Authors: Gavin Smith
It was over quickly. He reached Rannu’s Hellion first and just reached out a burning hand, snapped his plasma cannon and threw the exo-armour into the wall. Root-like tendrils of biomechanical flesh grew around Rannu’s Hellion holding it still. Rolleston turned to my Hellion all but ignoring the constant fire from the railguns. He reached up and his hands grew into claws. He dug into the front of the armour and tore it open.
It was empty. There was a limit to our stupidity – I hoped. Rolleston started to sink into the floor. We triggered the charges in the armour. The feed from the Hellions went down.
It would be nice to think that the charges had taken care of Rolleston, but I just knew we weren’t that lucky. Besides, by that point we were inside. We heard his screams of rage echo through the vein-like corridors.
‘Shit,’ I said. There was a conspiracy to force me to relive two of my most unpleasant experiences simultaneously. The technology-transformed-into-flesh of the
Bush
was forcing us to rethink our entry strategy. Maybe strategy’s a strong word. We had some contingencies but once again we were making this up as we went along
.
Only by reconfiguring the flesh insides of the Hellions had we managed to fit the spacesuits inside the exo-armour. Even then it had severely hindered movement and we’d had to use very lightweight suits. They had no armour and I was freezing. God was controlling the Hellions. We had successfully made the first fully functioning robots. God-driven robot devils. They were the diversion but we still had to get in ourselves
.
All around us the battle still raged but we were so small compared to it all. We were less than bacteria in the big scheme of things
.
I felt Pagan push a jack into one of the plugs in the back of my spacesuit, which in turn fed into one of my plugs
.
‘You ready?’ he asked brusquely
.
‘No,’ I said. I was shit-scared and hated this plan
.
I barely had time to close my eyes and exhale all the air out of my lungs. The tendrils grew through the flesh of my face and cracked the thin plastic visor of the shit spacesuit. Cold. Then burning inside as my blood boiled. I felt my skin stretch and distend as my body swelled. It was agony. The tendrils reached down and touched the skin of the
Bush
and connected me to something awful. I opened my mouth to scream, except now I had no mouth. We were swallowed
.
Flesh, awful and surrounding me. My mind touching it, assaulted, bombarded with information and images either too complex or horrific to process. It passes in a moment. It feels longer
.
We fall through the ceiling. I hit the floor with blood running out of my ears. My joints are agony. Frost coats my nostrils. My skin is red from burst blood vessels and despite my internal air supply I’m panting for breath as the tendrils recede back into my flesh and I have a mouth again
.
When something approaching conscious thought returns, when the theatre of atrocity that is the images downloaded into my skull stops dancing in front of my eyes, when the pain becomes manageable with the help of a lot of painkillers dumped into my blood, I use what Demiurge taught me when he possessed me. I get the bio-nanites that swarm through my body to heal the damage caused by hypoxia and ebullism. It can’t stop me shaking from the cold. Maybe it’s not just the cold
.
Pagan unplugs himself from me and looks down at me with contempt. I resist the urge to shoot him. Then I catch a glimpse of Morag. She’s not quite quick enough to mask the look of concern. The others are down on one knee, weapons at the ready watching all around us
.
Warm air runs through the corridor of biomechanical flesh we find ourselves in. It’s like something huge breathing on you. We take turns stripping off the shitty spacesuits while the others guard. We’ve got on inertial armour suits, the only armour we could fit under the spacesuits
.
‘Well?’ I asked Pagan as we change
.
‘I ran the spoof program, snuck it in using the cloak so it would be undetected. It’s adapted from one I’d use on normal tech but I’m unsure of the interface with the biotech,’ he said coldly
.
‘Very clever, Pagan. What does that mean?’ I demanded
.
He stopped and looked at me
.
‘Either we’ll be hidden from whatever detection systems they’re using or we won’t. Shame we couldn’t get Morag to do it.’ In other words, either we’d be hidden from Demiurge and therefore Rolleston or he’d have us torn apart. We needed Rolleston to turn up, just not yet
.
‘Drop the attitude,’ Merle said quietly to Pagan
.
Pagan glared at him for a moment and then nodded. He was just frightened. Well that and he hated me, which was reasonable. I did after all kill him
.
We pulled the reactive camouflage gillie suits on over our inertial armour and moved out
.
We’d downloaded the plans for most of the flag-capable ships in the colonial fleet. We’d been pretty sure that Rolleston would choose the
Bush
because it was the best but it paid to have contingencies. The plans we had for the
Bush
were very different to the ship/organism we were now presented with, but Pagan quickly adapted an intelligent navigation program he’d used as a combat air controller. It was mapping the terrain and trying to reconcile it with the plans we had.
We were moving quickly through the corridors, hiding if we saw movement and watching the last moments of the Hellions on our IVDs. We could hear the firefight in the distance. We watched Rolleston walk through some of the best firepower that modern weaponry could provide. The footage was not doing much for morale.
Like the boardroom in the Citadel, the ship was diseased human technology, except in the case of the
Bush
it was total. We didn’t see much in the way of movement initially and quickly found out why. The humans needed to run the ship had become components, stripped of unnecessary parts, formed into more practical, useful shapes – if you were a psycho – and melded into the biomechanics of the craft. Morag had to stop to throw up. I couldn’t blame her. I wished I still had that reaction to atrocity. That said, it was still seriously fucking with my head.
The feed from the Hellions went down. Then we heard the screaming. It seemed to echo through all the corridors. It was rage. It was unmistakably Rolleston. As much as I wanted to think otherwise, there was no way we could have killed him. The floor didn’t so much shake as quiver beneath us.
We were heading deeper into the ship. We needed to find the isolated Demiurge system. We had hoped for a more normal layout but C&C was still our best hope. However, Rolleston must know that we were inside and Demiurge was compromised. Now he would start to hunt us. The moment we were found we would be back to fighting the whole ship, except this time without the help of sophisticated exo-armour.
Outside, Rolleston’s fleet had consolidated. Whoever was commanding the colonial fleets knew what they were doing. With most of Earth’s orbital defences down, its fleet stood little chance. Rolleston’s fleet was advancing, concentrating fire on one big ship until it was cracked open and then moving to another. Their fighters and incredibly fast and manoeuvrable frigates were mopping up the smaller vessels. Already Earth ships were fleeing. The
Thunderchilde
was still there, however. It didn’t look so clean and new; it was a scarred and burned behemoth taking fire all over its armoured hull. All of the
Thunderchilde
’s own weapon systems were constantly lit up. A lot of its fire was aimed at the
Bush
. We weren’t even feeling the impacts.
On the net the battle was going a little better. Through sheer force of numbers the vagabond army of Earth hackers armed with godsware had taken out most of the enemy’s rank and file hackers and some of the angels. However, the four black suns of Demiurge were forcing them back with columns of black fire that turned anything they hit into ribbons of simulated black skin floating in the virtual air.
More than three quarters of the red sun was black now as the viral eclipse continued trying to eat God. I didn’t even notice God screaming any more. It was ambient noise.
We ducked into side corridors and hid behind rib-like supports when we detected movement ahead. We had motion sensors and tiny rotor remotes, also with motion sensors, feeding information to our IVDs, but in an environment like this their range was severely limited. The reactive camouflage helped, as did the heat- and EM-masking properties of the inertial armour suits.
That he couldn’t find us must have been making Rolleston furious. I wondered if he was worried now that he knew Demiurge was compromised. Though he must have had an idea when he saw us waiting for him when he turned up in-system.
We were deep inside the huge ship now. The absence of doors had made this possible. I don’t suppose they mattered so much when you controlled everything on board and you could grow a new wall if you needed to shut areas off. I still sweated. A lot. It was reassuringly human after I’d had the alien part of my flesh driven home again.
I leaned against a corridor wall hoping the reactive camouflage was sufficient cover as a patrol passed. I was desperate for a fag and wished that I’d made Mudge give me one back on the
Thunderchilde
. The patrol consisted of one of the weaponised Black Squadron members, four mutated Berserk-like bioborgs and something that looked like a cross between one of the Berserks and a praying mantis. It had downward-pointing, sword-like bones for forearms. I’d slowed down my breathing, supplementing it with air from my internal tanks.
The Black Squadron guy stopped. He sniffed the air. You have to be kidding. He turned to look at the wall. Rannu was little more than a pixelated ghost as his reactive camouflage tried to keep up. He looped his new monofilament garrotte around the guy’s neck and pulled it tight. His head popped off.
I was behind one of the Berserks. I pulled its head back with the metal of my right hand. Four blades extended from just behind my knuckles on my left hand and I punched them repeatedly and quickly into the back of its skull. It nearly knocked me over as it fell to the ground.
Another ghost and the praying mantis thing had a long blade sticking out of its skull. Merle had jumped up and stabbed it through the top of its head. The crack of armoured chitin breaking under the bowie knife-like point of the machete was fiercely audible. The thing shook for a moment and then dropped to the ground.
The others were having less luck. They were all carrying knives that weren’t really up to dealing with things like this in hand-to-hand. Of the three of them only Pagan really had the training for this sort of fight. That left them with their handguns and the 10mm rounds were no match for the chitinous armour.
Superheated air exploded as one of the remaining mutated Berserks fired its black light projector from its spiked and twisted weapons gauntlet. I heard Morag cry out and felt a moment of panic. I kicked out at the Berserk’s knee joint. I heard a satisfying crack and the thing lurched down on one knee and I drove the four knuckle blades on my right hand into its face, warping its horrible facial features further. I twisted the blades and then pulled them out. Letting it slump to the ground.
There was a burst of laser fire and one of the two remaining Berserks hit the ground, its head transformed into dirty black steam. A longer burst of gauss-boosted fire from Mudge’s converted AK-47. The final Berserk shook with every hit as it staggered back and then hit the ground.
We were now well and truly compromised.
Red steam floated into the air through Morag’s reactive camouflage.
‘You okay?’ I sub-vocalised over the tac net.
‘Fine. We need to move,’ she snapped.
We ran forward, stealth abandoned in favour of speed. Weapons sweeping left, right, up and down as we went. Anything moving got shot. We didn’t stay to see whether or not our fire was successful.
Where C&C should have been we found a solid wall of what we thought was new growth. We were taking shard and black beam hits on our backs. My shoulder laser was out searching for targets. Occasionally its red beam would stab out but mostly they were staying hidden.
We took cover behind the rib supports in the corridor and laid down suppressing fire. It was a waiting game now. Waiting for Rolleston to turn up and kill us, or more likely turn up, hurt us, torture us for a long time and then possess us so we could become part of his brave new world. I was firing the SAW and the shoulder laser. The corridor shuddered as white plasma fire ate away part of it. Morag caught the Black Squadron guy who’d fired with a three-beam burst from her laser carbine. Part of his superheated flesh was blown off but he ducked back around a corner leaving black steam hanging in the air behind him.
‘Jakob!’ Pagan snapped at me. He was a series of fractal images as his malfunctioning reactive camouflage tried to make him blend. Angrily he pulled the gillie suit off. He was hunkered down over by the new-growth wall gesturing at me to join him. I knew what he wanted.
‘I’m not a fucking jack!’ I snapped. It was just fear and selfishness.