Authors: Gavin Smith
‘The Black Wave?’ he asked.
I cursed my own indiscretion. On the other hand he’d know from my accent that I wasn’t from around here.
‘You worship it?’ I asked.
‘More venerate it as an inevitability. One war ends and another begins. This time we fight each other, and if the information the resistance is circulating is correct it seems that we did the last one to ourselves as well. There was a demon, a harbinger …’
‘In the net?’ Rannu asked.
The man nodded. This sent a shudder through me. Of all the religious experiences that people have in the net, the ones involving so-called demons are always the worst and most destructive – and not just for the hackers themselves. I remembered the boy lying on the soiled bed in Fintry, Vicar standing over him, cross and Bible in hand, trying to cast out the demonic virus in the kid’s ware.
‘He told me of the Black Wave’s coming. He told me that the Black Wave was hate.’ The man laughed. ‘Can you imagine? All these years of artifice and we finally make machines hate.’
‘So why venerate something so …’ I was searching for the right word.
‘Negative,’ Rannu supplied. It didn’t seem quite strong enough but it would do.
‘Because of its inevitability, its symbolism. Sixty years of warfare was not enough. At some level humanity wants to destroy itself. If not this war then other reasons will be found. The Black Wave is the perfect expression of this. We, as a race, have created a god and then we made it hate. How much harder do we have to work to destroy ourselves?’
‘It was a small group of people,’ I said. I couldn’t shake the feeling that history was the story of a small group of arseholes making the rest of us bloody miserable.
‘Do you oppose these people?’ he asked.
This was more difficult. Answering that had operational security ramifications. What was I talking about? I’d already sold us out. At least he didn’t seem malevolent. Rannu still gave me a sharp look when I nodded.
‘You still fight, hate, commit acts of violence and destroy other human life?’ he asked.
‘That’s …’ Now Rannu was searching for a word.
‘Sophistry?’ the man suggested. Rannu nodded. ‘Perhaps, or perhaps it’s taking responsibility, collectively, for our race’s actions.’
It seemed that nobody was going to tell me what sophistry was. Maybe it meant bullshit. Maybe that’s what Rannu had meant to say.
‘So you’re waiting for death?’ I asked.
‘In a way, but we won’t play its game. We’ll die on our own terms.’
I couldn’t make up my mind if this guy was a suicidal nut-job or one of the bravest persons I’d ever met. Not that they were mutually exclusive.
‘We still have to fight,’ Rannu said.
‘Even if it’s more futile, painful and destructive than putting one of their guns to your own head? Besides, there are ways and means of fighting. It doesn’t have to involve violence.’
His words were starting to make sense to me. He was very persuasive. Though I wasn’t sure he wasn’t twisting words out of shape to get us to think what he wanted.
‘Is this how you recruit people?’ I asked.
‘We don’t recruit people. They come to us when they’re ready. You will not join us. You are both still full of anger, hatred and fear. I can see the flames that burn around you. They surround you like a nimbus. I think you need to rage against the dark for a while longer yet.’
I had nothing to say to that. Was it insight or was it a sales pitch? I didn’t know. I did know that he’d saved our arses. I wondered if he was still fighting, like us, but used different methods. Better methods, if they worked. On the other hand, if they ever crossed Cronin, Rolleston or the others they’d be snuffed out. A more likely fate was death at the hands of bailiffs or scavengers. Their sin would be the old one of having what someone else wanted and not being mean enough to protect it. Or maybe it was all an elaborate justification for just giving up.
‘You’ll be going on your way.’ He said this with certainty. ‘You need rest before you do. When you go I would ask you to take only what you think you’ll need.’ He stood up to leave. ‘If you want anything just ask anyone. They’ll try to help as much as they can. Will you excuse me?’ He turned to walk away.
‘Thank you,’ I said. Rannu said the same. He didn’t look back at us but he nodded before he strode away.
I wasn’t drinking much. It didn’t take much. Rannu did drink but in moderation. Tonight he was matching me, tin cup for tin cup of the fermented engine oil. We were sitting under a pathetic canopy of what had once been ornamental foliage in a hole that was the dried-out remains of some kind of water feature.
The UV-lit false night was somehow managing to be cold and humid. Both of us were wrapped in borrowed coats and sleeping bags. It might have been warmer in the cave-like mansion but neither of us wanted to go inside. The cavern roof above us was enough of a prison for me.
Many of the End were dancing around the big fire listening to some kind of bass- and beat-heavy music that I suspected I would disapprove of under normal circumstances. They were just shadows where the UV light contrasted with the red and orange of the flames. They seemed unreal. Everyone was drinking heavily and taking rec drugs, and we were trying to ignore quite a large group having sex not too far away from where we were sitting. There was a sense of desperation to it all. The Ugandan poet with the staff walked among them, constantly being stopped. He took time to speak to any who accosted him. There was something comforting about him, even if he did trade on the darker side of the net. Perhaps his personable and comforting nature was the real danger, a type of seduction. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to mistrust him.
‘After Leicester, after Rolleston burned me, Ashmi asked me to stop,’ Rannu said out of nowhere. It took me a while to work out who Ashmi was. I felt a little guilty that I’d never asked Rannu about his family.
It had been Rolleston who’d betrayed Rannu to Berham, the head of the Thuggees, after Rannu had refused to break off the deep-cover operation to work for the Major. Rolleston once again teaching a lesson on why he must be obeyed.
‘I’m not surprised. Nobody wants that to happen to someone they care about.’ Of course I’d managed to avoid the whole physical torture thing by just spilling my guts. Not that it’d done any good. Two shots.
‘This is it. In the unlikely event that I live through this, I’m out. This is the last mission for me. Yangani and Sangar should have their father with them and Ash deserves her husband by her side. Though whether I deserve her is another question. I want to see my children grow up. Teach them what I can.’
‘I was surprised when Mudge told me you had a family. Surely you’ve got too much to lose to be doing all this stupid shit with us.’
‘I never had a choice.’ I turned to look at him. I didn’t understand. ‘I didn’t like working for Rolleston, but when I knew, after I found out in New York, what choice did I have? Your children judge you, is what I think. They don’t mean to – they don’t even know they’re doing it – but how could I go back to them and look them in the eyes if I hadn’t done everything I could to make a future where they are not just more meat to be ground up or just another weapon of polluted flesh? Because after we pollute our flesh with machinery we then pollute our minds with what we have to do. I know Rolleston. He would make my children slaves; he would make us all slaves. He does not tolerate dissent. It would have been like I’d done it to them myself. But this is enough.’
It was almost as if he was looking for permission. As if he wanted to be told that what he’d done was sufficient.
‘I think you’ve done your bit,’ I told him. Though I still needed him to help me kill Rolleston.
We lapsed into silence again. I feared sleep. I feared the Black Sun. I feared the replay of Morag’s death that I knew was waiting for me just beyond consciousness.
I took another sip of the fermented engine oil. Let it burn. I was hoping it would destroy some of my taste buds. Get rid of the constant taste of battery acid and rotten eggs. I wondered how long my lung filter had to go before it needed replacing. I wondered how long Rannu’s had – surely much less time if it hadn’t already expired. Were his lungs being burned with every breath as we spoke? I was sure there would be more symptoms if this were the case. If nothing else, then coughing and rasping when he breathed.
Eventually Rannu tried to sleep. It looked fitful. I just watched him, wishing I couldn’t think.
We were running on cheap stims and home-made amphetamines. We ran when we could, walked when we couldn’t run and staggered just before we crashed. We kept going. I didn’t want to sleep anyway. Sleep was a nightmare transformation of a healthy young woman to meat in the space of two gunshots.
We were living in the green light of our lowlight optics, far away from any other sources of illumination. Soon sensory deprivation, lack of sleep and bad drugs took me to a place I knew well from Sirius, that sort of twilight, half-dead, unreal feeling. I started to see fractals of light. My mind started to fill in the gaps in my perception, ghost images given fear and form in the corner of my eye.
I was finding the miles of rock above us more and more oppressive. It seemed to be weighing down on me. Crushing me like the high G. I missed the sky. I really wanted to see the sky again before I died. I didn’t think it was likely.
Always moving until we couldn’t any more. Eking out the food that the End had given us. They’d given us the drugs as well. They might be deserters and a suicide cult but they’d done all right by us.
I was almost completely healed now, one of the benefits of having what were effectively tiny little aliens throughout my body; the other of course was not dying from radiation poisoning. Rannu was weaker than he’d been for a long time but that was still pretty strong. He’d lost a lot of weight but he was keeping up.
We’d made it back to the
pa
by trial and error. All the maps had gone when I’d triggered the firestorm in my internal memory and wiped it, although I needn’t have bothered when I was going to spill my guts like I had. We’d taken a lot of wrong turnings but at least when we’d found the cave we knew it was the right one.
They’d left in a hurry and blown all the tunnels that would have enabled Rolleston to follow them easily. The problem was this made it almost as difficult for us. When we’d been camped here I’d studied the maps trying to commit as much of them to actual meat memory as possible in case I needed the info for E&E. I was pretty sure that I knew the long way round. The route that Rolleston and his people would have had to take. Then we could try and pick up the trail of either Rolleston or Mother’s people. Or we’d end up wandering Lalande 2’s Deep Caves until we died of hunger.
The one thing we did have going for us was our tracking ability. I’d grown up tracking and had been taught by one of the best, my dad. 5 Para Pathfinders had continued my training, as had the Regiment. Rannu had also grown up tracking and it was emphasised in Ghurkha training as well. That said, lightless caves were not the environment we were used to.
Day and night cycles were pointless in darkness and on stims. The time and date facility on our IVDs had become meaningless and I don’t think either of us was paying any attention to them. So I’ve no idea how long it took us to find the tracks. Maybe I’d remembered the complex cave system correctly or maybe it was just luck.
When two hundred people camp it is difficult to erase all the signs. The trails of crushed or grazed stone the mechs left were the easiest to follow. The mechs were not what you would call stealthy, particularly the Bismarck-class
Apakura
.
What I didn’t see was Rolleston’s trail. Either his force was using some other route or his people were good enough for Rannu and I not to find their tracks in this environment, which was a possibility. I knew, however, that he was down here.
It felt like I hadn’t seen light, let alone sky, for a very, very long time. The glow in the distance hurt despite the flash compensation on my optics. It hurt in my head. It hurt as a new and disorienting sensation. I had to remember what it was, what light looked like. All I’d seen was Rannu and rock in green for a good while now.
Of course we were too late. How could we not be? Still it looked like they’d put up a fight. Rolleston’s people were clearing it up. Looking for a way to spin it. Make this into good propaganda. Make us the bad guys. We got as close as we could.
The new
pa
was a large area of rock the colour of sun-bleached bone. Naturally occurring columns of rock ran between cave roof and floor at almost regular intervals. The cave floor was a series of pitted basins filled with the foul-smelling, salty sulphurous liquid that passed for water on Lalande 2. Much of it was red and steaming from where the acid content was eating away at the bodies floating or lying half in the pools.
Regular NZ army guarded the perimeter but it looked like a relatively small Black Squadron force had done most of the damage. They were checking the bodies for life and identity. Magnifying my optics I saw my friends, smoking as they were eaten away or just lying in piles of other corpses.
I saw Pagan face down in the water. I didn’t recognise him until one of the women in the Black Squadron turned him over. The acid had gone to work on his face but it was unmistakably him. He looked old, tired and in pain. As if death had come as a relief.