Authors: Gavin Smith
Everyone knows that war is horrific, and it is. What nobody will tell you is that sometimes it is beautiful. This was beautiful. This was like watching fireworks as a child. I was exhilarated but I was calm. This was so unreal. It was a beautiful chaos of light and fire and metal. It was balletic, and the only thing I could hear when I shut down the noise from the feeds to block out the screams and the panic was the sound of my own breathing.
I felt a surge of exhilaration as one of their battleships came apart under heavy fire from lots of different sources, including the bright blue lance of the
Thunderchilde
’s main particle beam weapon.
All around us impacts blew off fragments of armoured hull. The faster ships flew by, skirmishing with each other – or dogfighting, as pilots insisted on calling it – risking missile fire at the bigger ships, drawing laser and railgun fire from screening drones.
Above us my vision was filled by the enormous organic and seething chitinous form of the mutated
Bush
. The Hellion’s passive sensor picked up an increase in radiation as the
Bush
’s enormous entropy cannon fired and drew a scar down the length of the
Thunderchilde
. Good, I thought, it needed a bit of dirtying up. It needed to earn its scars.
I saw missiles fired from a battery that looked like a cancerous growth on the skin of the
Bush
. Where it was damaged, the hull swam like bacteria under a microscope as it grew new armoured flesh. This wasn’t a ship, it was a nightmare, some kind of monster.
I ignored the readout on my IVD that told me how fast we were going. It was relative, I told myself, as the
Bush
got larger and larger until it was all I could see. We were still tens of miles from it. We still had the screening drones to deal with. Whether they thought we were debris or not, they would still detect and fire on us to protect the mother ship, and they would be linked to Demiurge. H would know we were coming.
We sent the signal to fleet. Our prearranged call for help. The closest carrier to us was a German carrier, the
Barbarossa
. Every carrier had held a squadron back to help us if need be. Now that we had called for air support, all the reserve squadrons were released to join the fight. We saw some of them drop out of docking airlocks, manoeuvring jets moving them away from the carriers before they kicked in their main engines. Many of them didn’t get far.
I knew the
Barbarossa
. It had once taken on one of Their dreadnoughts in the Proxima system and won. Too old now for front-line service, it had been sent back to Sol for system defence duties. Sadly, Luftwaffe Fortunate Sons now crewed it. Shame. It would have been nice if it had been the Valkyries they launched to help us. I remembered that the Valkyries would be on the other side somewhere and flying better fighters.
Pagan did what he was good at, forward observing for the squadron of fighters that was being torn apart as it headed towards us. He used passive scans, so as not to give our position away, plotting the positions of the screening remotes we needed taken out. He also sent the pilots the locations of point-defence weapons on the hull of the
Bush
. All the other weapons were too large to be used against us. He then sent the pilots targeting solutions via our, hopefully, masked comms link.
Waiting for the fighters, falling up towards the
Bush
, I enlarged the net feed in my IVD. The war between God and Demiurge looked like a viral eclipse. As if God’s red sun was slowly being eaten by infection. More and more black spread over it. God’s screaming was a constant ambient noise on all the feeds now. Uncharitably I wished he’d shut up.
Then the best hope we’d had since the start of the fight. They came like a vagabond army – corporate and criminal hackers, amateur savants and signals veterans, sport and illegal-snuff virtual gladiators – the net’s dirty fighters, tricky bastards, chancers and assorted scumbags. Some were ex-military; many were draft dodgers, and I had a horrible feeling that many were still too young to be drafted. They were cloaked in icons that ran the gamut from just about every popular cultural icon to just about every religious icon imaginable. Some just came as themselves.
They were angry and armed with the best attack and defence programs that Morag, Pagan, Salem and Tailgunner, before he died, had managed to develop from what they’d learned of godsware. We’d given them the best software sword and shields we could in the packets that Pagan had sent after the Earth had been hit. It was manipulative. We’d known that Rolleston was going to bombard the Earth, but there had been little we could do about it and there had been no time for the powers that be to evacuate the targets. The packets had contained a heartfelt plea for aid from Mudge. He’d composed it when we’d been in the assault shuttle heading for Rolleston’s ancestral home.
The sun grew and the darkness receded. Slightly. As just about every single isolated computer system left on Earth, in orbit and in the fleet was opened to God.
I watched the vagabond army hit the demons and the angels as an undisciplined mess, trailing their silver cords behind them. There was less than a second’s delay between them thinking something wherever they were jacked in and their icons acting on it. The tiny delay was a result of operating in virtual territory so far away from their bodies. It was small but sometimes it was enough to give their opponents the edge, particularly the angels.
Demons were thrown into the air as the new army joined the fight and nasty tactics were used. Groups of hackers who knew each other ganged up on targets, took one down and moved to another. The vagabond army may not have had the training, discipline or technology of the attacking hackers, but they had the numbers and they’d seen huge parts of the Earth destroyed in the bombardment. They had anger on their side. Anger is always a good motivator.
Pagan sent us feed from the surface of the black glass plain. An angel towered over the vagabond hackers and the remnants of our fleet’s military hackers and signal personnel. It was sweeping multiple hackers aside with every stroke of its spear of white fire, leaving them corpses with smoking plugs back wherever they were tranced in. I saw Papa Neon charge the angel, throwing every dirty little hex program he had at it. He distracted it, parried a spear blow with his shining staff, slid under the angel’s guard and tore a lump out of its flesh. Papa Neon shot into the air above the angel and bit into it. The angel lurched like a puppet. Its own bones pierced its skin. The white flames went out of its eyes.
Elsewhere the fight wasn’t going as well. Few of the hackers were a match for the angels. Columns of black fire joined the plain of glass to the four black suns, burning lines of icons regardless of whose side they were on. Above the plain the sea of fire began to roil and surge angrily.
The fighters from the
Barbarossa
came into view on heavy burn. One of them came apart and started tumbling as a thick red beam of laser light superheated its hull until it exploded.
The fighters fired their nose railguns in a constant stream of tracers all around us and launched all their missiles as one, as close as they could to the screening drones.
The screen of drones fired back. Space was filled with a grid of red laser light. Missiles burst into multiple submunitions. Warheads exploded in space; some of them even reached their targets. In front of us drones exploded in rapid succession. Now cross hairs appeared on our IVDs as we targeted the survivors.
There were explosions on the hull of the ship as gristle-like point-defence systems were destroyed.
I fell up towards the
Bush
, firing short bursts from the Retributors at the surviving drones in my path. Some of the drones were burning as plasma fire ate through them. Black light from return fire scored the Hellion’s armour. I launched one of the missiles off my back at a surviving black beam point-defence system. The missile was destroyed before it got close, but one of Morag’s missiles hit the growth-like system.
None of the fighters made it. They were torn apart by the remotes before their first missiles hit.
We were now taking light fire as we plummeted up towards the
Bush
’s hull. Through the windows on my IVD I could see Mudge and Pagan firing their Retributors at its hull. I magnified the Hellion’s optics and saw Walker-like biomechanical constructs growing out of the ship’s flesh. I joined the firing. Then I realised I was coming in too fast. I tried a back burn on my flight fin. It slowed me but I hit the hull hard. The impact was hard enough to make me spit blood over the plastic visor of my helmet. I bounced. The Retributor flew out of my hands but it was still connected to the ammo pack on the Hellion’s back by its chain feed.
With the help of the suit’s systems I managed to regain control and make it back to the hull. The six of us grouped together in a rough circle, everyone facing out.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Merle said. ‘The architecture’s all off. The plans we downloaded are meaningless. I didn’t even see an airlock on the way in.’ It was as close to panic as I’d ever heard from Merle. It wasn’t very close but he was less than happy.
‘Plan B?’ Mudge asked.
‘You want to do it?’ I asked as I fired off a burst at something that looked like it was growing out of the hull.
‘I think it’ll have more impact coming from you,’ he said.
‘What’s plan B?’ Pagan asked suspiciously.
‘Wild Boys to Rolleston, over,’ I said over an open comms link.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ a furious Morag demanded. Merle turned to level his Hellion’s light plasma cannon at me.
‘What is it, Jakob? I’m a little busy right now,’ Rolleston asked impatiently. His voice sounded the same but now hatred outweighed fear when I heard it. The others went quiet.
‘Don’t be a cunt. Let us in and let’s get this over and done with.’
There was a long silence. Or at least there would have been if Morag, Pagan and Merle hadn’t started screaming threats and demands for explanations at me again.
‘Okay, Jakob,’ Rolleston finally said.
A lot of our plan was based around Rolleston’s arrogance. On the surface this might seem risky but you’ve got to think that if a guy wants to be a god then there’s going to be a degree of arrogance involved.
It looked less like an airlock and more like a blister as it grew out of the hull and enveloped the Hellions, blocking out the dangerous light show below us.
On the other side they were waiting. The Black Squadron troopers weren’t soldiers any more; they were just weapons. They were bent over, covered in thick, overlapping chitinous plates. Reinforced bone pierced their armoured skins; one of their arms was a long sharp curved blade of blackened bone and the other was some kind of ranged weapon. It was their mouths that got me though. They were locked open in a fixed silent scream. You could see the pain etched across their still-human faces. You could read the desperation in their eyes. They were all linked to Rolleston through Demiurge. I think he liked to feel their pain. I think he fed on it. Among the transformed soldiers were twisted and deformed versions of the Berserks, like we’d seen in the Citadel, and with them similarly twisted versions of Their Walkers.
A missile flew from the back tubes of each of the Hellions. Unlike Them, these constructs and mutations screamed when plasma burned flesh and bone. The plasma fire formed a rough circle, a bit of breathing room.
Marching forward firing railguns and plasma cannons at anything that moved, just another target-rich environment. The railguns turned whatever they hit into moist fragments. The plasma cannons left little in their wake but burning puddles of flesh and bone. Rannu’s Hellion and mine took the lead. A corridor was chosen at random. Any movement was met with overwhelming fire. They tried growing through the roof, through the walls, through the floor, but that took them too long. The whole ship was flesh now, writhing all around us.
When their numbers became too much, when they were about to overwhelm us, then missiles were used just to clear a little space. Plasma flame cauterised the flesh of the ship. Each time we could feel the ship react a little beneath us. It was in pain from the fire. The Hellion’s armour started to run as they marched through liquid fire. We couldn’t afford to hang around until the plasma flames burned themselves out.
Targets everywhere. The whole ship seething but the Hellions held their own. Anything that got close was ripped apart by their back tentacles. The armoured suits were soon covered in gore.
Overwhelming firepower or not, there was a limit to our ammunition, and the whole ship was trying to kill us.
Then he came. He didn’t look like the calm and contained professional bastard I’d known from Sirius. He looked like fury. The madness in his mind hadn’t so much leaked as flooded out. He was naked and had transformed himself to look like an ancient Greek statue, like the type Mudge had shown me in a museum in London. As railguns and plasma cannons were pointed towards him, the whole front of his body blackened into what looked like living metal. Surely he couldn’t withstand concentrated plasma cannon fire?
Repeated plasma fire wreathed him in a corona of white flames. The railgun fire hammered into him, blowing chunks out of his flesh, which regrew almost immediately.