft we found that the living space had been radically reduced. It was a rats’ nest where the Vucari must have been crammed together. The rest of the ship was full of a honeycomb-like substance that looked very similar to Them biotech. This was where the empowered Demiurge had been stored and was the increased memory and processing power that had given God so much trouble.

We found Bataar, the Vucari hacker. He seemed to have merged with the biotech material. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his plugs and penetrated his ears. Much of his body was buried deep in it. If there were pilots in there I guessed something similar had happened to them.

At the same time as Freetown 12 was hit all the other Freetown Camps and the asteroid cities suffered similar attacks. All from returning special forces groups sent to disrupt and gather information in Black-Squadron-held territory. All of them supported by Demiurge.

Some of the other Freetown Camps hadn’t been as lucky as 12. Over a dozen of them had been ‘sanitised’, as BPIC put it. As had Hygeia. I don’t know why God hadn’t been able to stop Demiurge in a city that size — perhaps Rolleston had sent larger ships with more space for Demiurge — but more than two hundred thousand people had died in the subsequent plasma bombardment from BPIC and system patrol ships. Two hundred thousand. It was just a number. A number heated by liquid fire that will burn in space and then cool in vacuum. I didn’t see the ballet of all those bodies blown into the cold night. The figure was so abstract I struggled to feel the anger I should have.

While the Black Squadrons had earned themselves another enemy in BPIC, they had managed to cripple the logistical support of the mining operations in the Belt. In doing so they had of course denied those resources to Earth. What we couldn’t work out was why had all those people turned. Why had the Vucari gone over to Rolleston? The most obvious explanation was that they had been slaved. If so it was a new and more sophisticated form of slaving because they’d had no slave jacks in their plugs and they didn’t seem to suffer the drop-off in performance than comes with slaveware.

Once the ritual part of the tea ceremony was over and we could converse normally Mudge had suggested brainwashing. Then he’d explained the concept. It was basically a form of psychological coercion to do what you’re told. We called it basic training in the army. Pagan had suggested that it was never as total or as effective as it had seemed on the Vucari.

‘Possession?’ I asked as Nuiko ladled tea from an iron pot set in a hole in the ground. Even serving the tea seemed complex. Nuiko was small, slender, pale, and wearing a simple dark kimono. Her features were a composed expressionless mask. I found this faintly disconcerting. I also didn’t like that she never met my eyes, particularly as I was wearing my Sunday-best icon, which Morag had made for me. The one where I had my natural eyes, or what Morag thought they should look like.

‘And this from someone with no faith,’ Pagan scoffed. He was in his Druidical icon, except that he too wore a kimono like the rest of us. The kimonos were a piece of code gifted to us by Nuiko. It was code that had been thoroughly vetted by Morag and Pagan before it got anywhere near us.

‘It happens,’ Morag said. Presumably irritated at having to back me up. She too wore a kimono and I was relieved that she was wearing her Maiden of Flowers icon out of respect for our host rather than the Black Annis. I didn’t like the Black Annis icon and I didn’t want to meet it while Morag was still so angry at me. That said, I hadn’t forgotten that Morag could kill me in here. I was only slightly worried that the tea might contain a piece of biofeedback poison code. Still it tasted nice when we finally were allowed to taste it and had been quiet long enough for our conversation to be proper.

‘So I’ve heard,’ Pagan said, smiling patronisingly. ‘To anybody you’ve known?’

‘Well no,’ Morag said, suddenly unsure of herself.

‘It’s a myth,’ Mudge said. His icon looked like himself without augmentation. I think it was more of Morag’s work. He’d only been allowed into the tea room sanctum after he’d promised Pagan that he’d behave.

‘Like the spirits in the net?’ I asked, bowing slightly to Nuiko, like Pagan had taught us, as she poured me some more tea. Pagan started to answer. ‘I’ve seen an exorcism,’ I said, forestalling his reply.

‘Bullshit,’ Mudge said and then studiously ignored Pagan’s glare of disapproval.

‘In Fintry, Vicar did it.’

‘Very convincing theatre, I’ve no doubt,’ Pagan said. For someone who wanted us to behave in here he seemed to be desperate to get slapped.

‘Maybe, but the guy was a howling lunatic, and according to friends and kin he was acting differently and knew stuff he shouldn’t. Vicar plugged himself into the guy. There was lots of screaming for someone who was supposed to be trancing, some thrashing around, a biofeedback kicking that Vicar swears hadn’t been inflicted by him, and then the guy was better,’ I finished.

‘There could be any number of-’ Pagan started.

‘Is it just the idea of this Demiurge possessing people that scares you badly?’ Merle asked. His voice was a deep rich baritone. It was also cold and emotionless.

I wasn’t sure I liked this guy. All he’d done since we’d come on board was eat the high-calorie combat rations we’d brought with us and exercise. Mudge had asked him how he’d managed to retain any degree of fitness while locked in the hole. Isometrics, Merle had told him. He did not have much time to get combat-ready after his imprisonment. Whatever we could say about him, he certainly seemed driven.

I wasn’t sure if Cat and him had sorted out their differences but I had come across them having a private conversation jacked into each other. Merle, like Cat, was wearing an off-the-shelf icon. The kimonos hung shapelessly off both of them.

‘No, I don’t like the idea, do you?’ Pagan asked, somewhat testily.

‘I don’t like any of this-’ Merle began.

‘Prefer to be in your hole?’ Mudge asked.

‘But I think we need to face up to what that means in terms of security,’ he said, glancing over at Nuiko. It was her house. We were in FTL; there was no one for her or God, who was in the Tetsuo Chou ’s systems, to tell out here. I’d agreed with Pagan’s call on that. Also it wasn’t as if she knew what we were going to be doing on the ground because we didn’t know ourselves. ‘It means that if any of us are taken we’re completely compromised and quickly.’

‘So we don’t get taken alive?’ Mudge said. He was smiling. I think going out in flash of glory was beginning to appeal to him.

‘You ready to kill any of us who gets captured?’ Merle asked.

‘Okay, you’ve proved how hard core you are. Let’s change the subject,’ I said, even though I knew he had a point.

‘Problem won’t go away,’ Merle said.

‘He’s right,’ Cat agreed. Though, like Morag agreeing with me, I think this cost her some.

‘I am prepared to kill any of us who gets captured,’ I said, ‘because I’ve seen the alternative. The people we killed used to be friends of mine.’ Except I knew I could never pull the trigger on Morag. I reflected that she had no such qualms, which was good. I didn’t want to find myself chewing down on a pile of corpses wearing someone else’s face. It didn’t seem dignified or hygienic.

‘How’d you get out of that hole anyway?’ Mudge asked. He was taking a lot of interest in our latest addition.

‘When the warewolf opened up the oubliette I just ran between its legs,’ Merle answered.

‘Simple as that?’ I asked.

‘Every second I’d been in that hole was preparation for that moment,’ he answered.

The problem was that we hadn’t had the chance to hang around and find out what was going on with the Vucari, why they’d done what they’d done. We’d had God relay the information of what we’d seen back to Earth, but that was the best we could do. Then we’d left on the Tetsuo Chou as quickly as we could, though if this was the opening move in the attack on Earth then for all we knew we could be passing Lalande’s colonial fleet in the night at FTL.

Merle was right, I had to admit. Everyone talks eventually, and eventually would become quickly if they used sense interrogation techniques because they could distend time. Even then we still had time. If Demiurge or whatever could actually possess then we had no time. If someone was taken that meant total compromise. That meant nobody went home, we just ran. So we needed to make sure that nobody got captured. That meant a suicide solution, which included a kill switch for a firestorm program in our internal electronic memories. More importantly it meant that we needed to be prepared to kill each other if we saw someone going down and we had the opportunity. Fighting Them was hard but less complicated. I missed Their simplicity.

Security-wise things had relaxed a little because we were self-contained. We would be keeping God out of planning as much as possible, but even he would have nobody to tell as he would not try and communicate with any Demiurge-infected system. Nuiko we would tell what she needed to know for her part of the job. Beyond that we would keep her in the dark as well. As much for her own good as ours. Talking to Pagan, though, I got the feeling that she would fly the Tetsuo Chou into the heart of a sun before she would allow herself to be compromised by the Black Squadrons.

My problem with Nuiko was that she was new and I didn’t understand her. Merle I didn’t trust but I had a frame of reference for him. Despite his behaviour he wasn’t a million miles removed from us. But Nuiko’s reserve was about a hundred times more extreme than your average English person’s. She was very private and apparently very respectful of our privacy, even though we were quite literally guests in her world. A lot of her behaviour seemed very ritualistic — the past, if it was even a real past, seemed important to her. To me she seemed to be fighting to keep something alive. Something I didn’t understand. I guess that her being a chimera didn’t aid my understanding. To all intents and purposes I was trying to relate to a machine, but she just seemed so… alien.

And then she withdrew. Pagan watched her and I watched Pagan as she took small steps to a sliding wood-and-paper panel and slid it shut behind her. This symbolised her leaving the closed system. In the real world we were all sitting cross-legged on crates facing each other, plugged into a memory cube. The jack that connected Nuiko was mounted on a cable snake, which would have disengaged from the memory cube and would be snaking its way back towards the armoured cocoon that protected our pilot. The memory cube held a downloaded copy of the tea house environment. Another gift from Nuiko. All these gifts made me nervous, but I wasn’t looking after the information security aspect of the operation.

Pagan and Morag started rechecking the security. Glyphs of light appeared in front of them, throwing shadows over their respective icons’ features. I took the opportunity to stand up and pace over to the wooden veranda. It looked out onto an ornamental garden of stone and water features. Past the garden was the stunning mountain vista. The tea house was part of some kind of castle complex built high into the side of a mountain. The fact that I could enjoy the mountain air, seemingly feel it cold and thin in my lungs, was sublime.

The holographic display hovering over the low lacquered wooden table took me out of the illusion and reminded me where I was and what I was doing.

‘This secure?’ Merle asked.

‘As anything is any more,’ Pagan told him. ‘Are you in or not?’

‘I’m not happy to be here, but it’s an improvement. Besides -’ he looked at Cat ‘- my sister has provided me with some very compelling reasons to help. Not least of which is a fuckload of money.’

‘Just so you know we’re probably not coming back,’ Pagan told him. ‘And don’t swear.’ I glanced over at him before turning back to Merle.

‘Want to share those compelling reasons?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Merle told me flatly. ‘Besides, I know the lie of the land. Things go to shit, I reckon I can disappear.’

‘I told you, don’t swear,’ Pagan said. I don’t think he liked Merle but there was something else here as well.

‘Fuck, Pagan, she’s not even in the fucking room,’ Mudge said, smiling.

‘I know. It’s just-’

‘It doesn’t seem right,’ I said. Pagan nodded. The language, the briefing, it was going to war with the environment. We needed our moments of fantasy. ‘And that’s it,’ I said with finality. They all looked at me expectantly.

‘I’ll bite. What’s it?’ Mudge finally asked.

‘From now on we’re not trying to piss each other off. We’re not trying to score points.’ I looked over at Merle. ‘We don’t need the strong silent hard men-’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Morag and Mudge said in unison.

I bit down the flash of irritation and jealousy. She had more than the right to try and make me feel that way.

‘If we don’t stop trying to pull each other apart then I will sabotage the OILO cocoons myself and we’ll sit out the war. Okay?’

‘Plus you won’t have to make the jump?’ Pagan said, but he was smiling.

I nodded.

‘No offence, man, but you’re part of the problem,’ Cat said. I glanced over at Morag, or rather the Maiden of Flowers that Morag was wearing. She was studiously looking elsewhere.

‘I think we all are, but you’re right. It’s not going to get in the way. We’ll either deal with it or ignore it effectively, or the mission won’t be happening at all.’

The Maiden of Flowers’ head snapped round to look at me. I thought she was about to argue. Maybe it sounded too much like I was making decisions for her, which people had been doing all her life. All I thought I was doing was stating our only two real options for the situation we were in. I think she reached that conclusion as well and nodded.

‘This soap opera’s a joke, right?’ Merle asked.

‘You can pack that in as well. I realise you don’t know us so you’ve got to wipe your cock in our faces so we know you’re not a victim. We get it. You’re hard core, so you can stop now. Also any problems you have with your sister, resolve them or leave them until after.’

He stared at me, but his icon was off the shelf and it didn’t have the same effect that being stared at by his weirdly intense brown eye implants would have had.

‘This mission being scrubbed is not the problem for me that it is for you,’ he told us.

‘Fine. Either you’re in or out. You’re out, you can rattle around in here until we’re finished.’

‘Bullshit,’ Merle said. Pagan’s icon seemed to twitch. ‘You’d put a bullet in my head.’

‘Compelling reasons. If you’re in, you play nicely.’

He gave what I’d said some thought and then nodded. The guy was a prima donna, I decided. He was too used to doing ops on his own.

‘Anyone who has a problem with Mudge’s pharmaceutical recreations can mind their own business,’ I said.

Mudge grinned but Cat and Pagan protested.

I continued, ‘Mudge, your hobby gets in the way, you run out and have a nasty withdrawal, or for whatever reason can’t keep up then you get left behind. If it’s a dodgy situation and it looks like you’ll get compromised I’ll shoot you myself.’

‘You are so masterful,’ Mudge said acidly.

I could tell he was about to go off on me. Come on, Mudge, I urged silently. You’re not stupid. You know I’ve faith in you. This has to be said. This is for the audience. I watched Mudge’s icon swallow. Morag’s programming was superb. I was betting that the tranced-in Mudge had done that back in the meat world. Mudge seemed to master his anger and nodded.

‘While we’re on the subject, what were you doing back in Trace’s office?’ I asked.

‘What? The guy was an arsehole?’ Mudge said.

‘So? We’ve met arseholes before.’

‘And I always deal with them like that.’ He was sounding defensive now.

‘You almost got us killed,’ Cat said angrily before turning to me. ‘And this is the point. I’m sure he’s a party guy but the drugs in his system compel him to make bad decisions, make him overconfident.’

‘That’s really not the drugs,’ I told her. It was meant to be flippant but in retrospect who knew? It was impossible to separate who Mudge was from the drugs. I’d only ever seen him straight once. That was in Maw City and he’d been sick from withdrawal.

‘Sometimes you’ve just got to shit in your hand and throw it at them,’ Mudge said. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. ‘It turned out all right.’

I was starting to get angry now. ‘It turned out all right because Morag was seriously on the ball. Everything we knew about the situation suggested that hacking their systems wasn’t an option. If she hadn’t noticed-’

‘And pulled off the greatest hack ever,’ Cat said.

‘Then we would have been dead,’ I finished.

‘We’ve all got to go sometime. If you’re scared then get another line of work,’ Mudge said.

Tried that, I thought.

‘Don’t worry, Mudge. We’ll get fucking killed soon enough but let’s at least try first, okay?’ I said angrily.

‘Good speech — raises the morale,’ Merle said dryly.

‘And when did you start arguing with me when we’re in the middle of a job?!’ I demanded, thinking back to the brothel.

‘You left me behind!’ Mudge shouted. I think that had really hurt him. ‘I don’t have to do what you say — we’re not in the army now!’

‘You never were!’ I shouted back at him.

‘So much for our mountain idyll,’ Pagan muttered.

‘Whatever it is, rein it in,’ I told Mudge. ‘Because I mean it: if you endanger this mission, you endanger the rest of us.’

‘What, you’ll shoot me? You are so fucking butch right now,’ he spat.

‘If you can’t convince me that you’re not a liability then I’ll leave you behind,’ I told him evenly.

Morag’s programming was superb. It picked up on just how hurt Mudge was.

‘Fucking whatever. I’m good. I’ll play nicely with the other children.’ He was all but sulking. He was pissed off and defensive because I think he knew that we were right.

‘These are just words,’ Merle said, testing the boundaries.

‘The only person in this room I’m not sure will live up to their words is you,’ I told him, met his look and held it. It was difficult to outstare a cheap icon as they weren’t sophisticated enough to blink.

‘So, macho posturing aside, what are we doing out here?’ Cat asked. She provided the distraction for both of us to look away with a degree of dignity. So I told myself.

‘Operation Ungentlemanly Warfare,’ Pagan said.

‘We have a name, how exciting,’ Mudge said. I glared at him. ‘Oh lighten up.’

‘Ungentlemanly is the information part of the operation run by me. Warfare is the physical security element run by Jakob.’

‘What’s our objective?’ Merle asked. I was pleased that he said ‘our’.

‘Twofold. First Morag and I want to hack Demiurge. We need to do that without being noticed. We need to do it to find the plans for the attack on the Sol system and we also need to find a way to defeat Demiurge.’

‘Can you even do that yet?’ Cat asked. ‘I thought Demiurge was like God, only worse.’

Pagan was looking evasive.

‘Don’t piss about, Pagan,’ I told him.

‘Not yet. We have a few advantages and some avenues of research we’re following up,’ he said. I hoped they had something a bit more concrete than that Pais Badarn Beisrydd bullshit.

‘So let’s say you somehow manage to hack this scary AI…’ Merle began.

‘Its not an AI-’ Morag started.

‘So what?’ Merle cut across her.

We all stared at him, except Pagan.

‘You mean, what do we do with the information?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, I can see we infiltrate with OILO, which might not be as easy as you think, but what’s your exit strategy?’

‘We don’t have one,’ Pagan told him.

‘Then you’re wasting your time,’ Merle said.

‘Nuiko has been paid to stay in proximity to Lalande 2 while we’re planetside. She’ll be at certain orbits at certain times for the first three weeks. Morag and myself will have the co-ordinates and the times. When we get the information we need-’

‘If,’ Merle interrupted again.

‘Then we use a tight beam uplink to transmit data packets to the Tetsuo Chou.’

That made sense. Unless the Black Squadrons could directly transpose something between the uplink transmitter and the Tetsuo Chou then they had no way of intercepting the information. Presumably three weeks was a function of the clipper’s logistics.

‘And if we don’t manage this in the first three weeks?’ I asked.

‘Then it’s a seventeen-day round trip plus another day for outfitting before she returns for another three weeks. That’ll be her last trip,’ Pagan told us.

‘If she’s not intercepted,’ Merle said.

‘Her risks are no different from ours,’ I said.

I noticed that Pagan looked troubled.

‘Except that she’s a spaceship!’ Mudge cried with mock enthusiasm, his apparent new leaf now at an end.

‘Exfiltration?’ Merle asked.

‘No such thing,’ I told him. ‘Either the war ends and we get to go home, or we wait for some as yet unforeseen opportunity.’

‘And?’ Mudge suddenly asked.

Pagan looked confused. ‘And what?’

‘And Rolleston and Cronin?’

‘Demiurge is our main priority,’ Pagan replied.

‘We go after them if the opportunity presents itself,’ I said.

‘They’re not a priority?’ Mudge asked.

‘They’ve got a number of planets and a lot of space they could hide in,’ Cat said.

‘Vicar seemed to think that there was a good chance they’re on Lalande 2, some place called the Citadel,’ I told them. Because its where Satan has his throne, whatever that meant.

‘There’s maybe a slightly higher chance than good that they are on Lalande 2,’ Pagan said. Glyphs shimmered in the air in front of him and a holographic display came to life showing a three-dimensional pictographic representation of a lot of information.

‘What’s all that?’ Mudge asked.

‘Its all the info in Limbo,’ Pagan said. ‘I stole it. It was weird, almost like Sharcroft had forgot he’d employed hackers. And yes, Mudge, if we live then you can have it all. Though I’m going to find a way to get God into their secure network.’

Mudge and I stared at him. Morag was just smiling. I could tell Pagan was pleased with himself but trying to appear nonchalant.

‘This is all the information on the Cabal and the Squadrons?’ I asked, suddenly feeling a little more optimistic.

‘All that wasn’t purged,’ Pagan said. He brought one file to the fore and seemed to explode it. Text info scrawled down the holographic display, as did a series of architectural schematics that formed a three-dimensional model of what seemed to be a heavily fortified building. It looked a little like a small-scale military arcology.

‘That can’t be right,’ I said. ‘It’s made of ice.’

‘Lalande ice,’ Merle said. ‘The pressures exerted on it make it very dense. It’s harder than reinforced concrete. It’s a bitch to cut, even with industrial lasers. That’s the Citadel,’ he said. Pagan was nodding.

‘Chewed out of one of the salt-acid glaciers with microbes. It’s in the New Zealand settlement zone of the Twilight Strip, obviously close to Nightside. Despite being in New Zealand territory and despite there officially being no British presence on Lalande, this is a joint Defence Evaluation and Research Agency and CIA Directorate of Science and Technology operation.’

I wasn’t sure I was following Pagan.

‘So?’ Mudge asked.

‘It’s a Cabal front,’ Merle said.

Now we were all looking at him.

‘You knew?’ Morag asked.

Merle shrugged. ‘Just putting the dots together.’

‘He’s right. According to Sharcroft, the Cabal, which didn’t even really seem to think of itself as a conspiracy, preferred to be as decentralised as possible. Most of their meetings were virtual and took place in highly secure sanctums. After the Atlantis base the Citadel was their main facility. It was their largest and it ran Themtech research. In fact it had been doing this before the Atlantis facility because they had wanted somewhere secure and off the beaten track,’ Pagan told us.

‘It’s not that far from Moa City,’ Merle said. He was sounding more interested despite himself. ‘But that place is hard, man. I mean the security’s some of the heaviest I’ve ever seen. I had some serious clearance but I never got very far inside. If you’re going in there then you’d best have a good reason.’

‘What sort of research?’ I asked. I found myself suddenly angry. I think Pagan realised that.

‘Them biotech, maybe some transgenic,’ he said. His icon wouldn’t meet my eyes.

‘Transgenic? Hybridisation?’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, on animals.’

‘On people?’ I demanded. I was angry but not at Pagan. Pagan nodded.

‘Does that mean more people like Gregor?’ Morag asked. I think she sounded a little afraid.

‘Potentially a lot more,’ Pagan said. ‘But earlier proto-versions.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ Mudge said.

‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ Pagan said. He was right. ‘Besides, I don’t think they’ll be as formidable as the current iteration. You know, the ones like Rolleston.’

He was also right about that. If they were all like Rolleston then I wasn’t even sure how we were going to kill them. There was some muttering.

‘We got a reason to go in there?’ Merle asked. He was trying to nod at the image of the Citadel but I don’t think his icon was co-operating.

‘I don’t know,’ Pagan said. ‘There’s evidence -’ he brought up some more information that looked like computer system schematics ‘- of an internal sub-system which the truly paranoid could use to hide information and develop plans.’

‘So you have to get in and out of that without being noticed and hack an unhackable AI? Seems simple,’ Merle said.

‘We’re going to try and find an easier way.’ Pagan sounded a little exasperated.

‘We’ve done really stupid things before,’ Mudge said.

‘I know. I saw the highlights. Look, it sounds like we could spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for you guys to develop software.’

I shook my head. ‘If it’s not going our way then we’ve got a whole list of secondary objectives we can go for depending on the situation on the ground.’

‘Under it,’ Cat said. Nobody lived on the surface in Lalande.

‘Intelligence-gathering, getting the truth out, assassination and sabotage, which is what Sharcroft thinks we’re doing,’ said Pagan.

‘He doesn’t know?’ I asked.

‘About wanting to hack Demiurge? He might guess we want to, but he doesn’t know that we may be close to it being a realistic option.’

‘He just thinks we’ll be causing trouble? Going after their infrastructure?’ Merle asked.

‘But that means killing a lot of innocent people,’ I said, meaning all the people who would quite reasonably have been taken in by the Squadrons’ versions of events. I thought back to Vladimir.

‘Can’t we shoot to wound?’ Morag said weakly. The others looked uncomfortable. It wasn’t an option and I think she knew it. You shoot someone, especially someone augmented, you had to make sure they were dead or they were just going to get up and shoot you back.

‘You’d all best come to terms with killing anyone who gets in our way,’ Merle said. ‘Otherwise you’ll get us killed.’

‘We’ll do it, but we don’t have to like it,’ I said.

It was the same as any other human war, I guessed. People who never reached the front line made the decisions and got people like us to go and kill each other.

‘If we go after the infrastructure,’ Pagan continued, ‘the Citadel would be a valid target.’

‘Why?’ Mudge asked.

‘Because if it’s a biotech facility it could be used to augment more of the Squadron’s people to become like Rolleston,’ I told him.

‘Hitting that place will not be easy,’ Merle said somewhat redundantly.

‘Harder than making whipped cream by sitting in a giant bowl of milk with a whisk up your arse?’ Mudge asked.

I turned to stare at him, Merle ignored him and Pagan just sighed.

‘Also we should try and link with resistance fighters if there are any…’ the ageing hacker said, trying to continue.

‘There will be,’ Merle said.

‘The Black Squadrons will tell them we’re the bad guys,’ Morag pointed out.

‘You don’t know these people. I’ve dealt with the Cabal, though I didn’t know it then. The whole reason they do what they do is because they’re control freaks. They may control the info but they’ll try to push people around. Those people, especially in the New Zealand settled zones, will push back.’ What Merle was telling us was thin but it was also the closest thing we’d heard to good news throughout this briefing. ‘A lot of this seems to be make-it-up-as-we-go-along-once-we-hit-the-ground.’

‘We’re jumping blind. Never been in the army?’ I asked.

‘Marines and air force mainly.’

‘Rannu’ll tell us more when we meet. Rendezvous with him,’ Morag said. I hoped that would happen as well but it sounded naive even to my ears.

‘That’s pretty risky, Morag,’ Cat said. Pagan had set up rendezvous points and times with Rannu. ‘It looks like a lot of the initial missions were compromised.’

‘Maybe, but Rannu’s good,’ Morag said, trying to keep the hope out of her voice.

‘We check,’ I said. We owed him that. I owed him that. I’d left Gregor too long. Merle and Cat protested. ‘Carefully,’ I added.

‘You’ve done a lot of questioning, Cabal-boy,’ Mudge said. ‘What are you bringing?’

Merle managed to turn his shit icon’s head and stare at him for a while. Then the icon smiled. It looked more like a grimace.

‘Oh I’m the native guide. I know the land. A large network of contacts, many of whom will have been compromised, some of whom I just can’t see co-operating, but if they’ve been slaved then who knows.’

‘That it? Well I’m fucking impressed. Guess you were worth the trouble,’ Mudge said dismissively. There was something I was missing in this conversation. I also couldn’t work out why Morag was smiling.

‘Also Cemetery Wind set up a series of caches all over the Twilight Strip.’ Merle tapped his head. ‘I know where all the goodies are hidden.’ This was our second piece of good news. There was only so much gear we were going to be able to jump with.

‘Why are they doing this?’ Morag asked. I sensed her naivety was not doing her any favours in Merle’s eyes.

‘Its just power and greed, same as it ever was,’ I said.

‘I get that,’ she said sharply. ‘But that was the Cabal, right? Why does Rolleston suddenly want to be god-emperor of the universe? Doesn’t it seem a little… I don’t know, like a viz story or something?’

Actually she had a point. Rolleston had always fitted my idea of the good servant. Suddenly he wanted to be a dictator.

‘Maybe it’s all on Cronin?’ I suggested, now less sure she was being naive.

‘I think they really believe that they know better,’ Pagan said. ‘That the strong have the right to rule. They’re true believers, fanatics.’

As he spoke glyphs were appearing and disappearing in front of him as he scrolled though the information on the holographic display. He found what he was looking for and opened the file. At first it was a lot of scientific-looking stuff, equations and chemical signs, that sort of thing. I was irritated with him. He knew this would mean nothing to us. What was he doing — trying to highlight our ignorance? Then I realised that I was looking at an incomplete, partially corrupted and highly classified personnel file. It was Rolleston’s. I looked at his birth date. He was more than ninety years old.

‘Fuck,’ Mudge said. ‘You’d think he’d have got higher than major.’

‘If he’d got higher than major then he wouldn’t be so hands on. He wouldn’t get the chance to fuck people up himself,’ I said as I tried to concentrate on the information in front of me.

He had been an exemplary officer in the Royal Marine Commandos and then the SBS. Then even shadier black ops stuff. I could see why the Cabal had chosen him. It seemed like no matter how hard the objective was he got it done, but there was a lot of information missing. Like everything before the marines.

As far as I could tell, though much of it was above my head, his longevity was down to early applications of Themtech. As the Cabal had refined their knowledge of Themtech they had continued to upgrade him. It seemed that he was a test bed for processes they were too frightened to try themselves, like Gregor but not so extensive, at least not initially. In fact Gregor had been the big breakthrough that had resulted in Rolleston’s current abilities. Even on Sirius he had been a bioborg.

‘Okay, other than the age we pretty much knew all this,’ I said.

‘No,’ Pagan said. ‘You’re not getting it.’ I so enjoyed being told I was stupid. ‘For dirty stuff Rolleston was the Cabal’s go-to guy.’ I winced at the Americanism. ‘For the other stuff it was Cronin, who has also been heavily augmented, though I suspect in different ways.’

‘We’d assumed as much. So?’

‘They were designed for this. Rolleston’s designed for conflict resolution, no matter what.’

‘So?’ I was starting to get irritated with this now.

‘Rolleston was designed to be able to run an entire military for the Cabal and Cronin is designed to be a one-man civilian government.’

I still didn’t see what he was getting at.

‘You mean they’re doing this because they’re programmed to?’ Morag asked.

‘A little more complicated and subtle than that, but yes.’

‘For masters that don’t exist any more?’ Mudge asked.

Pagan nodded. ‘Yes, but I think it’s more that they are programmed to think that they have the right to rule. More importantly, I don’t think they think like us any more, or rather they have different parameters for their thoughts.’

‘They live in a different world?’ Morag asked.

‘In a way. I’m guessing that for them there is no other course of action than the one they’re on.’

‘Which is weird and fucked up but does it help us?’ I asked.

‘All information helps. We need insight into our enemy, after all. But you’re right — I think we’ve got more pressing matters to worry about.’

Then something occurred to me. ‘What about the Grey Lady?’

Pagan shook his head. ‘Couple of references but nothing,’ he said. I wasn’t sure why, but that bothered me more.

We spent the next few hours discussing our hazy objectives, our total lack of useful intelligence and our not being able to plan until we knew more.

‘Okay,’ I finally said as I slid, a little too comfortably, into my NCO role. ‘All prep is done and we are packed and ready to jump by nineteen hundred Zulu on day seven. Yeah?’

‘It’s an eight-and-a-half-day trip,’ Mudge grumbled. He was grumbling because he was supposed to. Soldiers grumbled. Even if he was a journalist, Mudge had a lot to grumble about.

‘We’re going to get properly drunk on the seventh night,’ I said. Pagan groaned and shook his head. Mudge and Morag were grinning. ‘Don’t worry Pagan. We’ll behave, to a degree.’ He nodded, knowing it was pointless to argue. ‘That gives us day eight to recover and the final half a day to go over everything again and do any final prep,’ I finished. It gave us something to look forward to and we didn’t know when we’d next have the chance.

A day, an entire day of my life, one I’ll never get back, just spraying corrosion-resistant stuff on all our gear. Then Merle checked it and then we sprayed it again. Despite the masks, I would be tasting and smelling it for the next few days. We even got a warning from Nuiko because we were getting close to overloading the atmosphere scrubbers.

I spent most of the time going over all the information that Pagan had stolen. I superimposed it over my sight in my IVD or converted it to audio. The fact was we could prepare and plan as much as we wanted but we wouldn’t know what was going on until we hit the ground. The Demiurge-enforced comms blackout was crippling us. Whereas God’s open nature was making Earth more vulnerable.

I reviewed the information on Rolleston and what little we had on Cronin and the Themtech-enhanced soldiers of the Black Squadrons. Much of the biotech stuff went over my head but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d made themselves aliens. The Black Squadrons had finally managed to become the demons we’d always thought They were.

I thought about what Pagan had said about them thinking differently, though he’d shied away from using the word programmed. Did that make a difference? Were they victims as well? I glanced over to where Morag was spraying her kit. She’d barely spoken to me since we got on board. Even if they were victims you still have choices to make. I didn’t like the ones they’d made. I was still going to hate them. It would help me do the job.

The Tetsuo Chou, as a chimerical vessel, was a lot more open-plan than most ships I’d been on. It was basically a heavily armoured central compartment where Nuiko lived surrounded by a lot of cargo space. The engine room was down a small corridor separate from the rest of the ship. Nuiko controlled three remotes to do the hands-on work elsewhere in the ship. They were crab-like and reminded me of some of the images Pagan had shown us of ancient Japan. Mudge had described them as samurai robot crabs and being on the ship as like being inside the shell of a giant turtle. Once he’d shown me what a turtle looked like, I had to agree with him.

With human cargo Nuiko had had her servitors add a portable life-support unit to the cargo compartment. All our gear went in and we slept on a series of temporary platforms connected by catwalks that had been set up for the trip. We lived in compartments made of flimsy plastic walls bolted together. The cludgy, or head as it was called on ships, had been installed in the engine room. All and all I’d had worse billets.

Most of the room was taken up by the seed-pod-like OILO cocoons, tanks of acceleration gel and the large parachute rigs we were going to need to counteract Lalande 2’s heavy gravity. In many ways using the OILO cocoons for a flight-capable exo-armour drop would have been preferable but we just didn’t have the logistical support for long-term operations, particularly in a corrosive environment. So we were doing it the old-fashioned and hard way.

Mudge hadn’t been particularly talkative and seemed to be keeping his drug use to more acceptable levels. He was obviously pissed off with me. I decided to speak to him first. I reckoned he’d be the easiest bridge to mend.

I headed along to his makeshift cabin. The only noise was the ring of my combat boots on the metal grid of the walkway and the omnipresent hum of the spaceship’s power plant. I’d seen men and woman with too much metal in them driven mad by that constant hum. I’d made friends with the noise a long time ago. After all you couldn’t get away from it. Now, as much as I didn’t like space travel, I found the noise comforting.

I passed Morag, who was sitting on the edge of a catwalk dangling her legs between gaps in the containers below. She looked as if she was doing nothing but was probably going over something on her IVD. Part of her face was covered in medgel, as was mine. Merle had used a knitter and accelerant on her broken leg and then made a cast out of medgel and connected it to a medpak to drive it. Two days in she was hobbling about. Merle reckoned she’d have most of her mobility by the time we got there. She ignored me as I passed and knocked on the door to Mudge’s compartment.

‘I think he’s going over some stuff with Merle,’ Morag said. The sound of her voice surprised me. I glanced down at her but she was looking the other way.

‘Thanks,’ I said and moved down to Merle’s compartment, which wasn’t much further on, and knocked. There was no answer.

‘They’re discussing security protocols and have probably got a white-noise generator up,’ she called.

I should have known. She was right: they were very considerately using a white-noise generator — must have been Merle’s idea. They were not however discussing security protocols. I walked straight in on the pair of them.

‘Motherfucker!’ Merle shouted at me.

‘Can’t you fucking knock, dude!’ Mudge protested.

‘I’m… I’m sorry,’ I said, not sure what to do.

‘Out!’ Merle screamed at me. Oh yeah, that’s what I was supposed to do. I backed out of Merle’s compartment as quickly as I could and closed the door. Morag was lying on the catwalk convulsing with laughter.

‘That’s childish, Morag.’

She just laughed at me.

‘You could probably walk in on Pagan as well,’ she said, nodding towards his compartment once she’d managed to control herself.

‘Really? With who? Cat?!’ I asked as I slowly turned into a teenaged girl.

Cat and Pagan seemed an odd mix. Then again there had been Jess back in the Avenues. Besides, Morag was talking to me and I wanted it to last as long as it could.

‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ Cat said from out in the crates somewhere. She walked forward into the light. She’d obviously been working out. She clearly felt she needed to make her presence known before someone said something she didn’t want to hear.

‘Who then?’ I asked.

Morag looked at me as if I was dumb. ‘Nuiko,’ she said.

‘Wow,’ I said.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that straight away. It was a sense relationship. The technology meant that it would feel virtually the same as the real thing. Given Nuiko’s chimerical nature, it meant that Pagan was to all intents and purposes having a relationship with the ship.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Suddenly I felt very awkward and both Cat and Morag were staring at me. I think I was supposed to be doing something but I had no idea what. I’d killed Berserks in hand-to-hand combat and suddenly I wanted to retreat. With as much dignity as I could manage I headed back to my compartment.

Safe in my room I felt like taking trumpet-based revenge on the rest of them. Also I wanted to practise, but there’s only so far you want to push a group of ex-special forces types, not to mention Mudge and Morag. I decided to have a drink instead. I put some music on my internal systems and called up a book on to my IVD.

Mudge turned up about an hour later. The whisky had been a waste as all I could taste was anti-corrosion coating, so I’d got myself a beer instead. It didn’t taste much better but it was cheaper.

‘Can I get one of those? Assuming my crippling substance-abuse problems won’t derail the mission.’

I glared at him but gave him a beer as he sat down somewhat gingerly on the metal grid of the floor. He lit up a cigarette, just to annoy me, and then set up a white-noise generator. It was pretty much the only way we could have a private conversation short of hard-wiring ourselves together.

‘That is one angry man,’ Mudge said.

‘That why you’re walking funny? Is this adrenalin fucking?’

‘Always.’ He raised his bottle to me and took a long drink.

‘You realise he thinks you’ve just come in here to boast to your mates,’ I said.

Mudge just smiled and shrugged but then suddenly became more serious. ‘Why are you giving me such a hard time?’

‘You know what I said about the drugs was for show, right?’ He nodded. ‘Though they have a point. We could be there for a very long time depending on how long this war goes on.’

‘I’ve never not held up my end and you’ve got no right to question that,’ he said.

This was about as serious as Mudge got. I nodded.

‘I know that. But mate, Trace’s office. I mean, what the fuck were you thinking?’

‘What? The guy was a prick.’

‘Morag shouldn’t have been able to do that hack. We should be dead, and we would be if she hadn’t noticed the wireless link.’

‘Look, nothing’s changed, man,’ he said, but he was looking down. He wouldn’t meet my lenses. We can replace our eyes with bits of glass and electronics, but body language seems to be hard-wired in with the original flesh.

‘Yes, it has. You seem more…’ I searched for the right word. ‘Desperate.’

Mudge shrugged, drank some more beer but still wouldn’t look at me. ‘Mudge, you’re an enormous pain in the arse-’

‘You want to talk about pains in the arse?’ he said, grinning. I realised I’d chosen the wrong words.

‘I mean you’re a difficult guy to be friends with sometimes…’ I started. He looked at me, his face getting angry around his camera eyes.

‘Fuck you, Jakob, you sanctimonious prick! You think it’s easy being your friend? All the fucking whining, hand-wringing, moralising, the fucking sitting in judgement…’

I leaned back on the bed. I tried not to take what he said personally. There was obviously something he needed to get off his chest and we were in the lashing-out part of the conversation.

‘I mean, just try and live a little. It might be a shitty world but try and take what you can from it.’ He’d trailed off a bit towards the end and wouldn’t look at me again.

‘What I like about you is you tell the truth. That’s why we didn’t double-tap you and leave you in a ditch when we met you. Don’t start lying now. Not to yourself.’ I took another beer and watched him.

‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with me.’

‘Are you on a suicide trip?’ I asked. It took him a long time to answer. If he was I couldn’t let him take the rest of us down.

‘No more than normal, I think. My body’s an amusement park, and risks need to be taken, otherwise we might as well be living in a bubble like those Cabal old boys.’

‘Then what?’ I asked.

Again he gave this some thought before answering.

‘You ever think about the things we’ve done?’ he asked.

‘I feel like mostly I’m reacting.’

‘I went from reporting in a war zone to patrolling and raiding with you guys to fronting for God on system-wide viz and netcast…’ Once again he trailed off and drank some more beer.

‘Okay, put like that it sounds pretty intense, but that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

He looked up at me again. ‘How am I supposed to beat that?’ he asked.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

More than ever he sounded like a junkie looking for another fix.

‘The things I’ve done, the way I’ve lived, how am I supposed to go back to a normal life, whatever the fuck that is? I mean, we’ve done whatever the fuck we wanted.’

That wasn’t the way I felt at the time we were doing it.

‘You sound like Balor.’

‘No, it’s different. He wanted to be remembered. He thought he was some ancient hero, or maybe villain. I just want to feel. I need sensation but I think we’ve upped the game so much that I can’t get…’

‘The next fix?’

He looked away.

‘Maybe. I don’t want to die but life without sensation is death to me.’

I was trying to mask my contempt for this. I’d always known that Mudge was a middle-class thrill-seeker. He wasn’t the only one I’d come across when I’d been in the SAS; nearly all the officers were like that to a degree. What I couldn’t rationalise in what Mudge was saying was the disparity. This was a guy who was so bored that he did this for fun. The rest of us had to fight all the time just to eat. It was only my knowledge that he was a moral person that kept me speaking to him. That and what he’d said about sitting in judgement.

‘You don’t fancy the quiet life? Maybe just unwind, take a breather if we survive this?’

‘No, and neither do you.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.

‘See, this is what pisses me off about you. You lie to yourself. You’re no different. Your retirement ended with you being beaten up in police custody and where are you now? Right back here with the rest of us. Why? Because you need it. Why do you think Cat got fired and started canyon surfing? Or Merle tried to rob a precious metal freighter in flight? Because there are easier fucking ways for him to make money.’

If he was right, and maybe he was, then my need was buried deep in my subconscious. I thought I wanted the quiet life. On the other hand, the way I’d gone about my Highland idyll was arguably confrontational, and here I was again. For a while now I’d been wondering if there was some deep-down part of me that was highly masochistic.

‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go down onto Lalande just to look for bigger and better thrills, Mudge.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And Trace’s office? That would have been a shitty way for us to die after doing the things we’ve done. What were you thinking?’

‘I don’t know that I was. I wanted to see if we could get away with anything. Somehow I knew we’d be all right.’

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Caution was as much a part of these operations as risk, if not more so.

‘Look, man, I’ll be all right. I’ll reign it in. Take the right drugs to calm it down, okay?’ I nodded.

Mudge got up, belched loudly and scratched himself before nicking another bottle of beer and leaving my compartment. For the first time ever I found myself unable to trust him.

Still he’d left his white-noise generator, which gave me the chance to practise the trumpet without being assassinated.

By day six we’d almost managed to get rid of the smell of the anti-corrosion treatment. Day six was mostly going over weapons and personal loads that we’d already gone over on Earth. We were just trying to maximise what we took while staying under the weight allowance.

I don’t know about the others, but I was becoming tenser as the drop got closer. There were just too many unknowns and the drop was so dangerous that it would be easy to die before we even got planet side. Tempers seemed only a little more frayed. That may have been helped by half of us being loved up. Morag still wasn’t talking to me. She seemed a little less hostile, however.

Before we left the Freetown Camp Merle had kicked up a huge fuss about getting his gear back. Cat had brought some stuff for him with us but he’d insisted on getting his own gear back. There had been some violence involved. When he got his stuff I could see why.

Merle was down on the cargo bay cleaning his weapons on top of one of the crates. He was obviously aware of my presence but was ignoring me. All his gear was custom and expensive. Like Cat he had a Void Eagle set up in a Tunnel Rat configuration with the Tunnel Rats’ insignia on the handgrip.

He also had a CEC plasma rifle. Most plasma weapons are big and heavy and tend to be used as squad support weapons by military units from countries that can afford to equip their people with them. I didn’t like them because they were semi-automatic and, particularly for a support weapon, I preferred something that could lay down a lot of fire, like a railgun. Still their one-shot kill capability was impressive. Similar to the weapon that Rolleston carried, the CEC was only slightly heavier than most standard assault rifles. It was also very expensive.

‘Those what I think they are?’ I asked, pointing at two ten-millimetre pistols lying next to the Void Eagle. I climbed down from the catwalk to get a better view.

‘Twin Hammerli Arbiters. They were our grandpappy’s. Cat was pissed when I got them but I was always a better shot. I’m pretty sure he stole them. He certainly took enough lives with them.’ He spoke without looking up at me.

The Arbiters were supposed to be the most accurate and were definitely the most expensive fully automatic, production ten-millimetres ever made. I’d never seen one before, let alone two. Their grips were moulded to the shooter’s hands and the barrels seemed to slant forward, which was something to do with their recoil compensation.

‘Can I handle them?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, still not looking up from the somewhat archaic-looking rifle he was cleaning. I was a little put out but could understand why he didn’t want anyone touching them. Had they been mine I certainly wouldn’t have been parachuting into a corrosive environment with them.

‘That’s a hunting rifle, isn’t it?’ Again the rifle looked expensive. Parts of it were made out of wood. It also looked slightly oversized.

‘It’s a gauss rifle version of an old Mauser customised by Holland amp; Holland of London,’ he said, still not looking up.

‘Never heard of them.’ I shrugged.

‘No, you wouldn’t have. I never fancied lugging around one of the bigger rail sniper weapons for accurate work. This nearly matches their range and is more accurate. I can fire it semi-automatic or single shot for accuracy with a secondary electronic reload mechanism.’

‘Why?’ I may not have liked being in the military, despite what Mudge thought, but we all liked the toys and I was intrigued.

‘Because a self-loading system will always knock you off slightly. Obviously its smartlinked but it also has an on-board gyroscope. I can switch between hyper and subsonic for silent kills and it fires a. 465-calibre penetrator round which will put most people and Them on the ground. The wood furniture is cut from Lalande ghostwood, which is very dense, hard-wearing and of course resistant to the corrosion. It’s also got a smart trigger.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said. Smart triggers enabled you to fire a weapon with a thought. They required an awful lot of discipline to avoid negligent discharges and were highly illegal. Still there had always been rumours of them being used by the darker black ops types. Merle held the weapon up. It didn’t have a trigger.

‘The very action of pulling the trigger can affect your aim. Your Grey Lady’s a sniper. She’ll have a smart trigger on her weapon, I can almost guarantee it.’ I started to ask him something. ‘No, you can’t handle it. It’s probably worth more than all the money you’ve made in your life. You didn’t come here to talk about my guns. What do you want?’

‘Well I didn’t, but they’re still pretty impressive.’

He finally looked up at me. ‘Have you come to ask about my intentions regarding Mudge? I’ll still kill him if he fucks us up.’

‘Fuck that. He can look after himself. How’d you hijack that ship?’ I asked. He regarded me impassively just long enough for his strangely intense implant eyes to start making me feel uncomfortable.

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘I’m a very private person, your intrusion the other night notwithstanding.’

‘Yeah, I get that. You don’t like playing with others, do you?’

‘Nobody else around, then you’ve less chance of getting killed over somebody else’s stupid shit.’

‘Or have someone dragging your arse out of your own stupid shit. But my question?’

‘Is it relevant to anything? See, I can’t think of a single good reason to tell you.’

‘You want and need our trust,’ I said.

He leaned back and studied me a bit more closely.

‘This a price?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘Okay. I had an automated program that I could plug into the ship’s systems. It would crack the security and remote-pilot the ship to… somewhere else.’

So he’d been working with others. That made sense.

‘How’d you get in? Because you didn’t do it in the camp — the security’s far too high for EVA.’

‘Maybe if I’d had the best stealth stuff, but yeah, the camp was more trouble than it was worth. Just outside the camp’s security perimeter I had another craft match acceleration and trajectory.’

‘Okay. Difficult flying but okay. So how’d you get on board?’

‘I compressed-gas-squirted ship to ship,’ he told me.

‘Bollocks.’ Space was extremely big; it only needed the slightest variation in speed and he would have missed. The maths alone involved in something like that was staggering. The margins for error were tiny. He shrugged again, giving the impression that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.

‘Spacesuit set up for stealth. I had the maths on a program in my internal systems.’

‘What distance?’

‘Fifteen thousand metres.’

‘The slightest miscalculation,’ I said. I had absently picked up one of a pair of punch daggers and was toying with it. It looked like it was made from black glass. It had some kind of channel leading to the point of the blade.

‘So I didn’t miscalculate. Don’t touch that; it injects a pretty virulent neural toxin.’

For fuck’s sake, I thought, who was this guy? There was no doubt about it — if he played with us then he’d be an asset.

‘Are these glass?’ I asked.

‘Dayside obsidian, volcanic glass from Lalande 2. Sharp as glass but comparable to steel in toughness. Now put it down.’

I put the punch dagger down.

‘So how’d you get in?’ For obvious reasons airlocks, along with the engine room and then the bridge, tended to be the highest-security areas of a ship. On most military and high-security ships you couldn’t access the airlocks externally. I’d only been able to use the airlock on the Santa Maria during the mutiny because it was a civilian ship and I had a hacker as good as Vicar backing me up.

‘I spent seven hours stuck to the hull of the ship drilling through it. I nearly froze to death. I sent through a modified snake with a lock burner on the end. The lock burner had a pretty sophisticated spoof program added to it. The spoof program was probably the biggest outlay. It told the ship’s systems that the airlock was still closed. The snake was flush with the drill hole. I just kept on adding sealant around the crack while feeding it through.’

‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ I said. What he’d just told me had huge ramifications for spacecraft security.

‘You guys did it to that star liner back in the twenties, didn’t you?’ He was right: the SAS had attached a vacuum-proofed cargo module to a sensor blind spot on a hijacked luxury system cruiser and cut through the hull to deal with a group of so-called post-human terrorists. I’d studied it in Hereford while I was training. It was one of the few successful boarding actions in space warfare history. Normally the speeds and distances involved were too great. Ships got destroyed before they were boarded or they surrendered. Surrender hadn’t been an option fighting Them.

‘Different circumstances. The ship was docked when they attached the container; also ship security was much more rudimentary then.’

‘So what? You thinking of robbing a ship?’

‘No, I just like knowing how to do things.’

Again he seemed to be studying me. Finally he nodded.

‘Yeah, me too. We done bonding?’

I nodded. ‘Unless you want to let me play with your guns.’

‘Go away. I’m busy.’

The whole trip had been subdued. That happens when people are sure they’re going to die. You either get subdued or overcompensate, but even Mudge couldn’t be bothered with overcompensation.

On the seventh night we had some drinks and some forced conversation. Bar last-minute checks we were as ready as we were ever going to get. Nobody had wanted to hear me play my trumpet. They backed up their opinions on the matter with threats of violence. I didn’t think this was fair. I was sure I was improving.

Mudge confused me by presenting each of us with little animatronic action figures of Major Rolleston, the Grey Lady or Vincent Cronin. I got Rolleston.

‘What the fuck’s this?’ I asked. It was grotesque.

‘Voodoo?’ Pagan asked, laughing.

‘Let’s just remember how big these people are, shall we?’ Mudge told us. ‘This is how the children of Earth look at them, not fucking scary at all.’

‘This is weird,’ I said. Cat was nodding.

Morag held up her little Grey Lady. ‘I don’t know. I think I feel some voodoo coming on,’ she said.

Pagan couldn’t wait to go back to his compartment and trance in with Nuiko, who was with us as a nearly silent holographic ghost whose arms were her crab-like servitors. I wanted her to join us and relax but instead she was the perfect host. She had just as much to lose as the rest of us, except that she would be waiting on her own in the dark. If I was honest with myself, which apparently I didn’t like being, then I would have to admit that Nuiko still made me nervous. It wasn’t just that I’d never managed to have what I would describe as a conversation with her, but that for some reason she reminded me of the Grey Lady. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was the averted eyes.

I wondered how Pagan had managed to break through the polite and distant reserve that she wore as armour. But time can be made to do strange things in sense environments. Perhaps he’d been courting her for months instead of days. I wished him well but worried about the wrench of having to leave her to go and die. Maybe I should have tried to be a bit more optimistic.

Likewise Mudge was in a hurry to disappear into his compartment with the white-noise generator and Merle. He didn’t even get too fucked up, for Mudge. His choice of drug was some low-key euphoric and he only managed a bottle and a half of vodka. He still managed to fall off the catwalk into the crates. I guess appearances have to be maintained.

This left Cat, Morag, so much accompanying awkwardness it seemed to have its own palpable presence in the hold, and myself. Cat sipped from a beer as she peeled the last of the medgel from her wounded back. Occasionally she’d look between Morag and me, smile and shake her head.

Morag didn’t say much and still wouldn’t meet my eyes. In fact some of the time I think she was having a sub-vocal conversation with someone else. Though I couldn’t think who.

‘Well, as much fun as this is, I’m going to get some rack time,’ Cat announced. I’d no idea why she didn’t just say sleep, which would have been more economical. ‘Try and keep it down.’

‘You too,’ I said inanely.

She glanced back at me before disappearing into her compartment. That left Morag. I felt nervous and uncomfortable. I couldn’t read Morag’s expression.

‘I’ve been talking to God a lot,’ Morag said after the silence had stretched on for so long I had considered fleeing back to my compartment.

God, I had forgotten all about him. No, I hadn’t. I’d ignored him, pretended I’d had no time because his problems were so big that I could barely understand him. Talking to God had become too complicated, too difficult. Another friend I’d let down. Tried to hide from. Was he even a friend? I’d had a part, however minor, in his creation, his birth.

‘How is he?’ was the best I could manage.

‘He’s not good, but then you know that. Worse now since he’s met his younger brother. Since Demiurge hurt him, God knows first hand that he wants to commit deicide and hates him. Did you know that? They programmed Demiurge for hate. Why would you do that?’ Her tone was flat. No emotion.

I had no answers for her.

‘I was thinking about what Pagan said about Cronin and Rolleston being programmed, being malfunctioning tools of the Cabal. Just another weapon in the arsenal,’ she continued.

I was lying on the catwalk looking up at the curve of the Tetsuo Chou ’s hull. I propped myself up and took a swig of Glenmorangie and passed the bottle to Morag. She accepted it, wiped the top of the bottle and took a swig herself.

‘They could have designed them for anything. They could have made Rolleston want to protect, to help. They could have made Cronin want to try and make things better for everyone. Surely that would profit everyone in the end? Instead only a few can profit because control is what’s important. Instead they program for hate. I just don’t get so much suffering for such abstract reasons, and I think we’re going to die because of it,’ she finished.

I had nothing for her. Nothing I could tell her. When she said that she thought she was going to die I felt cold. I felt something bad happen to my stomach and bile burn the back of my throat. It had been Morag who had thought it was going to be all right going to Maw City.

‘I think maybe it’s always been that way,’ I said. ‘Powerful people make decisions and others pay for them. The decisions are either incomprehensible to most people, who just want food, shelter and safety for them and theirs. Mudge reckons it’s simpler than that: he thinks it’s all lies to justify greed. Or possibly sexual inadequacy.’

There was neither warmth nor humour in her smile. She rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look at me.

‘God, I hate you,’ she said. I preferred it when she was shooting at me. ‘We are not all right. Things are not good between us, and what you did was fucked up for so many different reasons.’

I couldn’t look at her. Even looking away it was like her eyes were burning me. They were judging me. I had been found wanting and couldn’t face their glare. I heard her start to cry. I turned back to look at her. Her face crumpled as she let out a dry sob. I sat up as she crawled over to me. I held her so tightly it must have hurt her. I felt her shake with each sob. She bit me, dug her nails into me.

‘I promised myself I would be strong,’ she finally said, angry with herself. ‘It’s not me. It’s Ambassador. He’s so lonely. So far from his people.’

She was carrying the pain for two.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

She looked up at me. ‘You bastard!’ she spat, so angry again. ‘I hate you and I think you’re the only thing I have really got out here. You know what I did back in Trace’s office…’

‘You saved us, then again with the mech,’ I said.

She hit me. She put power into it but it was at an awkward angle; I was still holding her.

‘You put me into a corpse, back in the Freetown, that mech driver you made me jack into, you fucker. You put me into a corpse after I’d killed for the first time. I killed and then you made me feel the consequences in a dead man’s head.’

I stared at her, appalled. I felt like all the blood was draining from my body, leaving a bag of skin filled with metal and plastic. I’d had no idea.

‘And you’d already made it so I couldn’t talk to you about it.’

She’d killed on the Atlantis Spoke as well, when she’d hacked their systems and used automated weapons to take out a Walker, but it hadn’t been so immediate. She didn’t watch the consequences in front of her eyes. She didn’t end up wearing their blood, and as a result I don’t think she’d faced up to it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up.

‘This is very fucking touching, but some of us are trying to have sex!’ Mudge shouted from his compartment.

Morag’s head whipped round at the voice. She looked so angry, searching for someone to blame. I don’t know why Mudge and Merle had turned off the white-noise generator but I knew why Mudge had shouted. He wanted us to know that everyone not tranced in would hear us. It was a warning. Moments later Morag understood.

‘C’mon,’ she said and took my hand. Hers felt tiny surrounded by the composite material of my prosthetics. The tactile sensors offered my nervous system the facsimile of touch as she dragged me towards her compartment.

Inside was dark. Various things were scattered around on the floor, and I’m sure I stood on some of them as she dragged me down to sit on the smartfoam mattress. I switched to lowlight and illuminated her in green as she came towards me with a jack, reaching behind my neck for one of my plugs. I caught her wrist in my hand.

‘Are you going to kill me?’

She shook her head but didn’t get angry.

‘Let go of me now.’ I did. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Now we do what I want to do.’

I felt the jack click into my plug. I watched Morag disappear.

I knew this place. It was a jazz club in New York from about a hundred years before the FHC, before the city was flooded. It was called the Cotton Club and at the time booze had been illegal. So of course it flourished. All the greats had played here: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

The place was subtly lit, filled with smoke. Tables were set around a dance floor in front of the raised stage. More intimate booths were set into the wall. There was a fully stocked bar against the back wall. The place was empty. Like the tea room, even the smell was right. Or at least how I imagined it would have smelled — wood with alcohol soaked into it, tobacco smoke.

‘I made this for you. I played down some of the more racist parts of the decor,’ Morag said.

I turned at her voice. She was dressed like a flapper. She wore a tasselled dress that came down to just above her knees, some sort of fabric skullcap/hat thing and a string of pearls.

I looked down at myself. I was wearing spats and a linen suit of the era. I even had a hat. Morag would tell me the hat was called a panama.

‘When?’ I asked.

She looked away from me. In here she — we — could cry.

‘After I found out.’

‘Why?’

She smiled as she wiped away the tears. ‘So you could practise without the others killing you.’

I smiled. ‘Can I hold you?’

She did nothing, said nothing for what seemed a very long time, and then she nodded. I moved to her and wrapped my arms around her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve no reason, no excuse; all I’ve got is that I love you and I won’t hurt you again.’

She looked up at me. ‘Why are you sorry?’ she asked. I opened my mouth to say for cheating and then closed it again.

‘I’m sorry I abandoned you,’ I told her.

I should have trusted in her, been in this from the start. She nodded and pushed me away.

‘People — men — have hurt me before, I mean physically. I’m used to it. Is this what you want? Because we can do it in here. It’s okay in here. It’s not real.’

I looked at her in horror. She held her arms out away from her body and suddenly she was drenched in blood. I stumbled away from her, horrified. I bumped into a chair and fell back onto the floor. I wanted to vomit.

‘No, Morag, please!’

I wanted the image gone. It felt like a horrible warning from the future, the sum result of Morag’s association with me. Her bloodied visage walked towards me and I recoiled from her. I didn’t think she was really offering this. I wanted to think it was a lesson, but maybe it was revenge. My back hit the wall and I curled up and closed my eyes.

‘It’s all right.’

I felt hands caress my face but it really wasn’t okay. I opened my eyes and she was kneeling over me unbloodied. I was weeping. The tears felt wet and real on my skin. They were a release, a relief.

‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said.

I watched her face harden as anger swept across it like a storm.

‘Are you going to leave me again?’ Through gritted teeth.

‘No, never. It’s just that I can’t take you into these places, see you hurt, get you killed. I’ll get everyone killed worrying about you. I don’t care. I don’t care if they win, if we live in some dictatorship; I just want you to be safe,’ I told her, still weeping.

Her face softened. ‘You know how selfish that is, don’t you?’

I nodded through the tears. ‘What are we going to do?’ The desperation in my voice shocked me.

She sat down cross-legged next to me. She didn’t hold me. I felt like a child. She stroked my hair.

‘I think the Cabal knew that Operation Spiral wasn’t going to work,’ she said. I stared at her incredulously. She wanted to talk about this now? She ignored my look. ‘I think they knew it was going to kill or drive mad everyone involved, but they needed some research data so they made a human sacrifice for the knowledge they wanted. Maybe the information was spiralling around Vicar’s or some of the others’ heads.’ I started to say something but fingers brushed against my lips to silence me. ‘It was in the files in Limbo. Somehow they hadn’t made the connection. Elspeth McGrath. She either died then in Their minds or she was unfortunate enough to spend time in an ongoing psychotic episode, trying to destroy herself while they opened up her mind as a sense simulation so they could better look for the information they needed. I was the lucky one. I was pretty.’ I looked at her, horrified. She looked back at me, straight in the eyes. ‘I wonder what you were doing when I found that out?’

I couldn’t speak for a while. Despite the artifice all the moisture had gone from my mouth.

‘Revenge?’ I finally croaked.

Another smile devoid of humour.

‘No, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t care. We just have to do what we can to make things better.’ The steely resolve that I’d first noticed back in Dundee was there.

‘Why? You don’t owe the world a fucking thing.’

She looked down at me. I think I saw pity in her eyes then.

‘But that means you doing your job. Do you understand me?’ I nodded weakly. ‘No, I don’t think you do. Jakob, I love you as much as I hate you right now, and I think the hate will die, but if you put us at risk — if you don’t do your end — then you need to know I’m a witch. I’ll tear your mind out, imprison you in an electronic hell and leave you a mindless husk. Do you understand me now?’

I once went into vacuum unprotected. I wasn’t as afraid then as I was now. She was looking straight into my eyes. I wanted to turn away. She turned away first.

‘Because I need you and I’m frightened of dying,’ she said.

I tried swallowing but it wasn’t really happening. ‘Can you promise me something?’ I eventually managed to say.

I flinched away from her look of fury. ‘I don’t owe you a thing!’ she spat at me.

I nodded, trying to placate her. ‘I know, I know, but please, I need it. Morag, I’m not as strong or as honest as you. I need this, I need it to do what you ask.’ I had nothing but contempt for the person saying this. I heard the weakness and the betrayal that weakness implied in my voice. She’d had more than enough and I needed more. I felt like a parasite.

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘If we get through this, if somehow we live and we’re not slaves, then we stop. We make our deal with whatever gods, but we don’t do any more of this dangerous stupid shit. We settle down, we find other ways to help that don’t involve guns and violence. Please promise me.’

I needed this more than I’d ever needed the escape of the booths, the whisky and whatever other crutches I’d relied on in my hollow empty life. It made me realise how little I’d had in my life.

She nodded. She was crying, though somehow she was smiling as well. She reached down to hold me. She held me for a long time. When she was ready she kissed me fiercely. We didn’t make love — that needed trust — we had sex, and she told me that was all right because in here it wasn’t really real.

Later as she seemed to sleep, though I wasn’t sure what that meant in here, I practised the trumpet. I had used the sense environment’s parameters to make the instrument quiet and soft so as not to wake her.

I sat on a chair on the wooden boards of the stage and looked around the club. Smoke and dust eddied in pale beams of light. Our fantasies may have less jagged parts than real life, but we worked hard at them to make them as real as possible. I sometimes wondered if we locked ourselves in prisons of our own entertainment because it was easier than trying to do something, anything. Was this how the Cabal had got us in the first place?

I was going to have to find a place far, far away from the rest of my thoughts to put all this — the hope of some kind of life and the fear of what could happen to Morag. For once, I thought as I played, I needed to not let Morag down. I had to be what she needed. I also needed to try and live for myself.

I finished a slow bluesy piece and looked up. She was awake and watching me. I couldn’t read her expression.

The sex may not have been real, but when we jacked out of the sense simulation she lay in my arms and I held her as she slept. Through the fabric of her T-shirt I could feel the metal of the spinal supports that violated her flesh. They may have been temporary but to me they felt like another little bit of her humanity lost to metal.

I couldn’t sleep. I opened up my internal comms and requested a link.

‘God?’

‘Yes, Jakob.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know, Jakob.’

‘You’ll tell the rest of you.’

‘Of course, Jakob.’

We made God. More to the point we made God tell the truth, and now we spent all our time hiding from him.