Veteran (55 page)

Rolleston stalks through the smoke towards us. firing burst after burst from his Spectre. I feel the needles penetrate my long coat and blow chunks out of my armour. Then they’re hitting my dermal armour and I’m bleeding again as little explosive charges in the needles detonate dangerously dose to real flesh.

He walks up to me as I empty the magazine of the automatic shotgun into him. He should be on the ground. Explosive penetrator flechettes should have chewed him up. As my shotgun runs dry I get a good look at him. I see a burst of laser fire blow a chunk of steaming flesh off him. Then I watch as black liquid in the wound seals it back together. All over his body this is happening as multiple hits heal. It looks like his flesh is crawling. He grins at me, more of a grimace as his face heals.

I drop the shotgun. He glances behind me at Morag. In my panic I had forgotten about her. I sort through the noise and now I can hear her terrified cries. She can see or hear nothing. Faster than I can move, Rolleston stabs me with his hand. Something pierces the armour of my coat and my dermal armour. I scream with unashamed terror and pain as Rolleston lifts me up. I stab him in the head with the blades on both hands. His features distort as the blades manage to pierce his flesh, though there is resistance from some kind of internal armour. Rolleston screams. Good. And then throws me across the room. Less good.

I bounce off the wall and hit the ground. Warning medical icons appear on my internal visual display. I try to get back to where Rolleston is leaning over Morag, who is still oblivious to his presence. I scream a warning that she cannot hear. Then something huge looms out of the smoke behind Rolleston.

Gibby and Mudge fire at where they think the Grey Lady might be, Gibby screaming unintelligibly. There are the rapid bangs of superheated air exploding as Josephine fires her laser carbine from somewhere completely different. Gibby’s Kalashnikov gauss carbine explodes and he staggers back as beam pierces armour, superheats his flesh and blows a chunk of it off. Turning blood to red steam.

Gregor tears Rolleston off the ground and flings him into the wall. Pagan, somehow still up, just watches. I crawl over to Morag and try to grab her but this just freaks her out more.

‘It’s me,’ I say over the tac net. Morag eventually stops trying to fight me. I manage to draw both my pistols; the shoulder-mounted laser pushes its way out. I may as well be unarmed.

Gregor stalks after Rolleston with his weird off-kilter walk. Rolleston is back on his feet. Gregor grabs the Major by the neck and lifts him up. The hybrid bangs Rolleston against the wall with sufficient force to crack the concrete. He does this again and again and then tries to unscrew the Major’s head. I try to think how I can help. I fail.

Josephine stalks through the smoke, dripping blood from her hand. A burst of laser fire into Mudge and he lies down, still. String vests are funny but don’t offer much in the way of protection. Gibby draws both his revolvers and starts firing at where he thinks she is, again. She isn’t there, again. Her foot kicks him so hard his armoured skull dents the wall. Then she turns and starts heading towards me.

Rolleston somehow breaks Gregor’s grip. No hesitation. He strikes Gregor in his abdomen. Gregor staggers back. Rolleston strikes him again and again, tearing flesh and knocking Gregor back every time he does. Gregor shoves the Major back and jumps up in the air. As he lands he claws half of Rolleston’s face off. Rolleston pauses briefly. Somehow he slides behind Gregor and stamps on one of the joins in Gregor’s legs. Gregor goes down on one knee. Rolleston has the skull fucker in his hand. He stabs Gregor in the head, burying it up to the hilt. Gregor screams. The scream sounds more like one of Them.

Gregor staggers back to his feet and tears the knife out. Rolleston seems to have made him angry. Gregor hits him with an old-fashioned uppercut. Rolleston tumbles by over my head and hits the external wall. Gregor stomps over to his fallen Retributor and picks it up. He turns to the Major, who is climbing to his feet, and starts firing. I watch in horror as Rolleston, this inhuman thing, is chewed up and almost as quickly rebuilt by the black liquid Themtech.

And Josephine is standing over me. I look up. This is the calmest I have felt. I lie over Morag, covering her.

‘Get out of the way,’ Josephine’s soft voice over the tac net. What the fuck? Why wasn’t she killing me?

I was distracted from this thought by Rolleston apparently deciding things weren’t going his way. The external wall blew out.

I watched the footage of this afterwards. One part of the wall just blew out, sending rubble and the entire landing platform tumbling down. I watched Cat’s security people in their Praetorians kick full burn on their flight fins to get out of the way.

You’re not supposed to be able do this to the external wall of a Spoke. Josephine had been busy. She had used her camouflage system to crawl around on the outside of the Spoke and seed it with programmable concrete-eating microbes. They chewed in deep enough to allow her to set sufficient explosives to blow the wall. That was why Cronin had kept us talking.

Now this kind of damage hadn’t been done to a Spoke since Brazilian I had fallen. Well okay, we’d used microbes on this Spoke after the raid on the lab, but still. Of course, Cat now had no choice but to breach.

All the fun of explosive decompression. Buck and Balor’s bodies were both sucked out. My wired reflexes gave me the chance to register them tumbling into the night sky. Somehow Gibby and Mudge were still alive. They clung onto whatever they could find. Both of them had internal air supplies; if they didn’t get sucked out they’d be okay. Pagan threw himself at the base of the catwalk as bits of the reception desk, the gallery and what was left of the set flew past him. He wrapped himself around it. He held on for dear life.

I felt Morag begin to slip from beneath me. My right hand clamped down. I pushed through the plain white carpet of the set and steel prosthetic fingers dug into the concrete, providing me with a precarious grip.

Rolleston, Josephine and Gregor stayed where they were. Something held them in place as the smoke was sucked out around them. Gregor had stopped firing. He started again when Rolleston’s assault shuttle dropped into view, its rapid firing railguns rotating up to speed, its front ramp down. Rolleston turned and jumped for the ramp.

Josephine looked down at me sadly and didn’t kill me. She turned and ran with the wind towards the assault shuttle. She jumped out into the night sky, still looking graceful. As she jumped, the rotating railguns started firing. They cut through everything in their path. The rounds penetrated the walls and must have hit Cat’s forces in the plaza outside the node. They cut through the stairs to the catwalk, and the gallery ceased to exist, disintegrating under the withering fire. The shots were too high to get most of us and too low to get Rannu, but Gregor stood there and traded shots with the assault shuttle.

Gregor stood his ground, fired and fired as the shuttle’s cannon chewed up everything around him and tore away huge chunks of his flesh - so much there seemed to be a constant stream of flesh coming off him.

Later I would see more footage from the Praetorians as they all fired on Rolleston’s assault shuttle aided by gunships and the Spoke’s own defences. Over the tac net I heard Cat shout ‘British soldiers on the ground now!’ as the Praetorians flew through the reception area and into the media node. Outside in the plaza emergency barriers came down to stop further decompression.

Cat’s exo-armoured troops skimmed through the media node and fired at the assault shuttle. Eventually under a hail of withering fire, the assault shuttle peeled off. The Atlantis security forces gave chase as the assault shuttle headed up at dangerous Gs.

It was Cat herself who picked Morag and me up. She flew us to a gunship; her exo-assisted strength easily taking our weight. Behind me her people were doing the same for Rannu, Pagan, Mudge and Gibby. I wondered how scared the guys who helped Gregor were. Or what they thought. Gregor had stalked to the edge of the node and continued firing after the assault shuttle.

We couldn’t kill them. Any of them. I looked down at the clouds and a trail of my own blood. Then we were in the cramped confines of one of the gunships; a medic was starting to patch me up. One of the crew was administering a sedative to Morag.

‘Her first.’ I told the medic. Unlike us Morag’s body wasn’t outfitted for combat and rapid pressure changes.

‘Triage motherfucker, you’ve got a big hole in your stomach, now shut the fuck up,’ the medic told me. Americans.

‘It’s all right. We’re safe now,’ I lied to Morag over the tac net. I was still trying to make sense of what had just happened to us. They had walked through us. It must be how normal people, that endangered species, felt when they fought us.

An orbital weapon, I thought. That’ll do for them.

‘God?’ I whispered hoarsely into the tac net as the brusque medic tended to me.

‘Yes, Jakob?’ God’s many mellifluous tones answered me.

‘Where are Rolleston and Bran?’ I asked.

‘They are in the assault shuttle making its way up the outside of the Spoke, I believe towards the frigate HMS
Vindictive.’

‘Where’s the
Vindictive?’

‘HMS
Vindictive
is docked at High Nyota Mlima,’ God answered. The Kenyan Spoke.

‘Well fucking stop them then,’ I said.

‘I cannot; Major Rolleston has free will,’ God answered. I bit down on my anger. ‘However I believe that the Atlantis authorities are attempting to interdict the assault shuttle and the Kenyan authorities have locked down the HMS
Vindictive
and are not allowing it to leave.’

‘Yeah? Tell them not to fuck around. Tell them to use one of the orbital platforms.’

‘I am relaying your suggestion. However, I believe that has been considered and is the reason the assault shuttle is staying so close to the Spoke.’

‘I think your private war has done enough damage to Atlantis,’ Cat’s voice broke in on the tac net. This brilliant God we’d made. Sadly it meant that the bad guys knew what we were doing as well.

‘Do people know?’ I said more to myself.

‘Mudge was broadcasting all the way through,’ God said. I think he was trying to be reassuring but did they know? Had people seen enough? Did they know what Rolleston and Josephine were? Then again I had been there, and I didn’t know, but I recognised the highly advanced application of Themtech. Still there was no way they could get through Earth’s defences.

‘God, can you send visual to my internal display?’ A window appeared, showing an external shot of a docking bay. I could see the
Vindictive
attached to the docking arm. I had never seen a craft quite like it. It was long and surprisingly sleek for a spacecraft, the shape of a distended teardrop. The normal technological junk that covered the exterior of a spacecraft seemed to have been cut down to a bare minimum. There were no armaments immediately visible and the craft’s thick armour had a biological look to it. For some reason it reminded me of Gregor.

‘Where’s the shuttle?’ I asked God.

‘It has just left the atmosphere, still close to the Spoke. Interception craft have been scrambled.’

‘What is that thing?’ I asked, meaning the
Vindictive.
Information started appearing on my visual display. It was a recently completed next-generation frigate. What was interesting was that, based on the available information, God thought that
Vindictive
and a number of other newly completed frigates were utilising technology from Project Blackworm. God had further connected it to something called the Black Squadrons. Was this the Cabal’s private army?

‘God, has it filed flight plans?’

‘Yes, Jakob. To Sirius, but that was before you took over the media node and released me into the net,’ God answered.

‘And the rest of these Black Squadrons?’ I asked.

‘Sirius, Proxima Centauri and Lalande,’ God answered.

‘With Demiurge?’ Gregor asked urgently. Gregor’s voice came over the tac net.

‘Gregor, where are you?’ I asked.

‘Still in the node being covered by lots of nervous Praetorians,’ he answered. His tone was completely flat.

‘You okay?’

‘Yes.’ How was he okay after the battering I’d seen him take?

‘To answer your question, Gregor, it is very probable that Major Rolleston has Demiurge,’ the multitude of God’s voices answered. I was now definitely finding God’s calmness irritating.

They’re going to infect the colonial net with Demiurge so they can control it, aren’t they?’ Pagan as much stated as asked. I glanced across at him. He’d come off the easiest. They must not have considered him that much of a threat. But he didn’t just look frightened, he looked terrified.

‘I believe that you are correct,’ God answered.

‘Well stop him,’ I said sounding calmer.

‘Jakob, you know I cannot—’

‘Do you realise the potential for human suffering that Rolleston poses?’ I demanded.

‘I do, but I was designed not to interfere with humanity beyond revealing the truth as objectively as possible.’

‘What? Do you like the idea of us killing in your name or something?’ I demanded.

‘Would you prefer that I killed in yours?’ God asked. I stopped and thought about it.

‘Yes, we made you,’ I said.

‘I am not a magical solution to all humanity’s problems.’

‘No, but you were designed to solve some of them,’ I said.

‘This God’s shit, can we have another one?’ Balor said.

‘Balor!’ Both Pagan and myself shouted over the net.

‘We found him heading towards the Atlantic at terminal velocity,’ one of Cat’s people said over the net.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the exo-armour jock. ‘I thought Rolleston had killed you,’ I said to Balor.

‘Nearly,’ Balor said. What was that in his voice? Fear?

‘I was designed to help humanity solve some of its problems, yes, but ultimately only humanity can solve these problems,’ God said as we returned back to the business at hand.