Veteran (49 page)

‘With all due respect, I am not a lawyer, but if what I’m seeing is true then it would seem that my chain of command is compromised and somebody is going to have to answer for crimes against humanity,’ she said.

‘Yes, and they are in that node,’ he said, sounding irritated. In some ways I was impressed by the way he could continue this discussion while getting kitted up. I saw him strapping on the various different weapons that he would be using against us in the near future. I thought about going over our response plan again but they all knew the score. Besides our comms were compromised just like everyone else’s now.

‘I’m afraid we will have to wait and see what happens when the dust settles,’ Cat replied.

‘The dust settling, as you put it, may be the destruction of our race. They have one of Them in there and they have released a Them virus that has taken control of the net. How much damage are you going to let them do?’

‘God?’ Mudge asked. ‘Have you taken control of the net?’

God’s mellifluous multiple tones seemed to float from every device capable of producing sound. ‘No, Howard, I have not; the capability of the net is still total. All I have done is make access available to every single piece of information there is.’

‘Are Earth’s defences still in place and under the control of humanity?’ Mudge asked.

‘They are indeed,’ God answered.

‘Excellent,’ said Rolleston and then went quiet.

‘I think you should be aware that Major Rolleston has just sent a heavily encrypted message to the Kenyan Orbital Weapons Platform, JuuJuu Nyota, ordering them to fire a particle-beam weapon at your position,’ God said, a little too calmly for my taste. ‘He has the authority to do so,’ he added.

‘Well fucking stop him then!’ Mudge shouted.

‘I am sorry, Howard, but due to the parameters of my programming I cannot interfere with human actions beyond making all information available,’ God said.

Mudge turned on Pagan. ‘See? I fucking told you! Who doesn’t believe in an interventionist God now, you cunt!’ he demanded before turning back to the screen.

‘Humanity must have free will,’ Pagan said somewhat weakly.

‘Do you not think that being destroyed by a particle-beam weapon will impinge on my fucking free will? Not to mention all the people living in this Spoke! Besides,’ he pointed at Rolleston’s image, ‘that prick isn’t fucking human!’

‘Mudge! There are children watching,’ Balor admonished.

Despite the fact I was about to die I took a moment to stop and stare at Balor. Mudge’s face had gone red and veins were popping out on his forehead. I looked over at Pagan and Morag. Morag was already tranced in but Pagan was shaking his head.

‘We don’t have enough time,’ he said. I knew that comms messages from Atlantis to JuuJuu Nyota and Kenya would be shooting backwards and forwards in the net, including threats of reprisal from the Atlantean authorities.

‘This is Air Marshal Kaaria of the Kenyan Orbital Command. Major Rolleston’s order has been countermanded. We will not, repeat not, be firing upon Atlantis, nor does Kenya in any way pose a threat to the Atlantis Spoke, its interests or its people.’ I looked up at the screen to see a solid-looking African in his early sixties looking out of the viz screen at us. The screen split to show Rolleston.

‘Air Marshal Kaaria, you do not have the authority to countermand that order. Begin firing now,’ Rolleston said. Kaaria’s image turned somewhat, presumably to face the screen that was showing him Rolleston. Rolleston was messing with the hilt of a skull fucker, a vicious old commando dagger designed to penetrate the skull. Despite its age, wielded with enough power it could still make a mess of even a military-grade cyborg.

‘Leaving aside the fact that I will not be ordered around by a mere Major—’

‘My rank is not indicative of my authority—’ Rolleston began.

‘I will not be interrupted! Major, do you think I am insane? Do you think that Kenya wants to be responsible for starting another full-scale, inter-human conflict? Do you not think that we haven’t seen the footage of what happened to the Brazilian Spoke and what happened to America afterwards? In short, do you think we’re out of our minds?’ Rolleston didn’t answer. Mudge and the others looked relieved.

‘Look,’ I said, and was less than pleased to see my face fill the screen. ‘You want us, we’ll surrender peacefully. There’s no need to kill tens of thousands of people. Nobody wants that and we’ve already done what we need to.’

Gregor was glaring at me.

I headed over to him. ‘It’s all right, we’ll get you out of here,’ I said.

‘How?’ he asked, unconvinced.

‘Okay, we’re probably all going to die. Feel better?’

‘A little.’ I saw that Watch Commander Sommerjay’s comms icon was flashing. I opened the channel.

‘I’m a little busy, Cat,’ I said as pleasantly as I could. She didn’t bother with pleasantries.

‘Surrender to us.’ I gave this some thought. In many ways it was a seductive idea.

‘Under normal circumstances—’ all the other times I take over part of a Spoke and release an artificial god into the net ‘—I would, but you’d still have to hand us over to Rolleston. Not going to happen. We know him too well.’ Cat seemed to give this some thought.

‘You want help?’ she asked. Bang, that was her career over. I wondered how many other people were going to get hurt before this finished. Yes, I did want help but I knew she couldn’t give it.

‘You know they’re probably listening?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘Look, thanks, but we’d just get in each other’s way, right?’ She nodded. ‘The best thing you could do is stay out of it.’ Behind me Rolleston and Mudge were still arguing on the viz.

‘I’m standing my people down. Good luck, Sergeant,’ Cat said. Hopefully none of her people would get hurt. Briefly I hoped that Rolleston and the Grey Lady wouldn’t try a two-person breach. After all we had Gregor and Balor in here; Rannu was capable as well. But I knew they would.

‘Mr Mudgie, you have just released a Them virus into the net, why on Earth should anyone believe what you say?’ Rolleston was asking as I returned my attention to the show.

‘God, are you a Them virus?’ Mudge asked.

‘No, Howard, I am not. My programming is almost entirely human, as are the parameters that have been set within which I can act. The operating system I use is based round technology derived from Them but that was purely in terms of information management.’

‘So by your admission you are part Them,’ Rolleston said.

‘You are choosing to focus on that part of my creation in an attempt to force a fallacious point, I believe,’ God said.

‘Everything about God is transparent,’ Pagan began, speaking with the sort of exasperation the technically skilled have for those who are less gifted. ‘We would encourage people to check our proof that God is not—’

‘This "proof" comes from one source, the source that has the most to gain from us believing it. It’s hardly objective,’ Rolleston interrupted.

‘I was designed to be objective,’ God countered.

‘So you say, and even if you are, you were still designed to be objective by subjective people,’ Rolleston said.

‘This argument could just go in circles,’ Mudge said, sounding bored.

‘Fine,’ Rolleston said with a degree of satisfaction. ‘I’m no signalman but as far as I know we do not have AI.’

‘Nor do They. What you think is AI is actual sentience. I am the sum of your culture: I have learnt and developed as human sentience did, albeit much faster.’

‘So you have no trace of your Them origins?’ Rolleston demanded. He was still readying gear on the assault shuttle, working quickly but without hurry. Bran was a study in the economy of movement.

‘Yes, I have maintained enough of Ambassador to behave in total cooperation with all my constituent parts and to reject duplicity as an alien concept. There is only one, that is I, and so I cannot lie.’

‘I see, so the Them part of you is the good part?’ Rolleston said.

‘That is your value judgement of what I said,’ God answered. ‘My constituent parts, the ones that I believe you would consider to be more important, are more human than not.’

‘So you say, and while a lack of duplicity is admirable in those who can afford it, what about what your people have done to the colonies? Murdered non-combatants, including children, mutilated them. Is it not true that you have exterminated humanity wherever you have found it?’ Rolleston asked, as he finished attaching a man-portable plasma weapon to his subsonic Spectre gauss carbine, creating an over/under combination weapon.

‘Of course They hit non-combatants,’ Gregor said, and suddenly his warped alien features were up on the screen. It occurred to me that this might not do us any good.

‘Yes, you would have insights, wouldn’t you, Mr MacDonald, being as you are part alien?’ Rolleston said sarcastically. ‘So please explain how They are actually little, misunderstood kitten-like creatures, and the sixty years of Them murdering humanity wherever They found them, men women and children, didn’t actually happen.’

‘They never knew war before the Cabal—’

‘There is no such thing as the Cabal!’ Rolleston said, angry again.

‘Before your people,’ Gregor continued, ‘ordered their habitation attacked. Their sense of self is different: each cell is an individual that forms their whole so for them it was genocide. Because they had no understanding of what was happening the only response they knew was the one we had taught them, all-out attack. How were they to know that we put arbitrary rules on conflict? Rules that we ourselves have often failed to enforce in the past. In a fight for survival they felt they had to do everything they could to win. It’s what you taught us,’ Gregor said. Then there was silence as what he had just said sank in. Rolleston was smiling.

‘Major, do you deny that you attempted to destroy every peaceful emissary from Them?’ Mudge asked. He was trying to take the attention away from Gregor’s admission, even though he was still looking at the hybrid.

On the screen, footage that God had compiled, presumably requested by Mudge, started playing. We saw craft similar to the kind Ambassador had shown me back in Vicar’s church what seemed like an age ago. As before, it was basically a disposable engine with lots of needle-shaped stealth re-entry pods. We watched as orbital defences and ships destroyed craft after craft of this type. Each piece of footage was accompanied by a recording of the encrypted orders and each of those was sourced to members of the Cabal. There were so many ships.

Then the footage changed. On screens all over the system we saw Them, like Ambassador, being executed. It happened in city streets, in the wilderness, in the sea. There were only a few of these executions but I recognised the killers, or at least what they were. Ex-special forces. This was what the XIs were set up to do: ensure that there was no chance of peace.

Finally God showed us footage of a wealthy family with their own yacht. They were presumably upper-echelon execs for some corp. The family was perfectly nuclear, one mum, one dad and two children. They were gathered round an alien that looked just like Ambassador.

All the members of the family had the same beatific expressions on their faces that Morag and the other hookers had had when I found them sheltering Ambassador. There was a bright light and a loud noise, the picture turned to static and then slowly returned. I recognised the effects of a multi-spectrum stun grenade. There was the sound of suppressed weapon fire. The alien was down. We saw a gunman walk into the cabin and calmly double-tap each member of the family. The next shot was from the water and we could see the yacht burning. The gunman was in the water, watching the burning yacht and waiting for pickup. The big screen split to show the encrypted comms communication.

‘Targets eliminated?’ Rolleston asked over the comms.

‘I murdered them all,’ Rannu answered. Even through the medium of the comms line I could hear the remorse. All of us were looking up at where Rannu was sat on the catwalk above. His face appeared on the screen as Mudge did a close-up on him.

‘That’s how I knew she was right,’ Rannu said.

‘So how is showing one of your people murdering a family supposed to prove anything?’ Rolleston asked.

‘Because we’ve demonstrated you ordered it,’ Mudge snarled.

‘"We’ve demonstrated"?’ Rolleston asked. ‘You’re one with God now, are you?’

‘Don’t change the subject,’ Mudge said.

‘What subject, Howard?’ Rolleston asked scornfully. ‘This is all very clever. Shame really. Had you spent this amount of time and energy trying to help humanity instead of engaging in wild flights of ego and vanity that will ultimately make us more vulnerable, you may have helped end the war. Let’s start with a few obvious things. I have done and ordered done a lot of horrible things. That is my job, and although I rarely have to justify it to myself in this way I guess I do it for the sake of humanity I watched Bran tuck both her pistols into holsters on her thighs. She picked up her laser carbine and was perfectly still. I knew she’d be calibrating the smartgun and running through the weapons diagnostics.

‘Oh come on,’ Mudge scoffed. ‘You’re an evil little prick who likes having power over others.’

‘No!’ Rolleston said. He’d finished readying his load. He stood up, talking directly into the lens that was recording him. ‘See, this is the problem with petty-minded individuals like you. Things aren’t right so you want to destroy everything, tear it down, find someone to blame without thinking about what comes next. We’re trying to build something, and because it requires sacrifice you want to whine about it and lash out. You make me sick.’

‘Build what?’ I asked quietly. Rolleston ignored me.

‘Well, guess what? All you are is a dupe. Did I order that family killed? Of course I did. Did I order all of Them killed? Yes. Why? Because they’re the enemy! Sixty years of warfare, humans wiped out wherever They found them, remember? What you call Ambassadors, you ignorant wretch, are what sane people call infiltrators.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Morag shouted as she made her entrance onto system-wide media.