Authors: Gavin Smith
I was clawing at the laser pistol on my right hip. The claws on my left hand were still stuck in his face. The gun came free. I put it against his head and squeezed the trigger again and again and again. I kept squeezing. The back of his head became red steam. By the time he toppled over dragging me with him, the entire back half of his head was missing.
I managed to free myself. I’d blown the tips of my own blades off with the laser. A clawed hand came out of the wall and ripped the side of my face off. I rolled to the side and scrabbled for my SAW. The deformed Berserk tore itself out of the wall and loomed over me. I pulled the trigger on the SAW. I walked a long burst all the way up its torso. It was coming apart as meat and not the usual liquid dissipation I’d come to expect from Them. It dropped to the ground. Killing Berserks was about the most normal thing I’d done in what felt like a long time.
Something stabbed through my armour from beneath. A cry of pain and I rolled to one side and up onto my knees. I fired another long burst into the Berserk rising from the organic floor. It disintegrated in a hail of bullets.
I was getting shot, a lot. I staggered forward. Pistol rounds. Just pissing me off. I spun round. A terrified and slimy Cronin was emptying a pistol in my general direction. I raised the SAW and fired. He was no longer there. He was fast.
Something fell through the ceiling and onto me, tearing at my armour. I stabbed into it with claws, fighting wildly. It was bleeding, not leaking all over me, or was that my blood? I managed to ram its head back against the table and fired the SAW one-handed until its only movement was the jerk of bullets tearing through dead flesh.
The floor was a bad place to be. I climbed to my feet. Rannu was slicing up a Berserk, a knife in each of his hands. Cat and Merle were fighting back to back. Mudge was firing rapidly, standing over an unconscious or dead Pagan and a tranced-in Morag. Need to get to Mudge.
Out of the chaos Cronin charged me with a katana. No time to shoot. I tried to parry with my SAW. The katana sliced right through it and buried itself in my helmet. I felt the blade bite into armoured skull and blood ran down my face.
I kicked forward, sending Cronin staggering back. Unfortunately he kept hold of the sword. I let the two halves of my SAW fall to the ground.
‘Come on then!’ I screamed at him like it was some feral pub fight back in Dundee as I extended what was left of my blades.
He was skilled, fast and desperate. He swung at me again and again with the blade. I parried what I could with the claws. The rest cut into me, going through my armour, painting me a deeper red. I ignored the warning signals on my IVD. I got cut so I could claw at him, not caring, pushing him back. Finally I got lucky and caught his sword between my knuckle blades. I headbutted him, and as he staggered back I jumped into the air and kneed him in the head. I felt part of his skull give way beneath the impact. I tore the katana out of his grip and stabbed him through the shoulder with my two remaining full-length blades. I pulled my other hand back, getting ready to ram the broken blades on my left fist through his face.
‘Bastard!’ I screamed at him, as inhuman as anything else in the room.
‘I surrender!’ Cronin screamed. He looked terrified but not of me. Why was he covered in slime?
‘Jakob!’ Morag. I heard the note of command in her voice. I wanted to kill Cronin so much I was shaking. Instead I grabbed him by his hair and pulled the antique assault shotgun out of its scabbard. I started making my way back towards Morag, firing the shotgun one-handed at anything that moved that wasn’t us, dragging Cronin with me.
On the other side of the table Merle and Cat were firing as they backed towards Morag, Rannu and Mudge. I saw Cat go down. Half her face was red steam and blackened bone. Laser fire. She hit the ground. I knew she was dead. I heard Merle scream. I saw Rannu, Mudge and Morag’s expressions change. They looked terrified. I turned round. Through the sphincter in the opposite end of the room I saw Rolleston and the Grey Lady enter. Marching at us, firing.
All of us poured fire at them. Merle’s repeated plasma blasts wreathed Rolleston’s head in white fire. His head was a blackened grinning skull in the white flames and still he kept coming.
I just about made it back to Morag and the others. They were standing over Pagan’s body. It may as well have happened in slow motion. I watched him turn his combination weapon on me. The plasma barrel fired. He couldn’t miss.
It hit me in the right side. I screamed as I burned. The plasma fire ate into me, through me, an unstoppable force, my own flesh now the fuel. What was left of my conscious mind prayed for death, for an end to the burning and the pain.
Somehow I was still conscious. Morag appeared by my side. There was a moment of peace through the pain, the chaos, the firefight. Then a piece of flesh was torn off her chin. She was still up. I was still screaming, burning. I felt a jack slide into one of my plugs. I didn’t understand. Then I was screaming through the pain at the terror. My flesh violated, made alien to me. It changed, meat sloughing off me, tendrils emerging through the skin of my face, somehow grown from my own flesh. The tendrils flailed, writhing in front of me, and sought out the strange flesh of the Citadel.
Then I was falling, burning. We were all falling. No, swallowed, being forced down and crushed again and again. Burned flesh all around me, gullet muscles constricting as we were pushed down at frightening speed, all the while my new alien flesh mating with the flesh of the Citadel’s roots.
Half a man reduced to charred screaming meat was deposited on cold hard rock. I was only vaguely aware of others there with me in the darkness. I tried to cringe from the heat but there wasn’t enough of me to move. The roots glowed orange and I heard it scream like Them as it carried lava up, from the depths of Lalande 2 to the Citadel. I could feel it. I was still joined with it. I screamed – inside only now, as every nerve ending burned again. The plasma fire all over again. Why couldn’t I die? Miles above us a city of ice became a volcano as the root system became enormous, destructive, flailing tentacles spewing lava.
‘I didn’t know I could do that,’ Morag said. There was wonder in her voice.
I stand in the centre of the great hall at Dinas Emrys on fire. Around me the stone starts to burn. I’m screaming. Some of the screaming is words. Those words are, ‘Where is she?!’
Pagan looks to be at his wits’ end. ‘You’re doing this to yourself!’ he shouts at me.
There just isn’t a way to manage this amount of pain. I can feel it through the morphine, through a chemically induced coma. Plasma is a one-shot kill unless you’re Balor or Rolleston. I get all the effects of the hit but none of the fun of dying. I think I’m aware of other pain beyond the burning. The human mind isn’t set up for this. This constant burning is the biblical hell the Christians talk about. Maybe I am dead. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life but surely nothing to deserve this.
I am put into a suit of warm meat. It breathes. It has its own pulse. New pain and more drugs. I am a lot lighter, easier for them to move, now that I only have half a body and should be dead.
I stand in the centre of the great hall at Dinas Emrys. I am still on fire.
‘You have to listen to me, Jakob. You are doing this. This is a manifestation of biofeedback. Your body burned and your mind is making it real, here, in the net as well.’
I know this. I’m not setting fire to stone now. I am not destroying code with the thought of pain. Even here I can still feel it though. Even here I still burn.
‘Where is she?’ I ask. Pagan does not have an answer for me. How can he tell me that she is hiding from me?
Dinas Emrys again. It’s the only place I have a semblance of life now.
‘I don’t want to die in space,’ I tell Mudge. Mudge’s icon that looks like Mudge. I’d need a mouth to tell him in the real world and all I have is charred mess.
‘I won’t let you die in space, man. If it looks like we’re not going to get picked up, I’ll use your own laser on you.’
‘That would still be dying in space,’ I point out.
‘Oh yeah, but you know at least you won’t run out of air and slowly suffocate or anything.’
‘I want you to know you’re a huge comfort to me. You could always save time and trouble and do it now. There’s nothing left of me anyway. Do it now.’
Normally Mudge would meet such a request with utter scorn but now he just looks uncomfortable.
‘You’re regrowing what you’ve lost, what the plasma took.’ Normally Mudge has no problem looking me in the eye and in here our eyes aren’t lenses.
‘I’m not comfortable with that.’
Now he looks at me. ‘Metal and plastic, alien nanites – what difference does it make? You’ve got to stop looking for the easy way out.’
Where’s Balor when you need him? He would have killed me in a second.
‘Where is she?’
‘Look, I can explain. Pagan can explain. You’re overreacting to—’
‘I don’t want to hear an explanation. Where is she?’ I want to discuss betrayal.
‘She’s too frightened to see you. Look, Salem’s out is sound.’
‘It’s for ore, the high G’s from the acceleration would powder bone.’
‘Not if we use their exo-armour suits. Their life-support systems are keeping you alive while you—’
‘Regenerate? Like an earthworm? What if I don’t want to go?’
‘Listen to yourself, man. Soloso and Strange survived. I just thought you should know. According to the information, the fleet is due to set sail in a couple of days’ time. We need to get back. This is our best hope.’
‘You don’t need me.’
‘You don’t want to die here, man. The air smells of greasy farts.’
He had a point.
Mudge showed me the footage. I was heavily sedated throughout the whole thing. He showed me Soloso and Strange saying goodbye. Soloso suggested that it would be unwise for us to ever return to Moa City. I couldn’t imagine why we’d want to.
It was surprisingly simple. Salem had a good eye for security weaknesses. We joined a cargo consignment. Pagan, Morag, Merle, Mudge, Rannu, Cronin and I were all wearing the stolen Themtech exo-armour. They were called Hellions. We were put in a crate and the crate was filled with counter-acceleration gel, the same stuff that we’d used in the OILO drop and that air and space fighter pilots filled their cockpits with. We were then smuggled into the cargo yard. No hacking involved, just a forged barcode and a switchover out of sight of Demiurge. Then we waited.
Even unconscious I felt our upward spiral ride on the catapult, a giant mass driver designed to fire cargo into orbit. Burned and new-growth flesh battered at impossible Gs. It felt like every blood cell burst. Despite the gel, we were all moved from the front of the container to the back. Even the flesh components of the Hellions became one huge bruise.
In orbit we’d cut through the container and pushed out some of the gel, hoping that nobody was scanning us too hard. Then Pagan sent the tight beam signal. We waited. Then he did it again. We waited some more. Well I say we. I was unconscious and yet still failing in pain management. I didn’t care. This could end in the flash of a particle beam weapon and all it would have meant to me was sweet release.
If I’d been a little less self-involved then maybe I would have thought of Tailgunner, Mother, Big Henry and Cat. Not to mention the seventy or so of Mother’s people, the resistance and belligerent street gangs who’d died in the diversionary attacks. People whose names we’d never even know, and mobilisation or not, Rolleston’s people would still be trying to track them down. No wonder Soloso and Strange didn’t want us back.
Oh yes, Cronin. Seems he’d defected. Seems that he was as scared of Rolleston as everyone else, maybe more so. He’d almost got himself killed by providing some initial information and then refusing to say anything else unless we got him off world and away from Rolleston.
It seemed that Rolleston put Cronin in harm’s way. As the attack began, Rolleston had transported Cronin and Kring through the Citadel’s added-on flesh parts to the boardroom. The slime they were covered in was lubricant. It helped you get transported through the root system better. We’d all been covered in it after Morag had hacked my flesh, turned me into something else and used me to interface with the roots.
And the hack had been successful. Except now, surely they knew that their systems were compromised? They knew about our miraculous escape and they would know that we had Cronin.
More than a day in space and the
Tetsuo Chou
had appeared. At which point they’d found us. Mudge showed me missiles fired over the planetary horizon, fighters trying to reach a firing point from higher and lower orbits. The
Tetsuo Chou
had taken some hits but in the end its speed carried the day and it managed to reach a safe distance to set sail.
I’d missed the ballet and the bright lights in the night. I’d missed the old near-dead red star and looking down on that huge stinking planet one last time. I’d missed fucking nothing.
I was staring at Morag as Black Annis. She was aware of it. Everyone else was aware of it. Even Cronin was aware of it and this was his debrief. For debrief read interrogation.
Rolleston and Josephine Bran had survived. Of course they had. They couldn’t be killed, it seemed, even if lava seemed a pretty final way to deal with a disagreement. Salem’s people had got eyes on both of them in Moa City after Morag had turned the Citadel to steam.