Veteran (10 page)

‘You got kin?’ I asked her. She nodded.

‘Where?’

‘Fintry.’ Christ, I thought, the Rigs must’ve seemed quite appealing to her. Even by Dundee’s standards Fintry was a shit hole.

‘They sold you into the life?’ I asked. She nodded.

‘They got quite a lot of crystal for me ‘cause I was pretty and young,’ she added by way of explanation. I didn’t ask her how old she’d been. Fucking wonderful, I thought. This girl may have even fewer options than I did. I took another drag of the cigarette; the glow lit up my burnt face and I saw Morag flinch.

‘You got people you can go to?’ I asked. She looked like she’d been slapped. I turned and made my way through the sucking mud towards the intermittent lights of the Rigs. I heard her struggle through the mud after me.

‘Hey,’ she said. I ignored her. ‘Hey!’ I kept going. ‘Fucking stop, you cunt!’ she yelled. I stopped and swung round on her.

‘I’m dead, do you understand me?’ I asked. ‘The people I’ve pissed off don’t stop and never fail. Sooner or later they will find me and kill me. Now I don’t know whether or not they know about you, but if they don’t the best thing you can do is run and hide as best you can.’ She looked up at me. I couldn’t quite read her expression; the fear was gone and something else was there. She looked like she was going to argue and then suddenly the life was sucked out of her.

‘So where are you going to die?’ she asked. I hadn’t really thought that through.

‘Dunno,’ I said. I hadn’t got enough cash for the booths, though that would’ve been nice. Drifting away, becoming disembodied in spirit. The Grey Lady quietly entering the booth and snipping my silver cord with a bullet, blade or toxin. That would be peaceful. ‘I guess I’ll get some cigarettes, go back to my cube, put on some Miles Davis and drink as much whisky as I can before they come for me.’ Morag nodded.

‘Sounds kind of nice,’ she said. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and flicked it into the mud. I turned and headed back towards the Rigs. Morag kept pace with me. I let this continue for a while, before stopping again.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, thinking that despite my earlier impressions she was just in fact another dumb rig girl.

‘Coming with you,’ she said. I stared at her for a while, knowing that all she would see would be her own reflection in the black polarised lenses that use to be my eyes, but she stared back at me defiantly.

‘I’m going to get killed. I don’t think you understand. This is no media. These guys don’t miss and have endless resources. To all intents and purposes it’s the government after me.’

‘What’ve I got?’ she asked. And then it struck me - Ambassador, what Vicar had said, the trip to Hull. False hope or not, this was probably the only hope she’d ever had. If she wasn’t already, then soon she would be old enough to get drafted and she’d end up a recreational worker, servicing the troops, officers first while her looks held up, then NCOs, then the squaddies. She would be used up by her early twenties. If she were lucky, sneaky, vicious and preyed on her fellow whores she would get NCO rank. Do unto others as she’d had done to herself. More likely she’d be discharged with no trade skills, not even the basic infantry skills of survival. If she dodged the draft it would be much the same, only in a more Darwinian environment. Coming back to my cube, drinking some whisky, listening to jazz and waiting to get shot in the head probably seemed like quite a good option for her.

‘What about Ambassador?’ she asked. It seemed to me she was trying desperately to keep the hope out of her voice.

‘Darling, it’s a pipe dream. The people it would need to speak to are the ones trying to kill it and us.’

‘But we could go to Hull?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, we could die in Hull instead, but all things being equal I think I’d rather die in Dundee.’

‘But if we could push this a little further, find out some more, maybe something’ll happen?’ she said, pathetic eagerness creeping into her voice. I was trying to decide what was worse. Destroying her hope outright or continuing down the road letting the hope build only to watch it crumble and die when they caught us.

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, I caught myself thinking as we resumed our trudge towards the Rigs. Maybe when the end was close enough and Morag had lived a little more than she should’ve with her assigned lot in life, a laser pistol to the back of her head would be kinder.

‘I’ll fuck you,’ she said, offering the only currency she thought she had. I closed my eyes.

‘Just ... Look, don’t say that again,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t fucking apologise!’ I shouted, angry, not sure at whom, probably me. The offer to completely take advantage of her wasn’t as abhorrent to me as it should’ve been. ‘Just don’t ... okay,’ I said, more quietly. She looked scared and confused but I was relieved that it didn’t look like she was going to burst into tears. ‘Look, we don’t have any money, no passes out of the city, no travel permission.’

‘We have these,’ Morag said, reaching into the canvas bag that Vicar had given her. She pulled out a bundle of paper cash. ‘And this,’ she said, holding up a pouch. I took it from her and looked inside. It contained rough, irregular-shaped yellow nuggets of metal. Probably Belt gold, not as valuable as the homegrown stuff but not something to turn your nose up at. ‘And this.’ She showed me a finance chip. I took the chip from her and plugged it into my chip reader. I let out a low whistle because it was an untraceable black chip, probably worth as much as the cash on it. More to the point it could be used with impunity even in corporate enclaves and Ginzas. In the big scheme of things we didn’t have a fortune but we certainly had enough to be going on with. I wondered why Vicar had done this and why he’d martyred himself. What was so important about all this?

Peripheral vision registered the light behind me. I turned around to see the aircar float out from the city over the river, twin searchlights playing over the area. It looked like a high-end Mercedes. Despite its civilian configuration I didn’t doubt for a minute that it was an armoured gun platform with an excellent sensor suite.

‘Come on,’ I said to Morag and dragged her under the rotting planks of what used to be the old commercial docks. We headed towards the riverside marketplace. They’d have thermographics and various motion sensors, both of which could be defeated if we were prepared to lie in the mud and crawl very slowly towards the Rigs. I was hoping to avoid that as the amount of toxic shit in the Tay would probably kill us in the long run, possibly the short run.

‘Is that them?’ Morag asked, out of breath.

I nodded.

‘Why don’t you just let them kill you?’ she asked. I glared at her.

‘Because I don’t want to die in this mud,’ I said. I’d had more than enough mud in my life. The Mercedes seemed to be searching further downstream. Perhaps they thought we were heading towards Perth on foot, or that Vicar had had the foresight to leave an escape craft of some kind, possibly even a submersible. In retrospect that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

We made it up into the bustling marketplace, hoping to lose ourselves among the other heat sources in the lines of stalls selling everything from tasteless vat protein mulch to dodgy black-market implants. The tarpaulin roofs of the stalls where blown about as the Mercedes took a low-altitude pass over the market.

A couple of times I saw people who stuck out, too clean, clothes too nice despite the effort to dress down. Occasionally they would seem to be listening to voices from elsewhere. Each time I was pretty sure we managed to avoid them. Morag was good, untrained but street smart and listened when I asked her to do something.

Eventually we made it through the market to the Rigs. We hurried onto a rickety catwalk of old pallets, the sludge of the river slopping around beneath us. We made our way up a scratch-built spiral staircase made of scrap metal. The staircase was about one quarter practical and three quarters dangerous self-expression on the part of its builder. We climbed up into the higher levels of the Rigs and headed deeper into the superstructure, both of us moving with the swiftness of long-term rig inhabitants.

I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It would be so easy to take the money from Morag, maybe leave the girl with enough for her to indulge her own tastes for once or maybe just enough for her to survive for a while. I could go to the sense booths and just wait; the Grey Lady wouldn’t make me suffer, she had no need to. It would be so easy I wouldn’t feel a thing. I mean, this wasn’t a media, I wasn’t some guardian angel; I was just another arsehole trying to get by as best I could and now I’d failed. I was out of time. So fuck Morag, she wasn’t my responsibility. But then she’d already offered that. I can’t remember how I found myself outside McShit’s and not the sense booths.

McShit’s was a series of split-open cubes held by high-tensile wires around the central support of
Piper Dawn,
one of the older Rigs. The wire-hung cubes arrangement made for an interesting environment during bad weather.

Inside was the usual array of scavenged bar furniture you would expect from a rig pub. The bar itself was an inverted bulletproof screen from an old bank with a wooden counter haphazardly glued to the top. A mixture of flickering electric bulbs, gas-burning lamps and various naked flames provided illumination. A still bubbled away behind the bar.

The place was filled with the various rig denizens who could afford a vice that night and had settled on booze. The place was subdued, probably because of the orbital strike on the Forbidden Pleasure. Nobody paid us much attention.

I knew the barman. He was a Twist, one of McShit’s kin. His name was Robby. Like all of McShit’s kin, a generation or two back his familial genes had been screwed by some viral weapon, pollutant or too much exposure to depleted uranium, and as a result he was born stunted. This didn’t stop them being used by humanity’s voracious war machine. If their nervous system wasn’t too screwed up then they would become chimeras - pilots for tanks, walkers, ground effects raiders and sleds, assault shuttles and even starships. A few of them were fast enough to become signalmen but most of them ended up like McShit himself: support and logistics. Robby looked up at me as I approached.

‘Evenin’ boss. Heard what happened?’ Then he gave Morag a long hard look. I think he knew her from the Forbidden Pleasure. Morag tried to smile at him. I nodded in answer to his question. He turned back to look at me more slowly.

‘Usual? The good stuff?’ he asked, his tone neutral, his expression guarded.

‘No. Er ... yeah, gimme a bottle and have you got any fags?’ I asked. Robby’s eyebrows rose. I could see his mind go into overdrive.

‘You minted, like?’ he asked, but reached under the bar for a bottle of the park exported single malt. I could feel Morag glaring at me. This wasn’t what the money was supposed to be for.

I nodded uneasily at Robby’s question.

‘What fags do you want?’ I gave him my brand, the expensive brand I liked. The brand normally smoked by officers, senior NCOs and rebellious corporate enclave kids. The brand I could normally only afford straight after I’d won a race or a pit fight.

‘How many d’ya want?’

‘Two hundred.’ Robby stopped as he was reaching under the bar for the black-market cigarettes.

‘Yeah?’ he said, somewhat surprised. I nodded. He looked between the two of us.

‘You score big tonight?’ I almost started laughing hysterically at this but Robby brought out the cigarettes and named his price. I turned to Morag.

‘Pay him,’ I said. She looked like she was going to argue but pulled out some of the dirty notes and counted them off for Robby.

‘New meal ticket?’ Robby asked sceptically.

‘Like fuck,’ Morag muttered under her breath. I lit up another cigarette and resisted the urge to open the bottle of malt.

‘Is McShit in?’ I asked. I watched Robby’s expression harden. Others in the bar were beginning to take an interest as well and not just the Twists.

‘Now you know McShit’s always out,’ Robby said.

‘How much till he’s in?’ I asked. Robby looked at Morag again.

Tell me straight, boy, you in trouble?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘A lot?’ I nodded again. He watched me, seeming to size me up. ‘We’re closed!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Everyone out!’ There was surprisingly little argument as people shuffled out, the cubes shifting slightly on their cables due to the mass exodus. A few of the Twists remained, making no secret that they were packing.

Robby opened a small door in the bar and beckoned us through. We followed him past the steaming, huffing still. Robby guided us to the tubular steel central support for the rig. The hatch that had been cut into the steel had been very well concealed. Robby must have sent a signal from his neural ware because the hatch popped open for us. Behind it was a red-lit world of corroded tube steel. Robby reached over and grabbed a rusted rung welded into the old metal and began to climb down with a practised ease that belied his stunted appearance.

The tube world inhabited by the Twists was an open secret on the Rigs. Everyone knew about it - you could hear them from time to time inside the supports. Off the Rigs it was a true urban myth, a grotesque hidden fairy-tale kingdom made up of all the shit things people say about the Twists: cannibals, stealers of children, that sort of crap.

All the lighting was red safety lighting, which gave the place an eerie glow. The distant echoes of other people’s movements in the pipes further increased the eeriness, though many of the areas had cheap foam insulation to try and deaden noise. The Twists didn’t want to advertise their presence; this was their place. The other inhabitants of the Rigs pretty much left them to it as the Twists were useful and they had their own niche.

Robby led us down into the concrete block at the base of the rig. Originally ballast, it had been hollowed out with the same programmable concrete-eating microbes that they had used for the old Tay Road Bridge. More supports had been added externally, both driven deep into the riverbed and attached to the neighbouring rigs.