Authors: Gavin Smith
Mudge’s tactical assessment seemed right on the money. Not bad for someone who was ostensibly non-military. Fucked we were. Most of Their forces were still trying to batter the fuck out of our forces, who couldn’t retreat fast enough and were periodically being overrun
.
We had a lot of Berserks doing what Berserks do. They ran at us firing shard and black light weapons with a view to closing with us and tearing us apart. This made Them easy to kill but eventually we’d run out of ammo or they’d overwhelm us. On top of that I could see a couple of Their Walkers, large biomechanical mechs, moving towards us. Even a few of Their ground-effects armoured vehicles wanted in on our imminent deaths. If we were really lucky, then the GE vehicles would be carrying yet more Berserks. All of Them looked like indeterminate shadows in the rain
.
We were laying down blistering fire all around us but were slowly being herded into a last-stand situation. I put the cross hairs from my smartlink over one of Their Walkers and used that as lock for both the Light Anti Armour missiles in their tubes on either side of my backpack. The two Laa-Laas launched themselves into the air. I switched to the next target and fired another burst from my SAW
.
Something bumped into my back. I didn’t need to look to know it was Bibs – Bibby Sterlin, the patrol’s other railgunner. She was a powerfully built thrill-seeker from a nice middle-class corporate family. Like Mudge she didn’t have to be here
.
Bibs let off stuttering burst after stuttering burst from the support weapon. Belt titanium-cored penetrator rounds were propelled at hypersonic speeds by the electromagnetic coil in the heavy weapon’s barrel. When they hit a Berserk it was like watching an angry child tear up paper, only very, very fast
.
‘This fucking sucks!’ she shouted, somewhat redundantly, I thought
.
‘You sound surprised!’ I shouted back. My sound filters were struggling to deal with the rapid hypersonic bangs from the railgun. ‘Reloading! Aaah fuck!’ My IVD went blank as the black light beam hit me under my helmet, turned my skin to steam and partially melted the subcutaneous armour on my face. A shard round caught me in the leg just below my armoured kneepad. The inertial armour didn’t harden quick enough to stop it and the round pierced my subcutaneous armour as well. I saw actual blood. Again
.
Bibs moved around to my side and covered me as I ejected the spent cassette from my SAW and rammed home another two hundred vacuum-packed, caseless, nine-millimetre long, armour-piercing hydrostatic rounds. I was firing again
.
Shaz was next to me now. Superheated air exploded as he fired burst after burst from his laser carbine
.
‘Reloading!’ he shouted as he ejected the battery. I shifted my field of fire to compensate. He rammed another battery home behind the bullpup-configuration carbine’s handgrip and immediately started firing again
.
David ‘Brownie’ Brownsword, the world’s quietest Scouser and our medic, was firing his weapon. He was covering Ashley Broadin, a tough, bald, bullet-headed Brummie and our combat engineer, as she ran to the closest approximation of cover she could find. She then returned the favour. It looked like they were wading through corpses. More Berserks were sprinting towards us
.
On the run I watched Brownie raise his SAW and make a lock with the smartlink. Both his Laa-Laas launched, and I was aware of their spiralling contrails as they flew into one of Their GE armoured vehicles and exploded, crippling it. But more Berserks were spilling out of the back
.
Mudge skidded in behind me. He and Gregor had been conducting fire-and-manoeuvre fun and games similar to Ash and Brownie’s
.
‘Do you know what would be fucking useful?’ he asked. I’m guessing it was rhetorical. He was on one knee firing burst after burst to either side of Gregor, who was wading through corpses as fast as he could to get to us
.
‘Watch your field of fire, Mudge,’ Gregor sub-vocalised again over the tac net
.
‘If I had Laa-Laas as well. Wouldn’t another two missiles be useful in situation like this?!’
‘Time and place, Mudge!’ I shouted as I fired my last grenade, hoping it was a HEAP. It was fragmentation. I got a couple of Berserks but didn’t dent the Walker that was about to establish firepower superiority all over us
.
Mudge was right but it wasn’t my decision. Command were pissed off at us enough for having a civvy around. They weren’t going to encourage him by equipping him with heavy weapons
.
Dorcas was the final one to reach us. The loud-mouthed marksman, on exchange from the Australian SAS, skidded in next to me, displacing Bibs. He endeared himself further by showering us with a wash of mud and rotten viscera
.
‘I was hoping to stay hidden,’ he said grinning. I knew he didn’t mean it. I was pretty sure that adrenalin, combat drugs and bravado were all that was covering up his pant-shitting fear of imminent death. Just like the rest of us
.
Dorcas’s sniper railgun was still disassembled in its sheath across his back. There was no need for finesse here. He had his Steyr carbine and was doing what the rest of us were doing: finding the nearest target in his field of fire, hitting it with burst after burst until it fell over, then moving to the next target. Anything got too close then he fired the underslung grenade launcher to give us a bit more breathing space
.
We were bunching up. It meant we were a target for the first area-effect weapon They brought to bear on us, but we didn’t have much of a choice. They were herding us and didn’t care about casualties
.
The amount of hot flying metal we were putting into the air was awesome. At the end of the day, however, special forces or not, we were infantry, and there was only so much hardware we could bring to bear
.
Gregor was concentrating his fire on the Walker, keeping it off balance, the impacts from his railgun causing ripples all up its strange, almost liquid, biomechanical flesh. He finished it off with both his vertically launched Laa-Laas. Immediately another one strode into view
.
We were gone. It was all over now bar getting rid of our ammunition before we died
.
Still, it could be worse. It had stopped raining after three days
.
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.