Authors: Gavin Smith
‘That’s pretty risky, Morag,’ Cat said. Pagan had set up rendezvous points and times with Rannu. ‘It looks like a lot of the initial missions were compromised.’
‘Maybe, but Rannu’s good,’ Morag said, trying to keep the hope out of her voice.
‘We check,’ I said. We owed him that.
I
owed him that. I’d left Gregor too long. Merle and Cat protested. ‘Carefully,’ I added.
‘You’ve done a lot of questioning, Cabal-boy,’ Mudge said. ‘What are you bringing?’
Merle managed to turn his shit icon’s head and stare at him for a while. Then the icon smiled. It looked more like a grimace.
‘Oh I’m the native guide. I know the land. A large network of contacts, many of whom will have been compromised, some of whom I just can’t see co-operating, but if they’ve been slaved then who knows.’
‘That it? Well I’m fucking impressed. Guess you were worth the trouble,’ Mudge said dismissively. There was something I was missing in this conversation. I also couldn’t work out why Morag was smiling.
‘Also Cemetery Wind set up a series of caches all over the Twilight Strip.’ Merle tapped his head. ‘I know where all the goodies are hidden.’ This was our second piece of good news. There was only so much gear we were going to be able to jump with.
‘Why are they doing this?’ Morag asked. I sensed her naivety was not doing her any favours in Merle’s eyes.
‘Its just power and greed, same as it ever was,’ I said.
‘I get that,’ she said sharply. ‘But that was the Cabal, right? Why does Rolleston suddenly want to be god-emperor of the universe? Doesn’t it seem a little … I don’t know, like a viz story or something?’
Actually she had a point. Rolleston had always fitted my idea of the good servant. Suddenly he wanted to be a dictator.
‘Maybe it’s all on Cronin?’ I suggested, now less sure she was being naive.
‘I think they really believe that they know better,’ Pagan said. ‘That the strong have the right to rule. They’re true believers, fanatics.’
As he spoke glyphs were appearing and disappearing in front of him as he scrolled though the information on the holographic display. He found what he was looking for and opened the file. At first it was a lot of scientific-looking stuff, equations and chemical signs, that sort of thing. I was irritated with him. He knew this would mean nothing to us. What was he doing – trying to highlight our ignorance? Then I realised that I was looking at an incomplete, partially corrupted and highly classified personnel file. It was Rolleston’s. I looked at his birth date. He was more than ninety years old.
‘Fuck,’ Mudge said. ‘You’d think he’d have got higher than major.’
‘If he’d got higher than major then he wouldn’t be so hands on. He wouldn’t get the chance to fuck people up himself,’ I said as I tried to concentrate on the information in front of me.
He had been an exemplary officer in the Royal Marine Commandos and then the SBS. Then even shadier black ops stuff. I could see why the Cabal had chosen him. It seemed like no matter how hard the objective was he got it done, but there was a lot of information missing. Like everything before the marines.
As far as I could tell, though much of it was above my head, his longevity was down to early applications of Themtech. As the Cabal had refined their knowledge of Themtech they had continued to upgrade him. It seemed that he was a test bed for processes they were too frightened to try themselves, like Gregor but not so extensive, at least not initially. In fact Gregor had been the big breakthrough that had resulted in Rolleston’s current abilities. Even on Sirius he had been a bioborg.
‘Okay, other than the age we pretty much knew all this,’ I said.
‘No,’ Pagan said. ‘You’re not getting it.’ I so enjoyed being told I was stupid. ‘For dirty stuff Rolleston was the Cabal’s go-to guy.’ I winced at the Americanism. ‘For the other stuff it was Cronin, who has also been heavily augmented, though I suspect in different ways.’
‘We’d assumed as much. So?’
‘They were designed for this. Rolleston’s designed for conflict resolution, no matter what.’
‘So?’ I was starting to get irritated with this now.
‘Rolleston was designed to be able to run an entire military for the Cabal and Cronin is designed to be a one-man civilian government.’
I still didn’t see what he was getting at.
‘You mean they’re doing this because they’re programmed to?’ Morag asked.
‘A little more complicated and subtle than that, but yes.’
‘For masters that don’t exist any more?’ Mudge asked.
Pagan nodded. ‘Yes, but I think it’s more that they are programmed to think that they have the right to rule. More importantly, I don’t think they think like us any more, or rather they have different parameters for their thoughts.’
‘They live in a different world?’ Morag asked.
‘In a way. I’m guessing that for them there is no other course of action than the one they’re on.’
‘Which is weird and fucked up but does it help us?’ I asked.
‘All information helps. We need insight into our enemy, after all. But you’re right – I think we’ve got more pressing matters to worry about.’
Then something occurred to me. ‘What about the Grey Lady?’
Pagan shook his head. ‘Couple of references but nothing,’ he said. I wasn’t sure why, but that bothered me more.
We spent the next few hours discussing our hazy objectives, our total lack of useful intelligence and our not being able to plan until we knew more.
‘Okay,’ I finally said as I slid, a little too comfortably, into my NCO role. ‘All prep is done and we are packed and ready to jump by nineteen hundred Zulu on day seven. Yeah?’
‘It’s an eight-and-a-half-day trip,’ Mudge grumbled. He was grumbling because he was supposed to. Soldiers grumbled. Even if he was a journalist, Mudge had a lot to grumble about.
‘We’re going to get properly drunk on the seventh night,’ I said. Pagan groaned and shook his head. Mudge and Morag were grinning. ‘Don’t worry Pagan. We’ll behave, to a degree.’ He nodded, knowing it was pointless to argue. ‘That gives us day eight to recover and the final half a day to go over everything again and do any final prep,’ I finished. It gave us something to look forward to and we didn’t know when we’d next have the chance.
A day, an entire day of my life, one I’ll never get back, just spraying corrosion-resistant stuff on all our gear. Then Merle checked it and then we sprayed it again. Despite the masks, I would be tasting and smelling it for the next few days. We even got a warning from Nuiko because we were getting close to overloading the atmosphere scrubbers.
I spent most of the time going over all the information that Pagan had stolen. I superimposed it over my sight in my IVD or converted it to audio. The fact was we could prepare and plan as much as we wanted but we wouldn’t know what was going on until we hit the ground. The Demiurge-enforced comms blackout was crippling us. Whereas God’s open nature was making Earth more vulnerable.
I reviewed the information on Rolleston and what little we had on Cronin and the Themtech-enhanced soldiers of the Black Squadrons. Much of the biotech stuff went over my head but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d made themselves aliens. The Black Squadrons had finally managed to become the demons we’d always thought They were.
I thought about what Pagan had said about them thinking differently, though he’d shied away from using the word programmed. Did that make a difference? Were they victims as well? I glanced over to where Morag was spraying her kit. She’d barely spoken to me since we got on board. Even if they were victims you still have choices to make. I didn’t like the ones they’d made. I was still going to hate them. It would help me do the job.
The
Tetsuo Chou
, as a chimerical vessel, was a lot more open-plan than most ships I’d been on. It was basically a heavily armoured central compartment where Nuiko lived surrounded by a lot of cargo space. The engine room was down a small corridor separate from the rest of the ship. Nuiko controlled three remotes to do the hands-on work elsewhere in the ship. They were crab-like and reminded me of some of the images Pagan had shown us of ancient Japan. Mudge had described them as samurai robot crabs and being on the ship as like being inside the shell of a giant turtle. Once he’d shown me what a turtle looked like, I had to agree with him.
With human cargo Nuiko had had her servitors add a portable life-support unit to the cargo compartment. All our gear went in and we slept on a series of temporary platforms connected by catwalks that had been set up for the trip. We lived in compartments made of flimsy plastic walls bolted together. The cludgy, or head as it was called on ships, had been installed in the engine room. All and all I’d had worse billets.
Most of the room was taken up by the seed-pod-like OILO cocoons, tanks of acceleration gel and the large parachute rigs we were going to need to counteract Lalande 2’s heavy gravity. In many ways using the OILO cocoons for a flight-capable exo-armour drop would have been preferable but we just didn’t have the logistical support for long-term operations, particularly in a corrosive environment. So we were doing it the old-fashioned and hard way.
Mudge hadn’t been particularly talkative and seemed to be keeping his drug use to more acceptable levels. He was obviously pissed off with me. I decided to speak to him first. I reckoned he’d be the easiest bridge to mend.
I headed along to his makeshift cabin. The only noise was the ring of my combat boots on the metal grid of the walkway and the omnipresent hum of the spaceship’s power plant. I’d seen men and woman with too much metal in them driven mad by that constant hum. I’d made friends with the noise a long time ago. After all you couldn’t get away from it. Now, as much as I didn’t like space travel, I found the noise comforting.
I passed Morag, who was sitting on the edge of a catwalk dangling her legs between gaps in the containers below. She looked as if she was doing nothing but was probably going over something on her IVD. Part of her face was covered in medgel, as was mine. Merle had used a knitter and accelerant on her broken leg and then made a cast out of medgel and connected it to a medpak to drive it. Two days in she was hobbling about. Merle reckoned she’d have most of her mobility by the time we got there. She ignored me as I passed and knocked on the door to Mudge’s compartment.
‘I think he’s going over some stuff with Merle,’ Morag said. The sound of her voice surprised me. I glanced down at her but she was looking the other way.
‘Thanks,’ I said and moved down to Merle’s compartment, which wasn’t much further on, and knocked. There was no answer.
‘They’re discussing security protocols and have probably got a white-noise generator up,’ she called.
I should have known. She was right: they were very considerately using a white-noise generator – must have been Merle’s idea. They were not however discussing security protocols. I walked straight in on the pair of them.
‘Motherfucker!’ Merle shouted at me.
‘Can’t you fucking knock, dude!’ Mudge protested.
‘I’m … I’m sorry,’ I said, not sure what to do.
‘Out!’ Merle screamed at me. Oh yeah, that’s what I was supposed to do. I backed out of Merle’s compartment as quickly as I could and closed the door. Morag was lying on the catwalk convulsing with laughter.
‘That’s childish, Morag.’
She just laughed at me.
‘You could probably walk in on Pagan as well,’ she said, nodding towards his compartment once she’d managed to control herself.
‘Really? With who? Cat?!’ I asked as I slowly turned into a teenaged girl.
Cat and Pagan seemed an odd mix. Then again there had been Jess back in the Avenues. Besides, Morag was talking to me and I wanted it to last as long as it could.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ Cat said from out in the crates somewhere. She walked forward into the light. She’d obviously been working out. She clearly felt she needed to make her presence known before someone said something she didn’t want to hear.
‘Who then?’ I asked.
Morag looked at me as if I was dumb. ‘Nuiko,’ she said.
‘Wow,’ I said.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that straight away. It was a sense relationship. The technology meant that it would feel virtually the same as the real thing. Given Nuiko’s chimerical nature, it meant that Pagan was to all intents and purposes having a relationship with the ship.
‘Oh,’ I said.
Suddenly I felt very awkward and both Cat and Morag were staring at me. I think I was supposed to be doing something but I had no idea what. I’d killed Berserks in hand-to-hand combat and suddenly I wanted to retreat. With as much dignity as I could manage I headed back to my compartment.
Safe in my room I felt like taking trumpet-based revenge on the rest of them. Also I wanted to practise, but there’s only so far you want to push a group of ex-special forces types, not to mention Mudge and Morag. I decided to have a drink instead. I put some music on my internal systems and called up a book on to my IVD.
Mudge turned up about an hour later. The whisky had been a waste as all I could taste was anti-corrosion coating, so I’d got myself a beer instead. It didn’t taste much better but it was cheaper.
‘Can I get one of those? Assuming my crippling substance-abuse problems won’t derail the mission.’