Veteran (11 page)

Piper Dawn
was on the east end of the Rigs, close to where the Tay led out into the North Sea. On the east wall of this damp, submerged concrete block was a home-made airlock. Home-made was never a phrase I liked hearing in connection with things like airlocks. There were a few rigs between
Piper Dawn
and the North Sea but the Twists had gone out in diving gear with torches and remotes and cut a channel. Now this was all that was left of the Port of Dundee.

This was how you came and went if you didn’t have the influence and the means to use the motorways, the Mag-Lev, the sub-orbitals or own an aircar. McShit’s Port of Dundee was for those who needed to leave quietly. The Port had a few uncomfortable-looking chairs in it and bits and pieces of equipment I guessed were for regulating the atmosphere inside, some of it maybe sensor-based. There were a couple of monitors that showed external views of the polluted riverbed.

Various Twists were working on the machinery or just hanging around. Again there were guns on display, as well as less than subtle security systems. Throughout the hollowed-out concrete block ran steel bars. They weren’t supports but rather formed a kind of climbing frame that provided access to all areas of the Port. From part of this frame hung McShit.

McShit had been a chimera. Rumour had it that he could have had anything from a fighter to a starship but instead he’d chosen an armoured recovery vehicle and joined the Royal Engineers. Since being removed from the vehicle he had made himself a sort of small armoured cupola to hold him and his life-support requirements. The cupola was hanging from the frame by two powerful-looking waldos, making McShit look for all the world like a baby in some kind of machine-like cradle.

The top half of his tiny stunted body stuck out of the cupola, various wires extending from it to plugs in the base of his neck. His eyes were ugly, home-made but doubtless good-quality optics that stuck out from his skull like old-fashioned camera lenses.

The waldos swung the cupola along the metal frames in a kind of inverted loping gait until McShit came to rest in front of us both. He didn’t look pleased. Robby must’ve texted him via an internal cellular link that we were coming and that we were hot. I hoped it had been encrypted.

‘McShit,’ I said.

‘Don’t you McShit me. You’re fucking tracking mud everywhere, you radge cunt!’ he snarled. I looked down at the filthy concrete floor. The only way he could know that we had tracked in more mud was because it was covering our boots.

‘Sorry,’ I offered.

‘Robby says you’re in a lot of trouble.’ McShit glared in Robby’s direction.

‘I need to leave Dundee, get to—’ I began. McShit held up a hand.

‘That wasn’t what I asked. Same people after you who did the Pleasure?’

I nodded.

‘Lot of people dead, lot of people hurt. Too much. Nothing we can do about it in the community. There was a lot of steam, the water going meant some of the rigs got knocked about, people got crushed, lot of pain, and here’s us with no resources.’ He was shaking his head.

‘Wasn’t my doing,’ I said, thinking it was half true.

‘That’s government trouble that is, or a major couldn’t-give-a-shit corp,’ he said.

‘They’ve got special forces operators on the ground hunting for us. People I knew, bad types.’

‘You’re bringing me a lot of heat.’ I was worried I couldn’t read his expression. Suddenly the other Twists in the room all seemed to be paying attention.

‘I’m not denying that.’

‘Could be I’d do better handing you over to them - maybe a reward.’

‘Probably, though they might just kill you, plausible deniability and all that,’ I tried.

‘You’re from here, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘I live here.’

‘They’re not, are they?’

‘They all live in nice places.’

‘This is a nice place.’ I cracked a smile at this. Good old-fashioned them and us negotiation.

‘They be able to trace you here?’ McShit asked me.

‘They’d be able to trace us anywhere if they put their minds to it.’

‘We need to get you out of here then.’

‘We need to get to—’ I began.

‘Will you shut the fuck up?’ McShit snapped. ‘If what you say is right then some bad people are about to come and traipse more mud through my nice little world, and they’re going to come with anger in their hearts a poor general demeanour and the willingness to do me and mine harm. When that happens I am going to tell them exactly what I know about you. I am going to cooperate as much as is humanly possible for this twisted little body to do so. I will spill my guts.’

‘Come on, he can’t help us,’ Morag said angrily.

McShit turned to look at her, a smile splitting his grotesque face. Then he swung the cupola back to face me. ‘I don’t have much of a neck and I’m not sticking it out for some dumb grunt and a whore.’

‘Fuck you, dwarf!’ Morag spat in anger bom of fear.

‘Shut up,’ I told her quietly.

‘So you see how important it is that I don’t know where you want to go?’

‘They could still kill you.’

‘If they’re professional then I will have to impress on them that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth to take me and mine out.’ Once again his leering grin spread across his face. ‘Now this is a deeply beautiful moment - workers unite in the struggle and all that - but how much fucking money have you got?’

8

North Sea

‘Why’d you have to give him that much?’ Morag asked. We were sat facing each other leaning against the ceramic hull of the stealth submersible. It was eerily quiet as the sleek craft, propelled by nearly silent hydro jets, slipped through the cold depths of the North Sea. I’d had to make do with the bottle of whisky because I’d been told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t smoke on the sub. I’d gotten about a quarter of the way down the bottle. I looked up at the tired, frightened, street-smart girl.

‘There’s a good chance McShit won’t make it,’ I said.

‘But he said he was going to grass us.’

‘Rolleston’ll probably still kill him and take out his operation,’ I told her. ‘Him grassing us is the only thing he can do. Even if he didn’t tell them straight off they’d find a way of making him talk. What he just did may have been the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for you.’ Morag lapsed back into silence.

The sub we were on was making a run to the drug factories in the Secessionist Amsterdam Territories. McShit had arranged with the captain that she would drop us where we asked. McShit would tell Rolleston all this and he would waste some time looking in Amsterdam, and find the captain, who would then tell Rolleston that we were in Hull. We would have a day in Hull at the most before they caught up with us. I hoped that whatever Pagan had for us was worth it.

I looked back up at Morag; she was going through the bag that Vicar had given her. Dressed casually and without the heavy makeup, she looked like any other kid. Though Christ knows what that meant today, just more grist for the mill. She was pretty, probably too pretty for her own good, and although there was wariness there it hadn’t quite become hardness yet. She looked back at me, suddenly self-conscious at my scrutiny despite the fact that when I first found her she’d been wearing very little.

‘What?’

‘How old are you?’

‘Why? Is it important?’ she demanded, sounding more like a teenager than a rig hooker now.

‘Yeah, it is,’ I said.

‘Seventeen,’ she said. I really didn’t want to know when she’d started working.

‘Old enough to be drafted,’ I said. She nodded.

‘MacFarlane fixed it for us. Bribed the Drumheads to hold off as long as possible so ... so ...’ she struggled.

‘So he got his pound of flesh.’ She shrugged. To her there was nothing strange or horrible about this. She thought of herself, at least at some level, as a commodity.

‘I want... wanted to be a signalman,’ she said. ‘When I got drafted I mean.’

Everyone wants to be a hacker, I thought.

‘You got religion?’

‘Not yet. I’ll get it in the net, when I begin to see,’ she said with a gleam in her eye. There was something about the interface: somehow or other it triggered the same response in people that religion did. They saw things, hallucinated religious iconography out there in the net.

‘You would’ve been posted to R & R,’ I said. Meaning she would’ve been doing the same thing in the military as she did on the Rigs, entertaining the troops. I didn’t stop to think just how cruel a thing it was to say. She stopped rummaging in the bag and looked up at me, her eyes meeting my lenses. I could plainly see her resolve.

‘Not if I scarred myself. Not with a knife but with acid, something like that,’ she said, and then went back to rummaging through the bag. I wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

‘You any good?’ I asked, lighting another cigarette.

‘At being a whore? Yeah, brilliant. You any good at whatever you do?’

‘Signals, hacking,’ I said, somewhat exasperated.

‘I broke into MacFarlane’s accounts once, had him donate some money.’

‘That’s pretty good for a surface hack with no implants.’

She shrugged. ‘My sister taught me how - she was signals.’

‘You’ve got a sister?’

‘Had. Brain fried over some planet out there. Don’t even know where. They didn’t think it was important enough to tell us, burial in space. Had she been here, Mum never would’ve sold me on.’

‘MacFarlane ever find out?’ I asked. She smiled to herself and shrugged.

‘ ‘Course. He hired a hacker to trace it and then scared some of the others into grassing on me. He had this guy, some wired-up kung fu type.’ I nodded thinking of the fashionable bodyguard I’d beaten to death on the Forbidden Pleasure. ‘Well he also had some other skills wired in, like how to hurt people without leaving a mark so you could still work. I got to spend a couple of hours with him.’ I thought about this for a while.

‘Probably won’t make much difference now, but that guy’s dead.’

‘Yeah, I got that,’ she scoffed. ‘The boat blowing up was kind of hard to miss.’

‘No, I mean I beat him to death.’ She was quiet for a bit.

‘Good,’ she said quietly. Then we sat in silence for a while. I was desperately trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t remind her of something horrible.

‘Why do you smoke?’ she suddenly asked. ‘I mean you’ve got lung filters and stuff, right?’

I nodded. ‘I like yellow fingers, brown teeth and the smell.’

‘Oh.’

‘We’re not very fucking stealthy if you two keep on talking!’ The Russian sub captain hissed at us through the door to the bridge. ‘And I told you no smoking!’ I put the cigarette out and the pair of us lapsed into silence again. I was kind of thankful for it.

I thought about what Morag had said, the way she’d said it. The human race could fly to the stars and this young woman felt she had to mutilate herself so she didn’t have to service the troops. That wasn’t right. I’d always known that things were fucked up but more than anything else this drove home to me that there had to be another way. After sixty years of war we needed hope, we needed the war to end. If what Ambassador had said was some psy-op head fuck then it would be the cruellest thing of all.

Duty was something they drilled into us in basic, something I got in 5 Para: duty to our leaders, duty to our fellow soldiers, duty as protectors of the human race. By the time I got to the Regiment we knew it was a joke, or maybe it wasn’t but we were pretty cynical about it anyway. If, on the other hand, there was the slightest chance that we could do anything to help this war end, give us a chance to recover as a race so we weren’t eating our young, then that was our duty.

See that was the thing that got me: what if the cure for cancer was lying dead in a trench? What if the child of Vicar’s god was born on the Rigs? What if the man or woman who could bring peace to the universe was too attractive so they had to go to a service brothel? Nobody would ever know.

I had seen, done and experienced a lot of very fucked-up things but somehow what Morag said was the worst. I’d been going through the motions, just putting things off until Rolleston caught up with me. We had no chance, we were dead, but I had been trained to operate with these kinds of odds. Unfortunately so had everyone we were up against. I couldn’t put the cork back in the bottle; it’d been thrown away. I was in this now.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I whispered. Morag looked up and shrugged.

‘I didn’t have much on,’ she said. We both smiled. ‘Besides,’ she said more seriously, ‘I think it was gentle.’ I guessed she meant Ambassador. ‘Doing what I do you very quickly get a sense of who’s gentle and who wants to cause you harm. I don’t think it wants to cause us harm,’ she finished.

I laughed.

‘What?’

‘We’re going to try and stop this war based on hookers’ intuition.’

‘I guess,’ she said, laughing.

‘You realise this could all just be a psy-op on Their part? Just another tactic in Their attempt to wipe us out.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘But I don’t believe it.’ The resolve was there again. She looked me straight in the lenses. ‘We have to try,’ she said, echoing my thoughts. I nodded.

‘You two can swim if you want!’ the captain hissed again.

I was looking forward to a downer-induced speed crash and then sedation in orbit. Natural sleep was a thing of the past, too many drugs, too much shit in the subconscious. Ahead of us we could see assault shuttles taking off, making their way to the fleet in orbit. In the pale Sirius B sky we could just make out the flashes of light. The 6th Fleet was catching hell in high orbit from Their fleet. As we approached the evac point we could see lines of soldiers waiting for transports. Waiting as the more valuable personnel and equipment was evacced first. I’d long ago stopped feeling angry about this. After all we were special forces so we were quite valuable.

‘Douglas?’ Amar Shaz, our signalman and hacker, said over our encrypted tactical comms link. He came from somewhere in the Midlands from a Sikh family. He‘d not been particularly religious before he‘d become a signalman, but now of course he’d found religion in the net. His faith renewed, he’d started attending virtual temple regularly, grown a beard and even started wearing a turban and carrying a vicious-looking, sword-length kirpan on patrol. The turban was made of ballistic mesh. In true squaddie style he’d come to us with the nickname of Sharon already firmly in place.