Veteran (7 page)

‘No,’ Morag said, suddenly sounding more confident. I looked at the human shield and then Morag. Wonderful, I thought to myself.

‘So you’ve been in this thing’s presence for a couple of hours and you’re ready to die for it?’ I asked.

‘It’s hope.’ The girl turned to the alien. ‘No,’ she said, tears beginning to well in her eyes for the first time since I’d entered the room. The young prostitutes began disentangling themselves from the alien lying on the cot. Now all of them were crying. Morag turned to me. ‘It doesn’t understand why you could hurt a member of your own race. It doesn’t understand why we’re treated like this. It doesn’t understand why everyone does not have as much food and safety as everyone else,’ she said through the tears. I didn’t really have an answer. My childhood had been bliss compared to hers and her only way off the Rigs was the draft lottery.

Now I had a clear shot at the alien, I aimed. Once more I caught sight of my distorted burnt features reflected in the black pool of its body. We both looked like monsters. It did not matter if it was talking to the kids, controlling them, I had to kill it, like so many others, to get the Major off my back and return to normality. The fights, the races, the booze and the sense booths, my normality. I lowered my gun.

‘Okay,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘Ask it why They fight us.’ Morag seemed to think for a while.

‘Defence,’ she said finally.

‘Bollocks.’ I raised the revolver and started to squeeze the trigger. Then I relaxed and gently pushed the hammer down and lowered the gun. I’m still not sure I could tell you why. I just wasn’t in the presence of malevolence, and it was my instinct telling me this. The instinct that had come with the original meat, not the metal and plastic I had become. There was audible relief from the prostitutes.

‘Thank you,’ Morag said.

‘Great, just great,’ I said. What the fuck was I doing? This was treason. I was siding with an enemy I hated and who wanted to destroy me and everyone who looked like me. And why was I doing this? I was doing this because of the say-so of a few cheap rig whores.

I was sure I was being mind-controlled or this was part of some new psychological strategy of Theirs. But the people telling me not to kill the alien were people I had no reason to distrust. The man telling me to kill the alien I neither liked nor trusted. The scale of it was terrifying: it was too big and I couldn’t possibly take responsibility for this.

The touch of the thing on my burnt skin was disgusting. It was like some kind of abrasive vinyl substance just beneath the surface of black water. It was not that it was an unpleasant sensation I was receiving from tactile feedback sensors and the few remaining nerves that hadn’t been burnt, it was just what the thing rippling in my arms represented what I’d seen its brethren do. Colonial township after colonial township, their civilian populations completely butchered regardless of age, nobody spared, their remains displayed in warning. Villages that seemed to be painted in human flesh, fences made of human skin.

I couldn’t explain what I was doing, why I was carrying this thing to the Forbidden Pleasure’s helicopter pad, where MacFarlane’s aircar was parked. I was still assuming it was mind control. Nor did I have the slightest idea of what I was intending to do with it. Morag walked with me.

‘What are you doing?’ I growled.

‘I’m coming with you, Mister.’ I really didn’t have time for this. I turned round to the girl, and she looked up at me, brown eyes wide and wet.

‘A lot of bad people are going to be coming for me—’

‘But they’ll come here first,’ she said. She had a point.

‘I’ll drop you somewhere,’ I said and continued towards the aircar. She had to jog to keep up. The lock burner opened the car and I placed the alien across the back seat. Morag climbed into the passenger seat. The Saab smelt damp and faintly of shit and blood. People had been hurt in it. I overrode its security before starting it up and jacking into the car’s system. I didn’t like some of the diagnostics I was seeing on my internal visual display but the pimp’s car would have to suffice. With a whine the car took roughly to the air. We climbed out above the jumbled superstructure of the Rigs. The sparse and intermittent lights and trash fires winked at us through ancient, corroded and tangled metal.

‘Morag,’ I said to the prostitute who was cradling one of humanity’s enemies on the back seat. She wriggled free and leaned towards me. ‘I need you to reach into the big pocket on my jeans and remove what you find there.’ She looked at me sceptically. ‘Just do it,’ I ordered her brusquely. She did as I asked and pulled out a smooth black rectangle of expensive tech. ‘Jack me in,’ I told her. She pulled on the jack, reeling out the cord and pushing it into one of the four plugs in the back of my neck. I felt it click into place beneath my skin, once a deeply unpleasant sensation, now commonplace.

‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice showing curiosity despite her underlying fear. The nose of the aircar sank as I powered it forward and headed towards the neon of central Dundee.

‘Most soldiers and all special ops people have transponders implanted in them so they can be tracked on the battlefield.’ I nodded towards the black block she’d just jacked me into. ‘That is an electronic countermeasures block. I’m going to jam my signal.’ I left out that the transponders were also of use for when the amount of plastic and metal outweighed your soul and turned you into a machine deep in the grip of psychosis. I also left out that while on active service most special ops types could switch their transponders on and off. For those times when it was important nobody knew where you were or what you were doing.

Everything went white, bright white. My flash compensators tried with little success to damp down the brightness. My audio filters shut down so I felt rather than heard the explosion. They were still letting in the frequencies that allowed me to hear Morag’s terrified scream and the sound of metal being punctured. The aircar was hurled forward as I desperately tried to control the machine. Through the drugs I was dimly aware of the heat and the signals that would normally be pain coming from my leg. I was also dimly aware of wetness on my trouser leg and wetness of a different consistency coating me. I realised I was tasting alien.

As the bright light subsided I managed to piece together what had happened while brutally bringing the car’s backup system online. Morag was sobbing silently; I think she was too scared to make a noise. Foul-smelling steam surrounded the aircar. Debris floated or fell past us, some of it raining down on the car. I could see the outside through a hole in the floor of the car. There was a matching one in the ceiling and in my badly bleeding leg.

Behind us there was a steaming crater where the Forbidden Pleasure used to be. The crater was rapidly being filled with the polluted river water of the Tay. Even after everything I had seen I was still appalled that Rolleston, or his masters, would use an orbital weapon on an Earth-side city. The alien had also been hit, shot through the car. Much of its liquid flesh coated the inside of the car, though there was still a semi-solid, faintly humanoid mass on the terrified Morag’s lap.

It was Bran, it had to be, somewhere on one of the rigs. Probably perilously close to where she’d called in the orbital strike. She had us in the crosshairs of her smartlinked sniper railgun. She’d killed the alien, tidied up the witnesses and given me a warning shot because there was no way she would have missed unless she chose to. Blood was pissing out of my leg, pooling in the footwell and even leaking out of the hole made by Bran’s railgun.

I managed to keep the Saab in the air as I reached into one of the many pockets of my long coat and removed a stim patch and attached it to my neck. It would keep me awake but I needed to do something about the bleeding; my self-repair systems were good but I was losing way too much blood. I cursed myself for not having brought my first-aid kit. The split screen on my internal visual display showed me what was going on around the aircar. I was controlling the vehicle through my interface; this left my hands free to search for an in-car medical kit. I found one but most of its contents were long gone.

Morag was still sobbing quietly. Her world, regardless of how bad it had been, had just disappeared in a moment of light and heat.

‘Morag?’ I said. She ignored me. I could see her fading into shock. ‘Morag!’ Her head jerked around to face me. ‘Can you fly this?’ I asked her. I already knew the answer but I wanted her mind on something else. She shook her head, her lips tight and bloodless, face pale under her make-up. I cracked a smile on the burnt visage of my ruined face. ‘That’s unfortunate.’ She gaped at me before my completely inappropriate humour made her smile and shake her head. I held the wound on my leg closed and headed for the city.

6

Dundee

I broke into the car’s autopilot systems and gave it illegal instructions. I sent out a heavily coded text, cycling it through the cryptography sub-routines of my ECM block and screaming it to emphasise the urgency. The Rigs were no longer beneath us; we were over dry land now. Beneath us were the huddled makeshift stalls, rafts and junks of the harbour markets. Many of the people were making their way to the riverside to see the aftermath of the explosion. I suspected that many of them thought that They had come and were attacking Earth. After all. They would obviously start with Dundee, I thought, smiling to myself.

The bright commercial lights of Dundee’s Ginza were up ahead of us. Flashing neon hologramatic signs simultaneously offering us all the happiness that material goods could offer while warning us of the sacrifices that we all had to make because of the war. There was also news from the front, the duelling strobes of light from yet another space battle above Dog 1, cut with ground action, armoured vehicles, mechs and tired infantry wading through mud in one direction and air ambulances going in the other.

We were on the outskirts of the true Ginza. Scum like us were kept out by heavy police and store security presence. Outside the true Ginza were the knock-off shops and cheap food stalls that the rest of us could afford. All of it hidden beneath the raised toll roads that salary men and women used to get to work and to go shopping. The true Ginza looked like a bright fairy-tale world compared to what the salary men and women called Underside and the rest of us called Dundee.

I nosed the aircar down one of the off ramps into Commercial Street. People eyed the wealth of an aircar suspiciously as we landed. Most of them were just people trying to make a living in Dundee’s non-corporate grey economy, but I could see the usual spatter of ultra-violents and conscientious-objecting gangsters. Some of the more proactive ones made their way towards the car as the door slid open. I turned back to the rear seat.

‘Can you carry it?’ I asked Morag urgently. She nodded, her face a tear-stained mess of cheap make-up. ‘Find something to wrap it in. Nobody can see it, do you understand me?’ She didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Morag!’ I said. She looked up at me.

‘They’ll be tracking us?’ she asked.

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

The bonnet of the car slid back accordion-style at my command and I removed the car interface jack from my plug and began tampering with the aircar’s fuel cell. A little trick insurgency training had taught us.

‘You all right, pal?’ I heard a voice behind me ask. ‘Your leg sore?’ I turned around to find myself looking at an ugly young man with bad cybernetics and even worse skin. He was wearing this year’s iteration of what the street scum around town wore. He took one look at my burnt features and general poor mood and backed off, his hand coming out of his armoured tracksuit top. ‘No problem, pal,’ he said, having decided against robbing us.

I turned back to the car and finished what I was doing as Morag got out. She had wrapped it in the tartan car blanket that seems to come free with every car in Scotland. The blanket was dripping with its ichor. I gave the ECM block its last instruction then removed the jack and dropped it into the footwell of the aircar, praying that Vicar had done what I’d asked.

‘C’mon,’ I said, and we headed towards the corner of Commercial and High Street. There stood an ancient pre-Final Human Conflict stone church. Moving light from within the building backlit the stained-glass windows covered in hundreds of years of city grime. Behind us the aircar took off. Morag watched it head down the High Street beneath the raised roadways. It wouldn’t defeat satellite surveillance but hopefully it would slow Rolleston down enough to buy us some time. The only problem was I had lost my ECM block. I would need another or they would get my transponder.

‘Isn’t that really illegal?’ she asked.

‘Treason, associating with prostitutes.’ I turned to look at her. ‘I think you’re a bad influence on me.’ She managed a weak smile again but I think it may have been for my benefit. Hand inside my long coat, I approached the thick armoured double doors. The fact that they opened as I pushed gave me hope.

‘... the white light was not Them! No! It was not one of their infernal weapons! The white light was from the sky, from heaven, it was judgement! The spear of God, a warning to those who would indulge in unholy couplings!’ To give Vicar his credit he could adapt and improvise to make his sermons topical.

Inside was bare undressed stone. The stained-glass windows had holograms projected onto them. The stylised hellish vistas gave the inside of the church a reddish glow that seemed somehow warm, belying the horrific imagery. There were a number of plastic pews, where the truly wretched and miserable sat being lambasted by Vicar’s sermons. Behind the altar and off to one side I could see Vicar’s work area, various tools and banks of equipment, much of it jury-rigged or built from scratch by himself.

Vicar stood in the pulpit. Presumably it had once been made of wood but that had probably been traded, or burnt for fuel a long time ago. Now it was just a metal and plastic frame.

Vicar himself looked the same, maybe a little older, a little wilder around his already wild eyes. He wore a black vest and dog collar, his powerful frame just beginning to go to seed. He had a long unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, and still-human eyes if you ignored the look in them.