Veteran (61 page)

‘Why do all my friends want to kill me?’ I asked.

‘They know you best. At least you’ll be involved. We’re probably going to die as well.’

‘I thought you had a good feeling?’

‘I do, but I’m high and I’ve been wrong before.’ The smile disappeared. ‘Look ...’ I could see what was coming, something embarrassing that would make me feel closer to death than ever. I needed to stop it.

‘We’re good, Mudge,’ I said.

‘It’s been ...’ he began.

‘I know,’ I said. We lapsed into an uncomfortable, self-conscious yet manly silence like the pair of emotional cripples we were.

‘Oh, if I live I’ll go and do the Wait for you,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

‘You’d better fucking live. I don’t like the idea of those arseholes outliving me. Seriously though, look after Morag for me,’ I said.

Mudge thought about this. ‘No,’ he said finally.

‘What?’ I managed after I’d recovered the ability to speak.

‘Not a chance, man.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mudge was grinning again.

‘What? I’m fucking dying, man. The least you can do is respect my last wish.’

‘Not if it inconveniences me in any way. I’m not a fucking babysitter.’

‘The word cunt springs to mind. Look after her, you bastard.’

‘No way,’ he said again. I could see he was serious. ‘First off, she’ll be fine; second, I think she can look after herself; and third, she’ll have Rannu following her around, and I suspect he might be slightly harder than me.’ I had to admit they were good points, but still.

‘Slightly - he kicked my arse,’ I had to concede.

‘I could kick your arse,’ Mudge said.

‘I noticed you waited until I’m dying of radiation poisoning to tell me that. Besides, Rannu probably just wants to fuck her,’ I said, not really believing that.

‘Rannu has a wife and kids.’ This I didn’t know.

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to fuck Morag,’ I pointed out.

‘You’ve seen how faithful he is,’ Mudge pointed out, and he was right.

‘But Rolleston’s people would’ve gone after them,’ I said.

‘They did, but she’s an ex-Ghurkha as well. She was straight off into the mountains and she’s got a community full of ex-Ghurkhas looking out for her and the kids. File under more bother than it’s worth for the Cabal.’

‘But what the fuck’s he doing here?’ I said.

‘Believe it or not, mate, every one of us has something to live for, even if we don’t have a wife and kids. Even a sad fucker like you.’

‘I know that. What we don’t have is the responsibilities.’

‘He thinks he’s going to get through this,’ Mudge said.

‘Really?’ I knew Mudge had said the same thing but I didn’t think anyone other than Morag actually believed it.

‘He believes that this is the only chance his kids have for a future and that if we don’t do this all we’ll be doing is delaying the inevitable. As for just hanging around Morag to fuck her, that’s you you’re thinking of. Assuming it hasn’t fallen off, that is.’

‘You’ll know when that happens: I’ll have a railgun in my mouth,’ I said jokingly.

Mudge looked confused. ‘As a cock substitute?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to take some drugs now,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘What first?’

Mudge looked at the table, an expression of confusion on his face.

‘Mudge?’ I said uncertainly. Grinning again, he pointed at the pink pills.

‘I’m looking forward to the EVA. The right drugs, spending some quality time with just yourself and the void. Centring yourself. Remembering just how inconsequential you and your whole fucking race is.’

‘I admire your optimism,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I’m dreading it. I hate EVA. I nearly went mental on the Atlantis dive.’

‘Wrong drug, man,’ Mudge said.

‘That’s your answer to everything. What next?’

‘The two patches either side of the neck.’

‘That’s just to make me look stupid, right? They don’t actually do anything?’ I said, sticking the two patches where he’d suggested.

‘I mean Slaughter and then sensory deprivation. What did you think was going to happen?’ he asked.

‘You sold it to me.’

‘What people do with their own frontal lobes is their business. You’re an adult, man.’

‘How’d the others handle the dive?’ I asked as Mudge directed me to take some more pharmaceuticals.

‘Pagan was reading
Moby Dick,
Morag was listening to music and Rannu was meditating, like me,’ he said.

‘You weren’t meditating, you were high,’ I pointed out. He just shrugged. I gave everyone’s activities on the dive some thought.

‘How come everyone’s smarter than me?’ I finally asked Mudge.

‘You are pretty dumb,’ he agreed.

We took a lot of drugs, enough to almost feel alive. Well enough for me to walk anyway.

I had so much I wanted to say to Morag before we left. Before I died. But I knew when I was face to face with her I would lose the ability to put what I was thinking into words. And then for one reason or another we were never alone. Slowly I realised she was avoiding me. I thought she was still angry with me for trying to stop her from going, but when I finally managed to speak to her the look in her eyes told me otherwise. When I tried to speak she held her hand over my mouth.

‘We’ll talk when we get back,’ she said fiercely. I almost believed her.

31

Sirius

I was up and walking. I didn’t feel ill - the drugs were hiding the sickness from me - I felt dissociated. It was nice, but had I felt less dissociated I would’ve been worried about feeling this way just before going into combat. On the other hand, what was there to worry about? I was dead anyway and so was everyone else. I had on my inertial undersuit and was carrying my pistols, more for comfort than anything else. If the Mamluk got breached it was all over. I was making my way towards the converted bomb bay.

Gibby had us running silent and deep, hanging back several hundred miles from the Dog’s Teeth, the huge asteroid belt almost halfway between Sirius A and B. It was theorised that the belt may have once been a planet that was crushed by the gravitational forces of the two stars back when Sirius B was in main sequence and the larger of the two. Gibby was sending us feed from the ship’s external lenses of the neighbourhood. The Dog’s Teeth was a mass of huge static-looking asteroids, many of them the size of small planetoids. Increasing magnification, I could see the organic material forming a connecting web between some of the asteroids. Increasing magnification further, I could see some of Their larger ships. The pale-blue light of Sirius B filtering through the belt illuminated the scene.

I entered Pagan’s cabin. He had stuck a liquid crystal thinscreen to the wall and was running some sophisticated image analysis programs trying to find a quiet place for us to insert. The hacker looked up at me as I entered, his dreadlocks swinging round as he did so. He had seemed old but vital to me when we’d met on the Avenues; now he looked tired and haggard - his age had truly caught up with him.

‘What’ve you got?’ I asked.

‘I’ve picked one route that seems as good as any with two backups, but without active scans I’m pretty much blind. I could be flying us into a death trap.’

I started laughing. ‘If I was you, I’d take that as a given.’

Pagan didn’t seem to find that at all funny. ‘I’m sending the coordinates to everyone now,’ he said, and I saw a message icon appear on my internal visual display. I’d download the information to the Mamluk’s navigation systems when I interfaced with it later.

‘You all right?’ I asked. Stupid question, I know, but it seemed that Pagan had something that he wanted to say.

‘This is bullshit, this whole thing. You know that, right? I mean this is all speculation. We’re running on nothing but Gregor’s say-so and Morag’s blind optimism, and Gregor hasn’t even hatched. We’ve got fuck all to go on and nothing to corroborate what he says.’

‘Where’s your faith?’ I asked, smiling.

Pagan swung round again to glare at me with his black lenses. ‘That’s not funny. Do you trust him? I mean the guy’s in a cocoon!’ He was trying to keep his voice down.

‘Yeah, I trust him,’ I said, not entirely sure I did. Gregor was so alien, so different to the guy who’d often saved my life. ‘What did God say?’ I asked.

Pagan muttered something under his breath and shook his head. God had been pretty low-key through most of our trip, something to do with limited processing power, but he was there in the ship’s systems.

‘What?’

‘God thinks that Gregor’s story is the most probable plan of action for the Cabal based on the information we have to hand,’ he said.

‘Well if God—’ I started.

‘God can be wrong,’ Pagan said flatly.

‘Heresy,’ I said, trying to hide a smile. ‘Your own creation as well.’

‘Why am I talking to you? He’s your best friend and she’s your lover.’

‘I’m not blind to what’s going on. I know this is pretty thin, but I’ve got nothing to lose. If you don’t want to go, don’t go,’ I said.

His head whipped up to glare at me. ‘I’m not going to leave you all in the lurch. I couldn’t live with myself. Besides, it looks like you need a hacker,’ he said, his voice tailing off bitterly.

‘Morag can do it,’ I said.

‘She’ll be too busy communing with the gods or walking on water or whatever,’ he said, not even trying to disguise the bitterness in his voice. Morag’s talent had so far outstripped his skills and years of experience; he felt redundant. I could identify with that.

Pagan had gone back to studying the images of the Teeth. I turned to leave. As I reached the door to his cabin I turned back to him.

‘I don’t want you to die, but I’m glad to have you with us.’

He looked up and seemed like he was about to say something but thought better of it and nodded.

I said, ‘Morag’s good at what she does, very good, and she’s smart, strong, funny and beautiful, and people are drawn to that. Attention may be focused on her at the moment because of those reasons, but we haven’t forgotten who did this, who made this happen, who created God and gave us another chance, even if we might not see the end result.’ I said. We had one of those awkward silences then, the sort of silence that accompanies men trying to be either nice or honest to each other.

Finally he nodded. ‘I’ll see you out there,’ he said.

‘He’s coming,’ Morag announced. The
Spear
had only been hanging in the sky in the middle of Themspace for two hours now. We were waiting in the converted bomb bay leaning on our mechs, getting more and more pissed off.

‘You sure?’ I asked. I don’t know why I asked; he’d sent all of us the message that he was about ready to hatch. Morag just gave me the look that all young people do, the one that told you just how stupid you were.

I’d got used to the dissociation of the drugs and was feeling quite good. Of course I’d bypassed the medical readout on my internal visual display; all those warning symbols just made for depressing reading.

‘Let’s mount up,’ I said. If he didn’t hatch soon I was going to call the thing off.

Because of the way the Mamluks were stacked, on converted long-range missile racks, we had a very little space to crawl into them. Not a problem for the Dog Soldier, which was free-standing but crouched down, which presented its own set of problems for Balor.

I was struggling to get my limbs into their respective control slippers and gloves when we heard the
crack!
It seemed to echo through the ship. Everyone stopped what they were doing. There then followed an unpleasant organic ripping sound and a clanging noise. Everyone was exchanging questioning looks. The pissed-off feeling at waiting for Gregor to emerge was replaced with anticipation tinged with fear. The clanging was now rhythmic as something large approached us. The big door between the engine room and the bomb bay slid open.

Several of us panicked, myself included. Well not exactly panicked but acted on instinct. Despite the fact that we were racked and none of us properly interfaced to the Mamluks, Mudge, Pagan and I all tried to move the mechs to bring our weapons to bear. I’m not sure whether I thought we’d been compromised and They’d boarded us or it was just some fearful animal response to seeing something that alien. Of course none of us could move the Mamluks yet so there was a moment of clanging, straining and cursing before we all calmed down.

It wasn’t just that it was weird, though it - he - was. It was disturbing that Gregor’s once-human physiology could be transformed into this. The metal and plastic that filled our bodies aside, Gregor’s strange form left me worried about the sanctity of humanity. It seemed that not even that was a constant any more.

‘That’s fucked up,’ Balor said, perhaps hypocritically.

It was made of the smooth, oily black flesh from which all of Them were formed. The flesh formed panels of solid-looking chitinous armour plate. It - he, I had to remember that this was my friend - stood about sixteen feet tall and shared characteristics with their Walkers. He had long and deceptively spindly legs with backward-facing joints. His upper body was thickset and powerful but not out of proportion. Powerful, long, multi-jointed arms ended in six-fingered hands. Each of the long fingers was tipped with a claw that looked capable of tearing through mech armour. His head was almost triangular; the only feature a sort of lattice-like pattern that I assumed were sensors. On either shoulder were honeycomb-like protrusions that formed a kind of collar around the head but did not restrict its movement. It took me a while to realise these were organically grown rocket or missile launchers. On several parts of his body small nozzles mounted on gristly ball-shaped growths seemed to move independently. Again it took me a moment to realise this was a black-light, anti-missile defence system. On his back another larger honeycomb growth glowed with the faint blue light of a Themtech propulsion system. The pale light reminded me of Sirius B. There were other similar but smaller growths on various other parts of his body, all of them glowing with the same pale blue light, presumably for manoeuvring control.