War in Heaven

17

We were running on cheap stims and home-made amphetamines. We ran when we could, walked when we couldn’t run and staggered just before we crashed. We kept going. I didn’t want to sleep anyway. Sleep was a nightmare transformation of a healthy young woman to meat in the space of two gunshots.

We were living in the green light of our lowlight optics, far away from any other sources of illumination. Soon sensory deprivation, lack of sleep and bad drugs took me to a place I knew well from Sirius, that sort of twilight, half-dead, unreal feeling. I started to see fractals of light. My mind started to fill in the gaps in my perception, ghost images given fear and form in the corner of my eye.

I was finding the miles of rock above us more and more oppressive. It seemed to be weighing down on me. Crushing me like the high G. I missed the sky. I really wanted to see the sky again before I died. I didn’t think it was likely.

Always moving until we couldn’t any more. Eking out the food that the End had given us. They’d given us the drugs as well. They might be deserters and a suicide cult but they’d done all right by us.

I was almost completely healed now, one of the benefits of having what were effectively tiny little aliens throughout my body; the other of course was not dying from radiation poisoning. Rannu was weaker than he’d been for a long time but that was still pretty strong. He’d lost a lot of weight but he was keeping up.

We’d made it back to the pa by trial and error. All the maps had gone when I’d triggered the firestorm in my internal memory and wiped it, although I needn’t have bothered when I was going to spill my guts like I had. We’d taken a lot of wrong turnings but at least when we’d found the cave we knew it was the right one.

They’d left in a hurry and blown all the tunnels that would have enabled Rolleston to follow them easily. The problem was this made it almost as difficult for us. When we’d been camped here I’d studied the maps trying to commit as much of them to actual meat memory as possible in case I needed the info for E amp;E. I was pretty sure that I knew the long way round. The route that Rolleston and his people would have had to take. Then we could try and pick up the trail of either Rolleston or Mother’s people. Or we’d end up wandering Lalande 2’s Deep Caves until we died of hunger.

The one thing we did have going for us was our tracking ability. I’d grown up tracking and had been taught by one of the best, my dad. 5 Para Pathfinders had continued my training, as had the Regiment. Rannu had also grown up tracking and it was emphasised in Ghurkha training as well. That said, lightless caves were not the environment we were used to.

Day and night cycles were pointless in darkness and on stims. The time and date facility on our IVDs had become meaningless and I don’t think either of us was paying any attention to them. So I’ve no idea how long it took us to find the tracks. Maybe I’d remembered the complex cave system correctly or maybe it was just luck.

When two hundred people camp it is difficult to erase all the signs. The trails of crushed or grazed stone the mechs left were the easiest to follow. The mechs were not what you would call stealthy, particularly the Bismarck-class Apakura.

What I didn’t see was Rolleston’s trail. Either his force was using some other route or his people were good enough for Rannu and I not to find their tracks in this environment, which was a possibility. I knew, however, that he was down here.

It felt like I hadn’t seen light, let alone sky, for a very, very long time. The glow in the distance hurt despite the flash compensation on my optics. It hurt in my head. It hurt as a new and disorienting sensation. I had to remember what it was, what light looked like. All I’d seen was Rannu and rock in green for a good while now.

Of course we were too late. How could we not be? Still it looked like they’d put up a fight. Rolleston’s people were clearing it up. Looking for a way to spin it. Make this into good propaganda. Make us the bad guys. We got as close as we could.

The new pa was a large area of rock the colour of sun-bleached bone. Naturally occurring columns of rock ran between cave roof and floor at almost regular intervals. The cave floor was a series of pitted basins filled with the foul-smelling, salty sulphurous liquid that passed for water on Lalande 2. Much of it was red and steaming from where the acid content was eating away at the bodies floating or lying half in the pools.

Regular NZ army guarded the perimeter but it looked like a relatively small Black Squadron force had done most of the damage. They were checking the bodies for life and identity. Magnifying my optics I saw my friends, smoking as they were eaten away or just lying in piles of other corpses.

I saw Pagan face down in the water. I didn’t recognise him until one of the women in the Black Squadron turned him over. The acid had gone to work on his face but it was unmistakably him. He looked old, tired and in pain. As if death had come as a relief.

Cat was in a pile of corpses. We’d fucked her life up completely. If not for us she’d still be in a cushy job as head of the Atlantis Spoke C-SWAT team. I couldn’t see her face. I don’t think I wanted to. She was wearing the gyroscopic rig for her railgun. I hoped and was reasonably sure that she would have given them hell before they got her. Though I did wonder whether the members of the Black Squadron were like Rolleston and couldn’t be killed.

Mother, Tailgunner and Dog Face were in the same pile of bodies as Cat. Maybe they’d been together because it had been a last stand. I think they were fucked as soon as they chose to resist. Still they would have lasted a little longer if I hadn’t ratted them out.

Big Henry was lying dead quite close to us. I reckoned he’d been on sentry duty. He’d been taken quietly and quickly judging by the blade wound in the back of his skull and the look of surprise on his face.

I didn’t see Mudge, Merle or Strange. I was pretty sure that Merle had died when the Walker blew in the Rookery. He’d been too close. Mudge and Strange weren’t necessarily alive; they could be at the bottom of a pile of bodies. I hoped that neither of them had been captured. If any of them had got away then my money would be on Merle, if he’d made it out of the Rookery.

Then the thought occurred to me. Two people had betrayed us. Two. Could it have been two of those three? Not Mudge, never Mudge. I didn’t know Strange well enough. She had seemed too fucked in the head to sell us out. On the other hand that could just mean that nobody knew what she would do, but she had seemed very loyal to the whanau.

Rannu and I had talked about fighting the Black Squadrons. We were going to try kill shots. That meant firing accurate shots to the brain, spine, back of the neck, that sort of thing. Trying to do them enough damage so they were dead before they started to heal rapidly, like the whanau had witnessed when they killed one of them.

As for Rolleston, our best idea was the four grenades each of us carried in our gauss carbines’ underslung grenade launchers. We also had a magazine and a half for each of the carbines. We had been hoping to pick up more ordnance on the way. This was going to have to be fast and dirty because they were there. They were all there.

Grief shut down. Grief would come later. No, actually it wouldn’t; I’d be dead. Grief was easy to lock down and turn into hate, looking at Rolleston, Cronin with a fucking media crew and Kring. The Grey Lady was there as well. I kind of hoped that she would kill me. That would seem fitting for what I’d done.

Two sentries die. I push two claws through the back of one of their skulls. Rannu does the other one with one of the shanks he made out of the two claws I’d removed from my left hand. Just ordinary soldiers. Fuck them, they should have resisted like the people they helped murder.

We slide into the water. Wriggle quietly in on our bellies like reptiles. We swim through blood and viscera. I feel the acid burn on my skin, eating away at it. If I’m in here long enough it’ll eat down to the armour. That’s good — show them the machine, the weapon. The weapon’s who I need to be right now. Pain is just information.

My internal oxygen supply enables me to stay submerged longer. I try to exhale slowly and only when I absolutely have to. I pull myself across the bottom of the blood-red pool, getting as close to Rolleston as I can.

We break the surface slowly. You can be as quiet as you like; nine times out of ten it’s movement that gives you away. We rise out of the pool like the walking dead. I’m already red and raw from where the acid has stripped away the skin. My smoking clothes are covered in other people’s blood. Heads whip around. Weapons are brought to bear. They’re too slow. They don’t have anything like our motivation.

Rolleston turns towards me. Everything round me fades away; there’s just a tunnel between him and me. The smartlink drops the cross hairs over his centre mass. I don’t think I need the cross hairs. I squeeze the carbine’s trigger. It feels like the Zen shot that I hear snipers talk about. The grenade fires from the underslung launcher. The gun bucks up in my hand. I centre in on him again, the second grenade more hurried. The carbines Rannu stole each had two fragmentation grenades and two High-Explosive Armour-Piercing thirty-millimetre grenades each. We made sure the HEAP grenades were first in the load. The thinking is, fast healing or not, he can’t heal if he’s scattered all over the cave.

The grenade hits. Penetrates his armour. Everything’s moving in slow motion. Magnified optics show the grenade penetrating his body. A moment later the second one does the same. Rolleston explodes. I so want to enjoy this moment. There’s no time.

A look of shock on the Grey Lady’s face. My suicide fantasies notwithstanding, she is the biggest threat to us and she’s not wearing a helmet. A short burst from the carbine. She goes down in a spray of red from her head. I can’t believe this. We surprised them.

Now people know we’re here. We fire frags into the largest groups of Black Squadron guys we can see. There’s panic. We use this. Embrace it. Move, fire. We drop the hypersonic needles from the gauss carbines in under their helmets, in the backs of their necks.

Taking hits now but I don’t care. Push our luck. Find Cronin.

There’s a roaring noise. A man screaming. Feral rage. In my peripheral vision I see Kring charge Rannu. Rannu gets off a burst of fire. Kring doesn’t even break step. He grabs Rannu’s carbine and lifts it. Rannu holds on and is lifted up off his feet. He takes this opportunity to knee Kring in the face. Kring throws Rannu away like a rag doll. Then I have my own problems.

Another member of the Black Squadron goes down in front of me but my gun explodes in two different places almost simultaneously. I’m taking fire now but I haven’t been torn apart yet. Which is what I was expecting. Fine, you want to do this the old-fashioned way. Four broken claws extend from my right fist and two full-sized claws from the left. I look around for the shooter.

Cronin is handing a fancy rifle to somebody. I see him mouth the words: ‘He’s mine.’ Less people are shooting at me as I charge him. I can’t believe my luck. Corporate boy is dumb enough to want to duel. Well unless he’s another biomechanical monster, which he’s bound to be. We run at each other. I don’t understand why he hasn’t got his katana.

Just before we meet he skids low into a puddle of water, the liquid splashing up into my face as he hits me low. I tumble over him and face down onto acid-wet rock. I feel my nose break. Dumb.

I roll the way I think he’ll least expect. His foot slams down where my head was moments before. I’m up on my feet and facing him. He walks purposefully towards me. I risk a low kick at his knee. He raises his leg to take it on his shin.

I swing at him, hooking with the blades. He’s fast, sways out of the way of the left. The right only just misses and would have got him if my claws had still been full length. He hits me in the face, the chest and then a kick to the knee. I stagger back, something gives in the knee but I’m still up.

I move to close with him. It’s what he’s been waiting for. He just slides to my side and locks up my left. This is it. Broken claws jam into his face. Blood everywhere, he bites back a cry of pain, he looks angry. I hook a leg behind his and sweep it back, driving him to the ground. On the way down he hits me in the side of the head hard enough to make me nauseous.

I glimpse Kring hit Rannu so hard it picks him up off his feet.

Cronin drags me down with him. He twists in mid-air and lands on me. How the fuck did this happen? I feel like my face caves in when he elbows me. I kick up, hook my leg round his neck and yank him backwards. He throws himself back with the momentum of it, rolling out of the leg lock into a low crouch. I start to roll to my feet but Cronin pushes forward off his legs, plants a hand next to me and the next I know he knees me in the face with his entire body weight. My face feels concave now. My IVD bores me with red warning icons. I may as well have them up permanently now.

It’s an ugly, badly aimed blow but it connects. More luck than judgement but there’s enough force there to punch through armour and reach flesh as I ram the two blades on my left fist into his side. I twist and thrash my hand around inside him trying to do as much damage as I can. For a corp this guy’s hard. He doesn’t scream; instead he steps through me. Pushing my hand out of his flesh and kicking me in the face. Bone and subcutaneous armour crumple on my chin and the back of my skull as it’s battered off the rock.

He’s angry now. Instead of pulling away, his leg goes high into the air. Why has nobody else got involved? He hammers it down in an attempt to scissor-kick me in the face. All he does is ram his leg down onto the four broken blades of my right hand. I twist and yank the leg, hoping to make it useless. I sit up and try and stab him in the groin with the blades on my left hand but he’s gone. He’s rolled out of the way, screaming out as he twists the broken blades out of his leg.

He skips up back onto his feet. I stand up more slowly, grinning at him. His face, side and leg are all pissing blood.

I sense more than see that Rannu is boxing Kring. Kring looks like pulped meat but I watch as he swings a huge fist with surprising speed and almost takes Rannu’s head off, sending the punch-drunk Ghurkha staggering back across the cave.

Everyone else is just watching. They look nervous. I don’t understand why they haven’t just shot me. Cronin didn’t strike me as the type to give someone a sporting chance.

‘I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!’ Cronin spits at me.

I just smile.

‘Don’t kill him,’ someone says. It looks like one of the Black Squadron soldiers. Why is he telling Cronin what to do? Something doesn’t make sense. I put that thought to the back of my mind as Cronin skips forward with surprising speed and kicks me in the knee. The knee snaps, bending the other way. There’s some screaming, quite a lot of screaming. Then I fall over. That hurts as well. Then Cronin is all over me. I get in some good blows but it’s over quickly. Him stamping on my head until I lose consciousness is just a formality now.

Knowing I’m a lost cause, Demiurge decides to show me the truth. As I try to crawl away, and Merle kicks me in the head again, I see that there is no carpet of bodies. There is no Black Squadron presence. Cronin is really Merle. The Black Squadron guy who told Merle not to kill me is Mudge. Kring is Tailgunner. Tailgunner has lifted Rannu off the ground by his neck and is pounding him again and again with a massive fist. Rannu hangs limp like some street kid’s prize rag doll. I don’t know who Rolleston was because he’s spread over a large area of the cave and mixed in with the broken remains of all the others we’ve killed.

Mother, Little Henry and Strange stand in the circle around our beating. Mother wants to kill me. I can tell that. Little Henry looks like he’s in shock. I think Strange wants to cry.

Another jarring kick to the head, another wave of nausea as my brain rattles around in the broken vessel of my skull. Rammed down into the stone, spitting out more blood, leaving a trail as I try to crawl some more. I don’t know where. Towards the Grey Lady’s body? Mudge and Pagan look traumatised by what they’re watching.

Another kick to the head. I’m laughing now, don’t know why, so much pain. Cat is crouching over the Grey Lady, working furiously on the head wound. Why? She’s the enemy. But she’s not. That was a lie. That was what Demiurge made me think. It’s not the Grey Lady. I crawl some more.

‘Motherfucker!’ Merle’s really angry. I fucked up his face. He punctuates the scream with a kick to my side for a bit of variety, which hits me so hard it flips me onto my back.

‘That’s enough.’ Mudge’s voice. Merle wants to kill me. They all want to kill me. I manage to roll back onto my belly, a good place for someone like me. I can see the Grey Lady now. Except it’s not her. I knew it wasn’t. I’m a good shot. There’s only so much you can do when someone who’s as good a shot as me puts three rounds from a gauss carbine into a human head. I look at Morag’s body.

Demiurge has had its fun. It feels like black water washing over my soul. It feels like drowning.