Authors: Gavin Smith
Of course Morag had to have a completely new filter system implanted. Another little cut, another surgical scar and more metal in flesh.
Cat was already augmented for operation on Lalande. I asked her what high G was like.
‘It’s like carrying your own weight around all the time. You don’t get used to it.’
When we finally got round to briefing Cat, she had already broadly guessed what we were doing and where we were going. We didn’t tell her too much more because we didn’t trust the environment of Limbo enough. However, Cat told us what she wanted.
We were in Morag and Pagan’s workspace within the Faraday cage. Pagan and Morag had swept for surveillance and found some more bugs. I was considering trying to force Sharcroft to eat them because this was just a waste of everyone’s time. Pagan set up the white-noise generator along with some other electronic countermeasures and we settled down to talk. As we finished with our sparse, broad outline, Cat was flicking through the special forces dossier on the touch screen monitor.
‘Your third shooter.’ She handed me the monitor.
‘Hey!’ Mudge said, affronted at not being considered a shooter. Cat ignored him. I hoped there wasn’t going to be a problem there.
Her choice was not what I’d quite expected. He had high cheekbones on a long face and surprisingly piercing brown eyes, though I guessed they had to be implants. The eyes sort of jumped out at you because he looked pretty intense. His hair was styled into short braids and his skin was just a touch lighter than Cat’s. I figured this for a boyfriend until I saw the name.
‘Merley Sommerjay?’ I asked. Cat nodded. Mudge tilted the monitor towards him.
‘He’s nice.’
‘Thanks for your input, Mudge,’ and then to Cat: ‘Brother?’ She nodded. ‘What? Want to see him dead?’
‘Reasonably often.’
‘I’m not sure about this.’
‘But it’s okay for you to go on ops with your best mate and your lover?’
‘She’s got a point,’ Pagan said. I ignored the flare of irritation and went back to reading his file.
‘A marine?’ I said, glancing at Cat. She’d been US Army and traditionally there was antagonism between the two branches. Cat said nothing. ‘Force Recon, served on Lalande.’
Force Recon were part of the US Marines Special Operations Command. They specialised in reconnaissance but were often tasked for unconventional warfare. They were a reasonable unit.
‘Then he transferred out to the air force and joined the PJs. That’s unusual,’ I continued.
The PJs were pararescue operators, their job to jump behind enemy lines and perform personnel recovery operations or provide medical aid. It was a difficult and very dangerous job, particularly fighting Them. The problem was that the US and Britain had different definitions of what it meant to be special forces.
‘Look, it’s impressive but …’ Cat leaned over and tapped the screen, enlarging part of the information. ‘Oh bullshit,’ I said.
‘What?’ Mudge asked, frowning.
‘Cemetery Wind,’ I said scornfully.
Pagan smiled and shook his head.
‘Really?’ Mudge sounded interested.
‘What’s Cemetery Wind?’ Morag asked.
‘Nothing. They don’t exist,’ I told her.
‘They exist,’ Cat said.
‘They might do, actually,’ Mudge chipped in. He was carefully reading Cat’s brother’s file. ‘What sort of name is Merley anyway?’
‘Mudge, it was you who told me they didn’t exist in the first place,’ I protested. ‘You went looking for them and came to the conclusion they were another combat myth.’
‘Well yes, that was what I told you.’
‘What is Cemetery Wind?’ Morag asked in exasperation.
‘They’re supposed to be an ultra-secret military intelligence unit whose job it is to provide up-to-date and actionable intelligence for special forces operations, except nobody’s ever met anyone in it or worked with one. Cemetery Wind’s a code name. They’ve apparently been called the Activity, Grey Fox, Black Light, the Intelligence Support Agency. Their name’s supposed to change every few years.’
‘Just sounds like another special forces group,’ Morag said, unimpressed.
‘Well yes. Except they’re rumoured to go in first, and sometimes the places they go SF fear to follow.’
‘But sometimes someone provides us with solid eyes-on intel before going in,’ Cat said. ‘Look, I mostly served in the US theatre of ops on Lalande, but Merle was all over. He knows the place like the back of his hand.’
‘It’s a planet bigger than Earth. How could he know the place like the back of his hand?’ I asked.
‘It is bigger than Earth but very little is habitable by humans. Merle’s operated in most of that. He’s even done deep-penetration Nightside recons.’
Lalande 2 was tidally locked. One side always faced the sun and burned; the other always faced the dark and froze. The Twilight Strip between the two zones was the only area habitable by humans. Even then the colonists lived deep underground to protect them from the corrosive winds of the surface and the worst of the acid-rich atmosphere.
Born in vacuum, Nightside was not a problem for Them. They based Themselves in Nightside, where it was very difficult for us to reach, and raided into the Twilight Strip. In order to get solid intelligence, some brave souls in heavily insulated life-support suits had risked the temperatures and set up observation posts.
‘If he’s that deep in with the intelligence side of things, then did he work for the Cabal?’ Pagan asked.
‘Well, you all did at one point or another, didn’t you?’ Morag said. Cat was suspiciously quiet. One by one we all looked at her.
‘Pretty extensively,’ she finally admitted. ‘That’s not to say he knew who they were and what they were about.’
‘It’s not to say he didn’t either,’ Pagan pointed out. He was not looking happy.
‘Mudge? Do you believe in these guys now?’ I asked.
‘I did then,’ Mudge said distractedly. He was studying the monitor. He looked up at Cat. ‘He’s very pretty.’ I’m not sure she knew what to say to that. ‘I went looking for them. I got very efficiently bagged. I was held completely immobile in a stress position for a week. Then someone I didn’t hear enter the room came and held a gun to my head for six hours. Completely still. Never uttered a word. I couldn’t hear him or her breathe. I decided to stop looking.’
‘You make them sound like the Grey Lady,’ Morag said and shivered.
‘Different kind of scary,’ Mudge said. ‘I like him. Let’s use him.’
‘Are you sure you don’t just want to fuck him?’ I asked.
‘He’s my brother,’ Cat protested.
‘Maybe, but if he is Cemetery Wind, then they scare me and make Morag shiver. I also like the idea that one of the guns is a little more subtle than you or me,’ Mudge said.
‘Morag?’
‘I agree with Mudge. It’d be nice to work with someone who can respond to a problem without shooting it a lot.’
‘Pagan?’
‘I don’t like the Cabal connection. But if he’s an ex-PJ then he won’t be as big a wuss about OILO insertion. I say we talk to him’
‘That’s an issue. What happens if we talk to him and either we don’t like what we hear or he doesn’t want to play? He’ll already know too much,’ I asked.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Cat assured us.
I wasn’t quite so sure. Family complicated things and there was a very real chance that we might have to put a bullet in this guy’s head. I couldn’t see Cat getting behind that and she was good people. Besides, it would leave us another shooter down and we’d have to start again.
‘Have you seen where he is?’ Mudge asked as he passed the monitor back.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake. A high-security clipper? En route? What did he think was going to happen?’ I said. ‘Well that’s him out.’
Pagan took the monitor from me. He read the info. ‘What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking,’ Cat said, ‘that aside from the ridiculous amount of money I want paid in advance, getting him out is my price. Either that or I walk.’ Except she knew and we knew that it wouldn’t be easy if she chose to walk.
The standard-issue sidearm for the SAS is the Sig Sauer P410. It is capable of semi-automatic or full automatic fire and has an integral suppressor. The standard magazine contains fifteen 10mm rounds, though oversized magazines with the capacity for twenty or twenty-five rounds are favoured when concealment is not an issue. When fighting Them the favoured load was an armour-piercing, hydro-shock round because of the effects on Their liquid physiology. The hydro-shock rounds are perfectly adequate when used against humans, but many, like Morag, preferred armour-piercing explosive rounds when shooting at people.
The P410 is largely a hold-out weapon. It does not have the stopping power of a rifle or a Mastodon or Void Eagle. If you’re using one against a Berserk then your day’s gone horribly wrong. Given enough hits, they will mess up a Berserk or someone with cybernetic augmentation up to the level of a special forces operator, but they are not one-hit-one-kill on someone with decent subcutaneous armour. This is something I was very grateful for when Morag decided to shoot me with hers. I was less pleased that we’d collectively advised her to use a large-capacity magazine.
Anyone putting any effort into tracking us was going to be able to, but we were trying to stay off the radar. The Brazilian was the closest spoke to New Mexico, but US military shuttles were still not allowed to dock there so we’d been flown to High Pacifica. I had never quite been able to reconcile the view from orbit with the reality of living on Earth. From high above the Earth looked bright, blue, peaceful and, weirdest of all, clean.
The space around High Pacifica was very busy with everything from military shuttles like ours to net tugs pulling in chunks of refined asteroid from orbital refineries, as well as interplanetary traffic from the rest of the system.
We made our way as inconspicuously as we could to an outbound tramp freighter with parts going to Freetown in the Belt. Cat and I all but sat on Mudge to make sure he didn’t call attention to himself.
The freighter was called
Loser’s Luck
and I was astonished it was still holding together. It had a mainly Indonesian crew who we’d paid enough to leave us in peace and hopefully not tell too many people that we were travelling with them. We still were not discussing the details of our mission, however. I think what bothered me the most was that I’d found myself in yet another poorly heated, thin-walled cargo hold far too close to the vacuum and radiation outside.
The flimsy cargo hold was yet another reason why I was less than pleased when 10mm rounds started sparking off the metal around me. This was foolishness, however. There are few man-portable weapons powerful enough to get through even the cheapest cargo hull. Still, getting shot was no fun.
I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention and it was pretty much the last thing I had expected. It was just like being rapidly punched with extraordinary force. She nailed me in the chest with a three-round burst, tight grouping. The integrity of my armour held, but warning icons were already appearing in my IVD as I rolled backwards off the crate of supplies I’d been lying on. The second burst caught me painfully in the left leg below the knee before I managed to get into cover.
I drew the Mastodon and my TO-5 laser pistol. I wasn’t sure what was happening or who was shooting. Mudge had been sitting on a pile of gear opposite, reading. Pagan was tranced into his own systems – I assumed working. Cat was checking the gyroscopic mount for the railgun and Morag had just wandered back from the galley.
‘You fucking bastard!’ Morag shouted and fired again. It was suppressing fire. It worked. I kept my head down. Then again, maybe she was just firing out of anger or frustration.
‘Morag?!’ I said incredulously. This was a completely new phase of our relationship and I wasn’t very happy about it.
‘Put the gun down,’ I heard Mudge say. I continued cowering behind the crate. I really wasn’t sure what to do. Had she really been trying to kill me?
‘Fuck off, Mudge!’ Morag said, and there was another burst of armour-piercing, explosive-tipped bullets.
‘Morag … what the fuck?!’ I managed. There was the sound of a scuffle. I dared to poke my head over the crate and saw Mudge grappling with Morag. Now Mudge is no slouch in a fight. I’ve seen him take special forces operators on without a trace of hesitation. He mostly lost, but he was game and reasonably skilled. Morag straight-armed him in the throat, pistol-whipped him and then side-kicked him so hard that he was knocked off his feet and slammed into the hull wall.
I threw myself behind more crates as she turned and fired again. I caught a glimpse of her face contorted with anger.
There was the sound of another scuffle. I heard Morag cry out and then a thump as someone hit the floor. I risked looking again. Morag was lying next to Mudge rubbing her wrist. Cat was standing close to where Morag had been, making the Sig safe. Cat was glaring and Morag was staring at me with so much hatred I was beginning to think I’d rather be shot.
‘What did you do?’ Cat demanded.
I was pretty much struck dumb for the moment. Apparently being shot was my own fault. Pagan had been tranced in though the whole thing, completely oblivious.