Authors: Gavin Smith
‘What are you doing, Vladimir?’ I asked quietly, trying to force down my rising gorge. He was crouched on top of the pile of bodies tearing gobbets of flesh from them and putting them in his mouth and chewing. His expression was pained, like a spoilt middle-class kid forced to eat something he didn’t like. A lot of what he was eating was just tumbling out of his mouth partially chewed. I think it was the noise, the tearing sound of skin and meat, which jarred my already frayed nerves the most.
He turned to look at me, wearing someone else’s face. He was covered from head to foot in other people’s blood. It should have been horrific, and it was, but there was something pathetic and pitiable about him as well. He’d got his wish to feast on human flesh but it didn’t look as if it was to his taste. This was a warewolf reduced to a ghoul, a mere carrion eater. He seemed tired as he took off the face.
‘My friend,’ he said sadly. He continued tearing off lumps of flesh. There was something compulsive about the behaviour. ‘I have betrayed everything.’ He tore off more flesh.
‘Why?’ was the best I could do. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had before Cat tried to waste him. He ripped off another lump of flesh.
‘If he does that one more time …’ Cat growled.
‘This isn’t you,’ I said.
He stopped chewing and looked at me.
‘We both know it is. We are always surprised by what we are capable of …’ Then he tapped his armoured skull with the tip of a bloodied claw. ‘When we serve something bigger than us.’
‘Has something made you do this?’ Pagan asked. He did not look at Vladimir; he was still covering the door.
‘I do not know you that you should address me with such familiarity,’ Vladimir replied, a predatory smile on his face. His mock haughtiness was like a ghost of his old self. ‘I always wanted to be a monster. It’s much easier than trying to be good.’
‘Are you slaved?’ I asked, though I’d seen nothing in any of the Vucari’s plugs.
He stared at me. It was all I could do to return his look.
‘Do you owe me a debt?’ he asked.
I didn’t want to answer that. I couldn’t see any form of repayment of my debt that was going to be good. I swallowed hard, trying to ignore the acid burn of rising bile in the back of my throat.
‘Yes,’ I finally managed.
‘I cannot do it myself,’ he said. He sounded almost solemn.
The glimpse of his face I caught as he pounced was of a mask of hatred and insane rage. We all fired. The railgun kicked up a storm of dead flesh. Despite the ordnance he took a long time dying.
I felt nothing as we probed deeper into the complex. Pagan was freaked but I didn’t care any more. All I could think of was that someone had done this to Vladimir. I wasn’t sure how but I was pretty sure who.
We were crossing a metal bridge over a deep pool of water that had been cut from the stone of the asteroid. The pool was part of the water supply. A thick carpet of algae covered the top of the pool to help with oxygen generation. The flickering lights in this section were ultraviolet to stimulate algae growth.
The UV made the blood-soaked Vucari that dropped from the ceiling wearing someone else’s face seem surreal. I think Mudge would have enjoyed the experience. It didn’t seem real to me. The Vucari landed between Cat and me. Cat’s blood looked black in the UV as he tore a claw up her back. The blow lifted her off her feet and sent her sprawling to the metal. As it turned to face me I threw myself back, trying to bring the gauss rifle to bear. I knew that behind me Pagan would be swinging around to fire but then the Vucari stiffened. Blood, his own, dribbled out of his mouth and he fell forward. There was a piece of jagged metal sticking out the back of his neck between the armour plate on his skull and the armour plate on his back. Even allowing for getting the metal between the two plates, it still would have to be pushed in with a lot of force to penetrate the subcutaneous armour. I had to admit I was impressed.
Standing behind the fallen Vucari was a naked man about my size. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was breathing hard and his right hand was bleeding badly. There was no body fat on him at all and he looked malnourished. I saw the high cheekbones that could make features like his look cruel but now they just added to his gaunt appearance. His hair was a dirty matted bird’s nest. His skin was as dark as Cat’s and there was more than a passing resemblance though he had a smaller build. The thing that got me the most however was his eyes. They must have been designed to look like the real things but I’d never seen implants like that. They had seemed intense in the pictures but now they managed to look simultaneously cold and somehow insane.
He spat on the corpse. Some feeling flickered inside me.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said.
He ignored me. He wrenched the metal shank out of the Vucari, turned him over and pushed the dead skin mask off his face. I recognised this one as well. His name was Vassily.
Cat climbed to her feet with some difficulty due to the railgun harness. She turned to face the man.
‘Merle?’ I couldn’t remember Cat ever sounding that unsure.
He looked back at her. His implants were certainly emotive. I wasn’t sure how that worked. I was sure I saw hate in his eyes.
‘A fucking cop!’ he spat.
‘Corporate secur—’ she managed to get out before he attacked her.
He attacked someone with a railgun with only a metal shank. I thought Cat was pretty good about it. After all the shit we’d been through I would have been tempted to just blow him away. I was quite tempted to do that anyway. He drove her to the ground and she was just managing to hold him off. It seemed that her obviously superior strength was not necessarily a match for insane conviction. The shank was getting closer and closer to her. I bet she wished she’d put armour on before going to Trace’s office now.
I shook my head. We really didn’t have time for this sibling rivalry bullshit. Pagan was covering our back. I put as much power as I could muster into the kick I delivered. It snapped Merle’s head around to one side and he spat blood all over Cat. His head was lolling around but he was still conscious, so I stamped on it. He collapsed onto her.
‘You’re not one of us yet,’ I told the unconscious body. Pagan backed up closer to me.
‘So we’ve collected another arsehole then?’ he asked.
Just once, I thought, it’d be nice if we could sort things out without violence.
‘Ungrateful bastard,’ I muttered, meaning Merle. We’d have to carry him now as well.
‘Could somebody get my naked brother off me?’ Cat asked.
This was weird. Apparently they used to have houses just for tea. This wasn’t like the sort of brew-up I was used to, either in a foxhole or on the bonnet of a Land Rover with your mates on watch. It was taking a fuck of a lot longer for a start. But then we weren’t expecting to be torn apart by Them at any given moment. While we may have had a boiled sweet before a cuppa, we didn’t have fancy sweets to ‘prepare our palates’ either.
I’d like to have dismissed this all as bollocks but the programming was superb. It was the detail. The sweets tasted like sweets and good sweets. How had they coded that? I could smell the blossoms on the air, which was fresh and clean and maybe a little thin, like we were actually on a mountain in the virtual environment. We could smell the tea as it was being prepared. I could feel the rough texture of the straw mats through the silk of the dressing-gown thing I was wearing. I think it was called a kimono, and while I’d protested at having to wear it, even virtually, I don’t think I’d ever felt silk before. You had to look hard to see the edges of this fantasy.
A lot of time, effort and probably money had gone into this program. It made sense, I guess. Michihisa Nuiko was a chimera. She had been born severely disabled, but luckily for her chimerical technology and her own inherent piloting ability meant that she could still join the war effort. It must have been nice for her to be part of such an inclusive society. Everyone gets used.
She wasn’t talking about her war record much. In fact beyond being the single most polite person I’ve ever met, sort of an anti-Mudge, she wasn’t saying much of anything. Judging by the craft that the Yakuza set her up with, her record must have been pretty good, and judging by the type of job she was recommended for and was prepared to take, her career must have been on the sharp end. Itaki had put us on to her. Despite his trigger-happy people and the weird thing with having everyone cut to look like him, he’d proved to be an okay guy for a mobster and a pimp.
Pagan had been excited that the Yakuza had the vice franchise in Camp 12 because he had worked with them before. While most organised crime operations had to live up to their word to a degree, otherwise nobody would ever deal with them, Pagan was of the opinion that the Yakuza were the least likely to sell us out. As long as they were properly paid that is.
Nuiko lived in a womb-like life-support cocoon in an armoured compartment in the centre of the ship. We would never see that. All our interaction was through the beautifully crafted sense programs in her personalised net realm. Like the tea room made of lacquered wood and paper looking out over a dramatic snow-capped mountain vista.
Her ship was called
Tetsuo Chou
, which Pagan told me meant ‘steel butterfly’. It was a small, heavily modified system clipper, which are pretty much the fastest ships available outside the military. Nuiko’s backers had paid for an induction sail to be added for FTL travel. The streamlined, distended-teardrop shape was covered in green/black energy-dissipating acoustic tiles to lower its energy signature. The ship had top-of-the-line navigation systems to minimise the use of manoeuvring engines, which in turn would further lower its energy signature. Internal power was kept to a bare minimum as well, which meant a cold ship. Its electronic countermeasures system was also state of the art, making it very stealthy. Which was just what we needed, and virtual Nuiko hadn’t batted a virtual eyelid when we mentioned an OILO entry. I think she’d done orbital insertion before.
BPIC decided not to slave us in the end. Partly because Itaki vouched for us, partly because we were fully armed by the time they regained control of Freetown 12, but mainly because they had their own problems. Itaki’s people had convinced enough ships’ captains to let the part of God that lived in their systems join the fight against Demiurge and Demiurge had finally been destroyed.
There had only been the eight Vucari and one had been destroyed by automated security systems while sabotaging the fusion plant. They’d come in on a long-range strike craft, the same one they’d left on when they returned to Sirius on a similar job to ours, I guessed. The LRSC had come back radically different, however.
When we finally managed to break into the craft we found that the living space had been radically reduced. It was a rats’ nest where the Vucari must have been crammed together. The rest of the ship was full of a honeycomb-like substance that looked very similar to Them biotech. This was where the empowered Demiurge had been stored and was the increased memory and processing power that had given God so much trouble.
We found Bataar, the Vucari hacker. He seemed to have merged with the biotech material. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his plugs and penetrated his ears. Much of his body was buried deep in it. If there were pilots in there I guessed something similar had happened to them.
At the same time as Freetown 12 was hit all the other Freetown Camps and the asteroid cities suffered similar attacks. All from returning special forces groups sent to disrupt and gather information in Black-Squadron-held territory. All of them supported by Demiurge.
Some of the other Freetown Camps hadn’t been as lucky as 12. Over a dozen of them had been ‘sanitised’, as BPIC put it. As had Hygeia. I don’t know why God hadn’t been able to stop Demiurge in a city that size – perhaps Rolleston had sent larger ships with more space for Demiurge – but more than two hundred thousand people had died in the subsequent plasma bombardment from BPIC and system patrol ships. Two hundred thousand. It was just a number. A number heated by liquid fire that will burn in space and then cool in vacuum. I didn’t see the ballet of all those bodies blown into the cold night. The figure was so abstract I struggled to feel the anger I should have.
While the Black Squadrons had earned themselves another enemy in BPIC, they had managed to cripple the logistical support of the mining operations in the Belt. In doing so they had of course denied those resources to Earth. What we couldn’t work out was why had all those people turned. Why had the Vucari gone over to Rolleston? The most obvious explanation was that they had been slaved. If so it was a new and more sophisticated form of slaving because they’d had no slave jacks in their plugs and they didn’t seem to suffer the drop-off in performance than comes with slaveware.
Once the ritual part of the tea ceremony was over and we could converse normally Mudge had suggested brainwashing. Then he’d explained the concept. It was basically a form of psychological coercion to do what you’re told. We called it basic training in the army. Pagan had suggested that it was never as total or as effective as it had seemed on the Vucari.
‘Possession?’ I asked as Nuiko ladled tea from an iron pot set in a hole in the ground. Even serving the tea seemed complex. Nuiko was small, slender, pale, and wearing a simple dark kimono. Her features were a composed expressionless mask. I found this faintly disconcerting. I also didn’t like that she never met my eyes, particularly as I was wearing my Sunday-best icon, which Morag had made for me. The one where I had my natural eyes, or what Morag thought they should look like.