Coward

by Gavin Smith

  Mother took in his earnestness, trying to calm herself, fighting the omnipresent anger. She knew he was not the enemy.

  “I know,” she sighed, calming down. “It just seems so far removed from… everything. Like a luxury, you know?”

  “All the more reason we have to listen to our ancestors.”

  “We are so far from home.” Mother had never set foot on Ao Te Aroa; nor had her parents. She often wondered how she could feel homesick for a place she had never been to. The rational part of her knew it was a fantasy, a promised land that could never live up to her expectations. She knew it was the irrational part that Tailgunner’s ferocious mythologies played upon, but she also knew there was no deception on his part. Maybe it was all a comfort tale; maybe that was what she – they – needed.

  Tailgunner wrapped his arms around her. She felt comforted but knew it made her look weak.

  “It’s not faith anymore,” Tailgunner whispered to her. She gently pushed herself free and silently shook her head, signalling not at the moment.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “Let’s call the others.”

  * * *

  Dog Face and Big Henry were looking troubled. Strange had hugged Tailgunner and held onto him as he told the story of his encounter with the God of Night in his sanctum.

  “What?” he asked them when he had finished. Dog Face and Henry were still looking uncomfortable.

  “Its just so…you know…” Henry managed.

  “Fantastic?” Tailgunner asked. Henry nodded and Dog Face kicked at the stone beneath his feet. “Yeah, that will happen when you speak to gods,” he deadpanned.

  “You want us to switch off all comms? The Mechs, our personnel stuff?” Henry asked.

  “If it was a hack or ECM, or any of the other stuff I normally do, or any other form of intel, would you question me?” Tailgunner asked.

  “This is different,” Big Henry began. “Hackers see stuff; the way they’re wired, it does something to the parts of your mind that handles religious stuff. Your…” Henry stopped. He seemed embarrassed.

  “My imagination?” Tailgunner asked. “What have we been doing? Has it all been lip service to our ancestors?” Tailgunner was a calm man and he did not anger easily, but Mother could sense his disappointment and maybe even a feeling of being betrayed.

  “It’s a lot to ask,” Dog Face growled.

  “Switching off your comms to see what happens?” Tailgunner asked.

  “That leaves us tactically isolated. Exposed. Not to mention the reaming we’ll get.” Mother had to admit that Dog Face had a point. About the Tactical Exposure, at least – she did not care about Martins.

  Strange apparently saw it another way: she just walked over and slapped Dog Face as hard as she could. Dog Face had not seen it coming and Strange was probably the fastest of all of them, which was why she drove the Scout Mech.

  “What the fuck!” Dog Face’s head whipped back, his canines bared.

  “Enough,” Mother said quietly. Strange backed away from Dog Face, her expression defiant. Dog Face glared at her but did nothing. “Tailgunner’s right. He’s never given us reason to doubt him, and we’re not going to start. Consider it an order; it’s on me if there’s any comeback.” Tailgunner opened his mouth to protest. “I said enough. Lets get this done.”

  All of them were surprised when the cheering started. They looked over at the infantry. All of them were smiling and cheering, a few of them fired shots into the air before their officers took control.

  “What the fuck have they got to cheer about?” Dog Face asked. “They think the war’s over?”

  Max was running towards them. He was even older than Mother; he had reached his age by being what he described as physically cautious. He had the look of someone that desperately wanted to go to seed but simply did not have the resources. He was the senior NCO in the part of the supply chain that kept the Mechs and their pilots running. He was a corrupt black-marketer but he always came through for them with what they needed. Strictly speaking he outranked Mother but he always deferred to her.

  He came panting up to them in his badly-fitting, sweat-stained uniform.

  “We’re looking at a field of severed heads. What the fuck have you got to be happy about?” Dog Face barked.

  “Its over!” he yelled.

  “What is?” Mother asked. She knew what she wanted the answer to be but it seemed beyond hope.

  “The war.”

  Nobody reacted. Max looked at the five of them, questioning but still grinning.

  “Bullshit,” Big Henry said carefully.

  “Okay, look, it’s not over. But They’ve all gone. Pulled out.”

  “Them?” Mother asked incredulously.

  “Yep. Not one of them left. The only trace they were ever here is little puddles of junk genetic crap from where they died. Everything else is gone.”

  “They’ve pulled into Nightside in prep for a big push,” Tailgunner suggested. Max shook his head.

  “We’ve got unconfirmed reports from a Nightside deep recon team that they saw Them leaving the planet.” It was starting to sink in. Big Henry was first to start smiling, then Dog Face; a smile even made it to Mother’s and Strange’s faces but Tailgunner still looked troubled. Max slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Cheer up man! It’s over! We’re going to head back to the firebase and we’re going to party! Bad booze and cheap sex! Hell, I’ll even treat you guys to a crate.” In his exuberance Max grabbed Mother and hugged her. Dog Face and Big Henry looked on in utter surprise at this.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Mother asked. Max immediately let go of her, looking apologetic.

  “A little bit,” he answered.

  “Thanks Max, we’ll be over soon,” Tailgunner said. Max looked between him and Mother and then shrugged.

  “Suit yourselves.” He walked away, looking slightly baffled at their attitude. They watched him go; Dog Face and Big Henry were still grinning, and even Strange looked happy.

  “Well?” Mother asked.

  “Nothing’s changed. We disable the comms,” Tailgunner said.

  “What, now? Didn’t you hear…” Big Henry started.

  “We heard. Do what Tailgunner said; if Max’s right then all that means is that we’ll be less tactically exposed.” Big Henry and Dog Face both looked as if they were about to object but in the end they nodded.

  * * *

  Command called it a firebase; it had a name made up of numbers and phonetic letters. The whanau just called it the pa, an old word for a fortified settlement. In reality it was a large cavern; the various entrances had been blocked off with scavenged armour plate from a destroyed cavern sea frigate. Various firing ports had been cut in it for manned and automated heavy weaponry.

  Past the armour walls was the normal mixture of tents and pre-fabricated buildings. Mother thought of it as a storehouse for military vehicles and equipment. Some of that equipment had human components, like her.

  The trip back had been uneventful. Tailgunner had disabled each of the whanau’s integral comms and done the same for their vehicles and any equipment they might have. He had made sure that they, their mechs and all their gear was utterly isolated from the net.

  This had not gone unnoticed, and eventually Martins had one of his adjutants keep pace with Apakura in one of the patrol vehicles. Tailgunner had unplugged himself and stuck his head out of the belly hatch. He had explained that the comms problems they had found earlier was systemic, possibly viral, and he had taken everything offline until he could deal with it.

  At the pa most semblance of military discipline had gone out the window. There was only a resentful skeleton crew looking after the pa’s defences.

  Amongst the sober and resentful were Dog Face and Big Henry. Tailgunner still did not like the situation and had talked Mother into maintaining the whanau in a state of readiness. Dog Face and Big Henry had talked about jumping Tailgunner. They were only half joking. On t
he other hand, signalman or not, neither of them fancied messing with Tailgunner.

  Mother was less pleased with Tailgunner when, after he had insisted that everyone isolate themselves from the net, he himself had tranced in. But he had not used the Apakura’s systems to do it.

  After they had run diagnostics, done maintenance, used the party atmosphere to steal some much needed spare parts and upgrades and installed them, Mother found herself leaning against the leg of Apakura listening to Dog Face and Big Henry moan. Strange was sat cross-legged watching Big Henry and Dog Face slyly. A naked drunken couple ran by them; this only seemed to further annoy Dog Face and Big Henry more.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Dog Face all but howled. He swung on Mother. “We’ve fought hard enough, we deserve some of this!”

  “Settle down,” Mother said. Her voice was even and quiet with just enough menace to let Dog Face know that he was approaching the line. The problem was she did not altogether disagree with his sentiments. She wanted to get drunk, go back to her tent and have some quality naked time with Tailgunner.

  “Have we not been good enough soldiers?” Big Henry asked in a tone that was almost sulky.

  “We’re not soldiers, we’re warriors,” Mother said without thinking. It was a reflex, something that Tailgunner always said. She wanted to talk to him. Get more of an explanation. Mother had often cursed what had seemed to be the constant violation of being personally linked to comms through her integral systems. Always being on call gave her a feeling of diminished privacy, even identity, but now she felt cut off, isolated from everyone else.

  * * *

  Tailgunner had been the system architect for the pa’s net representation. It looked like a pre-FHC Maori fortified settlement. A village of A-frame wooden buildings with a series of complex trenches that symbolised the defensive systems of the pa’s site. The mechs had been the to-scale mythological creatures they had been named for. Now cut off from the net, the mech’s icons were no longer present, and it made the pa look strangely empty to Tailgunner’s eyes. The environment looked like a sub-tropical volcanic landscape based on info he had found on Ao Te Aroa in the net.

  He stood in the centre wearing his kahuh huruhuru feathered cloak, cradling his taiaha. The eel net that Miru had given him was hanging from a rope wrapped around his waist.

  All around him patterns appeared and disappeared in the carved wood of the virtual pa’s structures, providing him with system information. There was only one other signal person tranced into the net at the moment and they were there under protest; they wanted to be partying in the real world like everyone else.

  Nobody was visiting the site from elsewhere but more and more information about Their withdrawal was making its way to the pa. Most of it was still classified, as nobody wanted to be the one to officially break the news in case they were wrong. So other than him and the wairua water spirits, guardian programmes of his design, and the inattentive signal person, the net seemed a lonely place.

  What got Tailgunner was that there was no warning. It should have tripped every single one of his sentry and defence programmes. Its virtual size alone was violating the pa’s protocols, the virtual rules that the environment was programmed to obey.

  Tailgunner had walked over the tops of the trenches to look out over the ocean scene he had programmed for no other reason than aesthetic pleasure. It was a high spec animation of the sun rising over what he thought was called the Pacific Ocean in the farthest, most eastern point of the north island of Ao Te Aroa. Tailgunner assumed that he could never do it justice, but it was vastly preferable to the harsh strip lighting of his subterranean life.

  In the sunlight-dappled water he was aware of, rather than saw, the inhuman movements of the wairua guardian programmes. Spirits, he reminded himself: spirits, not programmes, and he was a tohunga, not a hacker. Words were important, or rather belief in those words, particularly after the way he had lectured the others earlier on.

  Then the sun went out. Horror was etched on the beautifully rendered icon that Tailgunner wore in the net as he looked up. Something had blocked out the sun. He had only moments to register the wairua being sucked up into the wave, their colours changing to match the black water, their already monstrous features warping further. Less than a moment to register the beatific, angelic figures in the sky above the wave glowing with their own fierce light. Less than a fraction of a moment to grab the eel net from his rope belt and cast it at the wall of water about to engulf him and then eject himself from the net.

  * * *

  Tailgunner’s eyes flicked open. He was lying on his couch in Apakura, though he had tranced in through his own integral comms link, which he had just hurriedly shut down. He checked all his systems, software and hardware to see if he had been infected by what he had seen. He felt like he had been immersed in ice, it took him a while to realise that this was fear and not some kind of biofeedback from a viral attack.

  It must have been what Miru had warned him about, he thought. Was this a new Them attack? It had just swept through every defence as if they had not existed. What were the angels? Were they the icons of Them hackers?

  Tailgunner swung off the bench and headed for the belly hatch, dropping down onto the gravel. He could see Mother, Dog Face, Big Henry and Strange all staring at the massive viz screen bolted to a laser cut section of rock wall. He walked over to join them. The party had stopped. All the base personnel were watching the huge viz screen and suddenly seemed very sober.

  The viz was split-screen: half of it showed a group of armed people that Tailgunner recognised as soldiers or ex-soldiers – but then again who isn’t these days, he thought. The other half showed a handsome, well-groomed man with duelling scars that suggested an executive samurai to Tailgunner. He was wearing a flight suit.

  The soldier types looked like they had taken over some kind of broadcast facility. There was a sickly-looking man, a weirdo in a string vest and boxer shorts, a pretty young woman with short hair, a dark skinned operator whose ethnicity Tailgunner could not place, two cyberbilly musicians and then the two monsters.

  Tailgunner recognised one of the monsters; he looked like some kind of sea demon. His name was Balor, an ex-special forces operator turned pirate king of New York. Everyone had heard stories about him.

  The other was something different. The other appalled Tailgunner. Despite all the cybernetics Tailgunner just could not shake the feeling of disgust at the violation of the human form and flesh of the second monster. It looked like someone had tried to squeeze one of Them into a human form.

  Mother spared Tailgunner a glance as he joined them.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. Big Henry pointed at the ex-soldiers with the monsters.

  “Them Fifth Column.”

  Tailgunner was often described as taciturn but at this he just gaped at Big Henry in astonishment.

  “It seems that some vets including a human/ninja hybrid took over a media node and released a Them virus into the Earthnet. Handed all of the Sol systems comms and defences to Them,” Mother continued the story.

  “Earth’s fallen?” Tailgunner managed.

  “No. As far as I can tell Earth has been co-opted by a sophisticated black propaganda operation,” Mother told him. Tailgunner was struggling to keep up.

  “Looks like that’s the reason for the withdrawal,” Big Henry said. “You were right, it is a big push, but not on us – on the home system. And They’re going to find it wide open.”

  Dog Face just whimpered. Strange looked stricken.

  “Who’s the suit?” Tailgunner asked, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Vincent Cronin,” Mother answered. “Apparently he’s the head of the Free Earth Government in Exile. Him and a group of special ops and military intelligence types managed to fight their way out. They call themselves the Free Earth Squadrons.” Then Mother turned on him. “Where have you been this time?” Tailgunner was struggling to deal with information
overload. “Tails!” Mother snapped.

  “Something just happened to the Net. Something swamped it, just went through every defence I’d set up as if it wasn’t there.”

  “That was the Free Earth Guys,” Big Henry answered. “It’s some kind of intelligent programme, it’s the only defence we have against Their alien virus apparently.”

  “It’s what Miru warned me against,” Tailgunner said. The others turned to look at him. “What?”

  “It’s supposed to be our defence,” Big Henry said.

  “Then why did Miru want me out of the Spirit World?”

  “You mean the net, right?” Henry asked. Tailgunner stared at him. Big Henry met the look without flinching.

  “Crisis of faith, Big Henry?” Tailgunner asked. Strange came over and stood by Tailgunner and wrapped her arms around him. Mother tried not to let it bother her.

  “He’s right,” Dog Face growled.

  “Look, I’m all about this Maori thing,” Dog Face began. “I really am – our identity, our history, it’s all important. But believing our mythology? Literally?”

  “What, you think I’m lying?” Tailgunner asked. He felt Strange tense.

  “No, I just don’t think we can be sure what it was you actually spoke to.”

  “So that’s it? The first time we’re actually challenged over anything, we find it’s all a lie we’ve been living? Who we’ve tried to be, it’s all meaningless?” Tailgunner was starting to get angry. Dog Face and Big Henry were starting to shift uneasily. Strange was staring fiercely at the pair.

  “Slavish adherence to faith in the face of sense…” Big Henry started.

  “So we’re just going to take the word of a group of Earthers we’ve never met over one of ours because they’re up on the Viz screen?” Mother cut in. This stopped Big Henry and Dog Face. “We leave all the comms gear off, especially our personal stuff, until we find out more, okay?” Dog Face and Big Henry nodded, looking slightly ashamed of themselves.

  Strange tugged on Tailgunner’s arm and pointed. The other four looked over. They could see Martins talking to four MPs. They used their optics to zoom in on the conversation. Martins seemed to be looking repeatedly over towards the five of them.