Veteran (8 page)

Half his head was covered in long, matted curly hair, the same salt and pepper as his beard. The other half was ugly military tech, a built-in, fast and powerful computer, but as with most military tech it made absolutely no concession to design aesthetics. I could see more elegant add-ons that had presumably been done by Vicar himself in order to keep up with technology and improve his shelf life as a hacker. In his day he’d been one of the best, and as such was drafted into the Signals Corps, and from there he became Green Slime, Military so-called Intelligence. Vicar was still no slouch today, though presumably he had been superseded, like all of us, by the younger, faster and hungrier.

‘Out!’ I barked at Vicar’s ragged congregation as I limped into the church, holding the wound in my leg together.

‘This is a house of God!’ Vicar screamed at me, drool dangling off his beard. The congregation tried to decide who they were most afraid of. My Mastodon being pulled free of its holster gave me the edge, and the desperate-looking congregation scrambled out the door past Morag and me.

‘Lock us down, Vicar,’ I said. ‘Now!’ Vicar ran an appraising glance over the state I was in. His eyes lingered on Morag, still in her worn basque, before finally looking at the car blanket dripping black ichor onto the floor.

‘What kind of party are we having, Jakob?’ he asked.

‘Lock it down,’ I said again, this time more forcefully. Behind me I heard numerous heavy-sounding locks clank into place on the armoured door, now that the last of the congregation had gone. Vicar smiled his mad, wild smile as concertinaed salvaged armour plate unfolded around the walls and roof of the old church.

‘There used to be a castle on this land as far back as AD 80,’ Vicar said.

‘Fascinating. Did you do it?’ I asked. Vicar was staring at Morag, undisguised lust in his eyes as they travelled up her body. He moved closer to her as I grimaced and tried to hold the wound in my leg closed. Morag flinched slightly but held her ground as Vicar reached out and touched her.

‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication,’ he said quietly, as he used his soft fleshy fingers to move her head from one side to the other, his voice low, breathy and excited.

Suddenly he yanked the travel blanket from her, and its contents fell to the ground with a wet thump. Vicar looked furious. I wasn’t sure if it was for show or not. His voice rose until he was shouting furiously into the frightened young girl’s face.

‘And there appeared another wonder in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his heads.’ I really didn’t have time for this. This was why I hated dealing with hackers.

‘This is important, Vicar,’ I said harshly. His head twitched round to look at me. ‘Did you do it?’

‘You owe me,’ he said, smiling and then casting another glance at Morag.

‘Did you do it?’ I asked again. I was beginning to feel angry despite the fact that ostensibly I was trying to get Vicar to do me a favour.

‘Do you know where we are now?’ he further irritated me by asking rhetorically. ‘I mean humans as a people?’

‘Did you do it!’ I was looking around, trying to think of a contingency. Had Vicar hacked into Dundee’s traffic control and sent misleading information about our landing? Was he using ECM to block my transponder?

‘We have opened the second seal; war is on the land,’ he said, quieter now, the glint of mania still present in his eyes. I opened my mouth to angrily demand an answer to my question again. ‘Of course I fucking did it!’ he snapped. ‘You owe me.’ His gaze went to Morag again and then to the alien bleeding black ichor onto the stone floor of the church.

They’re not aliens, you know,’ he said. I gritted my teeth as the painkillers I had taken for the burns were either beginning to wear off or just weren’t up to the task. I limped over to one of the pews.

‘Have you still got the med suite?’ I asked. My question seemed to shake him out of his thoughts. He looked up from the wounded alien and then down at my leg. He nodded.

‘You’re wounded,’ he said.

‘Not for me,’ I replied, and then pointed at the alien. ‘For that.’ Vicar looked down at it, seemed to give some consideration to the matter and then shrugged. He picked its light form up and walked down past the altar and into the nave. I stood up and followed at a limp, Morag with me.

There were various banks of electronic equipment here. Most of it was for net running or building and maintaining electronic equipment, but there was some ancient jury-rigged medical diagnostic and treatment equipment. I was being generous when I described it as a suite.

‘This is unlikely to do any good,’ Vicar said. ‘Doubtless Their physiology is as incompatible as their psychology.’ He began hooking up the alien to his equipment. I searched around on top of one of his other dirty workbenches until I managed to find some accelerant and a knitter and went to work on my leg. Moments later Morag handed me some salve to clean and soothe my burns.

‘This is weird,’ Vicar muttered as he began firing up the equipment.

‘Oh, you think?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Your background notwithstanding,’ he said, meaning my time in the SAS. ‘I was seconded to Military Intelligence during my active service and we knew nothing about Them. We knew no more than the average squaddie and we could never get hold of one of Them or any of Their tech. It was always destroyed before it got to us. All we knew was They wanted to kill us, that They hated us.’ He frowned, presumably as he received some information on his internal visual display.

‘You said they weren’t aliens?’ Morag asked nervously. Vicar turned to look at her. Once he had had an eyeful he started talking again, though still staring at her.

‘There is no apparent purpose to Them. They appear to exist only to inflict suffering on humanity. They are here to test us.’ Morag seemed to be drinking in his words.

‘So what are They?’ she asked falteringly. I knew what was coming. I’d heard variations of this spiel before.

‘Demons,’ Vicar said, as dramatically as he could manage. Morag looked up at me and I shrugged.

‘He’s not a demon,’ she muttered quietly and then looked down at her hands. Vicar either didn’t hear her or chose not to respond. He got the Ninja settled into the cradle of the ad hoc medical suite and turned to look at me.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing with this?’ he asked, nodding at the creature. I realised I didn’t really have an answer, at least not one that made sense. What was I doing? I was taking the word of a group of rig hookers over my chain of command and committing treason against my entire species at the same time.

‘I want to talk to it,’ I said. Vicar’s head jerked around to look at me, his businesslike manner gone.

‘Who’re you running from?’ he demanded.

‘Rolleston,’ I said. Vicar nodded.

‘Understand this,’ he said, pointing at the creature. ‘Those are the servants of the adversary. If They speak They will only offer lies and we have no business communing with Them.’ He turned back to look at the creature.

‘That sounds like Rolleston,’ I said, though I didn’t really mean it. Vicar was busy examining his machines, a look of concentration on his face.

‘Repent,’ he said, though clearly his mind was on other things as he searched through an old filing cabinet. ‘Or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.’ He found what he was looking for, pulling out a solid-state memory cube, something that could hold an unimaginable amount of information. He placed a couple of jacks into two of the plugs in the back of his skull, plugging the other end of one into the medical suite and the other into the memory block. I stood up.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Vicar ignored me. His eyes rolled back up into their sockets, an affectation that signalled he was in the net. I took this opportunity to search around Vicar’s workspace until I found what I was looking for. There were a number of different ECM blocks. I picked what I thought was the best one and ran a diagnostic on it. It wasn’t working right so I chose another and another until I found one that was still functioning properly.

‘That’ll cost you,’ a disembodied voice said. Morag jumped, but it was Vicar, in the net but presumably still linked up to the internal surveillance systems of the church. The voice came from a speaker on the pulpit.

‘How are you intending on paying for all this, by the way?’ Vicar’s tinny disembodied voice asked.

‘I’m sure we can work something—’ I began, not really having a good answer. Fortunately the alien lost all cohesion at that moment, distracting us from the topic of money. One second it was solid, the next there was black liquid raining down on the stone floor of the church and soaking through the patched fabric cradle of the medical suite. I looked at it in astonishment, though I don’t know why. I’d seen this happen to the aliens all through the Sirius system, but for some reason here, in my hometown, it still seemed to come as a surprise. Morag let out a little whimpering noise.

‘Vicar, what’s going on?’ I demanded.

‘It’s all right,’ came the tinny voice from the pulpit’s speaker. ‘It was pretty much dead when it got here,’ said Vicar coming out of his net-running trance. ‘But I managed to save some of it.’ He looked thoughtful and surprisingly sane.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. I was beginning to think that I had risked my life for even less than usual.

‘It’s like I said, we never got our hands on one before. Their dissolution was always too perfect, all that was left was genetic junk.’ He then lapsed into apparent deep thought again.

‘So?’ I demanded. This seemed to break him from some kind of reverie.

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, well, according to the diagnostics I’ve run it appears They are some kind of bio-technological construct. Though it is just possible that They have occurred naturally, or rather They have much more control over how They evolve. That would explain the different castes, the Ninjas and the Berserks.’ This was old news, it had been posited for some time. I couldn’t really see how it would help. ‘The technology is almost like naturally-occurring nanites, only it’s liquid. It’s difficult to say what these aliens are. The race itself could be the individual cells and each bioform may be a colony or even an entire civilisation of Them.’

‘Well that’s very interesting, Vicar, but what does it mean?’ I asked. There was only so long we could stay in the church before Rolleston worked out where we were.

‘I’m not sure,’ he mused. ‘What it does mean is that our intelligence should have had this info years ago.’

‘Shoot to kill?’ I said, meaning the policy of utter eradication whenever we encountered them. Vicar shrugged. Then something occurred to me. ‘With technology like that, why not go viral? They could wipe us out in moments.’

‘I don’t know, perhaps some kind of societal taboo? Perhaps they see it as a form of suicide, but with this information we could certainly do it to them.’

‘If we hand this over then we can end the war?’ I asked.

‘If we hand this over then we provide our masters with the means to end the war,’ he said. He sounded doubtful. But this was a weapon; our masters liked weapons and they also liked victory. ‘And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the Earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword,’ Vicar said as he straightened up to face me.

‘I don’t understand any of that,’ I said.

‘War is loosed upon the land, the second seal is open,’ he replied, talking to me as though I were a particularly dense child. ‘Perhaps the war is the important thing. It’s the taking part that matters after all.’

‘What are you talking about? You mean they wouldn’t use this information?’

Vicar just shrugged.

‘I don’t think we should give them the info,’ Morag burst out. Both of us turned to look at her. She looked frightened, as if she wished she hadn’t spoken. ‘I mean, would it be that easy? To reprogram their bionanites to attack them?’ She seemed to have a much better grasp of what was going on than I did.

‘It depends on how cooperative They’re being,’ said Vicar. ‘I hacked the creature, or rather it gave me entry, and with technology that sophisticated it should have taken me a lot longer. I should have needed to build a whole new set of equipment to translate the alien data and I should have had a tremendous fight on my hands against alien intrusion countermeasures.’ I still wasn’t following and it must have been obvious by the look on my face. There were rumours that certain technology would allow meat hacks through interface plugs, but if it existed then it was blacker than black. ‘All DNA is information, but before it died it made certain information compatible with my systems.’ This still wasn’t making any sense to me. I hated information technology.

‘You downloaded it,’ Morag said, surprising me again. Vicar nodded.

‘That was what the solid-state memory block was for,’ I said, pleased I could finally make a contribution to the conversation. Vicar nodded again.

‘It’s isolated in there. I’ve set up a routine that’s building it an environment.’

‘I want to speak with it,’ I said.

‘Then you talk with the adversary ...’ Vicar began.

‘And hear only lies,’ I finished for him.

‘He’s not like that,’ Morag said.

‘You are just a whore, one of his already, and you have been seduced,’ Vicar said, getting back into character. I couldn’t understand why Morag looked so upset. Surely she’d heard crap like this before, and probably worse.

‘Why do you talk like that?’ she asked. Vicar ignored her.

‘Religious mania,’ I answered for him. ‘A lot of hackers get it. They say they see things in the net, the face of God, shit like that. It’s the dislocation of net running, I think. It’s like isolation and they start to hallucinate. Something about it triggers the parts of our brain to do with religion; they all end up like this or madder.’ I left out that Vicar had been on Operation Spiral, an attempt by the UK and US governments to hack Their communications infrastructure.