Authors: Gavin Smith
‘What?’ he demanded. ‘Oh yeah, I’m on a nice mellow high. Thought it would help getting to know people.’
‘That’s very responsible of you,’ Morag said.
‘Can you take it all the time?’ Cat asked from behind us.
‘Yeah, ’cause it’s fucking brilliant in a fight,’ Mudge said sarcastically.
Mother was just watching us with a raised eyebrow. Tailgunner and the others had sat back down. Mudge passed Dog Face the now half-empty bottle of vodka.
‘She has … problems,’ Mother said.
It was almost an apology coming from her. I nodded. It was obvious that bad things had happened to her.
‘Don’t fucking apologise to them,’ Tailgunner said angrily.
Mother and Tailgunner were clearly partners and long term. They were the mum and dad of this dysfunctional family but it was obvious that this caused tension between them. It wasn’t jealousy on Mother’s part but something else. I wondered if she was afraid of Strange for some reason.
‘Like I said, they’re useless to us. Nothing but trouble,’ Merle said.
He sprayed antiseptic on the cut before applying a knitter and a foam bandage to it.
‘Why were the comms on your mechs disabled?’ Pagan asked again, and again they all went quiet.
‘Tell them,’ Mother said.
‘What, all of a sudden we’re best friends?’ Tailgunner demanded.
‘They trusted us; we may as well trust them. Because you know what happens if we don’t?’ Mother paused. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘The risk—’ Tailgunner started.
‘Is the same as any other day. We’ll either live or we die.’
I was starting to warm to Mother. She was my kind of NCO, but Merle was right: she cared too much. But then again the same could be said about me. Well, when it came to Morag anyway, I cared far too much. Mudge also, sometimes, and Pagan to a degree, and I was putting off thinking about Rannu. It was a near certainty he was dead.
I was grateful it was my turn with the bottle of vodka. I took a deep long pull from it. The burn in my throat from the alcohol was a welcome change to the constant burn from the atmosphere. It still tasted like rotten eggs.
Tailgunner swallowed hard. He didn’t look happy but he told us anyway. ‘Miru, the ruler of night, warned us to separate ourselves from the spirit world.’
My heart sank.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Merle spat and turned to look at me. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to appeal to my common sense or was getting ready to walk away. Then again I didn’t fully understand why he was here. ‘We’re just wasting our time.’
‘Merle,’ Cat said from behind me, ‘back off for a bit.’
‘This is hacker religious bullshit,’ he said angrily.
‘Why don’t you show some fucking respect?’ Dog Face demanded.
I noticed that Strange was swaying in and out of the light and shadows further inside the cavern, still watching us. Glaring at Merle.
‘Why don’t you show me something to respect?’ Merle demanded.
‘I think you’re spending too much time with Mudge,’ I said to him.
‘Hey!’ Mudge said. ‘I’m behaving.’ And he was. He was also studying the patterns in the rocks intently.
‘He was like this before he met Mudge,’ Cat assured us.
Merle glared at her angrily. ‘Look, I understand that the lack of sensory information to certain parts of your brain in the net means it gets filled with religious horseshit. I understand that trancing-in presses the button on the religious gene, but this has nothing to do with why we’re here.’
‘Work on your own a lot?’ Morag asked him sarcastically.
‘Yeah, you can see why.’
‘Because you struggle to form relationships with normal people?’ Morag guessed.
Merle looked exasperated. ‘Fine, whatever, but this religious stuff still has nothing to do with what we’re trying to accomplish.’
‘Which is?’ Tailgunner asked. I saw Mother touch his leg and shake her head.
‘It’s real for them.’ I was surprised to hear this come out of my mouth. So were Pagan and Morag judging by the looks they gave me.
I think I was just sick and tired of religious discussions. I seemed to have had a lot of them in the last few months. I’d been instrumental in God’s release into the net and I’d met one of the so-called gods in there. I still had no problem being an atheist. Now I was not happy with another god rearing its head, even if only peripherally to us. I was hoping it was only operational paranoia, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were moving around us, helping shape events, manipulating us while staying out of sight.
‘Besides,’ said Pagan, ‘the warning seems to have had very real effects.’
Merle shook his head as if he couldn’t be bothered to argue. I hoped he was going to be quiet for a while. Suddenly Mudge started laughing. We all looked at him.
‘Normal people,’ he repeated as if he’d just got the punchline of a joke.
‘You SF types are awesome,’ Big Henry said, smiling.
‘He’s a journalist,’ Pagan, Cat and I replied at the same time.
‘A journalist and a sadly retired hooker … Wow. You really are here to rescue us.’
‘Tell them the rest,’ Mother said, apparently unimpressed with the banter.
‘We’ve got a little piece of it,’ Tailgunner said.
‘A piece of what?’ Pagan asked carefully.
‘The Black Wave,’ the big hacker answered.
Pagan and Morag gaped at him. I must have been doing the same thing. Even Merle looked up. Mudge was leaning closer to the smooth rock floor. We’d bored him earlier in the conversation, it seemed.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Miru, the ruler of the night, gave me an eel net to cast at—’ Tailgunner started.
‘Okay, never mind. Forget I asked,’ I said.
Tailgunner looked a little pissed off.
‘Can you not be fucking serious?’ Merle asked.
Tailgunner turned to look at him. There was something about the situation that reminded me of the time the two hardest guys in Fintry had confronted each other when I was a kid.
‘He is,’ Morag said, obviously fascinated.
‘And this is important,’ Pagan said. ‘You mean to say that one of the gods of Maori mythology—’
‘Don’t call it a mythology,
pakeha
,’ Tailgunner warned him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pagan apologised, though I don’t think he knew what
pakeha
meant. ‘But one of your gods gave you a program of some kind?’
Tailgunner nodded. ‘A program that I can’t understand. Just like the eel it caught.’
‘Huh?’ I managed intelligently.
‘The piece of the Black Wave I caught, it looked like an eel in the net,’ Tailgunner explained.
‘Did you see the Wave?’ Pagan asked.
‘Yes, and yes, it looked like a big black wave. It ignored every piece of security, every defence in the site as if it wasn’t there. It co-opted some of my security programs, changing them as I watched, and took control of every net-linked system.’
Pagan and Morag were nodding as they listened. He was confirming everything we’d guessed about Demiurge’s capabilities. Except that somehow he’d managed to effect Demiurge. Still I was always suspicious of these little shards of hope. Particularly when deities were involved.
‘There was something else there,’ Tailgunner continued, ‘high above the Wave. They looked like angels.’
Morag tried to suppress the shudder of fear, but I could read her body language too well. I don’t think anyone else noticed.
‘The angels are chimerical hackers,’ Pagan said, glancing over at Morag.
‘They have attack programs derived from Demiurge. Very powerful.’ Morag just about managed to keep the fear out of her voice.
‘Where is all this shit coming from?’ Big Henry asked. ‘And why’s it so much more dangerous than our stuff.’
‘These Freedom Squadron wankers. When we attacked them they were like Them inside. They’re infiltrators, right? They’ve finally got sophisticated. Info warfare, that sort of thing,’ Dog Face growled.
The four of them were looking at us expectantly. Now it was our turn to look uncomfortable.
‘It’s kind of a long story,’ I said.
‘We could show them Mudge’s documentary,’ Pagan suggested.
It took us a while to tell them what had happened. The affable-through-narcotics Mudge plugged himself into a monitor and did indeed show them part of the documentary he’d made. I felt he spent too much time on the kicking I’d got at the hands of Rannu in New York. He claimed it was to see if they recognised him. They didn’t. Pagan and Mudge did most of the talking.
‘Bullshit!’ Dog Face spat. He had drool around his mouth.
‘It was all a lie. The Cabal started the war and kept it going,’ Pagan assured him.
We’d been through this several times. Explained the Cabal’s reasons and their mechanisms of control, how they pulled it off but the
whanau
hadn’t lived it like we had. In many ways the concept of a sixty-year war as a con job was just too big. They looked stricken, pale, almost nauseous. Most people could understand the idea of a defensive war and the hardships and sacrifices that would mean, particularly if you’d grown up practically on the front line like these guys had, but to find out the whole thing was a lie? It meant that all you’d suffered, everyone you’d lost – the whole thing – had been for the profit of a tiny minority of people. They had just been told that everything they knew, their reality for all their lives, was a lie. Denial was a reasonable reaction. The anger that would come later was also a reasonable reaction. I almost felt like we should apologise to them.
‘How do we know which story to believe?’ Mother asked.
She looked shaken but her voice was even and calm. That stumped me. The truth was self-evident to us. We’d lived it. But all we were giving them was another story.
‘Yeah, no offence, but you’re asking us to take a lot on faith,’ Tailgunner said.
‘You know there’s something wrong,’ Morag said.
He nodded.
‘Your own god warned you,’ Pagan added.
I said, ‘I’m afraid you’re just going to have to decide which you believe. Though you could ask yourselves what possible reason we’d have to jump into hell’s creation, tab and drive all the way here just to fuck with your heads. I don’t want to be here.’
‘And this Cronin, the guy on the viz, and this Rolleston guy, they’re to blame?’ Big Henry asked.
‘They used to work for the Cabal, now I guess they are the Cabal,’ I told them and then watched them war with what we’d told them some more.
‘Look, you seem on the level,’ Tailgunner started. ‘But what if you’ve been slaved? What if you really believe but you’ve been brainwashed by the
taniwha
?’
‘The what?’ I asked.
‘Them,’ Mother said. She was deep in thought and I could not read her expression at all. Her calmness was weird, almost unsettling.
‘Then again, why are we taking so much time to convince you?’ Pagan asked. ‘Bit solipsistic, isn’t it?’ Everyone just looked at him.
‘Try and remember you’re talking to a bunch of squaddies,’ I suggested.
‘There is only me,’ Mudge said as if it was a revelation.
‘We are all playthings of your imagination,’ Morag said to him with mock earnestness.
The levity wasn’t working. We’d fractured their world too badly.
‘Okay, so I’ve got a question,’ Mother said. We looked at her. ‘So what?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Pagan said. I didn’t either.
‘What difference does it make? The Cabal pulled our strings, made us fight for sixty years. Nothing we can do about it now.’
‘
Utu
,’ Tailgunner said quietly.
Mother turned to him. ‘Really? How’s that going to work then? Look, I agree with you about our ancestors, our spirituality, but the fact is we’re not mythical heroes out of the past. We don’t have anything like the resources to fight, and doing it on principle is a shitty reason for us all to finally get killed.’
‘Because it’s the right thing to do.’ I was surprised that I said it. And after I said it I realised how hollow it sounded.
‘Well, I congratulate you on being able to afford such a keen moral compass. Again, I don’t want to die for a principle. Particularly as I don’t think it matters to us what war we’re fighting or who’s in command. It’s not going to change things for us and the end result is exactly the same,’ Mother said.
‘But we changed things,’ Morag said. There was almost desperation in her voice. ‘People can see what’s going on now. The Cabal can’t do those things any more.’
‘Really? Is anyone trying to subvert your god yet?’ Mother asked. She read the answer in Morag’s miserable expression. ‘Things getting better for the poor?’
‘These things take time,’ Pagan told her.
‘The powerful and wealthy are always going to fight for what’s theirs. You expose them and they find another, more subtle way to get what they want.’
‘So why fight them?’ Merle asked.
Mother flashed him a look of contempt.