War in Heaven

5

Learning to play the trumpet versus being a gunman. I guessed it just wasn’t meant to be. I was heading south again. Not sure where I was going. The sun had chased the rain away. It was a crisp day but very cold.

Did I belong anywhere? Could I settle? I hadn’t really tried. I couldn’t stop thinking about Morag and her imminent suicide bid.

‘God?’ I asked after switching my internal comms back on.

‘Yes, Jakob?’ Did God sound sad or was I reading that into all those tones because of our previous conversation?

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked. There was a long delay.

‘Little has changed.’

‘Morag?’

‘She is beyond my sphere of influence.’ Did God sound hurt? I wondered if he was upset at being ignored by his creators.

‘God, how did Vicar die?’ I was thinking back to my dream and Vicar being where he shouldn’t have been, in the never-ending replay of all the shitty and dangerous parts of my life that was my sleeping subconscious.

‘I have no information on William Stuttner’s death.’ So that was his real name. But that didn’t make sense.

‘Rolleston could keep it that hidden?’

‘I do not think that was the case.’

‘Vicar’s alive?’ I asked incredulously.

‘I cannot say for sure but that is what the evidence suggests.’

‘What evidence?’

‘The energy demand on the MI5 interrogation facility is commensurate with the power required to sustain both life-support equipment and a sense booth. Also I have no information that would suggest that he has been taken anywhere else or that anyone else is currently being held at the facility.’

‘And that is where he was taken when they got him in Dundee?’

‘Again, the evidence I can gather points to that being a near-certainty. Would you like to review it?’

It made a degree of sense. They would want to interrogate him first. He would have had a lot of information. Not just on Ambassador but also on the God Conspiracy that he had been part of along with Pagan, Big Papa Neon and others.

‘Are they still interrogating him?’ I asked.

‘Evidence would suggest that they are not doing so actively. If they are running a sense booth, however, there may still be ongoing automated interrogation. If this is the case then the information is not being transferred through any means of communication I have awareness of.’

‘If they have everything — and nobody holds out this long — then why is he still alive?’

‘I suspect that the people involved became so busy that nobody got around to killing him.’

Suspect? ‘God, did you just speculate?’

‘Yes, but based on 2.4762 terabytes of supplementary information.’

I wasn’t an expert but I was wondering if God had started exceeding his program. Would he make a bid for freedom? Or, more frightening, try to ‘fix’ what he saw was wrong with us.

‘Where is this facility?’ A file transfer icon appeared in my IVD. It had the address and images of the facility, which looked like a small warehouse in a run-down industrial area, as well as other information God had managed to find. This included footage of Vicar being bundled out of an aircar. He was hooded and his hands were secured behind his back. Josephine Bran had hold of the wrist restraints and was using them to steer the much larger man with ease. She passed Vicar on to some out-of-shape-looking types in suits who I reckoned ran the facility. Then she turned and looked straight into the lens shooting the footage.

I was travelling at sixty miles an hour on one of the less badly maintained Highland roads watching the footage on a small window in my IVD. I knew that this was just the Grey Lady’s instinct telling her where she was being surveilled from. I knew that she was in a different star system to me. Even knowing all this, I still jerked my head back up into the bike’s slipstream. Her nondescript features and lack of expression were somehow frightening. It was like she was watching me across the months. Which was of course bollocks. I still shut the footage down quickly.

The facility was in Coventry, on the edge of the Birmingham Crater. Coventry was another unwanted place. It was easy to hide things in unwanted places.

I had no option but to go after Vicar. He had been taken trying to buy Morag and me time. I cursed my stupidity for not checking before. I had assumed he was dead. Rolleston was thorough, Josephine more so, but we’d kept them jumping. I guess they had been forced to leave the system before they could tie up that particular loose end.

I wondered if this was what Big Papa Neon had meant about the dead wanting to talk to me. If it was, he could have been a bit clearer and we would have come and got Vicar. Maybe this was the price of God — messages all had to be cryptic now. But then how would Big Papa know? I suppose he could have just asked God.

Vicar’s guest spot in my dream had been my guilty subconscious telling me to check. At least I hoped that it was.

I was reasonably sure of my whereabouts, though I was still trying to keep comms use, including the GPS, to a minimum. I was riding through a small gully, a short cut, trying to save time. It was close to Pitlochry in Perthshire. There were steep rock cliffs on either side of the narrow road.

I passed a dirt lay-by and saw an ancient bus parked up. More wannabe settlers from the cities, I guessed. There was more than one family and they were all on their knees, hands laced behind their backs facing the bus. Parked in front of the bus, blue lights flashing, was a police APC. Two police covered the settlers. Another two were dragging a pregnant-looking woman out of the bus. She was struggling with them.

I drove by. Not every problem in the world was mine. I was going to go and get Vicar. I owed him. I didn’t have time for this.

I jammed on the Triumph’s brakes and looked back. They threw the woman on the ground. I kicked down the stand. They started beating her with shock sticks but they weren’t putting any current through them. I climbed off the bike. The woman was curled up trying to protect her unborn. Two of the settlers, a man and a woman, tried to get up to help the pregnant woman. They were kicked in the spine so hard their heads were battered against the side of the bus.

‘Hey!’ I shouted. The two cops beating the woman looked up. One of them pressed the sole of his boot down on the woman’s head. The other started towards me.

‘This is none of your business. Move on or you’ll get some,’ he ordered, his voice full of assumed authority. This tosser wasn’t even from Scotland. I kept walking towards him.

‘Did you fucking hear me?!’ He sent current through the shock stick. I closed with him and he swung at me. I ducked under his swing and hooked a punch into his chest, knocking him back. He tried to backhand me with the stick. I ducked again and it left him wide open to a side kick to his face. He staggered back. I walked after him and kicked him in the face again. He swung at me again. I spun under the blow and delivered a spinning kick to the head that cracked his helmet. The force knocked him sideways into another kick. He tried to stab me with the shock stick and I sidestepped, grabbed his arm and broke his elbow.

He was screaming now. I took the stick off him and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and groin with it. I took out every bit of my frustration and anger at Calum, Alasdair and pricks like these on this guy. He was a lump of bleeding pain masquerading as human when I let him fall to the ground.

I was breathing hard. It wasn’t the exertion; I had underestimated just how angry I was. I was also being covered by the other three police, two pointing shotguns and the third an assault rifle.

‘Lie down and place your hands behind your head!’ one of them shouted.

‘Given that I’ve just beaten the shit out of one of you, I can’t think that would end well for me.’

‘We will shoot.’

‘I don’t doubt it for a second.’

I squared up to them. My shoulder laser pushed its way through the break-open flap on my raincoat.

The people knelt by the bus were getting up. Two of them ran to the pregnant women. The others were slowly edging towards the police. They looked nervous, angry but nervous. The cheap replacement implants suggested that they were veterans. They must have hated being outgunned by the police.

‘Stay out of my way,’ I said to the settlers. They froze and then backed off. I turned to the police. ‘I am much better at this than y-’ I started but one of them was pulling the trigger.

The red beam of the shoulder laser stabbed through the shotgun, superheating the metal. The laser went straight through the weapon and into the policeman’s leg, blowing off a steaming chunk of flesh. The ammunition in the shotgun cooked off and exploded. The policeman was blown back onto the ground, the front of his armoured uniform a charred mess.

I was moving to the left, the heavy Mastodon revolver in my right hand, the TO-5 laser pistol in the left. The policewoman with the assault rifle was firing at me, trying to track my movement. To me the muzzle flashes of the weapon seemed to happen in slow motion. It was the same for the enormous muzzle flash of my revolver. The bullet caught her in the upper arm. The massive round penetrated her armoured uniform and any subcutaneous armour she might have. The hydrostatic shock of the large-calibre round blew her arm clean off. It went tumbling into the air. Her finger was convulsing round the trigger firing the assault rifle as the arm spun.

This was me trying hard not to kill them.

I aimed for the third and final officer’s leg with the TO-5. All I succeeded in doing was blow off smoking parts of his armour. His shotgun blast caught me in the side and spun me round.

He made a run for the APC. If he got there I was in trouble as he would be in an armoured vehicle and have access to its weapon systems. On the other hand I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed anyone yet and I wanted to keep it that way. I fired both pistols at the ground between him and the APC. He changed direction. He was now running up the road away from the lay-by. He let his shotgun drop on its sling, drew his automatic pistol and started firing it blindly behind him. A couple of the 10mm rounds flattened themselves against my armoured raincoat. There was a cry as one of the settlers took a ricochet in the leg. Right. Fun over.

I walked over to the assault rifle, removed the fingers of the severed arm from the grip and picked it up. My palm interface connected with the weapon’s smartlink. The magazine was empty but it still had grenades. I tutted when I saw what kind of grenades. I put the stock of the weapon to my shoulder, aimed and then fired the launcher. The grenade hit the running policeman on the back of his helmet with enough velocity to pick him up off his feet and sending him sprawling face down. He wasn’t moving. White gas was pouring out of the grenade.

‘Tear gas!’ I shouted at the policeman’s hopefully unconscious form. ‘Who the fuck uses tear gas?!’ Most vets had filters to survive gasses and their tear ducts were removed when their eyes were replaced. Tear gas was only really of use on children. Still I hoped I hadn’t killed him — for my sake, not his. The police could be vindictive.

I dropped the assault rifle and headed back towards my bike. The policewoman whose arm I’d blown off was alive enough to scream. The one whose shotgun I’d blown up was crawling. I kicked him in the head as I walked past.

The two families of settlers were just staring at me.

‘Next time, come mob-handed and bring media,’ I told them.

Now I was in trouble. There was some chasing, some hiding. The police were not very happy with me and God was helping them find me. I made one more contact with the net. With God’s help I downloaded the most detailed and up-to-date maps of the area I could find as well as details of police roadblocks and static surveillance lenses. Then I went comms dark.

I sat in the back of the freight container heading south. I didn’t dare drown out the clanking of the train with music because I was in working conditions.

I’d spent several days making my way to Glasgow, avoiding police patrols actively searching for me. In Glasgow I’d made my way to an old freight yard and stowed away on a cargo train. It was nothing like the Mag Lev Mudge and I had taken from America; in some ways it felt more luxurious. I was out of the rain and the wind. I’d got my stove going and had a brew. My clothes were drying and I’d bribed enough to get the bike into the container.

This was a very old-fashioned train. I think it was electric, completely automated. It ran on a network of tracks that delivered slow-moving but heavy cargo all over the UK and was much cheaper to operate than a Mag Lev. It would take me into Coventry, where I had a whole new list of problems to deal with. Chief among them was if the police checked with God then they’d know I was interested in the warehouse where Vicar was being held.

More of a certainty was that MI5 would know I was coming. It would have been easy for them to ask God to alert them if anyone took an interest in any of their holdings and operations. Also I can’t imagine that MI5 were very pleased with me, as releasing God into the net must have fucked up a lot of their operations and may even have got some of their operatives killed. I would also imagine that they’d lost more people through corruption purges and involvement with the Cabal. I struggled to see how I wouldn’t just be walking into a whole load of trouble.

I wrapped my coat around me and tried to get some sleep. The heating cells that ran through the coat almost managed to keep out the cold and wet. The rhythmic movement over the rails was almost soothing.

Aldershot, eleven months ago

It was a farce. Normally the court martial would have been at Hereford and I would have been taken out behind the bogs and shot, but Mudge had kicked up such a shit storm in the press that they had to do it publicly. Mudge had also arranged for us to be lawyered up, which was technically legal under military law but a career-destroying social faux pas if you tried it. Fuck it, what career?

Most military towns are shitholes. Aldershot had made an attempt to outdo them all. It was like the rotting corpse of a military town that had been revived just long enough for this circus. On the other hand, a lot of vets lived in the area and many of them were protesting outside the ugly concrete building. I say protesting; they were going to riot if the verdict went against us. I think they probably did more to get us dishonourably discharged rather than shot for mutiny than our lawyers did.

All of us were in manacles, except Mudge. One of his employers had paid for his bail in return for the print rights to the story. Vicar had been gagged as he just started screaming every chance he got, mainly at Rolleston. Rolleston was in the audience, sitting just behind the prosecutor’s desk. I think the media circus around the trial had also prevented us from being assassinated.

Heavily sedated, it was Vicar’s turn to testify. He was helped up and had the conditions of his testimony read to him. He nodded and mumbled assent.

‘Could you please tell us in your own words of the events that led to the mutiny on the Santa Maria?’ the prosecuting military lawyer asked.

Vicar stared at me. ‘And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought Michael and his angels,’ he said.

I saw the lawyer sigh. He had nobody but himself to blame: he had asked Vicar to use his own words.

Then Vicar turned to stare at Rolleston. Sedated or not, the madness was back in his eyes. ‘I know where Satan has his throne! I know where Satan has his throne!’ He just kept screaming it again and again. Eventually he was restrained, but by then Rolleston had stood up and walked out of the room.

I jerked awake. There had been a change in the rhythm of the train’s movement. I’d always wondered why nobody killed Vicar. He must have had something on them.

Getting out of the freight yard in Coventry wasn’t very subtle. It involved me riding very fast past angry security people, getting shot at and then forcing one of them to open the gate for me at gunpoint. Then there were more police and more running and hiding.

Even I was impressed by how much I’d managed to fuck up my easy life.

So, after retiring from gunfighting to start a career as a jazz hermit, I still somehow managed to find myself creeping through an old industrial estate on the edge of a really big hole.

Birmingham had been hit by one of the equatorial corporations during the FHC, using a fin-stabilised kinetic projectile launched from orbit. It had hit the city with the force of a reasonably sized meteorite, pierced the Earth’s crust and goodbye to the second largest city in the UK. After the FHC, orbital-launched kinetics, like nuclear weapons, were banned. It was too easy to crack the world open with them. We hadn’t even used them against Them. In retrospect that was probably due to the Cabal. If we’d used them, They would have learned how to grow them and use them on us.

The Brummies who’d survived the appalling devastation ended up in refugee camps on the outskirts of the huge crater that had once been their city. I guessed that this old industrial estate, mostly made up of warehouses, had been one of the camps. Their descendants were still here almost two hundred and fifty years later. Successive governments had promised to do something about the crater and the refugees but other uses had always been found for the money. Ash had grown up in a camp like this.

There wasn’t even a Ginza in Coventry. The centre of town was a mess of crumbling concrete controlled by the more heavily armed and violent refugees. We still called them refugees, even though this is where they had grown up for generation after generation.

I parked up, hid the bike as best I could and put my coat back on. I’d slung the smartgrip sheath for my Benelli automatic shotgun across my back and I had my bow in my hand, an arrow nocked, as I crept through the industrial estate. The bow was the quietest weapon I had. This was just a recce, I was telling myself. Just to see how much shit I would actually be in if I did try and get into the warehouse. For all I knew MI5 had already given the kill order for Vicar.

All the warehouses had been broken into and used for housing a long time ago. The rest of it was a tent city or lean-tos made of whatever material the refugees could scavenge. I saw people cooking rats. I saw tanks growing the protein gruel that poor people lived on, which I’d eaten many, many times when things were bad. I could see rag-clad children, the flames of trash fires reflected in their already dead eyes. If anything, this place was poorer than the Rigs. I was trying to be stealthy as I crept through the camp but they knew I was there. Coventry was a great place to hide things except from the people who lived there, but then I guessed they really didn’t matter to anyone.

I moved to the side of the crater. Even in the sparse moonlight, even in the light pollution of the flickering fires of the camp, the sheer scale of the crater was awesome. I was trying to maintain my professional detachment and concentrate on the task in hand but my attention kept on straying towards the hole, which was so deep I couldn’t see the bottom of it. It was a hole that contained the ghosts of over a million people.

The area around the warehouse used by MI5 was pretty much uninhabited. I guessed that any refugees who’d lived there had been moved on. There were a reasonable number of surveillance lenses set up in the surrounding area but I was able to avoid them. I guessed they couldn’t use motion detectors or other forms of early warning because of the hordes of rats that lived here.

I got closer. Still nothing and nobody. Rubbish blew through the streets and alleys. Finally, from an alley, I had the warehouse in sight. It was old, patched-up and almost stood out because of how nondescript they’d tried to make it look. The ghost town around it had already given it away.

I marked the security lenses. I probably couldn’t get to the warehouse without being seen. I couldn’t see any remotes or human guards. This suggested a trap. They must know I was coming. Both the police and MI5.

I tried to calculate how many people could be waiting for me in there. It was a small warehouse but I still didn’t like the odds. Also, if I went in, was I happy to start killing people? Well, it was pretty much a torture facility. I packed away my bow. There was nobody here that I would have to deal with quietly. Should I risk speaking to God? God might know the police’s planned response but there was a chance he would not know about MI5’s. I couldn’t see what difference going away and waiting would do other than give anyone who wanted it more time to track me down. The question was, did I abandon Vicar or not? I didn’t even know if he was alive.

On the other hand I had no plan beyond this. Where would I go? And it would be without Morag. I suppose I could try to fight my cause in court. The law was a joke and only enforced as and when people could be bothered. The police bothered to enforce it when they got hurt. Money or no money, I couldn’t see that ending well. Besides, I was bound to have numerous accidents while in custody.

Fuck it. Let’s get this over and done with. I strode down the alley and across the rubbish-strewn road towards the warehouse. I reached over my shoulder, drew the shotgun from its sheath and moved to the door, checking all around me as I went. So far no lights, sirens or guns.

I didn’t bother checking if the door was locked; I just slipped the lock burner into the reader. The burner I had was pretty good but I didn’t expect it to work here. I was pretty sure I was going to have to do something violent and noisy to break in. The burner took much longer than normal, but I was pleasantly surprised when the armoured door clicked open.

This was stupid. There was no way that they could not know I was here. I swept into the building, the Benelli up and ready, cycling between lowlight and thermographic view. Most of it was an open space. Towards one of the far corners I could see what looked like a hospital bed surrounded by all sorts of equipment. To my right there was a doorway. I checked the open space but did not advance further into it. I headed straight through the doorway.

I found myself in a comfortable living space. It looked to be set up for four people, but again there was nobody here. I guess this was where the staff lived. It also looked like they’d left recently. My mind screamed trap, but I was in here now so I had to check.

Back out into the main area of the warehouse. I didn’t want to think too much about the dark stains on the floor or the racks of horrific-looking instruments on the wall. Still checking all around, I headed towards the bed.

I suppose the emaciated mess of scar tissue covered by medpak-controlled medgels looked a little like Vicar. They’d properly worked him over, but it looked like it had been done a while ago and he’d just been left there to rot. Along with the various life-support equipment that was prolonging his existence, I noticed a sense machine next to the bed. A cable ran from the machine to one of the four plugs at the base of his neck. Sense technology was the ultimate in interrogation/torture technology. Any torture that could be imagined could be carried out and drawn out. An hour could seem like a year. And that’s before they start to play the head-fuck games — is it real or is it sense immersion? Made me wonder why they bothered with the physical stuff. Then again, I reckoned you had to be messed up in the head to do this sort of work. Maybe they just enjoyed it.

‘Jakob?’

I don’t mind admitting that I nearly jumped out of my skin and shot Vicar. The voice was tinny, modulated. It came from a speaker clipped to the head of the bed. I wasn’t sure whether it genuinely sounded like Vicar or I just wanted it to sound like him.

‘Vicar?’ I asked uncertainly.

‘I’m sorry, Jakob.’

Sorry? ‘What for?’

‘I talked, Jakob.’

‘Everyone talks, you know that.’

‘I held out as long as I could.’

‘It’s okay, we’re going to get you out of here.’ Yeah sure. I had no idea of how to even start going about that.

‘It wasn’t very long. They were hurting me.’

‘Don’t worry about it, man.’

He must either have been tranced into an isolated network or he was talking to me from inside a sense programme. That didn’t make a lot of sense. If they’d tortured him or just imprisoned his mind, why provide him with external communications?

‘I need to talk to you, Jakob.’

It was weird that he hadn’t quoted Revelations once.

‘We’ll get you sorted. Should I unplug you? From the sense machine, I mean.’

‘No, I need you to come in here.’

I stopped. Was this the trap?

‘There’s only me here, Vicar. I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’

‘Please, we need to talk. You need to know about Operation Spiral.’ Operation Spiral had been a joint US National Security Agency and UK Government Communications Headquarters project designed to hack Their comms structure. In effect to hack Their hive mind, not that it had been properly understood at the time. Thing is, it was old news for me.

‘I took the lock burner out of my anus,’ Vicar said.

I stopped my inspection of the medical equipment. That was a weird thing to bring up. He was right, the lock burner that I’d used to get into the cargo airlock on the Santa Maria during the mutiny had been in his arse. It was something that Vicar would definitely know. On the other hand, if he’d been extensively interrogated then his mind was an open book. But then why would an interrogator ask about that or even know enough to ask about that?

‘Okay,’ I said carefully. ‘So?’

‘So I need to speak to you, in here.’

‘It’s really not safe. Where are your interrogators?’

‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea of time. I’ve little idea of what’s real or not. In many ways nothing’s changed. Demons still roam the stars and you still owe me. In here. Now.’ It was starting to sound more like Vicar.

I found a doubled-ended jack and plugged one end into the sense machine. I looked at the other end. I hadn’t used sense since this whole mess started. I was trying to get to like the real world. It was a hard world to like. I reached behind my neck and felt the disconcerting click of the jack sliding into a plug embedded in my own flesh.

He was ready for me. I appeared as a very well-rendered icon. It was just me as I’d looked on the Santa Maria before this had all started. I was a bit thinner, a bit unhealthier-looking. I didn’t like it. There was even a pack of virtual cigarettes in the pocket of my combat trousers. I thought about having one because it wouldn’t hurt, but it would just make me want one back in the real world.

He looked sane and well. He still had his beard but it was trimmed, as was his hair. The ugly integral military computer that normally stuck out of half his head was missing. He was still dressed as a priest. We were in a church but it wasn’t like the one on the corner of Commercial and High Street in Dundee. This one was open and airy. Sunlight streamed in through huge stained-glass windows. The sunlight illuminated the motes of dust that filled the atmosphere. The walls were undressed stone. It looked very old and felt peaceful.

Over the altar in place of a cross was a constantly changing fractal spiral pattern. All the stained-glass windows showed variations of the same scene. Some sort of mighty beast, a dragon I guessed, with many heads. There were crowns and horns in the images and the beast seemed to be causing the stars to fall. As I watched I realised the stained glass was animated. In the final panel there was a glowing woman. She had the face of Morag.

‘I found your demons,’ I said to him.

‘They found me.’

‘What did they get?’

‘Everything I knew of relevance, little about you and her, but everything about our attempt to make God.’

‘Where are we?’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say and Vicar was just looking at me.

‘A church near where I grew up in Lincolnshire. It used to be a Templar church.’

‘Who?’

‘Warrior monks.’

‘Like the Wait?’

‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘I mean, where are we?’

‘Oh, we’re in the sense machine. They automated my interrogation using a simple AI program. More like a computer game where you’re constantly the victim. Very crude. I made a sanctum.’

‘You hacked your way out of your own interrogation?’ I asked, impressed. Obviously you’re not supposed to be able to do that. I guessed the God conspirators really were among the best hackers in the world.

‘To a degree.’

‘Where are your guards?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I was forgotten.’

‘Nothing gets forgotten any more. God’s always there to remind us.’

‘Did God work?’ Vicar asked.

‘Define “work”?’

‘Tell me everything.’

I glanced around the church. I don’t know why, habit really; after all, we were in part of a sense program. I wouldn’t see them coming. ‘I don’t think I’ve got much time.’

‘More than me.’

‘Can’t we get you out of here first?’

‘How and to where? Just tell me, Jakob. You owe me that much.’

He was right. Besides, I was looking at a beating and prison time. He’d been extensively tortured both in here and in the real world. The bastards seemed to have tortured him so much he’d gone sane.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing at the image of Morag.

‘A crude allegory. Tell me.’

I told him. He listened carefully and rarely interrupted, though he quizzed me on everything I knew about Demiurge and again about what Morag had done in the Dog’s Teeth. I don’t know how long it took. I tried not to think too hard about it but I hadn’t been yanked out just yet.

‘It’s a shame that you released God with those parameters. I don’t think they were strict enough. God is clearly given to introspection, whereas certainty and infallibility would have been more useful.’

‘And you could program that?’

‘Given enough time with the people involved, I think so. You’ve come close to destroying everything we worked for with an ill-thought-out and hurried solution.’

‘Oh I’m sorry. We’ll do better the next time we’re being pursued by a powerful conspiracy.’

Vicar managed to ignore my sarcastic tone and just nod sagely as if he knew I would. ‘In many ways Demiurge will be the finer accomplishment, though it is a tool of control,’ he said.

‘Are you looking to change sides?’

‘Don’t be facetious.’

‘Look, we need to find a way to move you and get you some proper medical treatment. I’ve got some cash if we can find a-’

‘I’m dead, Jakob. I’m just a ghost haunting this machine.’

‘But that’s not-’

‘You need to focus.’ He handed me an old-looking creased paper leaflet.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s a hymn book.’

‘What do I need-’

‘For God’s sake, Jakob, it’s a symbolic transfer of data. It contains all I can remember about Operation Spiral.’

‘What-’

‘If you stop interrupting, I’ll tell you. Get this to Pagan.’ I started to ask why but Vicar just held up his hand. ‘Spiral worked. It was a successful operation.’

‘You hacked Their mind?’

‘Obviously. But we couldn’t understand or deal with it. We weren’t in an electronic space that human minds had designed. We were in a biological mind that once aware of us had no problems repulsing us. It did so in its own terms, with its own references and understanding, which were of course alien to us. Our minds were never going to be able to cope. Our own minds struggled to grasp what was happening to them, to protect us in any way they could, to find a frame of reference that we could understand.’

‘You saw hell?’ I said.

He didn’t say anything but stared straight at me. He looked like he was trying to control rage. Towards who I wasn’t sure. He seemed to calm down.

‘What I’ve since worked out was that in order for it to work, the interface system, which we never saw, had to be either Themtech or some human biotech copy of it. Presumably supplied by the Cabal, which would make sense as Rolleston was present in the build-up to Spiral.’

‘But why bother? They were developing Crom? Complete enslavement?’

‘But they didn’t have Gregor at that time. Crom was still quite crude and remained so if what you tell me was correct, but if they could sneak in then they could start to influence Them.’

‘More thoroughly control the war.’

‘And prolong it if they wished.’

‘Sneak in?’ I asked. I hated IT but an idea was trying to force its way into my head.

‘Now you begin to understand. The others used Ambassador to help provide the operating system and processing power that God would need.’

‘And Demiurge used the same principles because it utilised your conspiracy’s research.’

‘Yes, and had greater access to Themtech and therefore was more reliant on it.’

‘Are you saying we can use the information from Operation Spiral to sneak past it? Hack Demiurge? But the Cabal must control it or at least be aware of it. They’ll see us coming.’

‘How? Everyone’s dead, mad or in my case both, and I was in their custody. Their systems are locked down by Demiurge, and even if they have an agent here who is aware that we have met, this is a sealed system and I have worked very long and hard to cultivate the persona of a notorious lunatic.’ I was only starting to realise how clever Vicar was. ‘Though I’m not denying Pagan and Morag… if she is who… if she is the savant you seem to claim, she will need to do a lot of work on it.’

This was beginning to sound like a chance, a very small one but a chance nonetheless. I hated the way that hope seemed to wriggle into my psyche like an intestinal parasite and get me to do stupid things.

‘Won’t the NSA or GCHQ already have all this info and make it available to Pagan and Morag in the US?’

‘Yes and no. Much of it is classified and Pagan and Morag are known anarchists after all. Also I have been theorising about this ever since I managed to make my sanctum, and I had been working on it before I was caught.’

‘You wanted your own way round God?’

‘Every single one of us would have been doing the same thing while trying to ensure that nobody else could.’

‘But when God-’

‘GCHQ and the NSA keep all the most sensitive stuff on isolated systems.’

‘If we turn this over then it means people can hack God. It means it’s all over. God just becomes a voice on the net. Nothing more than a depressed search engine.’

Vicar actually smiled at this.

‘That was inevitable. They are already trying to circumvent him, destroy him, subvert him. Yes?’ I nodded. ‘For some reason the demands of technology and commerce long ago superseded human concerns. We always try and kill our gods in the end.’

‘So it was for nothing. It’ll just go back to the way it is. That prick Sharcroft is already trying to make it happen.’

‘Nothing? Christ’s life was short.’

‘Look, don’t start giving me this religious bollocks.’

‘He changed everything. If nothing else, then God has at least shown everyone what is happening. The rest is up to us, it always has been. God was just a tool, as are arguably all gods. And it’s not religious bollocks; the whole thing was a secular revelation. Obviously I was just drawing a parallel.’ He was sounding less like Vicar, the frothing religious lunatic I’d known, and more like a university teacher in some old viz.

The church burst into flames.

‘Are we being attacked?’ I asked, alarmed.

‘It’s a virus.’

‘From outside? An attack?’ Vicar went and stood in the flames. They engulfed him but he wasn’t burning like human flesh would.

‘Break the fifth seal, Jakob.’

Despite myself I was backing away from the flames. I could feel the heat from them, virtual or not.

‘They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the Earth and avenge our blood?” Break the fifth seal, Jakob, because Rolleston will surely break the sixth.’

I was retreating from the flames. So Vicar had finally reverted to type. Except he wasn’t roaring and screaming, eyes rolling; he seemed calm and sane though he was burning like paper.

‘Have you had a religious experience, Jakob? A visitation, an epiphany.’

‘It was bollocks, a hallucination, like all of you.’ Even I wasn’t sure I believed that.

‘I know where Satan has his throne, Jakob. It makes the Atlantis facility look like some back-alley harvester operation.’

‘Where?’ I demanded.

‘Lalande 2, the Citadel.’ Then he started to laugh. ‘We have made a covenant, you and I. I need you to seal it!’

‘How?’ I was shouting now, as the roar of the flames was so loud. The church was burning like paper. Vicar told me how.

I was sitting on the floor next to Vicar’s bed. I couldn’t look at him and do this. The stench of the place really hit me this time — old blood, fear, sweat, shit, piss — it was an abomination.

If I was going to do this then I had to do it now before I lost the nerve. I stood up and walked away from the bed. My shoulder laser unfolded itself and pushed its way through the shoulder flap of my coat. The targeting window appeared in my IVD. I thought it would be easier using the shoulder laser, not pulling the trigger myself. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see my friend reduced to so much bloody steam, scorched flesh and bone. The problem with the targeting screen is it doesn’t matter if your eyes are closed or not. The bang of the superheated air particles was obscene, as was the flash of red light in the dark warehouse.

I hadn’t wanted to kill any more, and now I had. A friend of mine. Vicar was like everyone else, just another one of Rolleston’s victims.

As I headed for the door my flash compensators kicked in as high-powered lights stabbed in through the dirty windows and the slightly ajar door. I’d been aware of company since I’d come out of the sense trance. They weren’t quiet. I couldn’t be bothered to wait for them to come in and get me and couldn’t think of a way out. I decided to get it over and done with.

Outside was very bright. There were lots of flashing lights, sirens and shouting people with guns. It reminded me of docking at High Nyota Mlima, the tethered space station at the top of the Kenyan Spoke, after the mutiny on the Santa Maria.

As I followed the shouted instructions and walked forward, hands held high, a couple of things bothered me. Where were Vicar’s guards? I sank to my knees as ordered, the advancing C-SWAT team covering me all the time. I felt notorious. That lasted until I was kicked down onto my face and my hands secured. And how could Vicar have known about what I saw in the Dog’s Teeth? I was trying to forget what I’d seen myself.

Then of course the inevitable kicking began.