War in Heaven

11

This was a stupid way to die. I should have accepted Mudge’s offer of drugs.

Nuiko had shown us the star. Lalande 21185 was small, about half the size of our sun, and despite its red colour there was something dead-looking about it. It was like a ghost sun burning weakly. Lalande 2, however, was very large and looked like a black planet with a corona of heat perpetually on its horizon. It was partially eclipsing the star.

Nuiko had triggered a heavy burn as close as she dared to Lalande 2. Systems are nearly impossible to defend because space is big. Planets are much easier to blockade. That was the second most dangerous part of her job. She had to bleed off any residual heat and get the signature of the Tetsuo Chou down as low as possible as we approached what we assumed would be the planetary defences. We were flying blind to an extent and active scans would be suicide. We assumed the planetary defences would take the form of automated sensor and weapons satellites as well as elements of the Lalande fleet. We were hoping that the Orbital Insertion Low Opening pods, if detected — most likely during entry — would be thought of as meteorites. If not then we wouldn’t know much. We’d just cease to exist when the orbital weapons hit us.

The most dangerous part of her job would come when she had to open the cargo airlock and have her remotes throw us out. This would mess with the stealth signature of the ship and make her more susceptible to detection.

Exiting the Tetsuo Chou was going to be the trickiest part for us as well. Not that there was anything that we could do about it in our cocoons of heat-resistant foam and acceleration-resistant gel. It wasn’t just a case of being thrown out of a spaceship; we had to be pushed out at just the right velocity and just the right angle for entry. The maths involved was pretty heady. A mistake and we could burn up on entry or bounce, which would send us skimming over the atmosphere to end up in a low orbit until we ran out of air.

I’d done my fair share of parachute drops, though mostly we were inserted by assault shuttle, gunship or more rarely copters. I had done HALO jumps, mainly out of the back of assault shuttles, but I’d only ever done two OILOs before this and I hadn’t enjoyed them. Wrapped in the scan-absorbent and heat-resistant foam and surrounded by the gel designed to help you cope with the G forces, I could never shake the feeling I was the yolk of an egg being thrown at a stone in a fire.

The G force slammed into me. It was like someone massaging me vigorously with sledgehammers. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough to cause me to black out. I was panicking, which was irrelevant, as I couldn’t move. In the unlikely event I survived, I just wouldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even manage to scream as I entered the atmosphere. It was like hitting a solid wall. I had a moment to think my spine had broken and then, finally, I mercifully blacked out.

I knew I was dead when I came to. Beyond the faceplate of my environment suit I could see the gel bubbling. I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be happening. I was covered in sweat. This was the hottest I’d ever felt. I’d felt cooler when I’d been set on fire in Dundee. We’d fucked up. A stupid, stupid way to die. I should have just put the Mastodon to my temple and saved myself the pain. I’d seen people burn to death. At least that way it would be quick.

When I saw the cocoon burning away and the gel start to drain out I knew it was all over. Prat that I am, I didn’t pay any attention to the altimeter readout on my IVD. I had a jack from the parachute rig plugged into a port on the environment suit, which was in turn jacked into one of the plugs in the back of my neck.

Then the cocoon was gone. The chemical catalyst had started to dissolve the material of the cocoon as soon as we’d hit the atmosphere. I was falling far too fast. I understood everything in terms of flashes of dark ground, fast-moving cloud, a horizon of red light and then the stars again. Occasionally I could see other figures falling like I was.

I had to stop tumbling. Anger replaced panic as I desperately tried to remember my parachute training. I was supposed to be good at this. This is what we’d been trained for.

I managed to steady myself and get into the star position. I was free-falling looking down at shallow contours of dark rock and a storm front sweeping rapidly over them.

I felt heavy, like a lead weight, and all my movements seemed slow. The ground was coming up too fast. The urge was there to open the chute but I resisted it. Low opening, particularly with these scan-transparent stealth chutes, would minimise our chances of being detected. It would also give the corrosive storms that racked Lalande 2’s barren surface less opportunity to kick us around and less time to eat away at our chutes. Still it seemed like I was falling far too fast.

The ground disappeared as black cloud swept across it at a frightening speed. I had time to glance around and count four other people falling through the alien sky reasonably near before the cloud engulfed me. Then I was falling blind. Relying on the altimeter readout on my IVD. The number on the readout was counting down too rapidly for my taste.

Two thousand metres came and went so quickly I only just had time to pull the chute at fifteen hundred. A moment of fear as the upward yank didn’t feel as pronounced as I was used to but information from the interface showed that everything was okay. I glanced up, hoping to see a fully deployed canopy, but the thick cloud obscured it. Then the storm really started to knock me around.

Pagan and Merle were old hands at this; Cat had a little less jump experience than me; but Morag and Mudge had to rely on skillsofts and training simulations. It felt like I had to rely on every bit of training and experience that I could remember and fight the chute all the way down, using the interface and the chute’s on-board intelligent systems just to make sure I was mostly pointing down and not getting tangled. Fuck knows where I was going to land. At least I was moving at a speed I felt more comfortable with, but I still felt heavy and sluggish.

Out of the clouds and I could see narrow corrosion canyons in the dark scarred landscape, the horizon obscured by violently swirling cloud. Both the chute and myself were still wrestling with the wind. I was receiving warning icons from the environment suit’s temperature sensors. We were too deep in Nightside. There would have been ice below us if there had been any surface moisture.

I glanced up above me at the enormous canopy of the chute. Its translucence made it difficult to pick out against the backdrop of permanent night. I looked around and could make out another four parachutists and was pleasantly surprised to see one of the cylindrical drop containers had managed to track us. We had dropped six in the hope that one might stay with us. Because we couldn’t transmit without opening up comms systems to Demiurge, each cylinder chute’s intelligent system had been rigged up to a lens designed to track other parachutes by sight. Each of the containers had a timed explosive charge. If we didn’t get to them very quickly then the container and its contents would be destroyed.

I wondered who the missing parachutist was. We were all steering our chute rigs closer together now and closer to the container, all fighting the wind. It didn’t feel like the controlled graceful drop of parachuting; it felt like the ground was trying to suck me towards it. Every movement of my lead-like limbs was a painful exertion.

I hit the ground hard and got dragged along it for a while. The rock seemed to radiate cold despite the environment suit’s internal heater. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to trigger the chemical catalyst that would dissolve the chute before I hit the quick releases. Then I tried to get up.

I was used to carrying a lot of gear for extended periods in the field. I had the artificially boosted strength and stamina to manage it, and I had the fitness. Or rather I’d had the fitness. I’d done the maths and reduced my load by what I’d thought was enough to counteract the effect of 1.5 G. The problem was, it had been a long time since I’d carried a full infantry load. Arguably I’d been abusing myself somewhat since then as well. I couldn’t get up.

I resisted the urge to laugh hysterically at myself. I had this image of me lying there until the corrosive wind eroded me away. It felt like a massive weight was pushing me into the cold rock. Christ, if I felt like this how were Morag and Mudge coping? They didn’t have military-grade enhancements. Actually I knew how Mudge would be coping — with performance-enhancing narcotic alchemy. Again it occurred to me I’d been a fool to turn his offer of drugs down.

It was anger that finally got me to my feet. Well that and a purely medicinal stimulant from my internal drugs reservoir. Standing up felt like powerlifting. I really didn’t want to fall over again. I had no idea how I was going to operate in this place for a prolonged period of time. I felt like I was carrying someone my own weight around my shoulders.

My Heckler amp; Koch Squad Automatic Weapon was secured tightly across my chest. I loosened the strap and made the weapon ready. My IVD lit up with new information fed to my smartlink through the palm receiver on my environment suit. Time to pretend to be a soldier again.

I staggered through the high wind over acid-smooth rock to the closest parachutist. It was Pagan. I was glad to see he was on his feet. He signalled towards the container. Both of us made our way there. The other three visible parachutists were doing likewise. Everyone was struggling against the wind.

Morag had disarmed the explosives on the container. Cat was there, her Bofors railgun at the ready. Mudge as well. Merle was missing. Brilliant, our native guide. The problem was we couldn’t use GPS because it would give away our position and allow Demiurge a way into our systems. We had detailed maps stored in our internal systems memories but they didn’t tell us where we were initially and all of Nightside looked the same. There didn’t seem to be any particularly geographical features.

The parachute signal flare was a welcome if brief sight as the wind pulled it away almost immediately. I guessed that Merle had determined that there was nobody on the surface nearby before firing it. Unless it was a trap. We picked up the container and headed for where the flare had been fired.

I have to admit I hadn’t wanted to help with the container. In fact I would have been quite pleased to blow it up. Already all my muscles ached, but we didn’t know when we were going to get a chance to resupply. We also didn’t know if Merle’s caches had been compromised since he’d last been in-country. Pagan, Cat and Mudge had the other corners. This meant that Morag was on point. I would have preferred someone with more experience but she just simply didn’t have the enhancements to help with the cylinder. I was pretty impressed she was still moving, albeit with difficulty, carrying all the gear she was. Fucking Merle.

I’ve done some miserable fucking tabs in my life. The Brecon Beacons had been a piece of piss after growing up in the Highlands. Wading in full load through the mud and the constant driving rain of Sirius had been pretty shit. However this tab was just a long streak of misery. Merle had said that given time we’d acclimatise; Cat had said that acclimatisation was not the same as getting used to it. That security job that Calum had mentioned was starting to look very attractive now.

It was Pagan who folded first. To his credit I was at the point where everything was screaming in agony and I was taking life one deeply, fucking painful step at a time. Still I’d thought it would be Mudge. More and more I was respecting his better-living-through-chemistry ethos. Pagan stumbled and fell and nearly took us all down with him. We put the container down. I didn’t have the energy to help him up. I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to pick the container up again. Inside the environmental suit I was soaked through to my inertial armour with sweat.

Morag slung her laser carbine and managed to help Pagan up. She signalled for him to take point. Then she moved to his position on the container. I signalled negative. She ignored me. I was for leaving the container there but we picked it up again.

So far I wasn’t enjoying this planet. I was even starting to miss Dog 4’s mud.

Merle lit up a hand-held signalling flare to guide us in. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking. It had seemed like a very long, painful time. We were getting closer to the Twilight Strip, the habitable zone between the burn of Dayside and the cold of Nightside.

We were starting to see scrubby worm-like tubular plants, their roots burrowing into the corrosion-smoothed rock canyons. There they were sheltered from the worst effects of the wind. Merle had briefed us that these plants were a symbiotic species that lived on infrared radiation from the small red sun and bacteria that fed on the hydrogen sulphide present in the atmosphere.

We got to Merle as he was tucking the used flare back into his webbing. He pointed down into a small cave opening and then relieved Mudge on the container. Pagan took point with Mudge bringing up our rear as we headed into the cave mouth. Just before we left the surface I caught a glimpse of Lalande over the horizon. It looked red, huge and close, somehow hellish.

I wasn’t sure whether it was a natural tunnel that we followed down into the rock, but it was smooth, somehow organic. It looked like blackened bone in the light from our helmet-mounted lamps and the torches clipped to Mudge and Pagan’s weapons.

We seemed to be heading towards black light, an ultraviolet light source. We stopped and waited while Pagan scouted ahead. After what seemed like a very long time he came back and gestured us forward. Even through the anonymity of an environment suit I could see that he was ready to drop from fatigue. We needed to rest soon but the surface hadn’t been the place to do it.

I was working on automatic now as I picked up that fucking container again and we headed down.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but despite the briefings and vizzes I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the cavern. We were huddled in a tunnel mouth in the ceiling of a chamber looking down at a two-mile drop. The cavern floor was a dense carpet of genetically modified fern and what looked like giant spider plants. There were also ghostwood trees — wide but low and stunted, radiating out like ancient wagon wheels — genetically modified versions of the kauri tree indigenous to New Zealand. In the high-G environment they produced dense wood that was incredibly strong but difficult to cut and work. They were grown from seeds imported from Earth and had been designed to help with the terraforming process. The huge UV strip lights that ran across the cavern ceiling provided the plants with energy and bathed the whole chamber in the visible violet light from that part of the spectrum.

Acidic salt-ice glaciers had crawled through the belly of this planet like worms aeons ago. As they receded back into Nightside, subject to the vagaries of the planet’s unpredictable geothermal activity, they had left in their wake smooth caverns like this that went on as far as the eye could see.

The walls of the cavern were smooth and again reminded me of weather-eroded bone, but down here the clearly defined different rock strata were multihued and showed in stripes. However, the walls and much of the visible floor of the cavern showed extensive damage. The rock had been scored, burned and heavily cratered. Large areas of the genetically modified plant life had been trampled and ripped up — I assumed by fighting and the movement of large bodies of human and presumably Their troops. Parts of the rock were deformed where plasma strikes had made it run like lava before it had cooled and solidified.

Despite the war damage and the artificial violet light giving it an unreal feeling, like a London art club, the cavern was strangely beautiful. Or at least that was what I thought until I took my helmet off. The environment suit’s sensors had advised me that it was okay to try the air. They fucking lied. I could breathe, if you could call it that, but the atmosphere was greasy, acrid. It smelled of rotten eggs and every breath tasted like licking a battery.

I was covered in sweat from head to foot and steamed in the frigid but manageably cold air. The others were removing their helmets as well. All of us were gasping for breath, which, filter or no filter, was making our lungs burn.

We all looked different now. Just before the drop we’d injected our faces with a morphing compound that allowed us to change the look of our features to a degree. We were heading into what we expected to be a near-total-surveillance environment and needed to avoid being identified by the sophisticated facial feature recognition software that Demiurge was bound to be using.

The others all looked like themselves only slightly skewed. We’d also made other cosmetic changes. Changed hair colours, changed hairstyles where possible. Mudge didn’t look right with brown hair and he was going to have to wear glasses all the time to cover his camera lens eyes. I’d thought Pagan was going to cry when he’d cut off his ginger dreadlocks.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pagan said to everyone, shaking his head. I could hear the misery in the aging hacker’s voice at letting us down. He looked awful.

‘Don’t worry about it, that was a miserable fucking tab,’ I heard a bone-tired me say to him.

Merle ran his hand through the stubble on his skull. He’d shaved it to get rid of the mess of hair he’d grown in captivity. He looked more like his sister than ever now.

‘We need food, rest and a brew-up.’ I’d said it to everyone but I wanted Merle’s opinion.

‘We need to be careful. We’re near one of the processors. They’re heavily guarded. A lot of the fighting went on around them during the war. They have remote and manned aerial patrols so we can’t stay here too long, and I don’t know what a brew-up is.’

‘A cup of tea. You’re American — you wouldn’t understand,’ a panting, sweat-soaked Mudge said.

‘What’s not to understand about a cup of tea?’ Merle asked.

‘For your lot, how to bloody make one,’ Mudge answered.

Everyone from Britain who’d ever had an American-made cup of tea was smiling. Even Pagan managed a weak grin. I think Merle had understood his job as straight man. That was promising.

It wasn’t a proper brew-up in a mess tin over a camp stove. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk that in this atmosphere. It’d taste bloody awful. Instead we had cans of self-warming sweet tea — it wasn’t the same — and some energy bars.

Merle was rigging the climbing gear, though each of us would check it before we used it. I wasn’t sure where he was getting the energy. Particularly as up until less than two weeks ago he’d been living in a hole in the ground with a French name.

‘I love the atmosphere,’ Mudge said, hawking and spitting. ‘Nope, no better. I don’t even want a cigarette. This is a deeply depressing world.’

‘It’s what it does to my hair that bothers me the most,’ Cat surprised me by saying.

‘I could see how that would get to you,’ Mudge said.

Merle smiled as he drove another piton into a seam in the rock. The crack echoed out into the huge cavern. We paused and scanned the cavern for movement. We waited and waited. Nothing.

‘What, you think I was born bald?’ Cat said as if the conversation had never been interrupted.

Morag looked horrified. ‘It’s just grown back,’ she said, fingering her lank and sweaty hair.

‘It’s all right, honey. I shaved it because it kept on going frizzy; it didn’t fall out.’

Morag looked relieved. Pagan and Mudge were smiling and shaking their heads.

‘See, this was why I didn’t join the army,’ Merle said dryly.

‘Too worried about their hair?’ I asked.

Despite the banter we were constantly scanning our surroundings and taking it in turns to eat and drink; the rest of the time we had weapons in our hands. We needed the banter after that walk.

‘The air force have better stylists,’ Cat said.

I smiled at this. Now time to spoil everyone’s fun.

‘Okay, everyone pack up the E-suits and shove your camo on.’

By camo I meant reactive camouflage. They were like gillie suits made of a rugged liquid-crystal thinscreen that adapted to and blended with the surroundings. One of the benefits of a near-bottomless expense account. Well that and the amount that each of us had embezzled. We took it in turns to get out of the E-suits, breaking them down and packing them away. More weight to carry but we didn’t know when we’d need them again. Then we shrugged on the reactive camouflage over whatever armour we were wearing.

Each of us was carrying five hundred metres of photoreceptive smart rope. Merle was taking the end of each of the pieces of rope and chemically bonding them together. He was then checking them, then Cat was rechecking them and then I did the same.

‘Is this enough?’ I asked.

Merle shrugged in a not very comforting manner. He took the winch frame and mechanism from the drop container and started fitting it together. I headed around to the other side of the hole in the cavern floor to aid him. The rest were watching our backs. We wrapped the container in a reactive camouflage suit and swung it out over the hole. The engine whined quietly as the winch mechanism slowly started feeding in the rope we’d coiled on the floor. Merle guided it through to make sure it didn’t snarl up. Now Cat and myself were covering the hole in case anything happened. In theory it was moving so slowly that the camouflage sheet and the properties of the rope should render it almost invisible.

It took a long time. We’d fed over a thousand metres of rope through when we heard it. An engine. The so-familiar sound of a gunship had once been a comforting sound to me. Not now.

Merle slowed the winch, bringing it to as gentle a stop as he could manage. I could still see the rope swinging from the winch. Cat and I backed a little further away from the edge of the hole. Merle took something from his webbing and unfolded it. Super-spy had brought a hand-held periscope. He lay down on the rock floor and peered through it into the cavern.

Nobody said anything. The acoustics of the cavern were doing odd things. The engine noise seemed to get very loud and then recede. The echoing didn’t help. I was sweating again. Not so much from the exertion this time; I was suddenly overwhelmed with fear that the gunship would fly into the rope or the container. This was ridiculous. It was a huge cavern and a very thin rope. Eventually we heard the sound of the gunship’s engines definitely receding and Merle folded away his periscope.

‘Patrol,’ he said. ‘Would have been here longer if they were changing shift at the atmosphere processor.’ I nodded. He started the winch again. Some minutes later I saw the rope develop a bit of slack. ‘Well it’s long enough,’ Merle said.

We quickly disassembled the winch and packed it into Merle’s gear. He was first over. He just slithered over the edge head first. We watched the rope quiver as he slowly rappelled down it. After an age we saw it twitch. You had to be paying attention because the rope was now the same colour as the background rock.

Morag was next. That seemed to take longer. I had a brief thrill of terror as I watched her creep out over the precipice, but already the camouflage was obscuring her, turning her into fractal ghost movements in the violet light.

Then I went. The awful feeling of vertigo as I slipped over the edge head first, the sudden change in perspective, the shifting of the cavern floor and the sudden appearance of the cavern roof above me. I quickly suppressed the terror as I concentrated on rappelling down the rope slow enough for the reactive camouflage to work, using my legs to keep my inverted body straight. Down through the massive rigs that supported the UV strip lights. It was disconcerting because the rope seemed to disappear just below my grip and I was struggling to see my own hands. I had to rely on my sense of touch, dulled by gloves and inertial armour. The sound of my rasping breath was loud in my ears. Very quickly I was exhausted. I was so heavy and all the weight just wanted to pull me towards the distant ground.

All this rock. I wondered if Cat had gone to the Grand Canyon to remind herself of this place. Why would she want to be reminded? The mind does strange things to veterans. You don’t think you’ll miss these places but, like Mudge had pointed out, few experiences in your life ever live up to being that intense.

Looking back up I could see what looked like an enormous fan with an equally enormous filter beneath it. Around the edge of this giant piece of engineering I could see a system of catwalks with automated weapons at regular intervals. Fortified buildings hung from the cavern roof plus a landing pad that looked like it could take anything up to a transport shuttle. This was one of the atmosphere processors that helped make the air in the cavern system manageable. I didn’t want to call the air breathable. I continued pulling myself down. In terms of mega-scale engineering I guess the only things comparable were orbital stations and the Spokes. There were bigger ships, but we never saw the outside of them up close.

I was less than halfway down when I heard it. The ground still looked distant but seemed to be pulling me towards it. My enhanced hearing picked up the distant noise echoing from a connecting tunnel. The noise was deeper, signifying a much bigger vectored-thrust vehicle. I froze on the rope. I felt like a spider.

It was a heavy-lift military transport. It looked like a flying chunk of armour, a weapons platform with cargo space. It circled close enough to me that I was buffeted, bouncing up and down on the rope, making the reactive camouflage work harder. Close enough that I could look down gun barrels, count missiles and see the jacked-in pilot’s helmeted head. I didn’t have much of a contingency plan for compromise here other than to drop down as quickly as I could.

The buffeting from the transport lifted me high up on the rope and then dropped me hard. I tried not to cry out as the rope bounced. I lost grip with my legs and spun, the rope sliding through my hands. I felt utterly helpless, praying the camouflage was still concealing me. I heard the whine of more power added to engines as the ugly military vehicle rose, heading towards the landing pad next to the processor.

My back was screaming at me. Despite the supporting clamp and my own enhancements the impact in the high G had really hurt. Slowly I managed to recover and begin pulling myself down again as I responded to warnings in my IVD by dampening the pain with a small dose of painkiller from my internal reservoir. I wanted to use it sparingly. This planet was starting to seem like pain. What was worse, my skin was beginning to burn in the UV. None of us had thought to bring sunblock.

It was either a supply delivery or a guard change. I was still on the rope when the transport left and had to remain still again, but it didn’t come so close this time and the buffeting wasn’t so bad.

The canopy of giant ferns felt so cool when I got under it. Rolling over to land gently on my feet, Merle and Morag were nowhere in sight. I unclipped myself and brought the SAW up ready. There was a quiet whistle. I responded and part of the surrounding flora came to life. Merle gestured to me, images of the surrounding jungle seemed to slide off him as he did so, showing me where Morag was. I indicated where I was going and moved into position after shaking the rope, signalling for Mudge to follow.

Waiting beneath the fern canopy in violet light was the closest to a pleasurable experience I’d had since we’d got here. Perhaps it was the presence of the plants, but the air didn’t seemed quite so bad.

There had been another moment when an airborne combat remote had flown by as Cat had been coming down. She had remained still and the reactive camouflage had done its work. As had the heat-masking properties of our inertial armour suits. They were designed to dampen our IR signatures and make us more difficult to spot using thermographics.

When Cat was down Merle had touched the rope with the control wand. Normally we would have used our internal comms to transmit the command codes but we intended to remain comms dark our entire stay. No transmissions. In the cave in the roof of the cavern nearly two miles above us, the rope untied itself. We then kept well back as three thousand metres of it fell towards us. This made more noise than I was happy with, but we needed the rope and there was only so much we could carry.

Then it was time for another long tab carrying that fucking container. We went deeper into the stone guts of the planet. It got colder and the air stank more, burning the backs of our throats as we headed towards one of Merle’s Cemetery Wind caches. We travelled in the dark. Our lowlight optics powered by an internal light source let us see where we were going. It also made everything look green. Most of the time we walked, taking it in turns to carry the container while someone took point and the rear. Other times we were forced to climb. All the while a tremendous weight bore down on us. We stopped periodically to rest and eat. Nobody said much. Everyone was too tired.

Merle and Pagan, who I think was trying to prove something to us, scouted the cache position before coming back for us. We left the container and moved forward stealthily, ready for trouble and grateful that we found none.

It was just another small cave. The entrance had been camouflaged by the simple expedient of painting a sheet of material to look like the rest of the rock. The place was full of supplies and something even better.

‘I’m not in the military so forgive me if I don’t get the strategic reason we humped that fucking container about when there’s all these supplies here,’ Mudge said, sounding genuinely pissed off.

‘We didn’t know if it would still be here or if it had been compromised,’ Merle told him.

‘Mudge, Morag, I want one of you on the entrance and the other a little further out. Okay?’ I said. ‘The rest of us are going to do a sweep in here then sort out what we need.’ There was some muttering from Mudge but he nodded.

‘But the shiny cars?’ Morag protested. She was referring to the four Fast Attack Vehicles.

‘You can look at them later,’ I told her.

Grudgingly she joined Mudge, making for the entrance. I could understand her interest. They were a welcome sight and had long been the envy of most third-world soldiers like myself. They looked like a bizarre hybrid of performance sports car, old-style dune buggy and tank. With an independently driven four-wheel-drive combat chassis powered by a well-protected hydrogen power plant in the rear of the vehicle, the FAVs were heavily armoured, hermetically sealed and designed for stealth operations. This put them out of reach of all but equatorial special forces units — and apparently Cemetery Wind. The power plant’s cracker could remove hydrogen from water to power it. This meant if you had a ready supply of water the vehicle’s range was only limited by wear and tear. They made the Land Rovers we’d used on Dog 4 look like go-karts.

These ones had been modified for Lalande 2. The independent suspension had been reinforced and the tyres were made from intelligent smartfoam. This, along with twin front and back winches linked to grapples, gave them a limited climbing capability. They would cling to rock, and what they couldn’t cling to they could use the winches to get over.

We swept the cave thoroughly and then Pagan and I ran diagnostics on the FAVs. Cat and Merle cherry-picked what we wanted from the supplies. Merle assured us that it would be fine to take the quiet-running FAVs as long as we stuck to the deeper tunnels away from habitation.

We were still moving in the darkness using lowlight. There was a generator and lights here but we’d decided against them. It was like living in a permanent green twilight. I gathered Pagan, Cat and Merle around me.

‘You find any surveillance?’ I asked Pagan.

‘If it’s here then I can’t see it.’

His answer did not fill me with confidence.

‘There’s nothing active here,’ Merle said.

I wasn’t sure I liked that either.

‘When’s our next scheduled RV with Rannu?’ I asked Pagan.

‘Twenty-three hours,’ he said.

Day or night was meaningless under all this rock. Our bodies were going to find their own clocks. Pagan was hard-wired into a monitor and he showed us the rendezvous point on it.

‘Okay, that’s about twenty miles south and maybe three below Moa City. Good choice — there’s nothing there,’ Merle told us. ‘There’s so much tunnel down here, they would tie up all their manpower just trying to patrol a small part of it. They’ll keep their people close to strategic locations.’

‘I agree,’ Pagan said. ‘Our biggest risk is going to be remotes.’

‘Risk the FAVs?’ I asked. I tried not to sound hopeful. Cat and Merle nodded. I think everyone was relieved, I knew I was. ‘Okay, we take what we need and we do it quickly. We find a place to camp and stay there for fifteen hours. That’ll give us more than enough time to get to the RV point and hopefully we can find out what’s going on.’

Merle raised his eyebrows. Fifteen hours was a long time, but if the others felt anything like me then they needed the rest.

‘We camp up and get our heads down. Two on, four off — four-hour shifts. Cat and Merle, you get the middle shift, and yes, I am picking on you,’ I said.

Merle nodded; Cat gave me the finger. It meant a broken night’s sleep but it made sense. Cat and Merle were most used to the environment.

This was how it was going to be from here on in: always on guard, always on edge. Sleeping when we could. No respite for as far into the future as I could see.

Morag drove. The conversation had gone like this:

‘I’ll drive.’ I’d told her no. ‘What, you think I’ll be able to run the weapons better than you?’ She’d had a point. She’d driven.

The drive hadn’t felt right. Morag had complained that the vehicle was heavy, sluggish, even though she was jacked into the FAV. I guessed the higher G made a difference. When we cornered it always felt like we were going faster. Still it was the closest to fresh air I’d tasted since we’d left the ship.

We found a place to camp. I’d fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the mat. When Cat woke me up for my watch I had my arm round Morag. I hadn’t felt her lie down next to me when her watch finished. She didn’t wake as I got up. Everything ached.

The RV point was a tall cavern. What I could make out of the rock formations looked impressive. I couldn’t help admiring the thin wavy drapery formations and the stalactites probably formed over millions of years hanging from the roof. Against one of the walls was what looked like a frozen waterfall of flowstone.

Mudge, Pagan, Morag and I wove our way slowly through towering, almost tree-like stalagmites. We were wearing our reactive camouflage. Merle and Cat were covering us from raised and concealed positions. As quiet as we were trying to be, every footstep seemed to echo loudly to my enhanced hearing.

We’d parked the FAVs a little over a mile away and taken a circuitous route to get here. We had planned a number of different and faster routes back to the vehicles if things went tits up. We’d also set up a number of escape and evasion fallbacks and longer-term RV points if things went really bad.

There was no sign of Rannu, but without comms to establish contact it was a case of sweeping the cave hoping to see him, or that he’d find us. Rannu and Pagan had established a series of identification passwords and every so often we would stop and whisper, ‘Nudd,’ hoping to hear ‘Ludd.’ I had no idea what the words meant. So far nothing, and I felt exposed creeping around and whispering. It didn’t feel like there was anyone here.

I had really hoped that Rannu would be here. He would know what the situation was down here and would be able to brief us. I also just wanted to see him again. Considering he’d once pulled my arm off and beat me near to death with it, he’d become a good friend.

Our compromise was inevitable, but I think it was me that gave us away when I stepped into the pool at the base of the flowstone waterfall. To get further up the wall I’d had no choice. I tried to ignore the faint hissing noise and the smoke rising from where my boots and the reactive camouflage suit had made contact with the acidic liquid. The submerged part of the suit started to flicker and distort. That was when the remote that had been sitting inert on a ledge near the top of the flowstone formation rose into the air.

I froze. Nothing happened. It didn’t go straight for me or anyone else, which meant it had been alerted but was not sure. A small wisp of acidic smoke drifted up past my eye level. It was a medium combat remote. I knew that normally they were capable of autonomous action to a degree. If Demiurge had, as we suspected, overrun Lalande 2’s net, then this remote might contain a small portion of Demiurge, making it capable of intelligent thought.

Medium combat remotes were reasonably tough but nothing I couldn’t handle on my own. The problem was the noise I’d make doing it and whether or not it could communicate our presence to anyone through the rock. Transponders were used to relay and boost comms signals in the higher, more inhabited levels, but down here you would have to plant them as you went.

Was this a coincidence, a random patrol? It seemed like it had been waiting for us. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I wished I’d brought a silent weapon. I remained still as the cylindrical remote dropped down to hover on its fan-like rotors over the pool just in front of me. It began flying in an ever-increasing circle from the centre of the pool, radiating outwards.

The remote curved round to just in front of me and stopped. The sound of acid eating my boots seemed deafening. One of its gauss weapons swivelled round in my general direction. Its sensor array still looked like it was searching. A wisp of acidic smoke drifted up from the pool. The remote’s array stopped moving. Its gauss weapon pointed straight at me.

The impact sounded like loose metal dropping into gears as Merle put two silent rounds into the machine. There was an unhealthy clunking noise and the remote splashed into the pool. Smoke rose from my reactive camouflage where the liquid had splashed me. Nothing else happened immediately.

‘Fall back to the FAVs.’ I thought I’d said it quietly but it seemed to echo up the tall cavern.

We fell back in good order but quickly. Illuminated by the green light of lowlight optics, the others looked like flickering disturbances in the air. When I checked thermographics, the IR-dampening properties of our inertial armour made us look like heat ghosts against the cold rock.

We made it back to the FAVs. We’d parked on a ledge off to the side of the tunnel we’d been using as a road. A gentle slope branched off from the main tunnel up to the ledge. The photoreceptive paint on the FAVs camouflaged the vehicles to look the same as the surrounding rock. Pagan, Cat and I provided cover as Merle, Morag and Mudge started up the vehicles. Merle passed me on the way to his FAV.

‘You took your time,’ I whispered.

‘I was hoping it would miss you.’

I heard the noise first, the whine of a straining vectored-thrust gunship engine. I magnified my optics on thermographics and saw the telltale heat signature of a gunship being flown far too fast in a tunnel with so little clearance. A spiral of lights was heading towards us very quickly.

‘Down!’ Pagan, Cat and I sheltered behind the FAVs. They rocked as the railgun tracer rounds impacted into them, scoring off the paint, making them more visible. Suddenly the cavern was alight with ricochet sparks flaring in our lowlight vision.

Pagan leaned over the bonnet of his FAV and fired two grenades down the tunnel. He had climbed into the vehicle next to Mudge before the multi-spectrum smoke and ECM grenades exploded. His laser carbine would have been useless against the gunship but the smoke and ECM would make targeting us more difficult.

Normally we would have texted the ignition codes to the FAVs but being comms dark meant we had to do it manually by plugging in. This was taking longer.

My audio filters kicked up a notch as Cat fired a long burst from her railgun, one hypersonic bang ripping into the next. The railgun drowned out the long burst from my SAW.

The smoke eddied violently as blindly fired rockets jetted towards us. Cat and I leaped into our FAVs. Morag didn’t bother with the slope; she just drove off the fifteen-foot ledge. I shot forward. I hadn’t had time to put on my harness. The dashboard rushed up to hit me and I felt the subcutaneous armour on my nose give and blood squirt out. The smartfoam on the tyres tried to grab at the smooth, steep rock slope with some success. The front wheels were forward of the vehicle so fortunately they hit the ground first, the heavy-duty suspension cushioning the blow. Morag slewed the wheel hard to the left, battering me against the side of the vehicle. A concussion wave rocked us and we were driving through fire.

Fingers of flame reached for us through the disruption in the air as we drove. Mudge and Pagan emerged from the flame behind us and then Merle and Cat.

The FAV’s suspension and tyres made light work of the rough ground beneath us as I struggled into my harness and then jacked into the vehicle’s weapon systems. Suddenly the view in my IVD changed to provide a compressed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama around the vehicle. Information scrolled down and cross hairs appeared in my view as I wrapped my hand around the grip for the weapon system’s smartlink, connecting it to the receiver in my palm. The grip also had manual triggers. I brought the front and rear ball-mounted, point-defence lasers online first.

Behind me the cavern burned. Fire swirled around the gunship as it flew through the flames, skimming over the ground. The flames made it look like an even more violent and predatory piece of military tech. I didn’t recognise the model — it looked new, next generation. Only the best for the Black Squadrons.

The pop-up turret unfolded from the middle of our FAV. It had a railgun mounted on it with two light anti-armour missile batteries on either side. I couldn’t get an angle on the gunship because of the other two FAVs behind us. Cat and Pagan could, however. Sparks were flying off the front of the gunship as the two FAVs’ railguns chewed away at its armour.

There were flashes from underneath the gunship’s wing-like weapons pontoons as it launched missiles. Red laser light glittered off chaff foil as the missiles exploded mid-flight, taken out by Mudge and Pagan’s anti-missile point defences. The panoramic view in my IVD showed the force of the explosions kick up the rear of their FAV, lifting the wheels high in the air as Mudge struggled to control it.

The gunship appeared again through its own missiles’ flames, the triple-barrelled railgun on the nose rotating as it fired. Sparks were flying off the rear armour of Mudge and Pagan’s FAV. Pagan was returning fire. He risked firing off a salvo of missiles but the gunship fired its own chaff dispensers and point-defence lasers. More fire filled the cavern.

‘We need to split up,’ I told Morag. I knew that the FAV’s on-board sensor would be providing a detailed topographical map of the tunnels ahead. She would have overlaid the three-dimensional map onto her IVD, offering her various routes to our various RVs. The only problem was the map was incomplete because not all of the cave systems had been explored and it was almost a year out of date.

Morag yanked the steering wheel hard to the right into an even tighter tunnel and then sped up. The armoured vehicle was smashing stalagmites as we drove over them and tearing stalactites off the roof of the tunnel. The two other FAVs shot past the entrance to our tunnel, then the gunship shot past as well. I can’t say I was disappointed, but on the other hand we needed to get the pressure off Pagan and Mudge. I had about a millisecond to think about reversing out behind them when a second gunship went past. As it did there was a flash of white light. Just behind us part of the rock exploded, caught fire and started to melt. Warning signals lit up my IVD letting me know that part of the FAV had also melted.

‘They’ve got door gunners with plasma weapons, so stick to tight tunnels,’ I told Morag. She just concentrated on driving. Now we would have to go back. Then the third gunship turned into the tunnel behind us. Morag went faster. Possibly too fast.

I was exchanging railgun fire with the gunship but its higher rate of fire was telling on the integrity of our rear armour. After my audio dampeners had filtered out the worst of the impact noise it sounded like heavy rain. Ahead of us I could see several pillars where stalactites and stalagmites had joined to make thick columns. The FAV was accelerating towards them.

‘Morag!’ Her response was to go faster.

‘Turret,’ she said through gritted teeth. I sent the command to fold the turret away as she slewed the FAV up the wall of the tunnel. The smartfoam of the tyres bit into the irregular surface of the rock wall. The turret only just folded way in time, though a column tore off part of the hatch.

Behind us the gunship fired missiles at the column, which exploded. The tunnel filled with fire. There was another column bisecting the path ahead of us. We just missed that, driving up the wall at what felt like ninety degrees to the tunnel floor. Back on the ground Morag continued accelerating.

Missiles reached out through the flames to destroy the second pillar. The gunship followed, buffeted by the explosions but not slowing down, railgun fire still eating at our rear armour.

Morag jammed on the brakes. The straps on my harness had to work to keep me in the bucket seat. Ahead there was a large, roughly circular crevice in the tunnel floor. I thought she was stopping to avoid it; she was in fact slowing so that she wouldn’t jump it. The FAV skidded into the crevice and we started to fall.

The suspension extended and the tyres bit into the rock all around us. It was part vertical driving but mostly free fall. I’m not too ashamed to admit that I cried out. Red light from our point-defence lasers lit up the darkness as two missiles from the gunship dipped into the crevice above us. The subsequent explosion forced the FAV down, dropping it about twenty feet before the tyres caught again. I fired the railgun blind up through the flames. The gunship hadn’t followed us, as it would have had to expose its vulnerable belly.

I shouted in surprise when Morag retracted the suspension and just let us drop. The impact felt like something that should be followed by death. Then there was a second jarring impact as we hit the ground. Morag was lolling around in her seat like a rag doll. She spat blood out of her mouth as she came to life again. There was the sound of tortured metal as she pressed the accelerator, and the rugged FAV moved forward. I’d been battered around so much I had trouble working out what was going on. There was the sound of tearing metal from the rear of the FAV and then we broke free.

‘Missile!’ Morag shouted. Without thinking I swung the turret round to face behind us and fired off half the light anti-armour missiles. It was only then I realised what she’d done, why we’d had to drive so fast. She’d known about the crevice and how it bisected the tunnel that the others were in. She’d dropped us down on the front of the second gunship chasing the others. The missile salvo had finished it off. My panoramic view showed the twisted burning wreckage filling the tunnel behind us. She must have programmed an algorithm to do the maths on her internal computer while she was driving. She would probably shake and sob later when she thought about there being people in the gunship. That was okay, as long as it was later.

Morag accelerated. Now we were behind a gunship this was more fun. I triggered the railgun, firing long bursts, chewing away at its rear armour. The gunship’s weapon pontoons reversed. Warning icons appeared in my IVD — they had a missile lock on us. The gunship fired two missiles, but we’d kept well enough back that they were easy pickings for the point-defence lasers. We drove through the flame of their explosions still firing at the back of the gunship.

I risked two of our own missiles at it, but chaff and laser fire took care of them as we drove through fire again. As we emerged through the flames the gunship had gone. Ahead of us I could see the other two FAVs. The back of Pagan and Mudge’s looked like someone had been eating it. It had just driven up the wall and was now returning to the flat. I was remembering something about the map. There was a branching tunnel here that sloped down. The others must have avoided it by driving up the wall while the gunship, probably badly damaged, had taken it to escape. Morag went after the gunship.

‘No!’ I shouted too late.

The downward tunnel was short. The end of it was a hole in the roof of a large cavern. We were airborne. Suddenly we were the world’s shittest aircraft. The gunship was waiting for us. Its railgun opened up and it fired two more missiles. One of the plasma door gunners missed. Rock melted and burned behind us. The other clipped the front of the FAV, partially melting the bonnet and leaving the metal and composite armour burning.

I’m not sure how I had the presence of mind to do it, but the FAV’s superb systems gave me lock even as we fell and I fired the rest of our missiles. The FAV’s point defence took care of the gunship’s missiles. Above us the gunship’s own point-defence laser managed to take out all but two of ours. We splashed into the shallow lake that covered the bottom of the cavern. It was like hitting rock. Then we hit the rock under the water.

I didn’t see it, but just before the gunship exploded above us, raining burning wreckage down to hiss in the acidic lake, two large humanoid-shaped objects must have bailed out of the open passenger compartment.

I came to in the cab of the submerged FAV. Now it was the world’s shittest submarine. The cab was full of crashfoam. I couldn’t move or see. My IVD was red with warning signs. My body felt like one big bruise. Had she done all this on purpose?

There was quite a lot of water leaking into the supposedly hermetically sealed vehicle. It was warring with the crashfoam and the crashfoam was losing. I felt my skin start to burn as well.

I texted Morag but got an automated reply telling me that she was sorry she couldn’t answer on account of being unconscious. I burned myself in pooling acid as I reached for the manual release for the chemical catalyst that would dissipate the crashfoam.

As the crashfoam dispersed I got more burned as water squirted in on me. Eventually I could see Morag again. She was unconscious, parts of her skin bubbling as acidic water leaked into the FAV.

I opened a pouch on my webbing, removed a stim patch and stuck it to Morag’s neck. I saw a message from the FAV’s systems asking me if I wanted to use the periscope. This was for parking in a hull-down position (squaddie talk for parking behind cover). I replied in the affirmative and tentatively raised the periscope to just break the surface. This was still being kicked around by our impact and the fiery death of the gunship but I managed to pick out the two exo-armour suits circling the cavern high above us.

They looked familiar but I knew I’d never seen the model before. Although the water was slopping over the periscope, it still provided me with enough resolution to watch in horror as thick black tendrils unfolded from the backs of the two suits. They were, at least in part, derived from Themtech. Then I realised why they seemed familiar. They looked a bit like Berserks, if Berserks were larger, symmetrical, made mostly of human materials, attached to exo-armour flight systems and carried Retributor railguns.

Morag signalled her return to consciousness by mumbling a long string of nonsense.

‘It’s not a submarine,’ I said, largely for something to say.

‘What?’ she asked groggily. Coming more fully to, she assessed our situation. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘What were you thinking?’ I asked.

‘Shut up, it worked. What now?’

‘Well, those things up there don’t have the right tools for the job, though if they’ve got grenades they could make our lives miserable. But we’ll drown or melt in here if we don’t get out soon.’

I didn’t say that if they launched their missiles at us the force of the explosions would be magnified in the water. Their missiles’ engines wouldn’t work in the water but our point-defence lasers would pretty much be expensive and very bright flashlights. Also we now had no offensive ability, as without a pressurised barrel or a hydrodynamic round all the railgun was good for was pushing around water. All they had to do was wait us out.

We shifted around, trying to avoid the worst of the leaks, lifting our feet out of the footwell. The air stank of rotten eggs from the sulphur in the water. The good thing was, the FAV’s anti-corrosion protection was holding. The vehicle wasn’t going to melt around us, and had it been any less well sealed we already would have drowned. The bad news was, if we tried to leave the vehicle we’d be sitting ducks. Assuming we weren’t just dissolved by the acidic water (we wouldn’t be, but we would be badly burned).

Morag left unsaid that this all meant they’d got and broken Rannu. If they had all the information they needed then he was probably dead by now, unless they’d sent him to the Belt. In which case he was also probably dead by now. Rannu had been a good operator and was on top of his game, yet they’d still got him like all the others. We hadn’t stood a chance.

There were missile contrails in the cavern above us, then warheads blossoming to fire and force as black light, Themtech and point-defence weapons from the flying exo-armour took them out. We could hear the railgun fire through the water. The other two FAVs were on ledges far above the lake and had caught the two exo-armour suits in a crossfire.

‘See if the grapples work. We’ll see if the winch can get us shallow enough for the turret to fire,’ I said.

Morag fired both the front-facing grapples. One of them bounced off; the other connected and started to eat its way in. Already the acid in the shallow lake would be corroding the cable. Morag triggered the winch and we started to roll forward. We were moving slowly towards a smooth rock shore at one end of the cavern. This would only work while the two exo-armour pilots were too distracted to notice the cable.

Cat fired the remaining missiles from her turret-mounted battery. Sheer numbers overwhelmed one of the exo-armour suits’ point-defence systems and the impacting missiles destroyed it. The wreckage joined us in the lake.

The other exo-armour suit flew through the barrage of missiles from Pagan and Mudge’s FAV, firing its Retributor and its own missiles. Red laser light connected the FAV to the incoming missiles, detonating them. The suit appeared through the flame and smoke like a horrible angel, landed next to the FAV and tore off its railgun. I was appalled to see it start to tear open the armour, assisted by its tendrils.

We rolled forward painfully slowly to bring us to a firing depth, the winch straining to pull us through the water as it and the cable corroded. I watched as Merle exited the other FAV and sprinted to the edge of the ledge, bringing up his plasma rifle. White fire lit up the darkness as he fired almost the length of the cavern into the back of the exo-armour tearing open the FAV. The plasma fire started to burn the armour, eating into it. The turret on the FAV turned to face the Themtech suit.

‘Don’t do it,’ I said.

Pagan triggered the missile at point-blank range. He must have hacked the proximity fuse. It exploded. The FAV was airborne, tumbling over as it hit the side of the cavern before falling back onto the ledge. The exo-armour was blown off the ledge and splashed into the water close by the rock shore we were heading towards.

The barrel of our railgun broke the surface of the water. A smoking, blackened, still burning exo-armour stood up unsteadily. I hit it with round after round from the railgun as the winch pulled us forward. It staggered back under the relentless impact but would not go down. White light flashed again and again as Merle shot round after round over our heads into it. Finally it hit the wall of the cavern, its head now ablaze with white plasma fire. It slid down the wall and into the water. I put another two bursts into it anyway. The ammo on the railgun was looking low.

The protesting winch dragged us out of the water. Smoke poured off the FAV, the photoreceptive paint long gone. I hit the door release and slid it back. Morag did the same. I ditched my gear and started free-climbing up the rock. Morag ran into the cave system.

Morag reached the rock ledge, which supported Mudge and Pagan’s FAV, just before I did. She hacked the door mechanism and managed to feed a snake through the crashfoam, then took control of the FAV and fired one of the front and one of the rear winches. She stepped back. I watched feeling helpless as the winches dragged the vehicle up and over onto its wheels.

Morag reached in and pulled the manual release for the crashfoam dissolver. I ran forward and we pulled an unconscious and badly battered Pagan out of the FAV. Nothing looked broken but I didn’t like the look of the swelling on his face and skull. Mudge was battered but conscious and grinning. He was obviously very, very high.

‘I love these cars,’ he managed. I just shook my head.

The FAV’s armour was pitted, scored, burned, buckled in a couple of places and a blackened mess, but it seemed intact.

Opposite me, aided by patches of burning wreckage and guttering plasma fire, I could see a much larger cavern almost directly opposite this ledge. It would provide easy ingress for the final gunship if it knew where we were, and we’d been making a lot of noise.

‘Is the FAV running?’ I asked Morag quietly.

‘They’re hurt.’

‘We need to leave.’

Morag concentrated for a moment.

‘I think it’ll run. Not well, but it’ll run.’

On the other ledge I could see Merle signalling, asking if we were all clear. I signalled for him to wait.

That was when the final gunship dropped through the hole in the cavern roof that Morag and I had fallen through. As it did, two more Themtech exo-armours leaped off it. They had us. It was over.

Then in the mouth of the large cavern opposite me it seemed to get as light as day. The gunship became a fountain of white liquid flame as it dropped into the lake. The two exo-armours followed in rapid succession. Involuntarily I held my hands up in front of my face and backed away from the light. Beneath the water I could make out the three pools of plasma fire still burning, the surface of the lake bubbling as the water boiled.

‘Stay where you are, mate, or I’ll light you up,’ a booming voice echoed through the cavern. Even amplified I could make out the strong New Zealand accent.

That’s when we heard the giant’s footsteps. I saw its heat signature as I magnified my optics. It had been far back in the tunnel but was making its way quickly towards us to the sound of metal resonating off rock.

Cat moved their FAV back into the tunnel that had brought them to the ledge they were on and threw her brother a Laa-Laa. Merle extended the man-portable missile launcher and took cover, his reactive camouflage turning him into another piece of rock. Not that the light anti-armour missile would do much against the armoured metal giant that stalked out of the tunnel and waded into the lake. I recognised the enormous bipedal, roughly humanoid-shaped mech as a German-made Landsknecht, although it seemed bulkier than others I’d seen. I guessed that this was something to do with the heavier gravity. They had been superseded by newer, better models but were still serviceable and had still been seeing action on all the colonial fronts at the end of the war with Them.

Its armour was pitted and scorched and it had obviously seen a lot of action judging by the patchwork of repairs all over it. On some of the less damaged parts of the mech I could make out intricate patterns that reminded me of the knot work that Pagan favoured, only different somehow. It had a medium missile battery on either shoulder and point-defence lasers mounted on its chest. The plasma cannon which it had used to destroy the gunship had cooled down to only red hot.

‘You fellows were sure making a lot of noise,’ the amplified voice with the Kiwi accent said.

‘Who are you?’ I shouted.

‘We’re the resistance,’ was the amplified reply.