Authors: Gavin Smith
‘Oh.’ Big Henry sounded genuinely surprised.
Inside it looked like black meat, a Themtech version of human innards. I made a disgusted noise. It was obvious that a human was supposed to climb in there and join with the armour. It was also obvious that the armour was alive.
‘Demiurge?’ I asked.
Big Henry shrugged. Not an encouraging response.
‘There are no transmissions and no locators that we can tell,’ he said.
‘Worth getting Pagan or Tailgunner to check that out again,’ I said and turned around to jump out of the rear of the container.
The sickle fish-hooked me in mid-air. I tasted metal in my mouth and then my momentum tore the side of my mouth open, pulling my head back. I landed painfully on my back on the stone, my mouth full of blood. Big Henry was on me, his face a mask of bestial anger as he raised a club above his head. I kicked up from the ground catching him in the face, sending him flying out of my view.
A massive hand grabbed me by the front of my inertial armour and lifted me easily to my feet. I found myself face to face with Soloso in his finery of rags. It was a hit. They’d called in external help. I didn’t need this. Except Soloso looked furious. One-handed he threw me across the cave, slamming me painfully into the wall.
I didn’t even have time to slide to the ground before Strange was on me, slashing at me with her curved blades. I nutted her with every bit of strength I could muster. She staggered back as her nose exploded.
Fuck this. The three of them were closing on me. I extended my blades, though the ones on my right hand were still much shorter than those on my left.
‘I’m going to kill all three of you,’ I told them. Or that was what I meant to tell them. It was actually more a case of me gargling and spitting out blood as I failed to talk. My newly bisected cheek flapped around. It really hurt.
‘You killed them!’ Soloso screamed at me. This surprised me. He was genuinely angry.
‘Who?’ I asked, sort of, while drooling blood down myself.
‘The Puppet Show!’ he howled. The calm contained hard man I’d met in Moa City was gone now. This was a deeply emotional man. Admittedly it was a deeply emotional man holding a bloody sickle and wanting to cause me harm.
Then it hit me. I’d been an idiot. I’d been so worried about what my betrayal had done to the people here, I hadn’t considered that I’d implicated the Puppet Show, and unlike us the Puppet Show wasn’t exactly mobile.
‘Those three beautiful women! You destroyed them! Do you know they killed themselves rather than let the Squads put the Black Wave into their systems!’
The big man was much more upset than he was angry. Big Henry and Strange were casting uneasy glances at him and each other. Another four lives I’d fucked. More if they’d gone after the entire gang.
I just stared at him, not sure what to do. One thing that doesn’t go down well with vocational criminals is betrayal, particularly if high-ranking people go down as a result of it. I didn’t think that was Soloso’s problem. The guy had obviously not processed his grief. My blades slid back up into my arm.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ I gurgled at him.
I couldn’t fight them. They were the victims here and I’d had a hand in their victimisation. More than anything this drove home the warnings I’d been given about operating in the field with Morag. This drove home how selfish my feelings for her were. I’d been prepared to flush a lot of lives down the toilet. The people of Earth may have been an abstract. This huge and dangerous man sobbing in a way I knew made the muscles round the plastic in your eyes hurt wasn’t an abstract.
Soloso sat down hard. All the fight had gone from him. The sickle clattered to the stone and he held his face in his hands as he sobbed. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I don’t think that Strange or Big Henry knew either. I spat out some blood so I could try and talk.
‘Shall we leave it at that?’ I asked.
Big Henry looked at Strange. She nodded. I sat cross-legged in front of Soloso.
‘I’m really sorry, man,’ I told him earnestly through a mouthful of blood. He just sobbed harder. Finally he looked up at me.
‘They … they …’ He swallowed hard. Snot was running down his face. ‘They were incandescent,’ he finally managed.
I had nothing. I just nodded like I had the slightest idea what he was talking about. He leaned forward and I thought he was trying to kill me again. Instead he just hugged me and started crying harder. That’s the thing with the truly hard: some of them can be very sentimental.
Tailgunner and Mother ran into the cave. Tailgunner took one look at Strange’s broken nose. Strange at least had the courtesy to look guilty. The big hacker turned on me.
‘I told you …’ He trailed off as he saw Soloso’s massive form hugging me and sobbing. I looked up at him as I bled onto Soloso’s arm. Even Mother looked surprised.
She turned on Strange and Big Henry. ‘No more of this, okay? I mean it. We have enough problems.’
Strange was looking at her feet like a naughty child being scolded. Big Henry was staring back at her defiantly.
‘You would never—’ he started.
‘That’s enough!’ Tailgunner snapped.
‘We’re not letting this lie. We are going after those responsible, but I’m not going to settle for murdering the weapon. Do you understand me, Henry?’ said Mother. Big Henry didn’t answer.
‘You think you’re the only one grieving?’ Tailgunner demanded. The impact of his question was somewhat spoiled by Soloso sobbing all the harder. I patted his arm.
‘I mean it, Henry. No more. This is what they want to happen with these tactics. You do their work when you go after him,’ Mother said. Big Henry, with a final angry glare at me, nodded.
‘Pagan wants to see everyone in Rannu’s cave,’ Tailgunner told us. I nodded, wondering how I was going to disentangle myself from Soloso.
Mudge was heading towards Rannu’s cave. He changed his course to intercept me.
‘Does a day go by when you don’t get your arse kicked?’
I tried to tell him to fuck off but I just ended up spitting blood all over myself so had to settle for giving him the finger. Offensive or not, I could tell that Mudge wasn’t his old self.
In Rannu’s cave I saw Morag look up at my bloodied form and just shake her head.
‘You’ll have a smile like me soon,’ Merle said, grinning viciously. Not that he had much of a choice these days. I had to settle for giving him the finger as well.
‘Merle, look after the wound,’ Cat told her brother.
‘Fuck that.’
‘Don’t be an arsehole.’
‘Later,’ I tried to say but just ended up gargling and bleeding all over myself.
Pagan was already tranced in. There were a number of plugs on the ground. I picked one up and plugged it into one of my jacks.
‘Christ, Pagan, why does it always have to be so cold here?’ I asked. Or rather I thought, and my icon, who hadn’t just had its cheek torn open, asked. We were standing in some kind of great stone hall. One wall was missing and instead there was a large balcony open to the night sky. It was a welcome sight.
‘Sorry,’ Pagan said. The flames in a fire pit crackled and leaped as a wave of heat swept out of it. I was beginning to like it here. In the real world everything was pain and air that smelled of rotten eggs. I remembered how easy it had been to lose myself in the sense booths.
The others started to appear as Pagan passed me a stone bottle full of fake whisky. Normally I considered this sort of thing pointless, but he’d almost managed to program the taste of good whisky and at least it didn’t taste of greasy farts in here.
I had appeared near a decoratively carved, sturdy wooden table. On the table were two travel-stained, patched and ancient-looking cloaks.
‘This what was in my head?’ I asked when everyone was here.
‘Sort of, the components were,’ Pagan said.
He still didn’t seem comfortable with me. Couldn’t say I blamed him. I hadn’t ruled out beating the shit out of him yet. Still, I’d probably end up losing that fight as well.
‘Whatever they put in your head, it was well hidden. We couldn’t find it. It seems that Nuada needed to expose you to Demiurge.’
‘And they did that when they used the sense booth on you,’ Morag as Black Annis said. Where I betrayed everything for you, I thought. This explained the dreams of plains of black glass and the dark burning sun.
‘Nuada’s program could hide from Demiurge?’ I asked.
‘Which means you can hack Demiurge?’ Tailgunner asked.
‘Yes. More to the point, we can hack Demiurge without being noticed,’ Pagan said. The atmosphere in the virtual construct lightened. This was good news. This was a chance. There was a sense of relief, a relaxing of tension. Hope.
‘Can we fight Demiurge?’ Mother asked.
‘We can’t, not with our resources. But a data raid’s not out of the question and, more to the point, if they don’t know we’ve been there then they don’t know they’ve been compromised.’
‘Surely you can do that from any system in Lalande?’ Cat asked. She had a new icon that looked just like her. It was Morag’s work. Merle had a new one as well. Tailgunner had presumably designed the
whanau
’s high-quality icons.
‘Yes, if we just want to creep around and look at non-vital info,’ Annis said, her voice like grinding stones. ‘All the useful stuff is kept in isolated systems. They have learned from our mistakes.’
‘So they think they have an unassailable, completely secure system, but all the juicy stuff they still hold on an isolated system. And I thought I was paranoid,’ Mudge said.
‘You’re not paranoid; everyone hates you,’ I told him.
He brightened up. ‘Thank goodness for that.’
‘It’s SOP, good tradecraft. They’ve got no reason to stop using things that have worked for them in the past,’ Salem said.
‘Particularly when God demonstrated just how vulnerable non-isolated systems were,’ Pagan added.
‘So we’re right back to square one?’ Mother asked.
‘Where are these systems?’ said Rannu.
‘I’m guessing the fleet flagship will have one,’ Pagan told him.
‘Not going to happen,’ I said.
‘Or the Citadel,’ Annis told us. A lot of virtual air was sucked past virtual teeth.
‘Do we have a valid plan?’ Cat asked.
‘Kind of your job, but I think I can get us in, sort of. I just can’t figure a way out,’ Annis said.
‘Even if you do, so what?’ Mother asked. ‘How much use to you is it? Surely you’re stuck here until the war ends, and before then all of Rolleston and Cronin’s forces are going to pull out.’
‘It could help liberate Lalande 2,’ Tailgunner said.
‘And if Earth loses, then they just come back,’ Mother answered.
‘It’s more complicated than that,’ Pagan said. ‘We use what we know too soon and our advantage is gone as they’ll know that Demiurge is compromised and change their plans accordingly.’
It was an old military intelligence paradox.
‘Let’s see your in,’ Mother asked. Scrolls appeared in front of us and unrolled glyphs on the scrolls lit up and disappeared as information was transferred into our internal memories. I reviewed the data.
‘That doesn’t get us in; that gets us close, and then we die in a hail of vastly superior firepower,’ I said. It was good as far as it went but it was messy. Annis still looked like I’d slapped her.
‘He’s right,’ Rannu said.
‘It’s worth it if we get their entire strategy,’ Annis said.
‘But what use is it to you if you can’t get out?’ Mother asked.
‘Either we have to get into orbit undetected—’ Annis began.
‘Not going to happen,’ Mother countered, but I noticed that Salem looked like he had something to say.
‘We can do it with a tight beam broadcast from the surface,’ Pagan said.
‘Only on a clear enough day,’ Salem said. ‘There may however be a way to get you into orbit undetected. I would like some time to look into it.’
‘Can we use their exo-armour to infiltrate?’ I asked.
Pagan and Annis were shaking their heads. Presumably Tailgunner or Mother had told them about Soloso’s final delivery.
‘You can’t bluff them because the moment you don’t respond to hails they know something’s up, and they’ll know that eight of their exo-armours are missing and who has them. And we can’t reliably use them for a stealthy approach,’ Annis told us. Having looked at her plan I already knew she was right.
‘We’re also assuming that we don’t climb into them and Demiurge takes the suits over,’ Rannu said before turning to Pagan. ‘Can you give them a proper look over?’ Pagan nodded.
‘Can’t you hack Demiurge so it thinks the armour is theirs?’ Mudge asked.
‘No, that won’t work either. As soon as we hit them they’ll know we’ve broken Demiurge,’ I said. ‘Shame though, it’s a good idea.’
‘With a clear corridor of fire you can’t get them in with a direct attack?’ Mother asked. I saw Tailgunner glance at Mother. ‘I’m just asking,’ she told him.
It was Cat who shook her head this time. ‘Too far. I don’t fancy their chances of not getting picked out of the sky – even with the added confusion of looking like their machines, and believe me, I’d much rather be in exo-armour.’