War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Now I know you’re both Scottish,’ Mudge continued, ‘but not all communication has to be conducted by screaming at each other.’

  ‘Well, as entertaining as this is, we have work to do. So if you’re not going to help you’ll have to leave,’ Sharcroft said.

  ‘Are you really going to turn your back on it all?’ Morag asked, more softly now. I could still hear the anger and the resolve in her voice.

  ‘Turn my back? That’s not fair. Don’t you see that this is just starting the whole mess all over again?’

  ‘Mr Douglas, do you not think that the Cabal, as you so prosaically called us, has agents on Earth? With your background can you not see the need for secrecy, for operational security?’ Sharcroft asked.

  ‘For petty empire-building?’ Mudge asked.

  ‘For fighting a war,’ Pagan said.

  ‘So God’s over and done with. On to the next thing, aye, Pagan? Drag Morag down with you because you know she’s better, but reflected glory and all that. You fucking sell-out.’ I was just lashing out now.

  Pagan looked like I’d slapped him.

  ‘That’s not fair, man,’ Mudge said.

  ‘Who exactly do you expect to save you?’ Sharcroft’s modulated electronic voice asked.

  ‘I never expected to be saved,’ I told the living spider-corpse. It sounded hollow even to me.

  ‘That’s a cop-out,’ Morag said quietly.

  ‘So what should I do – turn myself over for dissection or just fuck off and die under an alien sun? Any battle’s going to be fleet and electronic anyway, probably followed by surface insurgency. You forget, I’ve done all this. Besides, aren’t you and Pagan just telling us that it doesn’t matter; there’s always going to be some prick in charge?’ I nodded towards Sharcroft.

  ‘Didn’t you say it was all about personal responsibility? We helped make this situation; we have to help fix it,’ she said.

  ‘How? By defecting?’

  ‘You know we haven’t done that.’

  ‘The sad fact is, Mr Douglas,’ Sharcroft began again, ‘that I’m very good at this sort of thing. I am the kind of cunt –’ he seemed to savour the word ‘– that you need. As for my previous associations, I don’t care whether you judge me. I don’t have to justify myself to you. You will never understand my motivations because you have never had any power and so cannot understand that once you’ve had it, it becomes very important to maintain it. You’ll do anything.’

  ‘That sounds like a justification to me,’ Mudge said. ‘Though not a very good one.’

  ‘No. I’m simply explaining that we are so different we’re never going to see each other’s perspective, so arguing about it is utterly pointless. If it’s any consolation, from your perspective I would now seem to be on the side of the angels.’

  ‘Oh, that’s exactly what it seems like to me,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘Did you really think that with the threat of Rolleston and Cronin looming that the military, industrial and intelligence complex would just dismantle itself? Did you not think that they would adapt to the new circumstances, as difficult as you all, rather foolishly, made it? Can you not see the requirement for us?’

  ‘There are ways and means …’ I said falteringly. ‘Look, you guys started the whole thing.’

  ‘Irrelevant except perhaps as testimony at my war crimes trial. We still have a situation to deal with. The question is, are you going to help or are you going to abrogate responsibility?’

  ‘To work with the likes of you?’

  ‘Do you think I’m happy about that? I think you’re meddlesome cretins in way over your heads, lashing out because you don’t understand what’s happening around you and too frightened to make the hard decisions. But we all have to play the hand we’re dealt, Mr Douglas.’

  ‘Things have to change,’ I told him. On the one hand I completely believed this; on the other I realised how empty it sounded.

  ‘So change them,’ Morag said. ‘Don’t run away.’ Maybe she was right. No, she was right but I just didn’t think I had any more to give. I don’t think any of us did, her and Pagan included. I also didn’t think they had any practical solutions, just death sentences.

  ‘If only it was that easy,’ I said to her, and then to Sharcroft: ‘Thanks for the job offer but go and fuck yourself, parasite.’

  ‘And the rest of you?’ Sharcroft asked. Divide and conquer.

  ‘I’m with the overwrought one,’ Mudge said. Rannu didn’t say anything.

  ‘We’re done. How do we get out of here?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re not done. We’ve got something to do, and you guys are coming with us,’ Mudge told Pagan and Morag. Pagan nodded, getting it before I did.

  ‘They have—’ Sharcroft began.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Rannu said. He’d been looking thoughtful throughout the conversation but the menace in his tone was unmistakable. Morag looked as confused as I did. I should have known better.

  I think we were in Old Mexico. Either that or we were in part of New Mexico that looked like Old Mexico. Anyway it looked like I’d imagined Mexico looked. That could have just been for the tourists, though tourists in this part of town would have to be quite intrepid and well armed.

  We were in the upstairs private room of a bar, sorry, cantina. It had a small wrought-iron balcony that looked out over a crowded street of revellers, which is a fancy word for drunk people, the service industries that survive them and the predators that prey on them. It was a pleasantly warm night.

  ‘To Vicar, Balor, Gibby and Buck!’ Mudge shouted. He was halfway to standing on the table. ‘Better men than us by dint of having the common courtesy to die doing stupid things!’ He knocked back his shot of tequila and then chased it with a long draw from a bottle of the same.

  ‘To Vicar, Balor, Buck and Gibby!’ we all shouted and knocked back our shots. I grimaced. I struggled with tequila, conceptually. As far as I knew it was rotting whisky. Why would you purposefully let whisky rot? It didn’t make sense. Also I didn’t like the way the worm in the bottle glowed. In fact I didn’t like that there was a worm at all.

  Mudge fell off the table. We laughed at his pain. He tried to get up but Rannu knocked his leg out from under him.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Mudge slurred. ‘Spensive.’ I think he meant his prosthetic legs. When you’re a front-line, or in our case behind-lines, soldier you don’t think in terms of the grand scheme. You think about small objectives – kill someone/something, disrupt a supply line, extract another squad in trouble. You assume that you’re part of a bigger picture and that what you’re doing will help, despite the doubts. Sitting there and thinking that you successfully saved an entire alien race from being assimilated by bad guys was just too big to get your mind around.

  Getting back in-system and not ending up in prison, or in my case being dissected, had taken up everyone’s attention, and then we’d each had things that we’d felt had to be taken care of. In doing so we’d forgotten that the four people mostly responsible for our success, the four people who were responsible for us being alive, needed a send-off. They needed remembrance.

  Don’t get me wrong, if Pagan hadn’t figured out Crom’s betrayal then we would’ve been dead, and if Morag hadn’t successfully established contact with Them we’d definitely have been dead. Vicar had sacrificed himself to try and give Morag and I enough time to escape from Rolleston. Buck gave his life fighting the Cabal, killed by the Grey Lady. Balor had kept Crom – I wouldn’t think of that abomination as my friend Gregor – busy long enough for Gibby to fly the ship into it.

  Rannu and I had largely been spectators. Admittedly spectators fighting for our lives against Them. Mudge had been recording it all for posterity. He’d made them heroes. A difficult word to take seriously, particularly in the military, but it applied here.

  So here we were to send them off, their wake. I suspect they deserved a global celebration. What they got was the five of us drunk out of our minds telling the fu
nniest stories about them we could remember. Mudge told us about the time he’d been hiding in New York. Balor had a meeting with someone from the American government. To make the government man nervous he’d taken the meeting naked, sporting a huge erection in a room completely covered in thinscreens showing footage from wildlife vizzes of fish spawning. Mudge and I told the story about Vicar on the Santa Maria giving me the lock burner he’d hidden in his arse. I told a story I’d heard second-hand about Buck and Gibby accidentally bombing a Them surface-to-air emplacement with live chickens meant for a dinner being held by some hopelessly optimistic officers.

  Everyone had a story of some kind, mainly about Balor, who was better known. Many of them were probably pure myth. Mudge and I knew a reasonable amount about Buck and Gibby, and we all had something to say about our time with them. We got more drunk.

  I hoped that the Hard Luck Commancheros had done the same for Buck and Gibby back in Crawling Town. I also hoped that the pirate nation of New York had done the same for Balor. Though reports out of New York pointed to widespread conflict between factions that had previously been held together by Balor’s sheer force of personality.

  It was Vicar I felt sorry for. He’d never seemed to have any people around him. I’d only known him on the Santa Maria, the trial and then in Dundee. It had mainly been a business relationship. He had provided me with tech I needed when I could afford it. I didn’t think his desperate congregation was going to miss him. Maybe the food and the clothes he gave out, but not all the hellfire and damnation. Did he have any family that would miss him? Did they know? Maybe it was something I should look into. I could tell them just what sort of person the mad old bastard really was. Make them proud. If they cared.

  ‘The sun’s coming up!’ Mudge announced, and the night did seem to be developing a red tinge to it.

  ‘You’re not thinking of quitting now,’ Pagan managed after a number of attempts. ‘Lightweight,’ he added.

  ‘Nope. This wake has moved into the next phase. The one I like to call whore phase!’ Mudge announced. ‘Though I have in the past called it sexually transmitted disease phase.’ Mudge tried standing up but failed. He turned to look at Morag. ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t mean you.’ We all stopped.

  Morag glared at him but then cracked up laughing. She reached over and tugged at his cheek. ‘S’all right, love. I’m not your type, am I?’

  ‘Nope, not enough penises,’ Mudge agreed. Rannu, who was quiet when drunk – at least I hoped he was drunk, the amount he’d had – seemed to be puzzling this comment through.

  ‘How many penises does Morag have?’ he finally asked. We fell about laughing. Rannu just looked confused. We’d had a dangerous amount to drink.

  ‘The question is: how many penises does he want?’ Pagan suggested.

  ‘All of them! All the penises!’ Mudge shouted. There was cheering from the street. ‘Besides, Morag and Jakob have to go and have angry make-up sex!’

  ‘What! Now wait …’ I managed, but Morag just grabbed me.

  ‘C’mon.’

  There was an urgency to it. A need, for both of us. It wasn’t angry but nor was it tender. She rode me as I held her up, her back against the wall of the aging, rotting room at the top of the cantina, the glass door to the balcony open to the dawn air. Maybe it was passion – difficult to remember. She led the way. She was in control. She had to be.

  Because afterwards she sobbed and shook in my arms as I tried to fight off the hangover I so richly deserved. It was the frustrated sobbing of someone who can’t shed tears because their eyes are metal and plastic now. I held her. I said nothing. This wasn’t just the normal emotional retardation of a male not knowing what to do when his girl’s upset. I knew there was nothing I could say.

  I knew what was wrong. We’d talked about it when we’d finally had the chance to in the Dog’s Teeth. When we’d finally had the chance to do the talking bit that normally comes first with people in a relationship. Talking was difficult when people are trying to kill you all the time.

  I think she liked sex. I think she liked me enough to want to have sex with me, for whatever that was worth, but she’d spent so much of her life being used. She said at times that she’d felt little more than an appliance, the cheap alternative to sense booths. That made sex complicated for her. She wanted it; she liked it; but then doing it made her feel cheap. Doing it reminded her of so much bad stuff. What could you say to that? All I could do was hold her.

  It didn’t help that when we had been really intimate, when we’d shared a sense link, felt what the other felt, I’d fucked it up by getting scared and acting like a prick. In my defence it was because the alien essence that lived in Morag’s headware had taken that moment to enter my head and change my dreams. That still didn’t help Morag or excuse my behaviour.

  I held her until she stopped crying. I guess I was surprised that she was still able to be this vulnerable with me after all the bad things I’d said to her in the past. Then it occurred to me – if not me then who? Then we made love again. This time more tenderly. This time she didn’t cry. Afterwards she fell asleep. I resisted sleep for as long as I could. I wanted to watch her, and sometimes sleep wasn’t so good for me. Eventually I drifted off.

  Morag had been training with Rannu. Mainly physical training but some hand-to-hand stuff, the kind the Regiment taught us as well as the Muay Thai that he excelled at. She was still hot and sweaty, my arms wrapped around her as we looked out over Maw City. It was like a bioluminescent termite mound but somehow beautiful at the same time. It was difficult to explain. Their industry was somehow hypnotic. The others were further back in the cave.

  Pagan and Rannu were discreetly keeping their distance and Mudge was too ill to be obnoxious. Actually that wasn’t true. He was too ill to move; he was never too ill to be obnoxious. This was as close to privacy as we were going to get. I was frustrated because this was the first time in a long time we weren’t in immediate danger.

  Morag took the metal of my right hand in her much smaller one. The tactile sensors in the hand sent messages to my brain, a simulation of touch. With my real hand, albeit a hand that had armour and enhanced muscle under the skin, I stroked her hair.

  ‘Why don’t you train me?’ she asked.

  ‘Laziness, and Rannu’s better than me,’ I told her.

  ‘Not because you don’t want me to know this stuff?’

  ‘You need to know this stuff, I guess, but I’m not keen for you to be in harm’s way, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t have to be protective all the time,’ she said, but there was no sharpness in her tone.

  Eventually I think I worked out what she was getting at.

  ‘I have faith in your abilities, if that’s what you mean,’ I told her.

  She smiled. See? Given time I could think of things to say that weren’t just going to upset her.

  We sat there for a while watching the industry of the alien habitat. All the zero-G manoeuvring looked so graceful, much more so than the clumsy machines we utilised. I guessed that’s what came of evolving in vacuum.

  ‘What are They like?’ I asked after we’d sat in silence for a while. Morag gave this some thought.

  ‘Very different. They think as one and They just haven’t developed certain things that we take for granted.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘They don’t understand that we don’t think as one like Them. They can’t see how some of us would act against others of us. The biggest problem I had was trying to explain what happened with Crom. Even the concept of the Cabal is beyond Them. They just don’t get duplicity at all.’

  ‘That would explain their tactics during the war.’

  ‘There’s something very soothing about communication with Them. Something warm. Like this place.’

  ‘Womb-like?’ I wasn’t sure where that had come from. Again she gave it some thought before answering.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’ She sounded distant.

/>   She was quiet for a while.

  ‘I can trance in, you know,’ she said. I looked down at her and found her looking back at me, searching for my response.

  ‘Yeah?’ I managed. I wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘I mean, I haven’t but I know I can.’ She looked away from me.

  ‘Have you heard of Project Spiral?’ I asked.

  She nodded. ‘Vicar worked on it. It was the American and British governments’ attempt to hack what they thought was Their comms net,’ she said.

  ‘But it wasn’t, was it? It’s Them, Their minds.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s Their comms net as well. They have the equivalent of biotechnological telepathy.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. You could argue we have that with integral comms links,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the same. I’m going to trance in. With my own systems and Ambassador’s help I should be able to do it.’

  ‘You know what happened in Operation Spiral?’ I asked, sounding calmer than I felt.

  ‘No, do you? I’d be interested, but God’s so far away. I know the results of what happened. Everyone brain-burned or mad. Vicar—’

  ‘Was the best of them,’ I finished for her.

  ‘But they didn’t know that it was Their mind and they hadn’t been allowed in.’

  I wanted to talk her out of it or at least tell her to be careful. I didn’t. I was sort of sure she knew what she was doing though this was uncharted territory for all of us. How did an ex-Rigs hooker end up on Earth’s first contact team? Okay, not first contact, but still.

  ‘You can come. I can piggyback you.’ She seemed to be serious. She looked cross when I started laughing. I wasn’t laughing at her; I was laughing at the ridiculous, mind-blowing scope of the thing.

  ‘Me in an alien mind? I think Mudge would be a better person for the job.’

  ‘I don’t want Mudge with me.’ She sounded a little put out.

  ‘I just …’ I struggled for the words to try and say what I meant. ‘All I’ve ever really wanted is to not be hungry, or in pain or frightened, or so tired all the time. I don’t think I want much – to make a living in a way where I don’t have to get shot at or kill other people, like my dad did after he was discharged.’ Before some rich bastard killed him because he could. ‘Then a good book, some Miles Davis in the background and a dram.’ Morag was watching me intently but also smiling. ‘Now you’re talking about going surfing in the mind of an alien race who I’ve spent all my adult life trying to kill, and they’ve been doing likewise to me. I’ve no frame of reference for this.’