Veteran (58 page)

Pagan said what I’d been thinking but she was intent on going. She told us that she had to go. Pagan asked her if it was her or Ambassador that wanted to go. Morag silenced him with a look too.

Twenty minutes later Pagan, looking like a beaten man, changed his mind and agreed to come with us. I asked him if he was sure; he said he was. With Morag going Rannu was in, which I was thankful for - the quiet Nepalese was a solid trooper.

The air marshal got us the ship and the other gear we needed. They even delivered it to High Atlantis for us. The Atlantean authorities laid on a shuttle to take us up. Probably because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with us after Cat bullied their security services into not arresting everyone.

The shuttle’s airlock had been about to close when Mudge reappeared.

‘I figured this is going to be a pretty good story as well. Besides, clearly we’re invincible,’ he’d said.

‘Publicity whore,’ I replied.

‘Not just publicity, mate,’ he’d said, but the banter sounded hollow, forced.

‘Invincible?’ Pagan asked. I’d been thinking the same thing: which fight had Mudge been at?

‘Only Buck died,’ Mudge said, grinning. There was an appalled silence but Mudge didn’t stop grinning. Then Gibby started to laugh.

So everyone was in - strange how I couldn’t get happy about that. I’d spent much of the shuttle’s ascent trying not to get caught by Morag staring at her. She was right: her decision was nothing to do with me. It just seemed such a waste.

We couldn’t pronounce the name of the ship but roughly translated it came out as Spear of Understanding, so we just called it
Spear.
It was a long-range strike craft, the spaceship equivalent of a long-distance bomber. Stealth capable, it was designed to penetrate Themspace and deliver its payload at asteroid habitats or command ships. The funny thing was, long-range strike craft had been developed from deep-space, system-survey craft. I wondered how long we would have to wait before we could decommission our weapons of war and use them for more peaceful purposes.

Like some of the lighter frigates, many LRSCs were often refitted to use as special forces delivery platforms for jobs that required slightly more finesse than you could achieve with a guided missile. Well, that’s what they’d told us in the Regiment anyway. The elite Kenyan Reconnaissance Commandos had refitted the
Spear
for just such a use.

We’d inherited most of the commandos’ gear. Most importantly the refitted bomb bay had contained six Mamluk light mechs. In the same class as the Wraiths, the Mamluks were a more up-to-date light mech/exo-armour with improved stealth and sensor capabilities. Lying prone in their modified missile racks, their matt-black, sensor-absorbing, featureless, almost organic outlines were beautiful to look at. It didn’t matter how much you hated the military, if you had served then you still got a thrill from the hardware. The Mamluks were superb pieces of kit, only the best for equatorial special forces, I guessed. They were outfitted for vacuum operations and already had their propulsion/manoeuvring fins attached. Not quite as strong as the Wraiths, the Mamluks’ interfaces and responses from the servos were a lot faster, meaning they would react quicker than the older exo-armour model.

There was also a slightly older American-made Dog Soldier mech. The Dog Soldier was the only special forces mech ever designed to fulfil a fire-support role. It was not as stealthy or as fast as Mamluks or Wraiths, but was more heavily armed and armoured. Balor had arranged to have the Dog Soldier delivered to the
Spear
while we’d been en route on the shuttle. Now that we were under sail he was busy modifying it with Pagan’s help so that he could fit into it.

I was worried about the Dog Soldier’s lesser stealth capabilities but I was pretty sure we’d need its firepower. The Mamluks were armed with the most modern derivative of the chain-fed, 20-millimetre Retributor railgun and back-mounted, vertically launched, smartlink-targeted, anti-armour missiles. The Dog Soldier carried the heavier Vengeance 30-millimetre chain-fed railgun with an over-slung, magazine-fed, 105-millimetre mass driver. Basically the mass driver was a semi-automatic, much larger-calibre railgun. It also had an anti-missile/anti-personnel, ball-mounted, laser-defence system and two shoulder-mounted, smartlink-targeted missile batteries. I just hoped that Balor got it ready on time. I also wondered how he’d managed to find it and get it delivered to the
Spear
that quickly. The Mamluks came in at just over ten feet tall, the Dog Soldier was closer to fifteen feet.

Rannu, his face still covered in a medpak, was running Morag through extra-vehicular-activity combat simulations for the Mamluks. I didn’t like the idea, but if she was coming she should at least be as ready as we could get her.

As soon as we’d set sail Gibby had begun tinkering with the LRSC’s controls. I didn’t like space travel at the best of times, so Gibby mucking around with the
Spear’s
controls while we were moving faster than the speed of light did not go down well - especially when he accidentally managed to shut down life support for two hours - but he seemed to have everything working now. He rarely slept as he was speeding most of the time, and you could usually hear his strangely subdued and melancholy music drifting through the ship.

I’m not sure what Mudge was doing, probably masturbating and recording it with his eye lenses again, and I was busy dying. So we all kind of had something to do, but what we couldn’t do was plan. Gregor had been very insistent but vague about what the plan was. All we knew was that it would be EVA, my least favourite things to do. But we couldn’t work on the plan while we were under sail, while we had eight days to do so, because Gregor was in a fucking cocoon. This pissed me off and not just because it was deeply not normal.

Mudge had discovered it on our first day under sail. It had taken him quite some time to convince us it was real, as he’d been taking recreational psychotropics at the time. Eventually he showed us footage he’d shot in the engine room. It was a huge, resinous-looking pod held upright in the corner by the power-containment equipment. Some power lines had been spliced into the cocoon. Gibby checked the systems and confirmed a significant power bleed. I was too sick to go and look myself, or rather I was saving all the best drugs for the job, but from the footage the pod looked to be about eighteen feet tall.

Gibby reviewed the security-lens recordings from the engine room. The grainy low-quality picture showed Gregor entering the engine room. He was naked, his huge off-kilter physiology making it seem all the more obscene. He was carrying a tool kit. People like Gregor and I knew our way around an engine room because we had been trained to sabotage them. He uncoupled a very heavy gauge power cable. All of us then winced and were thankful for the low quality of the image when he pushed the cable into his flesh where the base of a human spine would be. It looked like he’d dislocated his arm several times to get the cable in place. Then he’d just leant against the wall. That got boring so we fast-forwarded it.

‘He’s got a big cock,’ Mudge said. We all turned to stare at him. ‘I’m just saying,’ he said defensively. We turned our attention back to the image. Gregor was shaking. His flesh beneath the skin seemed to be writhing, flowing and bulging of its own accord as his shaking began to look like a serious seizure.

‘What’s that?’ Morag asked, and then made a disgusted noise. Gregor was producing a substance that looked like viscous black bile. Before long he was vomiting it all over himself. We were all disgusted, but of course we all kept watching. The black substance adhered to him and solidified into the hard resinous substance of the cocoon. Soon he was covered in the cocoon, only his head, a fountain for this black vomit, showing. Eventually that was covered as well. We were quiet for a bit, just looking at the image of the solidifying cocoon.

‘What’s the chance of him becoming a butterfly?’ I asked. Mudge started giggling, seemingly uncontrollably.

‘What the fuck’s he doing?’ Gibby had asked. He was strumming one of Buck’s guitars. We were all in the quarters that Morag and I shared. I was propped up and coughing blood into a bucket every now and then. The interface that Gibby had set up meant that he could pretty much control the ship from anywhere on-board.

‘Maybe he’s just sleeping?’ I suggested. ‘Conserving energy?’ I realised how weak this sounded.

‘He’s drawing a lot of energy,’ Gibby pointed out.

‘Which he has to use for something,’ Pagan said thoughtfully.

‘This is quite interesting,’ he finished and lapsed back into silence. Morag, Rannu, Gibby and I all looked at him expectantly. Mudge was examining his own stomach.

‘And?’ I managed before coughing racked my body again.

Pagan looked up, his thoughts disturbed. ‘Basically, They are, as far as we can tell, autonomous colonies of what we consider to be naturally occurring nanites, right?’

We all nodded as if we knew what he was talking about. Mudge nodded very enthusiastically.

‘Well, presumably he’s using the energy to manufacture more of... well, himself, I guess,’ Pagan said. ‘But I am guessing.’

‘So it’s a transformation?’ Morag asked. Once again, although Gregor sounded and to a degree thought like my friend, I was having it driven home just how alien this thing actually was.

‘I would imagine so,’ Pagan said.

‘Butterfly!’ Mudge added.

‘Into what?’ Gibby asked, running his fingers up the fretboard of his guitar.

‘Butterfly!’ Mudge interjected again. Morag tried to kick him.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Pagan answered.

‘A warrior,’ Rannu said. He sounded pretty sure of himself.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Perhaps. It would certainly be a form that will be of use to him, and hopefully us, for whatever this mission will involve. Perhaps he’s disguising himself as one of Them, I don’t know.’

‘What if he wakes up and decides he wants to eat us all?’ Gibby asked. ‘Or insem ... insem ...’

‘Inseminate us?’ Morag asked.

‘Yep,’ Gibby said.

‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

‘Or eat us then inseminate us?’ Gibby suggested. We just looked at him.

‘There’s very little on this ship worth inseminating,’ I pointed out.

‘Hey!’ Morag objected.

‘I’d inseminate you,’ Gibby said. He was largely going through the motions of banter. He knew what was expected of him but his heart wasn’t really in it. Morag smiled and I glared at him.

‘Thanks, Gibby. That’s sweet,’ Morag said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, letting out an exaggerated sigh. ‘There’s very little worth inseminating on this ship bar Morag, as I’m too sick. Basically, I think you’re safe except from maybe Mudge.’

‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

Gibby glared at him. ‘I want you to know I’m heavily armed.’

‘It is a serious point ...’ Pagan said.

‘What, Mudge inseminating Gibby?’ I asked, unable to help myself. Pagan tried to ignore me.

‘I mean what comes out of the cocoon and whether or not it’s going to be hostile to us.’

‘Why wait until now?’ Morag asked. ‘Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to take us out.’

I wondered if her life had become so strange that things like someone cocooning himself were becoming commonplace to her.

‘Besides, we’re well armed,’ I pointed out. Even as I said this I knew what a stupid thing it was to say.

‘Did you see him on the Spoke?’ Rannu asked. Everyone went quiet. I didn’t really have an answer, or rather I did, but I didn’t think they wanted to hear that we’d all just get killed.

‘So what do we do?’ Gibby asked after an uncomfortable silence.

‘We wait,’ Morag said. She sounded a lot less troubled by this than I was.

‘But we don’t know what Gregor has planned. We don’t know where Crom is going to be or how he intends to deal with it or even get to it. We don’t know if the Black Squadrons will be there or anything,’ I said. I was pissed off about this. If Gregor wanted to turn into a beautiful butterfly he should’ve done it on his own time.

‘Where are we going to arrive?’ Rannu asked Gibby.

‘Far side of Sirius, way beyond fleet-controlled space and deep in Them space. Gregor gave me the coordinates. He also said we had to be very quiet when we got there.’

‘We’re going to the Teeth?’ Pagan asked. Gibby nodded. There was an uneasy silence in the cabin that I decided to break.

‘Well, we know it’s going to be a stealth operation,’ I said, and that was about it. That was about all we knew. I was doing my second least favourite thing, space travel, on my way to do my least favourite thing, EVA, to my least favourite place, Sirius, deep inside territory controlled by a whole alien race that was still hostile towards us.

I was listening to the spacecraft. That’s kind of a contradiction. It was very quiet, though you could feel the hum of the power plant throughout the vessel, but it was something you were more aware of than could actually hear. Every movement made a kind of booming echo through the skeletal black metal of the ship’s interior.

I was just lying there, listening and dying. It was a bad day. I’d had two heart attacks despite the augmentations to my heart. Any time I’d tried to speak I just coughed up blood, and during one particularly bad fit of coughing I’d actually managed to bring up a component of my artificial lung. Rannu had kept me alive - it turned out that he was a pretty accomplished medic. I was alive because of Rannu, the automed and Mudge’s ad hoc narcotic pharmacy.

We were four days in and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to Sirius, let alone back to Earth. I hadn’t been expecting Balor when the door opened. I’d seen very little of him on the journey. He’d mostly been working on the Dog Soldier and I reckoned his warrior credo didn’t cope well with weakness like mine. I think he thought I should have walked out into the wilderness to die so I could stop using up the tribe’s valuable resources. I also think the kicking he’d got at Rolleston’s hands had given him a fright. I looked at his chest. They had rebuilt his chest armour on the Atlantis Spoke, recreated it as well as they could. I wasn’t entirely sure it matched the rest of his skin. Still, he’d brought a bottle of good whisky and I was determined to have some of that regardless of how bad I felt and how much damage it did.