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 t
he 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.
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.
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