Authors: Gavin Smith
I didn’t feel quite so bad about killing Them. They may have been innocent dupes of the Cabal but they had been trying to kill me at the time, and it’s a lot easier to kill things that look that different from you. Still, it can’t look good on your application for heaven
.
Then I decided that I’d been spending too much time around hackers and that I didn’t believe in all that religious shit anyway. So where the fuck was I?
The selfish part of me was happy to see Morag in heaven. Then I started to mourn her death, which I should have done first, piece of shit that I am. Then again, I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in any of that
.
‘What?’ I managed. Morag smiled. She did look like an angel. Well, like a non-scary one with short spiky hair. She reached down to touch my face. Her hands felt warm. I felt warm and not at all like I was dying from vacuum exposure. Or being torn apart by Them. Or running out of air. Or just getting round to dying of radiation poisoning, which was something that I’d been meaning to do for the last couple of weeks. I also felt very naked and there were ‘things’ in me
.
Mudge proved that I wasn’t in heaven, though hell was possible, by appearing over me, leering. He looked fucking dreadful
.
‘The good news is you’re not fucking dead; the bad news is there’s no fucking drink to celebrate with,’ he told me. He sounded angry
.
‘You look awful,’ I managed to sort of squeak. It felt like I hadn’t spoken for a very long time
.
‘He’s run out of drugs,’ Morag told me
.
‘They made this for us?’ I asked again. It was taking a lot of getting used to. ‘Are we prisoners?’
‘More like stuck,’ Morag answered
.
I was in a cave in the side of an asteroid close to planetoid size. Across the front of the cave was a membrane made of … well, made of Them. Them being the individual bio-nanites that were the actual aliens rather than the Berserks or Ninjas that we had previously thought to be Them
.
This membrane kept us safe from the rigours of vacuum, and other Them-growths were apparently providing air, heating and somewhat unpleasant sanitation facilities. There is nothing quite like having a previously hostile alien species climb up your arse to clean it because they have never had to develop toilet paper. Other growths also provided a kind of unpleasant gruel and a funny-tasting liquid which I think was supposed to be water. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were eating some inert form of Them, perhaps Their dead?
What They couldn’t produce, much to Mudge’s discomfort, was drugs, cigarettes or vodka. He was mostly a sweating, cramping, pale, feverish bundle of bile in the corner of the cave. I wouldn’t have minded a drink and a smoke myself
.
The membrane was transparent, which allowed us to appreciate just how far out in space we were. I was looking out on what seemed to be a sort of crossroads. There were four very large asteroids including the one I was currently in. They were either tethered or just connected to one another by tubes like biomechanical Them-growths. There were more growths sticking out at all angles from the asteroids. These looked like a cross between organic high-rise buildings and stalagmites or stalactites, depending on your perspective. I recognised this place now. The crooked Them-structures had reminded me of teeth and I’d christened this area Maw City. We were not far from where we had fought Crom
.
We used to think that these structures were Their habitats but now we knew it was just Them. Everything seemed to have a function in Their society. Their roots were deep in the asteroid. They somehow drew out the raw materials from them. With energy harnessed from the system’s twin stars They broke down the raw materials to provide the resources necessary to make Themselves into these awe-inspiring structures
.
Massive tendrils snaked between the asteroids, the growths and the hundreds of Them-ships moving through this apparent nexus point. I watched as one moved in front of me, completely obscuring my view. The tendrils moved anything from Berserks up to frigate-sized ships around. It was one of these things I’d seen grab Morag
.
The whole place was crawling with Them. There were Berserks, Walkers and other things that we had previously thought to be vehicles. I also recognised a lot of the ship configurations I saw from footage of fleet actions
.
If I strained and used the magnification on my optics I could see beyond Maw City. There were fields of a coral-like substance, where everything from Berserks to dreadnoughts were being grown and born. Deeper still I could see the cored hollow remains of exploited asteroids
.
All the Them-forms we were used to seeing were black – combat forms, I guessed. But many here were white and had a pale-blue bioluminescent glow that I had become used to seeing in the honeycombed energy matrices of Their engines. It was the same bioluminescence that lit our little cavern. I had always thought it beautiful. Not that I could have told anyone. Maybe Morag, though even she’d take the piss
.
The growths handling the air made it feel like there was a warm wind constantly blowing through the cavern. Apparently getting the heating, water and temperature right had been touch and go, initially. When I had been dying. There was kind of a lot to take in
.
I looked at my hand. There were no scabs or sores, just healthy armoured flesh and boosted muscle. I felt great, no nausea. In fact it had been a long time since I had felt this good. Though I would have liked a cigarette
.
‘So let me see if I understand you properly. They ate all the unhealthy flesh and replaced or regrew it, at a cellular level. Is that correct?’ I asked again. I heard Pagan sigh. I didn’t really blame him, I had asked that question a lot recently
.
He was sitting leaning against the wall in his inertial armour suit. He had his staff fully assembled and it lay across his lap
.
Pagan was in his forties and one of the oldest people I knew who wasn’t a member of a powerful secret government of arseholes. He was thin, his skin weathered and covered in various spiralling tattoos. Some of the tattoos were implanted circuitry to aid the ugly utilitarian integral computer that stuck out of half his skull. Unruly orange dreadlocks sprouted out from the other half. He was currently scratching at his scalp, running his hand through his dreads
.
‘Yes. We have similar treatments, but they tend to be only available to the wealthy,’ Pagan explained. Again
.
‘So am I an alien?’ I asked again
.
‘Undoubtedly,’ Mudge groaned. He was lying on the floor, which was covered, in a soft, comfy, moss-like material. He was wearing only a pair of white boxers with hearts all over them. He got up onto all fours and started crawling towards the sanitation growth
.
‘No,’ Morag said. She also sounded agitated. She was wearing her underwear and a T-shirt and sitting on a rock also covered in the moss. I couldn’t help but be distracted by her shapely legs. She was small, but the exertions of our time together had hardened her up. That could be seen in the tone of her muscles and sadly in her features as well. It did not detract from how attractive I found her
.
Her hair had been shaved off so that the sophisticated integral computer she used for hacking could be implanted. Her hair was growing back but was still short, though it did cover most of the implant. The integral computer had been a high-end civilian model provided by Vicar so it was not as obtrusive as the military model sticking out of Pagan’s skull
.
I missed her eyes. After Rolleston and the Grey Lady had blown the side out of the media node, the explosive decompression had permanently blinded her. She had had her eyes replaced with cybernetic ones. They provided her with similar capabilities to the rest of us – magnification, thermographics, low light, flash compensation, etc. Her eyes were civilian models designed to look like normal ones. They had been modelled after pictures of her own eyes provided by Mudge, but I could still tell the difference. When you started replacing bits of yourself it had a cost
.
‘You’re still you,’ she reassured me. This was a sore point with her. After all, she was carrying around the information ghost of Ambassador in her neural cyberware and had been accused of being compromised by the alien on a number of occasions. I’d even done it during one of my frequent outbreaks of arseholery
.
‘Thank God!’ Mudge shouted dramatically before collapsing face first into the sanitation growth. We all grimaced as he started to throw up the food substitute they’d been giving us. I was trying not to think of it as necro-gruel
.
‘It’s astonishing to think that we actually managed to save an entire alien species from assimilation by Crom,’ Pagan mused as he watched Mudge vomit
.
‘Is he going to be okay?’ I asked Rannu. The quiet ex-Ghurkha was the closest thing we had to a medic. Mudge was annoying but he was my oldest and closest friend who was not dead. Also he’d never duped me into coming to Sirius to infect Them with the Crom slave virus. Though in fairness to Gregor that was more Rolleston’s fault than his
.
Rannu shrugged. He was stripped to the waist, his compact and powerful frame covered in sweat from his near-constant working out. That was probably the real reason he beat me in New York. He never stopped training
.
‘It’s withdrawal,’ he said. He still wore his kukri, the curved machete-like fighting knife of the Ghurkhas, at his hip. As he turned to grab a cleaning form to rub himself with I caught a glimpse of the stylised tattoo of Kali on his back. It had been done when he had been working undercover back on Earth
.
‘From what?’ I asked. Actually meaning which drug. Rannu gave this some thought
.
‘Everything, I think. It shouldn’t kill him because of his enhancements but he is going to be in a lot of discomfort.’
Knowing Mudge, that meant that the rest of us were going to be in a lot of discomfort as well. I still wanted a smoke
.
‘So I’m a hybrid like Gregor?’ I asked. Morag opened her mouth to answer but Rannu surprised me by beating her to it
.
‘More like Rolleston.’
‘Nice,’ I said grimly. It made sense though. I felt stronger, faster and healthier than I ever had. Hell, I was looking forward to sparring with Rannu. I’d had so much of my flesh cut away and replaced with machinery and now what flesh I had left had been replaced
.
Maybe I had died. Maybe all that was left was a sophisticated, or not, Themtech simulacrum that felt a little like me
.
‘So let me see if I understand this properly …’
Even Rannu sighed and shifted to make himself more comfortable
.
Mudge nudged me awake. I could hear the whine of the copter’s engines straining. I looked out of one of the windows. We seemed to be sinking into some huge vertical tube of concrete and metal. It looked old. Maybe even pre-FHC.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s an old missile silo,’ Rannu said. ‘For nukes.’ That woke me up. I looked for confirmation from the three bruised egos in suits in front of us. They just glowered.
‘You know it could just be a coincidence. Our invitation to New Mexico and God thinking that Morag is here, I mean,’ Mudge said. I ignored him. He lit a cigarette to spite me.
‘My comms is down,’ Rannu said quietly. I tried mine. Nothing. Not even short-range person-to-person between the three of us.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded from the three spooks. They said nothing. ‘You wanted us here. Do we have to fucking beat it out of you?’ These were truly exasperating people.
‘Have you got any religion?’ the one in the middle asked. I just gaped at him.
‘Are you asking if we’ve got anything with God on it?’ Mudge enquired.
He nodded.
‘What if we have?’ I asked.
‘You can’t go in,’ the middle one answered. I was beginning to see what was going on here.
‘It’s a comms quarantine. You’re trying to keep God out.’ Rannu voiced my suspicions.
‘And how’re you going to stop us?’ born-again-hard Mudge asked.
‘They probably just won’t let us in,’ Rannu suggested.
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ I muttered.
We didn’t have much on us as most of our comms stuff was internal and one of God’s parameters was to be non-invasive as far as people’s personnel cyberware went. I had nothing. I just contacted God through my internal comms when I wanted to speak to him. Rannu had some kind of medium-range comms booster and Mudge had bits and pieces of media tech. They had to leave all of this behind in the copter.
‘And no pictures,’ one of the failed gunmen told Mudge.
‘Of course not,’ Mudge said with false sincerity. We stepped out of the copter.
If I hadn’t seen Spokes or fleet carriers or the Dog’s Teeth the scale of the place would have been quite impressive. As it was, it was a big concrete hole in the ground.