Authors: Gavin Smith
Why would I want to go back to Dundee? The only reason I could think of was my bike.
‘I don’t know,’ I finally said. ‘I guess I’m staying around here and looking for work. Then who knows?’
‘Is that in case you see
her
?’
‘No, it’s because I’m fucking skint.’ And far too proud to ask if she still had any of the money that Vicar had given us.
‘I got you covered.’
This pissed me off. Mudge could be like this sometimes. He came from a reasonably well-off family and his job paid a lot more than being in the SAS had. He’d often offer to pay for things. It was patronising. I didn’t need charity. Okay, maybe I needed charity but still, I had my pride and a bottle of tequila. Admittedly it was Mudge’s tequila.
‘Look, Mudge, I’ve told you about—’
‘Relax. I’m not about to further abuse your fragile Celtic pride. I made some investments on everyone’s behalf.’ He looked quite smug.
‘What gave you the right—’
‘Okay, let me put it another way. I capitalised on all our suffering.’
A file was blinking away in the corner of my IVD. Mudge had just sent it to me. I opened it up and saw what he was talking about. He’d sold the story, including the download and broadcast rights to an edited version of all the stuff that had happened.
‘You should have asked us about this.’
‘Jake, you get that I’m a journalist, don’t you? Don’t let my cameo as a revolutionary fool you – this is my job. It’s the one thing I take seriously.’ All flippancy was gone now.
I remember just after I’d first met Mudge he’d quoted some pre-FHC writer who’d said that a journalist’s job was to charm and betray. They needed to get to know who they were writing about so they could reveal – not all, but what needed to be revealed for the story. Suddenly that struck me as a very lonely existence.
On the other hand, if these figures were right he’d made a fucking fortune.
‘Merchandising?’ I demanded.
Mudge started laughing.
‘You’ll love it, man. They’ve even got these cute little animatronic action figures. The one of you has really realistic sores from the rad sickness, but you get likeness rights on every one sold. Mind you, if we’re inadvertently responsible for starting the war that wipes Earth out or if the Cabal win we might not sell very many. Also I think you’re the ugliest. Balor, Gregor and Morag all tested well, as did I of course. Best of all, we make money off the figures of the villains.’
‘Rolleston and Josephine?’ I asked incredulously. Mudge was grinning. ‘They’re going to castrate you and dip the wound in biting insects when they get hold of you.’
I tried to imagine how angry the pair of them would be when they found out. As pissed off as I was by the idea of little action figures of me, if the figures were correct then I was not just looking at a sum of money but an income. It was like some kind of financial sorcery. How could I be earning this much money if I wasn’t actually doing anything?
I continued reviewing the information that Mudge had sent me. He’d done well. It looked to me like he’d squeezed as much money out of this as possible. Everything had been divided equally, though arguably he’d done all the work. It wasn’t just Morag, Rannu, Pagan, Mudge and me. He’d set up trusts in Buck, Gibby and Balor’s names. He told me he was going to see if they had any of what he called ‘genuine’ family to hand the money over to. What he meant was he didn’t want to give it to any freeloading opportunists who were vaguely related. If he couldn’t find anyone he was going to give their money to charitable organisations that he thought they would have approved of. He reckoned it would mainly be veterans’ charities, maybe shark conservation for Balor.
‘So? Does this change things?’ Mudge asked.
‘It really does.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Retire.’ Then I saw something that caught my eye. ‘You’re calling your memoirs
My Struggle
?’
Mudge was grinning again. ‘Yes, but only to upset people. I got the idea from the Wait.’
Initially I’d thought that taking the Mag Lev back to Britain would be interesting. The journey, I mean. But despite the incredible feat of engineering that was the transatlantic tunnel, at the end of the day it was just a long dark tunnel. Mudge and I got drunk. It had been Mudge’s idea to take the Mag Lev, but go first class rather than take a faster sub-orbital. We only just managed not to end up in the train’s brig.
In London, which Mudge had always described as his spiritual home, we went out drinking again. I stayed for a few days. I even met his mum. We went drinking with her as well. Suddenly, why Mudge was like he was started to make more sense. Apparently she’d used a lot of recreational pharmaceuticals when she was pregnant.
He also showed me some tricks of the moneyed classes – how to get places, transport authorisations, that sort of thing. More to the point, he checked out my legal status back in the homeland. We’d done some very naughty things in the name of what we’d thought was the greater good. Critics called us terrorists. I don’t know why. We hadn’t been trying to scare anyone; quite the opposite.
Air Marshal Kaaria of Kenyan Orbital Command had been appointed by the UN to extensively debrief us when we returned, as had numerous dodgy intelligence types. It seemed the Air Marshal, who I think was a grudging fan of ours, had managed to smooth things over with the authorities. Which was good, as it meant we weren’t arrested and executed for using concrete-eating microbes on the Atlantis Spoke. The authorities had decided to, if not forgive us, then ignore us until it suited them.
We arrived back just after a hastily called election. It had surprised no one when God revealed that our government of whichever indistinguishable non-event of a political party was in power at the time was a bunch of shits. Those that weren’t in hip deep with the Cabal were sucking other suitably sleazy and unpleasant big-business cock at the expense of the electorate. So they went. Though I’m not sure who people thought would do better.
Our new prime minister was a badly scarred submariner kept together with cybernetic parts who had served in the freezing depths of Proxima Centauri Prime. Reputedly she had served with Balor, though to her apparent credit she wasn’t making a big thing of it. She had grown up in the East End in London’s Bangladeshi community. She was a cockney through and through and made no apologies for her family’s extensive connections to organised crime, though she had distanced herself from their criminal activities. She had run on a platform of national management instead of party politics and had a lot of support in the veteran community. Mudge liked her and compared her to some pre-FHC prime minister I’d never heard of. He’d texted me some books about the era.
Books. That was the best thing about money. I could afford real, old books with paper and bindings and the smell. And I could afford to download lots of good-quality music and buy real single malt Scotch from the park distilleries in the Highlands. Funnily enough I had no interest in the sense booths.
There was a better view on the Mag Lev from London to Dundee. Much of it went through parkland. I’d started paying attention to the date in my IVD. It was November now. I hadn’t been back to Scotland since August. The hot summer had been replaced by a bleak grey autumn of near-constant driving rain.
The Mag Lev curved in over the Tay. It was slate-grey, broken by white-crested waves blown by a harsh, cold northern wind. I looked out the window. The four-track Mag Lev bridge was raised over an old pre-FHC rail bridge. It was a heritage site of some kind.
Even the bright colours of the Ginza were somewhat muted by the driving rain. I could see the Rigs to the east. They looked inert, still and dead, no sign of life. I couldn’t shake the feeling that with my new-found wealth, my first-class ticket on a Mag Lev and my legal transport papers, I’d somehow betrayed them.
I thought about how I’d left Dundee. Sneaking out on a drug-smuggling sub. It had seemed like everyone was trying to kill us. Now this.
Betrayal or not, the Rigs fucking depressed me. Perhaps it was my new optimism, what Morag had said about caring about myself. Or perhaps it was my prospects, the changes that money brought, but I could not bring myself to stay and I had no reason to. This was a place you came when you had nowhere else to go. There was nothing holding me here. After all, the closest thing I had to a friend here was the slug-like sense pusher Hamish, and I really didn’t like him. Mind you, the Grey Lady may have killed him on her last visit.
I’d lost my Rigs legs. It was with difficulty that I made my way across the rain-slick metal of the structures. Past the houses made of salvaged scrap, where people crowded round trash fires for warmth. I avoided a mugging and was able to give money to some begging veterans who hadn’t managed to hold on to replacement limbs and eyes when they were discharged. I hoped it would help them for a little while, but I couldn’t handle the way their empty eye sockets seemed to stare at me.
I stayed away from the huge ring of fused metal surrounding clear water where the Forbidden Pleasure had been before it was destroyed by an orbital weapon at Rolleston’s bidding. He’d been trying to kill Ambassador. It had been like using a sledgehammer on an ant. More ghosts walking behind me.
I had come for one thing. It had better still be there.
As I approached the storage facility I heard the ringing sound of metal being banged on metal. It was coming from inside the tubular steel of the Rigs. It was coming from the world of the Twists.
I made my way across a badly swaying bridge made of driftwood and rusted corrugated iron. The armed guards, who came with the money I’d spent on storage, met me. They had honoured the contract. The bike was still there. It would have been sold off at the end of December if I hadn’t returned. I’d always paid in advance because my Triumph Argo was the one thing I could not stand losing. Besides, it was a source of income when I went scheme racing.
I ran some diagnostic programs on the bike and did some maintenance. It needed a few adjustments. I was going to need some synthetic oil and a few replacement parts sooner rather than later, but overall it was in good shape.
I was plugged into the bike’s system, kneeling next to it, letting the 3000cc engine idle, when he appeared. One moment there was nobody there; the next there was a small figure on top of one of the tubular supports of the old oil rig. I had a good look around to see if he had brought any friends with him. If he had I couldn’t see them. The heavy rain made a ringing noise as it hit the metal superstructure.
I recognised him. His name was Robby. He was a Twist, someone whose genes had been fucked by the war or pollutants so his growth had been stunted. Many of them lived in the metal tubes of the Rigs. Robby was the barman at McShit’s, a pub owned unsurprisingly by McShit, the crippled Twist who ran the inner world of the Rigs and who’d risked his livelihood and life by helping Morag and I escape.
‘You look a lot less desperate,’ he said. His accent was very broad Dundonian.
I was tempted to make a crack about his appearing trick. He was like a character from a children’s story, suddenly appearing small and wizened in front of me. That would have been low, however. The Twists get a hard enough time of it as it is and their community had done nothing but help Morag and I. Although admittedly they had got paid.
‘Not staying around then?’ he asked.
I stood up, unplugging myself from the bike’s systems, the diagnostic readout disappearing from my IVD.
‘Hey, Robby. No, I’m not hanging around.’
Robby made a point of looking me up and down. It was still me, the same armoured coat, though it had been cleaned and the temperature regulation system had been fixed. The same jeans and boots, though they were also clean on, and I was wearing a new jumper. And I’d had a shower and a shave on the train. I was also well fed.
‘Done all right for yourself.’ His tone was neutral but it was a forced sort of neutral. ‘Saw you on the viz. I think everyone did. They said it wasnae you, nae the heedbanger from the north side cubes, nae him, but I kenned and looked it up afterwards.’
I was wandering where this was going.
‘Does McShit want to see me?’ I asked. His answering smile held no humour in it whatsoever. That was how I knew that Rolleston had killed McShit. ‘I’m sorry, Robby. What happened?’
‘What do you think happened?’ Here was the anger he’d been holding back. ‘Those English bastards cut their way into our world, killed any who got in their way. Tortured McShit, not immersion, nothing fancy mind, not for us wee folk. They just beat him, broke parts of him, cut him till they got what they needed. What little he knew. Tell me, was it worth it, half my pals dying, I mean?’
It was a while before I answered. ‘I think so.’
‘Really! What with another war on the way, this time with our ain folks?’
‘They forced me into a situation where it was run or die. I’m sorry I dragged you all into this but McShit knew what he was doing. I didn’t lie to him about what kind of people were after me.’
‘Aye, I ken that. I’m sure you can justify it to yourself. It just seems to me that all my pals died so even more people could die. Maybe it would’ve been better if only you’d died.’