War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  Of course they turned on him. They were laughing. He wasn’t; he was sobbing and begging as I made my way through the crowd towards him. Anyone who got in the way had their legs kicked out from under them or got an elbow in the face.

  As I reached him he turned and started to beg. I grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off his feet and carried him through the crowd by his neck until I could slam him into the wall.

  I pulled my arm back and extended my blades. Fiona was standing next to me. The look of expectation on her face was almost sexual. Her look turned to one of disgust as Alasdair soiled himself. There was laughter. Someone grabbed my arm. I whipped my head round ready to hurt someone else and saw Calum there.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. Then calmer: ‘You can’t do this, Jakob.’ There were sounds of disappointment from the crowd. I let Alasdair go and retracted my blades. He sank to the ground in a pool of his own muck.

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you people?’ I asked, shaking my head. I was disgusted, as much with myself as with them. I wouldn’t fight to do something worthwhile like kill Rolleston but I’d become a spectacle, entertainment for these scum. These were the people that the Cabal had worked to protect.

  ‘You could have stopped this,’ I said accusingly to Calum.

  ‘I told you. A man in my position is expected to provide entertainment for his guests. Though I may not like it.’

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We may as well have been from different species.

  ‘If I’ve killed one of those three,’ I said, pointing back towards the broken bodies lying on the sand, then I’m coming back here and killing him.’

  Calum held his hand up in a placatory gesture. ‘Look, why don’t you let Fiona patch up your wounds?’

  ‘C’mon, Jakob, please?’ Fiona took hold of my arm. The concern in her voice lacked sincerity. I shook her off and stormed from the cellar, grabbing a bottle of whisky off a table as I did so.

  I’d taken worse beatings, notably at Rannu’s hands, but this seemed even more pointless than my fight in New York. I emptied about a quarter of the bottle of Glenmorangie into my mouth, just managing to swallow it before crying out as I forced too much whisky into my system and it burned my cuts. I leaned heavily against the wall of the corridor.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Fiona asked, her voice full of mock concern.

  ‘Oh just fuck off, will you,’ I told her wearily.

  ‘Daddy wants me to make sure you’re okay. I want to make sure you’re okay,’ she said coquettishly. I wasn’t coping well with this.

  My head jerked round to stare at her. How fucking bored and jaded was she? She leaned in and kissed me. I tried not to think of Morag as I returned the kiss. Or rather I tried to think about all the things about Morag that angered me.

  Anger was the emotion of this fuck. And that’s all it was, a fuck. Watching your partner through thermographics during sex can be beautiful. Looking at the colours and how they shift and change as they become hotter. The internal blush of sex. In this case I did it so I didn’t have to look at her.

  She was wild in bed but less than happy when I called her Morag. There was screaming and slamming of doors. I didn’t care. I had the rest of a bottle of Glenmorangie to drink. The bed looked like someone had been murdered in it. I should have got my injuries sorted out but I was so tired.

  Of course they were Spetsnaz. Who else could they be? And we owed them big time. Lieutenant Vladimir Skirov and his Vucari. The name was from some ancient Russian werewolf myth. Skirov and his people claimed that they weren’t try-too-hards who wanted to be scary but rather that the idea of warewolves, as they called themselves, made sound tactical sense. Having seen them in action I could see what they meant. The physiological changes that allowed them to run on all fours made them a lot faster. They had heavily augmented arms for the running, which gave them a lot of power in hand-to-hand, particularly with their steel-claw-tipped fingers. Their maws also gave them an edge in hand-to-hand combat. Assuming you didn’t mind getting a mouthful of what you’d bitten, and these guys didn’t.

  The thing was, however, that Russian cybernetics and prosthetics, particularly military ones, where built for function and power rather than looks and finesse. They looked less like the sort of werewolves you’d see in horror vizzes, immersions and on street-gang augmentations, and much more like mechanical, faintly canine monstrosities. Mudge had told Skirov this earlier, which had caused Skirov to shoot vodka from his nostrils he was laughing so hard. Russians had an odd sense of humour.

  They also drank a lot. Vladimir had told us proudly that, after combat, the biggest cause of casualties in the Russian armed forces was drinking non-beverage alcohol. I think a lot of what they drank was the fuel for alcohol-burning combat vehicles.

  We owed the Vucari. This meant that we’d spent a week engaging in a fine tradition of the Regiment. Stealing. In this case every bit of alcohol we could find to say thank you. There was no doubt in any of our minds that without the timely presence of these cheerful Russian psychos we would have been dead.

  We’d drunk to Dorcas. We’d drunk to the Spetsnaz who’d died on their patrol. Mudge had even suggested drinking to my arm. We’d drunk a lot.

  Saturday night found us in the NCOs’ mess. Fortunately the lieutenant was not too proud to drink with enlisted and NCOs. I suspected he’d drink with the Berserks if they asked. The mess was a partially bombed-out bunker, a twisted labyrinth of tunnels with various chambers used for drinking. The deeper parts belonged to special forces and you took your life in your hands straying into them unless you happened to be a very pretty squaddie on a date with someone hard enough to look after you.

  The cybrids weren’t Spetsnaz, they were Cossacks originally from southern Russia. The Cossacks often supported Russian special ops in much the same way the Special Forces Support Group did for British special forces and the Rangers did for the American Delta Force. They were lead by Captain Kost Skoropadsky. He was young and didn’t seem as big a wanker as many officers. He mainly kept quiet, and despite his higher rank tended to defer to Vladimir. The cybrids had removed their horse bodies and had attached cybernetic legs to become bipeds. I think they felt a little uncomfortable.

  In the wake of the Organizatsiya’s takeover of the Russian Federation the Cossacks had rebelled and set up their own autonomous state of Cossackia. While Cossack regiments still fought with the Russian army, if they met Spetsnaz on the streets of Moscow there would probably be bloodshed as memories were long in that part of the world. The rebellion had badly bloodied both sides. However, these particular Cossacks were descendants of colonists on Sirius. The plains of Sirius, before the war at least, were close enough to the steppes of their homeland. They had bred horses before They had come, and when They had come the Cossacks did what they always did: they fought.

  The cybrid centaur bodies had been developed to aid their horse ranching. They were capable of speeds comparable to many wheeled vehicles and had the ability to go places that wheeled vehicles just couldn’t. The Cossacks had soon found a new use for their cybrid bodies.

  Kost told me that he had never even seen a real horse. They had all been killed before he was born. Sometimes he would go to the sense booths and go riding or just stroke one. He wondered if they had got their smell right.

  The dogs were called Tosa-Inus, and were extensively modified Japanese fighting dogs. One of them had his head in Vladimir’s lap and he was scratching the animal behind its ears. I liked dogs. We’d been lucky enough to have one as a child. It was a working dog, a Border collie, but these were scary. They followed the Spetsnaz everywhere and were utterly silent. Vladimir explained that they’d had their vocal cords cut. I reached down to rub the back of one of their heads. The dog opened an eye and looked at me. The eye was a matt-black plastic lens, just like mine.

  In some ways it was horrible that they were used as weapons but there was something comfortable about their presence here. It was like a parody of nor
mality.

  Service in the Spetsnaz practically guaranteed you a high-ranking enforcer position within the Organizatsiya. Many of Vladimir’s people were stripped to the waist and proudly sporting tattoos. Hundred of years ago they would have been prison tattoos, but to go to prison in Russia you have to commit a crime that the Organizatsiya did not approve. Most never made it to prison.

  Mudge, who’d had to fight for his place in the mess and had nearly died in doing so, had pulled. Frankly, the huge warewolf Spetsnaz looked terrifying.

  ‘Won’t it be a bit like bestiality?’ I drunkenly asked him.

  ‘Yes!’ he shouted with altogether too much enthusiasm. I took this moment to head to the bar with some of my hard-earned back pay. I made my way through the crowd, knowing I was going to have to bargain to get reasonable-quality vodka. I say reasonable-quality – something that wouldn’t make you sterile. It was lucky that our eye implants meant we couldn’t go blind.

  I glanced over to the corner and saw Buck and Gibby. They were a mess of dreadlocks and beards. Their dusters and hats were thrown over nearby chairs and girls and boys of the R&R regiment were entertaining them. I turned away trying to suppress my distaste. It wasn’t just that the R&R regiment made me uncomfortable, though they did. I preferred the full sensory immersion porn of the booths. Buck and Gibby were with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers. They were superb pilots who flew missions in support of special operations. Except these two were chauffeurs for our nominal commanding officer Major Rolleston and his pet killer Josephine Bran, the Grey Lady. If Buck and Gibby were here, that meant that Rolleston and Bran were here, which in turn meant something shitty was about to happen to us.

  After some bartering, cajoling and threats, I got the drinks and made my way back towards our table, carrying a number of bottles. This was possible because I’d also got my new arm. It was superb. High-spec, fantastic flesh/prosthetic neural interface; it pretty much felt like part of my body. The tactile sensors were high spec and it had integral sheaths for four new knuckle blades. Best of all it had a smartlinked but independently tracking and firing shoulder-mounted laser.

  The new arm had become a thing of wonder among the Wild Boys. Special forces or not, it was very unusual for an NCO to get an arm this good, though Mudge had assured me that it was not as good-quality as his legs. Shaz had dug around and found that the limb had been meant for a high-ranking officer who’d lost his arm in a tank accident.

  ‘Do you know anyone called Nuada?’ he’d asked me.

  ‘No. Odd name. Why?’

  ‘Well it seems that it was Nuada – I’m guessing he’s a signalman somewhere – who had the arm redirected to you.’

  ‘Nice of him.’ But I was none the wiser. Maybe the officer in question had pissed this Nuada off.

  The bottles of vodka were quickly taken from me and distributed. The Spetsnaz were good company but quite scary people. I would not want to get on the wrong side of them, or owe them money. They spent most of their time raiding, only coming back to resupply and cause havoc. They had an even higher level of operational intensity than we did, and that was saying something. Some of the scrapes they got in sounded very hairy and they appeared to be pretty much a law unto themselves.

  I was watching one trying to impress Mudge, using his power-assisted steel maw to bite a chunk out of the metal table. Gregor, normally quiet even when drunk, was killing himself laughing at some story one of the Cossacks’ rail-gunners was telling him. I looked around the table. It was amazing the effect the Russians were having. So often our drinking bouts were maudlin because we knew that no matter what happened, how bad things got, we were going to have to go out and do it all over again. The Russians seemed at peace with that and perhaps even to relish it.

  ‘I have not yet eaten the human beef!’ Vladimir shouted. I think he was trying it on with Bibs, who sprayed vodka all over the table to shouts of derision from the rest of us.

  ‘I have,’ she announced when she finished choking on her vodka. ‘You’re not missing anything.’ Ash cracked up.

  ‘You’re a cannibal?’ I asked, surprised. Everyone else started laughing at me. ‘What?’ I demanded.

  ‘She’s talking about giving head, Jakob,’ Ash said somewhat patronisingly.

  ‘Surely that’s human pork?’ Mudge asked.

  ‘All human meat is pork,’ Gregor said. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘Pork-like.’ There was a long pause while we waited for him to qualify what he had said. ‘So I hear.’

  ‘You have only eaten the human meat if you bite down when you go down,’ one of the Spetsnaz warewolves said. I was pretty sure she was female. Ash, Bibby and the women with the Spetsnaz and Cossacks started laughing to cries of protest from the guys.

  ‘Andrea swallows,’ one of the other Spetsnaz said.

  ‘More importantly, I chew before I swallow. You should remember this, Vassily,’ the female Spetsnaz pointed out to more male cries of protest and female laughter. Ash clinked glasses with the woman.

  ‘Do you chew, Ash?’ I asked, grinning.

  Ash looked down at my groin. ‘Chew what?’ she asked innocently. I’d asked for that. I tried not to worry too much that Bibs, who I’d had a one-night stand with a little while ago, was laughing the hardest.

  ‘You’d only taste cock implant anyway,’ Mudge said, trying to keep a straight face. More laughter.

  ‘Like you’d know,’ I managed weakly.

  ‘No!’ Vladimir cried. ‘This is not right!’

  ‘We have an alternative opinion?’ Mudge asked.

  ‘The pork, that is only when human flesh is cooked. This I have tasted.’

  ‘You are a sick motherfucker, Vladimir,’ Ash pointed out. Vladimir was nodding drunkenly.

  I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. Cannibalism was reasonably prevalent in some of the worst parts of the poorest cities in western Europe. We’d all heard of it when we were growing up, just people too poor and desperate to find anything else. It had also happened during the war. Vladimir seemed to think it was something cool, but then again Russia’s criminal empire was not nearly as poor as most of western Europe and America, though it was not as wealthy as the equatorial states.

  ‘Everyone has done this in Russia,’ Vladimir said. He was trying to clear his head to make his point by shaking it. It made him look like a large and grotesque mechanical dog.

  ‘What did you eat?’ Brownie, our normally near-silent medic, asked.

  ‘A finger.’

  Brownie seemed to be considering this. A frowning Vladimir was watching our Scouse medic carefully. ‘You are such a pussy,’ Brownie finally said.

  The Vucari looked between each other and at their commander. I think Kost was holding his breath. Now Brownie chooses to speak? I wondered. We all tensed up wondering if he had gone too far. Vladimir looked furious as he pointed at Brownie’s expressionless face and then burst out laughing.

  ‘You are not afraid of anything, my funny little friend!’

  Brownie smiled and started laughing as well.

  ‘Nice deadpan delivery, you wanker,’ Shaz told the Scouser.

  ‘This is why They are not worthy enemies,’ one of the Russians said. He had an Asian look to him. The others had called him Bataar and I was pretty sure he was their signalman, their hacker.

  ‘Worthy enough for me,’ a pained-looking Gregor said.

  ‘Because you can’t eat them?’ Bibs asked. Vladimir was nodding. I was starting to think Bibs was taking an unhealthy interest in this.

  ‘No, well maybe for Vlad and some of the others, but we cannot feed our gods and honour their death without blood,’ Bataar continued.

  ‘That black shit won’t do you?’ Ash asked.

  ‘The black shit, as you call it, will not do. Mother Wolf was nurtured on blood. She gives us much bounty, lets us hunt as we please. It is only right we offer something back in return.’

  Listening to Bataar it occurred
to me how lucky we were with Shaz as our signalman. I watched many of the Spetsnaz nodding at what Bataar said. Vladimir may have been the leader but Bataar was clearly the high priest. Shaz was devout but he wasn’t mad. I’d heard lots of stories from other special forces units of extreme and often bloody religious views and in some instances, as seemed to be the case here, of entire squads becoming religious cults.

  On the other hand these guys revelled in the war. It was a point of view I couldn’t get behind, but it was also the reason we were alive. I tried to imagine what would have happened if the positions had been reversed. Would we have come in to help? I didn’t like the answers I was coming up with. We certainly wouldn’t if we’d been out of ammo.

  ‘It’s fear,’ the more sober Kost told us, returning to the initial point. ‘Working for the Organizatsiya there are so many dangerous people. There has to be something about you that will keep others in line. The longer this goes on the more outrageous that has to be.’

  I wasn’t sure I would have been so frank with a man like Vladimir. The Spetsnaz lieutenant seemed to be giving Kost’s explanation some thought.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Kost raised an eyebrow. ‘No?’

  ‘No. Or that is not all. Fear is important.’ He held his arms out expansively. ‘We are predators! We hunt and kill! I want to chase a man down, a man who has wronged me or mine!’ His shouting was drawing looks from others in the mess as well as the occasional cry to shut up. All the Wild Boys were looking around a little nervously, making placatory gestures towards the people we knew. ‘I will chase him down! I will make him fear me! Make his heart beat faster so when I sink my teeth into his neck the blood will surge into my mouth again and again with the last beats of his heart, and I will taste his fear and know what I have done to him! How I have changed him!’ By the time he was finished he was standing on the table with many of the mess’s other patrons shouting at him to be quiet.

  Vladimir bit his tongue and spat blood into his glass of vodka. All the Vucari did the same. Kost was shaking his head.