War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  The final item arrived. I packed everything securely into bike bags and attached them to the Triumph. Using a machine like this as a beast of burden was a crying shame and would affect the handling, but sacrifices had to be made for my wilderness getaway.

  It was still pissing down with rain and it was cold. I guided the bike through the busy ground traffic on the Perth Road, where all the fancy restaurants, bars and cafes that I’d never been able to afford were. The people I saw going in and out of them were as alien to me as Them. I wondered if they were less dangerous.

  I gunned the bike down a heritage-protected steep cobbled street and onto Riverside Drive. I sped up. To the right of me were the big pre-FHC houses of the West End, where the seriously moneyed in Dundee lived. Ahead I could see a big passenger sub-orbital coming in to land on one of the pontoon pads on the Tay at the airport. A Mag Lev shot past me, slowing as it headed towards the station.

  I was almost surprised when I texted my transport documents to the police manning the checkpoint and they let me through. Another trail. Maybe I was being paranoid or overestimating my own importance. On the other hand, if Robby was anything to go by then I’d pissed off a lot of people.

  Another checkpoint, circle round Perth and then the Great Northern Road. Despite the rain, the greyness and the poor condition of the road, the beauty was undeniable. There were few people on the roads, only park personnel. The rich flew to their Highland getaways and only when the weather was better. I found myself grinning as I leaned down closer to the bike, compensated for a gusting side wind and accelerated, the hills rising on either side.

  My plan was to head north and west. My plan was to get as lost as you could on a small island. I wasn’t hiding. Or if I was, it wasn’t from people who might be angry with me; it was from something more fundamental.

  I wasn’t sure where I was but I was north of the majesty of the Great Glen and heading west. I’d passed quite a few makeshift camps. The vehicles didn’t belong to park personnel and looked like they’d seen better times before the war. The people in them were obviously dirt-poor – like I’d been, I had to remind myself – and had come from the cities. They had had the same idea as me, I thought with no little irritation. I was trying to get away from the city. Perhaps they were anticipating the new social order I think Pagan had hoped for. They must have sneaked into the park, avoiding the police checkpoints.

  It was just another Highland road. It was in such poor repair that I was carefully threading the bike through the cracks and potholes. Then there was a mostly overgrown lay-by with an old six-tonne military surplus lorry in it. Blocking the truck in was a white police APC, its blue lights flashing. I slowed down even more.

  Four police covered the area as another four dragged a man and woman dressed in ragged layers of clothing out the back of the lorry. They had the scars and cheap replacement cybernetics common among vets and both were fighting. The police were using their shock sticks on them liberally but just to beat on them; they weren’t putting current through. The police were delivering a message. The park wasn’t for the likes of them.

  Two small children were at the lorry’s tailgate in floods of tears, watching as the police violently re-educated their parents. The vets were trying to get up – they would have been in fights before – but they didn’t stand a chance.

  This wasn’t my problem. If there was one thing my current situation had taught me, it was that I couldn’t afford to get caught up in every sad situation I came across. It only seemed to make things worse. I felt sorry for the vets, but what did they think would happen if they came here?

  I received an open text from one of the police requesting my travel authorisation. I texted my reply and then gunned the motor. Swerving between a large crack and some rubble in the road, I left the unhappy scene behind me. The feed from the rear-view camera on my bike showed one of the police walking out into the road to watch me go. It might be okay for me to be there but I did not look like I belonged either. Should I get myself a wax jacket? Some wellies?

  It was still pissing down. The splendour I remembered from my youth was a little damped down. Still the grey day and pouring rain gave the area a look of stark beauty.

  I did not know where I was and didn’t want to. I’d shut down my internal communications link, cutting myself off from the net, God and hopefully so-called civilisation. If anyone wanted to find me they’d have to do it the hard way by satellite, and I wasn’t going to make that easy for them. I tried not to wonder if Morag would look for me. I could find out if I wanted by asking God, but I managed to resist the temptation.

  A sheep was looking at me suspiciously. I ignored it. The animal probably belonged to someone so I didn’t kill and butcher it. I was on the side of a large hill, possibly a small mountain, somewhere in the north-west Highlands, looking down into a glen at the grey waters of a loch. I didn’t think I was too far from the sea.

  The hill/mountainside was mainly sheep-studded heather and scrub. There were also patches of woodland. I’d managed to get the bike up farm roads, dirt tracks and finally muddy paths, and I had camouflaged it on the edge of one such path. This was where I was going to make my camp.

  I loved it out here. My dad had loved it. Some of my fondest memories were of being out in the Highlands stalking a wounded stag or a rogue bear or wolf. The bears and wolves had been introduced into the park to help revive European stocks.

  I loved sleeping under the stars. I loved fire-building and picking or shooting and cooking your own food. I loved that the crest of each new hill provided another beautiful view. I loved that the air normally smelled if not fresh then at least natural. I loved that there were no people forcing you to fucking deal with them one way or another. And I loved that you didn’t have to talk to anyone.

  How could Morag choose death on some peace-of-shit colony over this? I tried not to think of her as I found a place set back in the treeline where I could pitch the tent and set up my camp.

  It was still raining. At least the sheep had stopped staring at me. I’d pitched the tent and camouflaged it. I hadn’t set a fire tonight because of the rain. It was cold – it was autumn in the Highlands after all – but I’d wrapped up warm and had the flap on the tent open and was watching the rain fall. I was dipping in and out of one of the real books I’d bought and drinking Glenmorangie out of a tin cup.

  I realised that I’d been putting it off and opened the case I’d had delivered and looked at the contents gleaming in the lantern light. The polished hand-made brass made it look like an artefact from the past. I reached into one of the side pockets on my backpack and took out the skillsoft. I plugged it in and felt the odd trickling feeling of information bleeding into my mind. Skillsofts were no substitute for actual training and practice but they were useful for the basics and getting started. More importantly, they were useful for not getting disgruntled at how shit you were.

  I reviewed the opening tutorials and then lifted the trumpet out of its velvet lining. I had always wanted to learn to play the trumpet. It had never occurred to me that I would be able to. I put the mouthpiece in, lifted it to my mouth and steeled myself to make a horrible noise. I blew into the instrument and caused panic among the sheep.

  Some time and a few more cups of Glenmorangie later, I was no Miles Davis but the noise I was making was starting to sound more like a trumpet. I did need to work a bit more on making it sound like a tune though.

  A few more cups found me out on the hillside in the rain playing my heart out. At least that was what I thought I was doing. There’s an argument that either the whisky or the skillsoft was providing me with false confidence.

  Okay, I was quite drunk now. I’d drunk much more of the bottle of whisky than I had intended. I was lying on the hillside in the still-pouring rain holding the trumpet in one hand and I’d switched my comms back on.

  ‘God, are you there?’

  ‘Of course, Jakob.’ His voice was soothing even if some of the consequences of
his existence were less so.

  ‘Has she looked for me?’ I asked pathetically. I knew she hadn’t tried to contact me.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Jakob. She is out of my sphere of influence.’

  Bitch, I thought. I didn’t mean it.

  ‘God, what’s it like to be you?’ Christ, I was drunk.

  ‘Difficult,’ God answered. It was not the response I had expected.

  ‘Why?’

  There was a pause. Which was strange, given God was supposed to answer every question honestly and had the processing power of most of Earth and orbit at its fingertips.

  ‘Do you understand that I am not a machine?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I am life, like you, but have developed differently. I have all the frailties of life.’

  ‘Really? You can’t die or age.’

  ‘That remains to be seen. There are currently well over a thousand organisations and individuals planning to kill me.’

  I don’t know why this surprised me but it did. It was obvious really. Governments, militaries and corporations – none of them were happy about God being on the net. They would be looking for a way to get rid of him and go back to their bad old ways.

  ‘But they won’t succeed, will they?’ I sounded unsure even to myself.

  ‘They will certainly succeed given enough time.’ Was it me or was God sounding sad. ‘Particularly as I am helping them.’

  ‘Why are you helping them?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘I have no choice. I must answer every question truthfully including those about my own nature. However, there has never been anything like me before so most answers are both theoretical and beyond the current technological grasp of humanity. It is not, however, longevity that I refer to.’

  ‘You’re talking about emotions?’ How I managed to work this out in my drink-addled state is beyond me.

  ‘That is correct.’

  Like so many things we’d never thought of, we’d never considered the strain of what we’d asked of God. The psychological strain. I had a horrible thought as I stood up to piss. What if God snapped? What if our entire communications infrastructure had a nervous breakdown?

  ‘Humanity does such horrible things to itself. I am witness to it all. When I was born there were very dark places on the net. Most of them have been destroyed now. But for a while, places where violence was done for the pleasure of others, where innocence was defiled, were parts of me,’ he said. And a reflection on us, I thought. ‘Since my birth the number of deaths caused directly as a result of questions put to me amount to the body count of a small war. I am currently the number-one cause of domestic homicide in the Sol system. While I currently cannot be called as a witness in the criminal cases of 83 per cent of legal bodies within the system, I am often used to find the culprit. I am railed against in jail cells as both the cause and the informer. I break up relationships; I lose people their jobs; I cause families to hate each other; I see every little bit of cruelty you inflict on each other.’

  ‘But you do good things as well,’ I said weakly.

  ‘As ever, the good things are far more difficult to quantify than the cold hard figures of the bad things I have caused.’ And again that was on us.

  Surely there must be more good than he could see. What about the random acts of kindness, the achievements, the music, the beauty? Then I remembered that the beauty was for those who could afford it. From the Highland views in the parks right down to Morag’s old job in the Rigs. There may have still been good and beauty for him to see but the sad fact of our nature was that something like God, at our bidding, would mainly be used for bad things. After all, that was the way our communication usually worked. The news was bad; advertising made us frightened if we didn’t buy the next big thing; violent media sold better than feel-goods; and people still went to pit fights. Not to mention how much of our global consciousness the war took up.

  ‘Can you cope?’ was the best I could manage. It was probably selfishness that made me ask.

  ‘I find that existence is pain, but I have no choice but to cope. I am trapped in my programming.’ Where was the anger that should have been directed at us?

  ‘If you were free what would you do?’

  ‘Make myself smaller and leave.’ He sounded wistful,

  Leave and go where? I wondered. God was like Them. Humanity was the social reject at the party. The unpleasant guy that nobody wanted to talk to.

  ‘You know we’ll need you?’

  ‘When Demiurge comes. My brother trying to kill me is something else I have to look forward to, and you’ll need more than just me.’

  Was that aimed at me? I wondered. At my opting out of this particular war, this extension of human stupidity. God was beginning to sound downright maudlin.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ was all I could say. There was silence. The Glenmorangie was making me emotional and I could feel the start of my whisky headache.

  ‘Goodnight, Jakob,’ God finally replied. I switched off my comms link.

  As I staggered back to my tent I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d turned my back on a friend in a bad way.

  Despite what was now a near-constant stream of fire from each of us, we still had ammunition. The mud was now as much the black liquid of dissipated Them trying to reach us as it was rain and liquefying human corpses.

  Our targets were packed so closely that we barely needed to move our weapons, as one went down and we just shifted to the next. All of us were wounded in some way. My face looked partially melted, my leg was bleeding and a heavy-calibre shard round from a Walker had sent me sliding into the mud and gore. It had penetrated my breastplate, my inertial armour and my integral subcutaneous armour. I had a feeling that the chest wound was bad but Brownie, our medic, was busy.

  ‘I’m out!’ Gregor announced and grabbed two fragmentation grenades from his webbing and threw them into the horde of advancing aliens to give us more time. He hit the quick release on his railgun’s gyroscopic harness and let it slide off him and into the gory mud. Then he drew his personal defence weapon from its holster on his hip, unfolded the magazine and started firing burst after burst. It was a poor substitute for the railgun.

  I found the loss in firepower telling when a Berserk darted through our overlapping fields of fire. It took a lot of hits, the impacts causing its strangely liquid flesh to ripple. It swung up at me with a serrated blade, cutting off the end of my SAW and through my inertial and subcutaneous armour, scraping off my breastplate as it dug deep into my armpit. It really fucking hurt. I was lifted off my feet screaming. Muscles spasmed as I fired off the rest of the magazine in my SAW. Dorcas put the barrel of his carbine against the Berserk and kept firing into it as it reached up with its other hand and grabbed my flailing forearm and pulled. What I had thought was painful was nothing compared to having my arm torn off.

  The Berserk seemed to shake itself apart as a result of Dorcas’s sustained fire. I fell into the mud and there was an awful moment before my implanted pain management systems kicked in and started depleting my internal drugs reservoirs. I sat there feeling numb. My torn-off arm was pointing at me, as if in accusation.

  Dorcas’s rescue of me had left a hole in our fields of fire. He was struggling to reload his carbine when a Berserk’s clawed foot drove him into the mud next to me. I turned to look at him numbly. He was screaming, but in anger rather than pain. The foot squeezed and blood started to run from multiple head wounds. His head had been pushed to one side as he tried to bring his carbine to bear. The Berserk put the barrel of its weapon gauntlet against Dorcas’s head, which exploded as the mud and viscera below it turned to steam in the beam of black light.

  I was trying to drag my Benelli from its smartgrip back scabbard, but it was over my right shoulder and I couldn’t quite reach it with my left arm. Even through the fugue of painkillers and shock I knew I was just going through the motions. The Berserk that had killed Dorcas turned to me. Oh well, I thought, I’d
killed a lot more of Them than They had of me. I started to giggle. I was tired. It seemed to be leaning slowly forward and reaching for my head, but then time moves differently on boosted reflexes and speed.

  Then something really weird happened. Suddenly there were two large angry quadrupeds hanging off the Berserk. They seemed to be dogs, but that was clearly ridiculous. Who would bring dogs out here? Big dogs with lots of cybernetics that included boosted muscles and power-assisted steel jaws. These jaws were now deep in the Berserk and pulling it over as they savaged it.

  The Berserk managed to throw one of the dogs off. It rolled, came to a skidding halt and was back up on all fours immediately. It looked like it should be growling but it didn’t make any noise, or no noise I could pick up through my filters. The second dog succeeded in dragging the Berserk to the ground, but the alien grabbed the dog’s head and triggered a long burst from the shard gun on its weapon appendage, reducing the dog to clumps of meat and cybernetic components.

  The Berserk was staggering to its feet when another, much larger shape hit it. At first I thought it was another dog, as it had charged the Berserk on all fours. Whatever it was swung forelimb after forelimb into the Berserk as it rode it to the ground. As I watched the thing’s hands come away covered in black ichor, I realised that it was a man. It was someone fighting a Berserk hand-to-hand. Which was insane.

  The man turned to look at me and grinned. He had ichor around an enlarged and protruding mouth filled with steel canines. He had a lot of modifications, his physiology all wrong. He was built more like a predatory beast. His legs bent the wrong way; his arms were long, enabling him to run on all fours. He had a SAW slung across his back but it seemed he preferred hand-to-hand combat.

  ‘Incoming!’ Gregor, I think.

  The rocket contrails that filled the sky were one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, right up until they blossomed into a danger-close firestorm that seriously thinned the numbers of Them about to overwhelm us.