War in Heaven

1

Why was I thinking about Dog 4 again? Just another gunfight, though it had been a hairy one. Another fucking last stand. My arm ached. The prosthetic one.

‘It’s the purity!’ Mudge was practically howling at me. ‘I mean, not the purity of the powder. This shit is probably cut with rat poison. But the colour, the whiteness of it, so, so virginal.’ He was very excited about the large pile of coke he had on a piece of plastic on his lap.

‘It’s white because it’s bleached,’ I growled. I was desperately trying to find my way through the sandstorm. For such a large disorganised convoy you’d think that Crawling Town would move slower. Instead I had to rely completely on information from the four-wheel-drive muscle car’s sensors.

The three-dimensional topographic map on my Internal Visual Display told me where all the surrounding vehicles were. Hopefully. They all looked unreasonably close to me. All I could see was a solid-looking wall of airborne dust and dirt. In theory Rannu was out in that shit on a bike. Every so often a huge wheel from one vehicle or another would appear close to our car and cause eddies in the dirt.

Mudge snorted a line of the white powder. Cold turkey had been a bad, bad time for him

‘You really missed that, didn’t you?’ I asked.

‘You’ve no idea, mate. You want to do a line?’

‘No, Mudge. I don’t really feel like switching off my nasal filters in the middle of a huge poisonous dust cloud.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged and did another line up the other nostril.

We’d already seen a number of accidents. Well, less accidents more automotive Darwinism. Mainly smaller vehicles, like ours, misjudging their place in the scheme of things and getting ground up by larger, much heavier vehicles with bigger wheels/tracks. I wasn’t surprised that accidents were the number-one cause of premature death in Crawling Town.

Still, in the body-count stakes car accidents had fearsome competition from the toxic and sometimes irradiated environment of the Dead Roads. I’d found this out the hard way the last time I had visited. The Dead Roads was the blasted and polluted wasteland that ran down the eastern seaboard of the United States. The result of the Final Human Conflict some two hundred and fifty plus years ago and unregulated industrial pollution in the wake of the country’s financial collapse.

Coming in a surprising third for cause of death in Crawling Town was the internecine feuding between the various nomad gangs, while we were here to see if we could increase the number of deaths caused by violence. I had an old and cold reason to do this. A score to settle.

I had been happily enjoying my retirement from getting shot at in the colonies fighting in the never-ending war against Them. No, that’s a lie. I was miserable, but I really didn’t know any better and so was everyone else. Also it was the sort of misery that was easy to cope with. Then my old CO, Major Rolleston, a thoroughgoing bastard of the highest order, had decided to complicate my life by sending me after a Them infiltrator. We had assumed it was a Ninja — squaddie parlance for one of Their stealth killing machines. One had killed most of the Wild Boys, my old SAS squad.

It wasn’t a Ninja. That would have been less complicated, though more fatal. It was an Ambassador. It was being sheltered by a group of prostitutes who worked in the Rigs, the shanty town made up of derelict oil rigs in the Tay River off the shore of Dundee. That was how I met Morag and really, really complicated my life by disobeying Rolleston. Fleeing with Morag to Hull (I only get to see the nicest places, a holdover tradition from my army days) with the downloaded essence of Ambassador, we agreed, sort of, to help Pagan, a computer hacker, create an electronic god out of humanity’s communications network.

Rolleston was of course delighted with my disobedience, betrayal and apparent treason against humanity and dispatched all sorts of interesting people to find and kill us. This included, but was not limited to, Rannu Nagarkoti, a Ghurkha ex-SAS man, who was currently riding through the sandstorm somewhere, and the Grey Lady, Ms Josephine Bran, the scariest operator in the scary world of black ops.

Hull got burned. Pagan, Morag and I fled to New York. I came a close second in my arse-kicking at the hands of Rannu. He then joined us. I’m sure there are easier ways. I met my old friend Howard Mudgie — Mudge to his mates. We also got the support of Balor, the insane pirate king of the ruins of New York, though this had taken some persuasion and, for reasons still unclear, me getting the aforementioned beating at the hands of Rannu. Balor was a heavily augmented cyborg who had had his body sculpted to look like a sea demon from some old mythology. Mudge put us on to two pilots I really wanted to speak to, Gibby and Buck. They’d both worked the same shady world of special ops that I had. They had been Rolleston and the Grey Lady’s taxi drivers, the taxi being a heavily armed and armoured vectored-thrust gunship. Gibby and Buck had been the last to see my best friend Gregor on Dog 4 after he’d been infected by one of Their Ninjas during its death throws. The two pilots were hiding out in Crawling Town. That’s why we’d come here the first time, and some bad shit had happened to me for no good reason I could think of.

Gibby and Buck had told us that they had taken Gregor to the Atlantis Spoke, one of the city-sized orbital elevators that ring the planet on the equator. We found Gregor in a lab deep below the surface of the ocean being experimented on by Rolleston’s employers, the Cabal. The dying Ninja had somehow joined with Gregor, transforming him into a hybrid form of humanity and Them. The Cabal were a shadowy group of upper-echelon corporate execs, military types and intelligence operatives. So we had some of the most powerful people in the world after us, and we were in the company of a human/Them hybrid and wanted for betraying the entire human race.

What we found out was that They had not started the war, as we had always been led to believe. It was us — or rather it was the Cabal. Not only had they started the war, but they had taught Them — who as far as I could make out were some kind of harmless vacuum-living space coral — to fight. They had done this through what Pagan called negative stimulus and what I call blowing the shit out of them.

So we’d been conned for sixty years into fighting a war that was manipulated so as not to end. I’m still a little hazy as to why. I’m guessing it had something to do with power, control, greed and all that good stuff. Mudge, however, claims it was to do with sexual inadequacy on the part of the members of the Cabal. Mudge puts a lot of the problems of people he doesn’t like down to that, though Morag did point out that the majority of the Cabal were male. The Cabal were also working on their own version of God called Demiurge. Only instead of guiding the net to sentience and electronic omniscience (a word I’m sure no self-respecting squaddie should be using as much as I have been) they just wanted to control it.

So as our situation got worse and worse we came up with more and more desperate plans. We decided to program God to always tell the truth but to be under nobody’s control. I know why we did this but often I feel it would be useful if we’d retained control of the electronic deity. We took over a media node in Atlantis at gunpoint and released God into the net. Now suddenly all information was available to everyone. Mudge then used the node to broadcast the evidence of the Cabal’s crimes against humanity and Them.

After a worldwide televised argument with Rolleston and Vincent Cronin, the Cabal’s corporate mouthpiece, the good Major and the Grey Lady made a concerted effort to kill us. In Buck’s case they succeeded. In what felt like a one-sided exchange of violence it also appeared that the Major was somehow augmented with Themtech. He was pretty much walking through railgun fire.

A lot of pissed-off people’s secrets had been revealed. There were also a lot of people baying for the Cabal’s blood. As most of the Cabal were fat old men being kept alive by machinery they weren’t too hard for the vigilante crowds to deal with.

Ambassador had told us that They wanted peace. We wanted peace. Hurray, the war’s over. Except Rolleston and Cronin got away. They escaped in next-generation frigates using Themtech, supported by frighteningly good hackers who we think were using technology derived from Project Demiurge. The frigates, which we’re now apparently calling the Black Squadrons, made for the four colonial systems of Sirius, Lalande, Barnard’s Star and Proxima. We believed they planned to take over the comms networks in each system with Demiurge, which would mean that they controlled the information in them, which would in turn help them take command of humanity’s colonial military. We also thought they were going to try and use a Themtech-derived biological agent developed by Project Crom to infect, subjugate and control Them in the Sirius system. And that is how I ended up going back there, my least favourite place but where my mind kept returning to.

We went to the Sirius system for other reasons. Maybe it was because I was dying of radiation poisoning at the time or maybe it was just because Morag really wanted to go. I was surprised by how it was actually worse this time than all my previous visits. Suited in Mamluk exo-armour we performed extravehicular activity — we exited a perfectly functional spacecraft and infiltrated the Dog’s Teeth. The Dog’s Teeth is an asteroid belt and was home base to the largest concentration of Them in the Sirius system. Our plan was to find the Crom virus/spores and stop them from infecting Them.

Morag had a different plan. With the remnants of Ambassador living in her neural cybernetics, she wanted to communicate with Them. She left us.

What we didn’t know was that when Rolleston attacked us in the Spoke he had infected Gregor with Crom. He had effectively turned Gregor into a slave plague-bearing weapon. We got compromised. The billions of Them there decided to kill us. That I understood. Gregor attempting to assimilate and warp the flesh of Them and infect Them with the Crom virus so they could be controlled by Rolleston and Cronin was more of a surprise.

Balor died. He finally opened his bad old eye. Whatever weapon he had behind the patch nearly succeeded in killing Gregor. Nearly wasn’t enough. Still, the old monster had given himself the warrior’s ending he’d always wanted. It was Gibby who killed Gregor. He was flying the Spear, our ship. He’d forsaken stealth and flown into the Dog’s Teeth taking fire every inch of the way but managed to make it to Gregor and detonate his payload and engines. Sanitising the area. I’d never seen anything like what Balor or Gibby had done. I thought the days of actions like that had long since gone, if they’d ever really been.

So instead of looking at peace we were looking at war between humanity. More than two hundred and fifty years after we swore we’d never do this to ourselves again. After we’d decided that the cost was too great we were looking at one half of humanity fighting the other. And it was our fault. Actually it wasn’t; it was the Cabal’s. It was Rolleston’s and Cronin’s. We were just the catalyst.

Gregor’s betrayal had hurt. A lot. But even though the monster had had his warped features, it had been Rolleston’s demon — he had been programmed. My friend hadn’t done this. My friend had died in the Spoke when Rolleston had stabbed him in the head and injected Crom into his hybrid physiology. Rolleston had tried to kill me so many times. He badly needed to die. It wasn’t so much revenge, though that would be good. It just really needed doing, though not by me.

We’d played long odds and won. Or some of us had. By ‘won’ I mean we were still alive. We were on the eve of a new war between humans, but my fight was over. We’d more than done our bit surely? Someone else’s turn. It wasn’t just that I was tired of it, though I was. It was that I knew I was about one gunfight with someone who knew what they were doing from being dead. I’d never had much luck, none of us had — there wasn’t much around — but I’d pushed what I had way too far.

Morag disagreed. She wanted to see this through to the end. She used words that only the young and terminally optimistic use, like responsibility. Or maybe she wasn’t optimistic. Maybe she wanted to die. After all, she’d been sold into a life of prostitution by her mum for crystal. She’d had even less luck than the rest of us. Why push it? But she did. I couldn’t do it any more. I thought she would cry when I told her that. I didn’t want to make her cry, though God knows I’d done enough of that. It’s just nice to know there’s someone who cares enough, about anything, to still cry. But her eyes were cybernetic now. Like the rest of us, this never-fucking-ending war was making her sell her humanity piece by cybernetic piece.

My war was over.

Well maybe there was just one last bit of business. One of the tribes of Crawling Town were a bunch of pricks called the Wait, a skinhead monastic order originally from Oregon. They followed some bullshit pre-FHC credo to do with racial purity. For some bizarre reason they seemed to think that the white race is different from all the others. As if we didn’t have enough reasons to kill each other — food, money, anger, etc. — we apparently have to go and invent completely spurious ones.

These arseholes were led by a nasty, should-have-been-aborted, piece-of-shit hacker called Messer. He’d decreed that I wasn’t racially pure. I’m a quarter Thai and three-quarters Scots, more proud of both now. His response to my lack of purity was to crucify me on the back of a dune buggy and have me taken for a ride through a high-radiation nuke crater. I caught a big dose. He’d killed me slowly. Left me to die painfully of radiation poisoning.

Morag, Pagan, Mudge and Rannu rescued me with the aid of some of the lords of Crawling Town. One of these was Papa Neon, head of Big Neon Voodoo, the most powerful gang in Crawling Town. The other was Mrs Tillwater, a borderline serial killer and possible cannibal. She ran the First Baptist Church of Austin Texas, which, despite the name, was also a gang or possibly a woman’s auxiliary, maybe both. Because the Wait were a Crawling Town gang the rescue took the form of diplomacy. Well, diplomacy through the medium of gun-pointing and threats. We weren’t allowed to deal with the Wait violently because we were outsiders.

Mudge, Rannu and I were here to remedy their existence. My last battle.

A car appeared out of the dust in front of us. I braked slightly, watching the ghost of the sensor reading of the large truck directly behind me on the topographic map overlaid on my IVD. I didn’t want it to get close. The car in front demonstrated why.

I watched the driver swerve to avoid the huge armoured wheel rolling through the dust on his right side. He overcompensated, misjudging his clearance on the left, and ended up caught between two of the wheels on one of the Wait’s military-surplus personnel carriers. The car, which looked way to fragile to be out here, got snarled up in the armour plate and dragged up into the wheel arch. Trapped between the two wheels it was crushed like an egg.

It was very fast. Mudge was watching with rapt attention. Pieces of the car rained down on our own vehicle. I checked the map and moved the steering wheel just enough to avoid hitting the wreckage still caught up in the personnel carrier’s wheels. I gave the car a command through the link jacked into one of the four plugs on the back of my neck. It accelerated slightly, keeping us out of trouble.

You had to know how to drive to be in the middle of the city-sized convoy that was Crawling Town. If you drove on the outskirts then you risked being picked off by the scavengers that accompanied it.

‘Shit,’ Mudge breathed. ‘Want me to drive?’

‘I’d like you to learn properly,’ I answered back. Sounding surly to myself.

Mudge glanced over at me. ‘What’s your problem?’

The last time the Wait had got the drop on me. Now we were ready for them, armed. I had Rannu, an experienced and capable ex-SAS operator, and Mudge, who’d gone out with us enough that he may as well have joined the Regiment, backing me up. We were going to do this clean. Get rid of some completely excess humanity before the lords of Crawling Town even knew we were there. So why was I so pissed off.

‘God?’ I sub-vocalised. Mudge was watching me.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Mudge asked. That pissed me off.

‘Yes, Jakob,’ God answered. He was everywhere now. To me he sounded like a hundred soothing mellifluous voices talking to me at once. The amusing thing was that all the Wait had to do was ask God where we were, and under the parameters of behaviour that we’d set up God would have to tell them. We were hoping that the Wait had not thought to ask. Though if I’d pissed off someone with my skill set I’d be asking pretty regularly.

‘I told you I quit,’ I snapped at Mudge. I shouldn’t be having nicotine withdrawal because my internal systems should have scrubbed the poison out, but I still badly wanted a cigarette. Mudge’s desperate chain-smoking, drinking and doing drugs wasn’t helping. It was like he was making up for lost time. After all, despite his repeated requests to synthesise them, smokes, drink and drugs had been in short supply back in the Sirius system. Even food had been trial and error and not something I enjoyed thinking about.

Of course, I could check to see if anyone was asking about us. Checking on operational security in a world that didn’t have any, thanks to us. That would have made sense.

‘Where is she?’ I asked. Or instead I could pine for my estranged not-quite-girlfriend.

‘I do not know,’ God answered. So much for omniscience.

‘Quitting is a mistake,’ Mudge opined. ‘We all need coping mechanisms.’

‘Is that not quite difficult for you? To not know?’ I sub-vocalised to God.

‘You talking to Rannu?’ Mudge asked.

‘No. Has it occurred to you that you have too many coping mechanisms?’

Mudge’s features suddenly brightened.

‘It does suggest a certain amount of effort on her part to avoid surveillance,’ God answered.

‘Could she have left the system?’ I was worried she would try and go to one of the colonies in a misguided attempt to help.

‘Prostitutes!’ Mudge shouted, much to my irritation. ‘After we’ve killed these cunts we should go and find some hookers! Some really dirty ones.’

My jaw clenched and my cybernetic hand tightened its grip on the steering wheel, crushing it slightly.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,’ Mudge said without the slightest hint of contrition. He had been thinking; he had been looking for a response.

‘As I told you before, Jakob, I do not believe she could have left the system without me knowing.’

‘So where do you think she is?’ I asked. Trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

‘Again, the data I have suggests that she is in New Mexico somewhere.’ The good thing about God was that he never got impatient, no matter how many times we had this conversation.

‘Are we doing this or do you just want to talk to God about your ex-girlfriend?’ Mudge asked, an edge in his voice.

‘She’s not-’ I started.

‘Your girlfriend or your ex? Focus, Jake.’ Mudge always used the contraction of my name when he wanted to get a rise out of me.

‘We’ve got arseholes to kill.’ I ran my fingers through my hair. Was it still my hair?

‘Jake?’ Mudge asked.

‘Abort. Abort. Abort,’ I said over the tac net.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Mudge slammed his fist down on the dash before angrily taking another swig from his now nearly ever-present bottle of vodka.

‘Say again, over?’ Rannu was too professional to let his surprise be heard over the comms.

‘Abort. Abort. Abort,’ I repeated.

Mudge shook his head. ‘You are such a fucking pussy.’ He seemed genuinely angry with me. Instead of caring I slewed the car violently to the right, slipping it under the trailer of an articulated lorry. Mudge shouted out in surprise.

‘Let’s get out of Crawling Town,’ I said over the tac net.

‘Roger that, over,’ Rannu answered.

‘God,’ Mudge said loudly, ‘could you play my friend’s ever-so-pathetic most recent conversation with you back, please?’

Every single fucking time. I had started grinding my teeth since I’d quit smoking. I was doing it now. The recording of my conversation with God started over the car’s speaker system. I began to drive even more erratically. Mudge swore as he spilled vodka all over himself.

When we’d discussed the idea of God and what he should do — always telling the truth, complete transparency — it had seemed like a good idea. No privacy whatsoever was less good. We’d also completely underestimated the annoying uses that Mudge could put God to.

‘So where we going? New Mexico?’ Mudge asked scornfully. The drive through the city-sized convoy had taken a while despite my suicidal speed and manoeuvring. Even then we’d only got clipped a couple of times. On the way out some of the outriding parasites had shown an interest in us. They got less interested after I’d sideswiped a trike into some wreckage.

I’d skidded to a halt on a slight rise in some scrub wasteland looking out over the US border proper. The edge of the Dead Roads. Things didn’t look that much better over there.

‘No,’ I answered tersely, sounding a little childish even to my own ears. I climbed out of the car. Mudge followed. I could see Rannu riding towards us on a powerful dirt bike, his head swathed in a shemagh, dust goggles protecting the black lenses of his cybernetic eyes.

Mudge turned his camera eyes on me. It had taken a long time for me to get use to the way the lenses always seemed to be rotating one way or the other as they found the best focus point. He was a little shorter than my six feet and much thinner, though both of us had a wiry build. There was something weird about his long face, but it was difficult to put your finger on it — he just looked slightly odd. He had two days of sparse blond stubble on his cheeks and his fair hair was a short unkempt mess.

Rannu brought the bike to a halt, kicked the stand down and dismounted. His cargo trousers and black armoured combat jacket were covered in dust from the road. He started to beat the dust off himself, all the while observing around us.

‘What happened — were we compromised?’ he asked.

‘Only by this pussy’s delicate feelings,’ Mudge answered. I could practically hear the squat, powerfully built Nepalese’s eyebrows rising under his goggles.

‘We’re not doing the Wait?’ Rannu asked. Now I could hear the slight undertone of surprise.

‘We’re not,’ I told them.

‘Really?’ Mudge asked. It sounded less like a question and more like an experiment to see how much sarcasm you could pack into a single word. ‘See, they kidnapped me, tortured me, gave me a lethal dose of radiation poisoning and generally made my life a living hell. Not to mention what a fucking whiney burden on my friends I became. Oh no, wait, that wasn’t me. It was fucking you!’

Rannu shifted uncomfortably.

‘You didn’t have to-’ I started.

‘Yes, I fucking did!’ Mudge spat. He seemed overwrought. ‘Because you made me promise!’

‘When I thought I was dying. I’m better now.’

‘My promise to help deal with them still stands,’ Rannu said. He’d finished beating off the dust and had removed his goggles. His eyes, like mine, like most vets’, were matt-black plastic lenses. I sighed and leaned against the car wishing I had a cigarette.

‘I know and I appreciate that.’

‘Then fucking what?!’ Mudge screamed at me.

‘Why aren’t we killing the fascists?’ Rannu asked much more calmly.

‘The what?’ I asked, confused.

‘Their ideology, it’s called fascist or Nazi. It’s pre-FHC. The fucking bad men!’ Mudge explained not very helpfully.

‘We’re on the eve of what could be the biggest human-on-human war since the FHC. This is in part our fault-’ I started.

‘Bullshit. Rolleston and Cronin could call it quits any time they want,’ Mudge pointed out.

‘We have to take responsibility, wasn’t that what you said?’ I asked.

‘You want to go and fight the Black Squadrons?’ Rannu asked. For the first time I realised this held some appeal for Rannu. I’d known I was holding him back by getting his help in dealing with the Wait when I’d thought I’d wanted to. I had thought I was holding him back from returning to his family. It seemed it was something else.

‘No. That’s it. I don’t want to kill any more people. Enough is enough.’

‘Oh, this is bullshit. This was the same song you sang before Atlantis,’ Mudge said, but he was calming down.

‘And we didn’t kill anyone.’

‘We tried damn hard with Rolleston.’

‘Him I’d make an exception for. He needs to die for the general well-being.’

‘So do those fuckers!’ Mudge exploded. Rannu was nodding. ‘Those silly wank-stains want to kill you because your grandmother was from Thailand; they want to kill Rannu because his skin’s a different colour to theirs. For fuck’s sake, we raise the average IQ of the race by putting these cunts out of our misery!’

‘No doubt, but I can’t do it any more. We were so close to an end to it all, so close to peace…’

‘I think we may have to fight some more first,’ Rannu said.

‘Probably, but not me. Don’t you think we’ve done enough?’

‘I think we’ve done a lot. I think we’ll know when we’ve done enough. There will be peace and my children will be free.’

‘I’m sorry, but someone else is going to have to fight this one,’ I said. Rannu nodded. I think he understood but I think he was disappointed as well. I turned to Mudge. ‘Are you going to fight?’

Mudge pointed at the huge dust storm in the distance that was Crawling Town. ‘I just want to kill the arseholes,’ he whined. Rannu and I looked at him. ‘You know me, I’ll shoot it.’ He tapped his camera eyes in a way that put my teeth on edge. ‘And if it gets too hairy…’ He rapped his legs with his knuckles. His cybernetic legs were his pride and joy. He’d paid a lot of money to be able to boast that he was built for speed. ‘I’ll just do a runner.’ He’d always said that. It was all bullshit, he never ran.

‘Vehicle incoming,’ said Rannu, the only one retaining any degree of professionalism.

Mudge and I looked up. Both of us zoomed in on the bizarre vehicle approaching us, which looked like a cross between a six-by-six pickup truck and a hearse. The front passenger side seemed to have been cut away and there was something monstrous and metallic sat there, a little smaller than an exo-armour suit. Through the magnification on my eyes I could make out the brightly coloured glowing veves painted on the side of the vehicle. These were the mystic symbols of Papa Neon’s own brand of Pop Voudun. The truck definitely belonged to the Big Neon Voodoo.

It pulled up next to us in a cloud of toxic dust and dirt. The monstrous thing in the truck’s cutaway cab was Little Baby Neon. Younger brother of Papa Neon, he had traded his soul for cybernetic power until he was a deranged, uncontrollable psychotic. His older brother had, as far as I could tell, effectively lobotomised him in an electronic ritual and turned him into a cyberzombie.

Little Baby Neon climbed out of the pickup/hearse. Actually he more sort of unfolded himself. The suspension looked glad of the relief.

We were sort of friendly with the Big Neon Voodoo, but it was more through Pagan and he wasn’t here. I had one hand in the car, close to where my Benelli assault shotgun scabbard was strapped to the underside of the roof. Mudge was doing likewise with his converted AK-47. Rannu just stood close to where his shotgun/sniper combination weapon was clipped to the dirt bike.

With Little Baby Neon watching us, the pickup/hearse moved round so its back was facing us. Dry-ice smoke started to issue from the back of the vehicle. Mudge glanced at me, his eyebrow raised questioningly. The back doors opened, then the glass roof slid back. A colourfully decorated coffin, adorned with skulls, bones and other grizzly additions, rose up to a nearly vertical position. The front of the coffin swung open.

I started laughing, as did Mudge. I’m pretty sure even Rannu cracked a smile. Papa Neon’s bass laughter joined us. He was a tall man with very dark skin. His weathered features were covered in implanted circuitry that formed veves on his face. Dreadlocks sprouted from his head where they could; the rest of it was either covered by a precariously balanced top hat, or by his military-built and black-market-augmented integral computer.

Papa Neon wore a long purple leather coat that looked heavy enough to be armoured and was again covered in many colourful symbols. As he stepped out of the coffin he leaned on his glowing neon staff. He looked every part the role of the Voudun priest and gang leader that he played so well.

He stepped down and we all relaxed somewhat. He nodded at Rannu, who nodded back and courteously stepped away from the bike and the weapon clipped to it.

‘Does that ever impress anyone?’ I asked as the smoke was clearing, carried away by the dry wind that blew across the wasteland.

‘No, but it is good fun,’ Papa Neon announced in his thick Haitian accent. He looked me up and down. ‘Are you dead?’ he surprised me by asking. Then again hackers tend to see the world differently as a result of their various net-born religious manias.

‘I’m as you see, Papa Neon. In no small part thanks to the drugs you supplied.’

After I was rescued from the Wait I had received medical treatment from the Big Neon Voodoo. This had included a substantial supply of drugs that had enabled me to cope with the symptoms of dying from radiation poisoning. Papa Neon gave this some thought.

‘This is good. I think that the Loa have blessed you. I know this because they have told me. They are pleased that Obatala is now among us in the spirit world.’ I think he was talking about God. ‘I danced when he returned.’ I knew he would. ‘But the devil walks around the sun far out in the night,’ he finished. I looked at him blankly.

‘I think he means Demiurge,’ Mudge suggested.

‘Not my problem,’ I said. Papa Neon regarded me carefully before reaching into the pocket of the threadbare finery that was his waistcoat and producing his UV monocle. He placed it in this eye and looked at me some more.

I was starting to feel the discomfort I always got when hacker pseudo-religious bullshit was brought up. Particularly when it was applied to me. I realised it was how they understood the world around them. At its heart they just had a different but arguably no less valid way of understanding things. It still always sounded like madness to me.

‘Ogun Badagris has had too much fun.’ I glanced at Mudge, who shrugged. ‘Will you not cage his horse?’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said, ‘but my fighting days are over.’

He moved in close to me. I tried not to flinch. I could smell rum and stale marijuana smoke. Then something occurred to me.

‘Have you been speaking to Pagan?’ I asked.

‘The Loa and the dead want to speak to you.’

‘Where is he? Where’s…’ I started and then suddenly felt very self-conscious, more about Rannu than Mudge. Though Mudge was reasonably well informed about how pathetic I could be.

‘The Mambo walks in the lair of Anansi’s twisted younger brother,’ Papa Neon told me.

I looked at Mudge again. ‘Anansi’s a spider god, I think.’ It didn’t sound good.

‘Look!’ Papa Neon shouted. I turned to look where he was pointing and could just make out a large copter speeding towards us. Its rotors were folded and it was using its jets.

‘The spider wants to speak to you,’ Papa Neon began. ‘The dead want to speak to you and the Loa have not done with you.’

Fuck. I just wanted a drink and a smoke, maybe some peace and quiet.

‘Is that a black helicopter?’ Rannu asked, a hint of incredulity in his voice. I shaded my eyes with my hands and watched as the copter’s twin rotors unfolded and started to rotate. It was a military cargo model that had indeed been painted black, its windows tinted.

Mudge started laughing. ‘Fucking spooks, man. One cliche after another.’ He shook his head. ‘They actually think this shit is cool.’

I turned back to look at Papa Neon. Maybe he was a cliche too, a stereotype. It was difficult to tell how much was real and how much was show — a bit of theatre and intimidation for those watching, waiting for his fall. Or maybe he’d played the role too long and believed it. Or maybe it was all real, which is what the hackers would have us believe.

‘I think you came here to feed the Baron with those stupid white boys,’ he said. Then it hit home.

‘You were on us from the moment we came into Crawling Town,’ I said.

‘I asked Obatala to watch for you,’ he said. Thanks, God, I thought. But the sense of betrayal was misplaced. This was what we had asked God to do after all. On the other hand, how were we ever going to sneak up on someone ever again? ‘The way those boys killed you-’

‘They didn’t kill me…’ I started. Papa Neon looked at me in a way that made me want to not interrupt him.

‘The way they killed you, you don’t walk away from that.’

‘Those boys are evil,’ I told him. The copter was getting closer.

‘No doubt, but they is our evil. You do not live here.’

I’d decided that the Wait got a pass, but I couldn’t help smiling and playing devil’s advocate. ‘So how long would I have to live here before I could do them?’ I asked.

‘Jakob?’ Rannu said. He had the sniper/shotgun combo in his hand. He unfolded the weapon and twisted the barrel, changing it from a smoothbore twelve gauge to a rifled twenty gauge. Turning it into a heavy-calibre marksman’s weapon. I was aware that the copter was beginning its landing approach. He slid the magazine with the caseless twenty-gauge rounds into the combination weapon.

‘You have to live here.’ Papa Neon emphasised the live. ‘We know the difference. Goodbye, my friend.’ He turned, heading for his pickup/hearse.

The copter was now kicking up a lot of dirt. I reached into the car and slid the assault shotgun out of its scabbard. Mudge already had his AK-47.

‘Goodbye, dead man!’ Papa Neon shouted through the swirling dust.

The copter was heavily armed. I could make out rotary railgun turrets pointed in our general direction.

‘Papa Neon! When the devil comes will you fight?’ Mudge shouted over the roar of the copter’s engines.

I could hear Papa Neon’s deep laughter as the coffin closed and he sank into the back of the truck. Little Baby Neon was already in the cutaway passenger seat, and the vehicle made its way back towards the huge dust cloud that was Crawling Town. The cloud seemed to fill a lot of the horizon. I was sorry to see them go. It would have been nice to have someone as frightening as Little Baby Neon backing us up in a discussion with the inhabitants of the copter.

The three of us spread out. Mudge to my left, Rannu to my right. Our weapons were at the ready, held horizontally against our bodies but not pointing at anything in particular. The dust cloud engulfed us as the aircraft landed. We all switched, I’m guessing, to thermal to look at the copter in the reds, yellows and oranges of its heat signature. This was significantly masked, which suggested it was set up for stealth to a degree.

A door in the centre of the copter opened, stairs extending to the dirt. Three figures came out. We saw them as thermal outlines. They had weapons at their shoulders pointed at us.

Rannu and I had our weapons to our shoulders covering them. We each picked the closest target. I’d been working with him long enough to know that was what he would do. Mudge was a fraction of a second behind us.

‘Drop your weapons!’ they shouted. They were American. We didn’t say anything; we just kept them covered.

‘Drop your weapons or we will shoot!’ The one in the middle was doing all the talking. Still we didn’t reply. We just watched for the tells that they were about to fire. Hoped that we were quicker. Worried about the copter’s weapon systems, which were the biggest threat by far.

This sort of bollocks was typical of some paramilitary types. Had they landed and talked to us we would have talked back to them. Instead they’d probably read in some textbook somewhere the importance of establishing dominance in a power relationship so they could control the situation. The thing is, to us it wasn’t about a power relationship, it was about a threat. If we didn’t respond to having weapons pointed at us this time, then what happened the next time, when someone did actually want to do us harm? People like this never seemed to learn that they could get a lot further by behaving courteously. Would they get scared and back down or would they get scared and do something stupid?

Okay I admit it, part of it was that we just didn’t like being strong-armed. If they were going to do that they should have brought a lot more people.

‘We have you covered! Lower your weapons!’ The vocal one shouted again.

‘Should we threaten them back?’ Mudge sub-vocalised over the comms. ‘I can sound really macho and threatening when I want to.’ I failed to completely stifle a laugh. Rannu grinned. This didn’t help.

‘Put down your guns!’ He sounded shriller now. The dust was settling. The three of them looked almost identical. Boy Scout haircuts, dark glasses, anonymous dark suits, fancy European gauss carbines. They looked exactly like what they were: bad intelligence operatives. They may as well have worn a uniform. The question was: were they going to commit suicide today? The problem was that if they did it meant our imminent death at the hands of the copter’s heavy weapons.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Mudge sub-vocalised. He even managed to sound genuinely peeved. ‘I am threatening and intimidating.’

I decided to throw them a bone.

‘Shut up, Mudge,’ I said out loud. ‘You want something from us?’ I called out. ‘Because if you do you’re not going about it very well.’

‘Drop your weapons. You are coming with us,’ the guy in the middle said. All three of them looked nervous. We didn’t.

‘I can’t think of any compelling reason to do that. Why don’t you take your guns off us and tell us what this is about?’

‘Put your guns down!’ he screamed.

‘His shrillness bothers me,’ Mudge said. Rannu remained quiet. I favoured Rannu’s approach more. I’d had enough.

‘Put your guns down,’ I said to Mudge and Rannu.

‘What?!’ Mudge demanded. I lowered my assault shotgun.

‘Are you sure?’ Rannu asked.

‘These guys are dicks. They’re also stupid. If we don’t, they’re going to force us to kill them.’

‘Put your guns down!’ He was sounding more masterful now. I think he thought he was winning. That this was somehow validation for being a dickhead.

‘Shut up!’ I shouted back at him. ‘I just can’t be bothered with it,’ I said to Mudge and Rannu. I also didn’t mention that the result of killing these idiots was death by rotary railgun. Both of them lowered their weapons.

The three idiots rushed up screaming at us to drop our weapons and lie down. Mudge started laughing at them. Rannu seemed to have just the slightest look of contempt on his face, which was unusual for the passive ex-Ghurkha. I was just bemused.

‘Look, what do you want?’ More screaming. ‘You must be here for some reason. If you’d just tell us…’ Yet more screaming and threats. ‘We’re obviously not going to lie down, so what have you got left? Are you going to shoot us?’

The one closest to me produced a shock stick from a pouch on his belt. With a flick of his wrist he extended it. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d practised that move in the mirror. He triggered the display that sent sparks of electricity surging down the weapon. I wondered if it was supposed to intimidate me. What did he think I’d done for a living? I grabbed his wrist and stabbed him in the face with it. Which had to be embarrassing. I was pleasantly surprised that his internal systems were not sufficiently insulated, like mine, to cope with a shock stick, and he hit the ground a juddering mess.

Rannu stepped past the one closing on him. As he did so, he grabbed the barrel of the gauss carbine and pushed it up over the gunman’s head. The gunman got tangled up in the weapon’s strap and found himself lying on the ground with Rannu kneeling next to him.

Mudge cheated, in my opinion. The guy on him was distracted by the fun that Rannu and I were having. Mudge just sidestepped, drew his sidearm and levelled it at the guy’s head.

I extended the claws on my right arm. Four nine-inch long, hardened ceramic blades slid out of my forearm through slits just behind my knuckles. I reached down to the recently electrocuted gunman, cut the sling off his gauss carbine and tossed it away. Then I walked over to the one that Mudge had covered.

‘Are you more reasonable?’

‘I ain’t telling you shit,’ he said in a manner I think he thought was macho. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. Mudge clattered him on the side of the head with his pistol. I looked reproachfully at Mudge. Not because he’d hit him but because you shouldn’t get so close to your target that they can reach you — as Rannu and I had just demonstrated.

‘What do you want?!’ I screamed. The guy just kept his mouth shut. ‘Do you realise how fucking stupid it is to go to all this effort and not tell us?!’

‘Someone wants to see you,’ the guy that Rannu had taken down shouted.

‘Shut up!’ Mudge’s guy yelled.

‘You’re supposed to tell us that,’ I tried pointing out. I then walked over to Rannu and his prone friend.

‘Who?’ I asked him.

‘Sharcroft,’ he said. The name meant nothing to me. I told him that. Mudge joined us, forcing his prisoner to his knees in front of him. Mudge was sub-vocalising something as he did this.

‘What does he want?’ I asked.

‘He has a proposal,’ the guy said.

‘Funny way of making it. If you’d succeeded then we’d be useless to him. You didn’t, so he should have sent smarter people. Either way I’m not inclined to meet him.’

‘Look, we fucked up.’ He looked over at the guy whose face I’d electrocuted.

‘Trying to prove yourself?’ I asked. The guy said nothing. He just glared resentfully at his unconscious mate.

‘Trying to prove himself, was he?’ I asked. The look on the guy’s face said it all. The arrogant part of me was scornful of them thinking they stood a chance.

‘You need some proper trigger time, sunshine. You are way out of your league,’ Mudge said. I turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. Sometimes I thought that the SAS had been a bad influence on Mudge. Though it could have been the other way around. Mudge shrugged.

‘Simon Sharcroft?’ he asked the talkative one. The guy nodded.

‘Know him?’ I asked.

‘Know of him. So do you,’ Mudge said. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘He’s one of the Cabal.’ I lost my sense of humour and drew my Mastodon from its holster.

‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ Rannu’s prisoner shouted as he got a good look at the massive. 454 revolver designed for killing Berserks.

‘You fucking pussy!’ Mudge’s prisoner spat at the guy. ‘Ow!’ Mudge had clouted him round the head with his pistol. I think Mudge was starting to enjoy this sort of thing too much.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. Was it starting all over again? Surely the Cabal couldn’t be starting up again — could it?

‘All I know is that he wants a meet, I swear!’ Rannu’s prisoner was begging. A text file appeared in the corner of my IVD sent by Mudge. I opened it and scanned the words superimposed over my vision.

Sharcroft was from some old — meaning pre-FHC — money family, America’s answer to Britain’s aristocracy. Right schools, right fraternities, probably got his arse whipped with rolled-up towels in the right secret societies. Sharcroft was a Pentagon II insider. He was an intelligence and government powerbroker and acted as a liaison between the multitudes of compartmentalised intelligence agencies that confused the American government and military. He’d made a name for himself early in his career by running very black ops for the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Department. He was described as someone not afraid to make hard decisions. Or, from the perspective of people on the ground, he was a cunt who didn’t care how many people he got killed to make himself look good.

No war record — he was too old, well over a hundred. He had of course been implicated when we revealed the Cabal to everyone. He’d been neck deep in their nasty shit but, according to the info Mudge had gleamed from God, had disappeared very quickly after the big reveal.

Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.

‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.

‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.

‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.

‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.

‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.

‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.

‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.

‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.

Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.