War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Look, what do you want?’ More screaming. ‘You must be here for some reason. If you’d just tell us …’ Yet more screaming and threats. ‘We’re obviously not going to lie down, so what have you got left? Are you going to shoot us?’

  The one closest to me produced a shock stick from a pouch on his belt. With a flick of his wrist he extended it. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d practised that move in the mirror. He triggered the display that sent sparks of electricity surging down the weapon. I wondered if it was supposed to intimidate me. What did he think I’d done for a living? I grabbed his wrist and stabbed him in the face with it. Which had to be embarrassing. I was pleasantly surprised that his internal systems were not sufficiently insulated, like mine, to cope with a shock stick, and he hit the ground a juddering mess.

  Rannu stepped past the one closing on him. As he did so, he grabbed the barrel of the gauss carbine and pushed it up over the gunman’s head. The gunman got tangled up in the weapon’s strap and found himself lying on the ground with Rannu kneeling next to him.

  Mudge cheated, in my opinion. The guy on him was distracted by the fun that Rannu and I were having. Mudge just sidestepped, drew his sidearm and levelled it at the guy’s head.

  I extended the claws on my right arm. Four nine-inch long, hardened ceramic blades slid out of my forearm through slits just behind my knuckles. I reached down to the recently electrocuted gunman, cut the sling off his gauss carbine and tossed it away. Then I walked over to the one that Mudge had covered.

  ‘Are you more reasonable?’

  ‘I ain’t telling you shit,’ he said in a manner I think he thought was macho. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. Mudge clattered him on the side of the head with his pistol. I looked reproachfully at Mudge. Not because he’d hit him but because you shouldn’t get so close to your target that they can reach you – as Rannu and I had just demonstrated.

  ‘What do you want?!’ I screamed. The guy just kept his mouth shut. ‘Do you realise how fucking stupid it is to go to all this effort and not tell us?!’

  ‘Someone wants to see you,’ the guy that Rannu had taken down shouted.

  ‘Shut up!’ Mudge’s guy yelled.

  ‘You’re supposed to tell us that,’ I tried pointing out. I then walked over to Rannu and his prone friend.

  ‘Who?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sharcroft,’ he said. The name meant nothing to me. I told him that. Mudge joined us, forcing his prisoner to his knees in front of him. Mudge was sub-vocalising something as he did this.

  ‘What does he want?’ I asked.

  ‘He has a proposal,’ the guy said.

  ‘Funny way of making it. If you’d succeeded then we’d be useless to him. You didn’t, so he should have sent smarter people. Either way I’m not inclined to meet him.’

  ‘Look, we fucked up.’ He looked over at the guy whose face I’d electrocuted.

  ‘Trying to prove yourself?’ I asked. The guy said nothing. He just glared resentfully at his unconscious mate.

  ‘Trying to prove himself, was he?’ I asked. The look on the guy’s face said it all. The arrogant part of me was scornful of them thinking they stood a chance.

  ‘You need some proper trigger time, sunshine. You are way out of your league,’ Mudge said. I turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. Sometimes I thought that the SAS had been a bad influence on Mudge. Though it could have been the other way around. Mudge shrugged.

  ‘Simon Sharcroft?’ he asked the talkative one. The guy nodded.

  ‘Know him?’ I asked.

  ‘Know of him. So do you,’ Mudge said. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘He’s one of the Cabal.’ I lost my sense of humour and drew my Mastodon from its holster.

  ‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ Rannu’s prisoner shouted as he got a good look at the massive .454 revolver designed for killing Berserks.

  ‘You fucking pussy!’ Mudge’s prisoner spat at the guy. ‘Ow!’ Mudge had clouted him round the head with his pistol. I think Mudge was starting to enjoy this sort of thing too much.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. Was it starting all over again? Surely the Cabal couldn’t be starting up again – could it?

  ‘All I know is that he wants a meet, I swear!’ Rannu’s prisoner was begging. A text file appeared in the corner of my IVD sent by Mudge. I opened it and scanned the words superimposed over my vision.

  Sharcroft was from some old – meaning pre-FHC – money family, America’s answer to Britain’s aristocracy. Right schools, right fraternities, probably got his arse whipped with rolled-up towels in the right secret societies. Sharcroft was a Pentagon II insider. He was an intelligence and government powerbroker and acted as a liaison between the multitudes of compartmentalised intelligence agencies that confused the American government and military. He’d made a name for himself early in his career by running very black ops for the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Department. He was described as someone not afraid to make hard decisions. Or, from the perspective of people on the ground, he was a cunt who didn’t care how many people he got killed to make himself look good.

  No war record – he was too old, well over a hundred. He had of course been implicated when we revealed the Cabal to everyone. He’d been neck deep in their nasty shit but, according to the info Mudge had gleamed from God, had disappeared very quickly after the big reveal.

  Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.

  ‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.

  ‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.

  ‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.

  ‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.

  ‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.

  ‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.

  ‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.

  ‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.

  Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.

  2

  New Mexico

  We sat on the benches of the black copter opposite the three walking bruised egos that took the form of lower-echelon spooks. They’d optimistically asked for our weapons as we’d boarded the copter. We’d politely refused, Mudge had hit one, but I’d promised they could have their guns back at the end of the trip.

  They’d also been more than a little annoyed when we’d loaded the four-wheel-drive muscle car and the dirt bike into the back of the copter. I mean cars and bikes don’t grow on trees. We’d taken the time and the effort to steal them so we wanted to hold on to them. So the gunmen had spent most of the trip staring at us resentfully.

  It was my first trip to America. Or rather my first trip over the border into the America controlled by the American government. I didn’t get much of a chance to see it. Being in the back of some kind of military transport vehicle usually meant I was on my way somewhere to do something stupid, wasteful and dangerous. The journeys to and from said stupid, wasteful and dangerous things were often my only downtime. It had taken me a long time to learn the skill, but I could sleep anywhere, even in the back of these often noisy and always uncomfortable vehicles. I drifted off quite quickly. Careless perhaps, but I knew Rannu and Mudge had my back. They’d wake me when one of them wanted some
rest.

  Heaven appeared to glow a blue-white colour. It reminded me of something, something dangerous. I wasn’t sure about opening my eyes but I felt good. In fact I felt the best I had in a very, very long time, presumably because I was no longer dying but was in fact dead. On the other hand, I remembered that I’d done an awful lot of bad things in my life, from stealing money from my parents to buy cigarettes when I was ten to killing a lot of people. Some in cold blood and some after I’d tortured them – those were the ones I felt most bad about.

  I didn’t feel quite so bad about killing Them. They may have been innocent dupes of the Cabal but they had been trying to kill me at the time, and it’s a lot easier to kill things that look that different from you. Still, it can’t look good on your application for heaven.

  Then I decided that I’d been spending too much time around hackers and that I didn’t believe in all that religious shit anyway. So where the fuck was I?

  The selfish part of me was happy to see Morag in heaven. Then I started to mourn her death, which I should have done first, piece of shit that I am. Then again, I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in any of that.

  ‘What?’ I managed. Morag smiled. She did look like an angel. Well, like a non-scary one with short spiky hair. She reached down to touch my face. Her hands felt warm. I felt warm and not at all like I was dying from vacuum exposure. Or being torn apart by Them. Or running out of air. Or just getting round to dying of radiation poisoning, which was something that I’d been meaning to do for the last couple of weeks. I also felt very naked and there were ‘things’ in me.

  Mudge proved that I wasn’t in heaven, though hell was possible, by appearing over me, leering. He looked fucking dreadful.

  ‘The good news is you’re not fucking dead; the bad news is there’s no fucking drink to celebrate with,’ he told me. He sounded angry.

  ‘You look awful,’ I managed to sort of squeak. It felt like I hadn’t spoken for a very long time.

  ‘He’s run out of drugs,’ Morag told me.

  ‘They made this for us?’ I asked again. It was taking a lot of getting used to. ‘Are we prisoners?’

  ‘More like stuck,’ Morag answered.

  I was in a cave in the side of an asteroid close to planetoid size. Across the front of the cave was a membrane made of … well, made of Them. Them being the individual bio-nanites that were the actual aliens rather than the Berserks or Ninjas that we had previously thought to be Them.

  This membrane kept us safe from the rigours of vacuum, and other Them-growths were apparently providing air, heating and somewhat unpleasant sanitation facilities. There is nothing quite like having a previously hostile alien species climb up your arse to clean it because they have never had to develop toilet paper. Other growths also provided a kind of unpleasant gruel and a funny-tasting liquid which I think was supposed to be water. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were eating some inert form of Them, perhaps Their dead?

  What They couldn’t produce, much to Mudge’s discomfort, was drugs, cigarettes or vodka. He was mostly a sweating, cramping, pale, feverish bundle of bile in the corner of the cave. I wouldn’t have minded a drink and a smoke myself.

  The membrane was transparent, which allowed us to appreciate just how far out in space we were. I was looking out on what seemed to be a sort of crossroads. There were four very large asteroids including the one I was currently in. They were either tethered or just connected to one another by tubes like biomechanical Them-growths. There were more growths sticking out at all angles from the asteroids. These looked like a cross between organic high-rise buildings and stalagmites or stalactites, depending on your perspective. I recognised this place now. The crooked Them-structures had reminded me of teeth and I’d christened this area Maw City. We were not far from where we had fought Crom.

  We used to think that these structures were Their habitats but now we knew it was just Them. Everything seemed to have a function in Their society. Their roots were deep in the asteroid. They somehow drew out the raw materials from them. With energy harnessed from the system’s twin stars They broke down the raw materials to provide the resources necessary to make Themselves into these awe-inspiring structures.

  Massive tendrils snaked between the asteroids, the growths and the hundreds of Them-ships moving through this apparent nexus point. I watched as one moved in front of me, completely obscuring my view. The tendrils moved anything from Berserks up to frigate-sized ships around. It was one of these things I’d seen grab Morag.

  The whole place was crawling with Them. There were Berserks, Walkers and other things that we had previously thought to be vehicles. I also recognised a lot of the ship configurations I saw from footage of fleet actions.

  If I strained and used the magnification on my optics I could see beyond Maw City. There were fields of a coral-like substance, where everything from Berserks to dreadnoughts were being grown and born. Deeper still I could see the cored hollow remains of exploited asteroids.

  All the Them-forms we were used to seeing were black – combat forms, I guessed. But many here were white and had a pale-blue bioluminescent glow that I had become used to seeing in the honeycombed energy matrices of Their engines. It was the same bioluminescence that lit our little cavern. I had always thought it beautiful. Not that I could have told anyone. Maybe Morag, though even she’d take the piss.

  The growths handling the air made it feel like there was a warm wind constantly blowing through the cavern. Apparently getting the heating, water and temperature right had been touch and go, initially. When I had been dying. There was kind of a lot to take in.

  I looked at my hand. There were no scabs or sores, just healthy armoured flesh and boosted muscle. I felt great, no nausea. In fact it had been a long time since I had felt this good. Though I would have liked a cigarette.

  ‘So let me see if I understand you properly. They ate all the unhealthy flesh and replaced or regrew it, at a cellular level. Is that correct?’ I asked again. I heard Pagan sigh. I didn’t really blame him, I had asked that question a lot recently.

  He was sitting leaning against the wall in his inertial armour suit. He had his staff fully assembled and it lay across his lap.

  Pagan was in his forties and one of the oldest people I knew who wasn’t a member of a powerful secret government of arseholes. He was thin, his skin weathered and covered in various spiralling tattoos. Some of the tattoos were implanted circuitry to aid the ugly utilitarian integral computer that stuck out of half his skull. Unruly orange dreadlocks sprouted out from the other half. He was currently scratching at his scalp, running his hand through his dreads.

  ‘Yes. We have similar treatments, but they tend to be only available to the wealthy,’ Pagan explained. Again.

  ‘So am I an alien?’ I asked again.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Mudge groaned. He was lying on the floor, which was covered, in a soft, comfy, moss-like material. He was wearing only a pair of white boxers with hearts all over them. He got up onto all fours and started crawling towards the sanitation growth.

  ‘No,’ Morag said. She also sounded agitated. She was wearing her underwear and a T-shirt and sitting on a rock also covered in the moss. I couldn’t help but be distracted by her shapely legs. She was small, but the exertions of our time together had hardened her up. That could be seen in the tone of her muscles and sadly in her features as well. It did not detract from how attractive I found her.

  Her hair had been shaved off so that the sophisticated integral computer she used for hacking could be implanted. Her hair was growing back but was still short, though it did cover most of the implant. The integral computer had been a high-end civilian model provided by Vicar so it was not as obtrusive as the military model sticking out of Pagan’s skull.

  I missed her eyes. After Rolleston and the Grey Lady had blown the side out of the media node, the explosive decompression had permanently blinded her. She had had her eyes replaced with cybernetic ones. They provided h
er with similar capabilities to the rest of us – magnification, thermographics, low light, flash compensation, etc. Her eyes were civilian models designed to look like normal ones. They had been modelled after pictures of her own eyes provided by Mudge, but I could still tell the difference. When you started replacing bits of yourself it had a cost.

  ‘You’re still you,’ she reassured me. This was a sore point with her. After all, she was carrying around the information ghost of Ambassador in her neural cyberware and had been accused of being compromised by the alien on a number of occasions. I’d even done it during one of my frequent outbreaks of arseholery.

  ‘Thank God!’ Mudge shouted dramatically before collapsing face first into the sanitation growth. We all grimaced as he started to throw up the food substitute they’d been giving us. I was trying not to think of it as necro-gruel.

  ‘It’s astonishing to think that we actually managed to save an entire alien species from assimilation by Crom,’ Pagan mused as he watched Mudge vomit.

  ‘Is he going to be okay?’ I asked Rannu. The quiet ex-Ghurkha was the closest thing we had to a medic. Mudge was annoying but he was my oldest and closest friend who was not dead. Also he’d never duped me into coming to Sirius to infect Them with the Crom slave virus. Though in fairness to Gregor that was more Rolleston’s fault than his.

  Rannu shrugged. He was stripped to the waist, his compact and powerful frame covered in sweat from his near-constant working out. That was probably the real reason he beat me in New York. He never stopped training.

  ‘It’s withdrawal,’ he said. He still wore his kukri, the curved machete-like fighting knife of the Ghurkhas, at his hip. As he turned to grab a cleaning form to rub himself with I caught a glimpse of the stylised tattoo of Kali on his back. It had been done when he had been working undercover back on Earth.

  ‘From what?’ I asked. Actually meaning which drug. Rannu gave this some thought.