War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  ‘Sneak in?’ I asked. I hated IT but an idea was trying to force its way into my head.

  ‘Now you begin to understand. The others used Ambassador to help provide the operating system and processing power that God would need.’

  ‘And Demiurge used the same principles because it utilised your conspiracy’s research.’

  ‘Yes, and had greater access to Themtech and therefore was more reliant on it.’

  ‘Are you saying we can use the information from Operation Spiral to sneak past it? Hack Demiurge? But the Cabal must control it or at least be aware of it. They’ll see us coming.’

  ‘How? Everyone’s dead, mad or in my case both, and I was in their custody. Their systems are locked down by Demiurge, and even if they have an agent here who is aware that we have met, this is a sealed system and I have worked very long and hard to cultivate the persona of a notorious lunatic.’ I was only starting to realise how clever Vicar was. ‘Though I’m not denying Pagan and Morag … if she is who … if she is the savant you seem to claim, she will need to do a lot of work on it.’

  This was beginning to sound like a chance, a very small one but a chance nonetheless. I hated the way that hope seemed to wriggle into my psyche like an intestinal parasite and get me to do stupid things.

  ‘Won’t the NSA or GCHQ already have all this info and make it available to Pagan and Morag in the US?’

  ‘Yes and no. Much of it is classified and Pagan and Morag are known anarchists after all. Also I have been theorising about this ever since I managed to make my sanctum, and I had been working on it before I was caught.’

  ‘You wanted your own way round God?’

  ‘Every single one of us would have been doing the same thing while trying to ensure that nobody else could.’

  ‘But when God—’

  ‘GCHQ and the NSA keep all the most sensitive stuff on isolated systems.’

  ‘If we turn this over then it means people can hack God. It means it’s all over. God just becomes a voice on the net. Nothing more than a depressed search engine.’

  Vicar actually smiled at this.

  ‘That was inevitable. They are already trying to circumvent him, destroy him, subvert him. Yes?’ I nodded. ‘For some reason the demands of technology and commerce long ago superseded human concerns. We always try and kill our gods in the end.’

  ‘So it was for nothing. It’ll just go back to the way it is. That prick Sharcroft is already trying to make it happen.’

  ‘Nothing? Christ’s life was short.’

  ‘Look, don’t start giving me this religious bollocks.’

  ‘He changed everything. If nothing else, then God has at least shown everyone what is happening. The rest is up to us, it always has been. God was just a tool, as are arguably all gods. And it’s not religious bollocks; the whole thing was a secular revelation. Obviously I was just drawing a parallel.’ He was sounding less like Vicar, the frothing religious lunatic I’d known, and more like a university teacher in some old viz.

  The church burst into flames.

  ‘Are we being attacked?’ I asked, alarmed.

  ‘It’s a virus.’

  ‘From outside? An attack?’ Vicar went and stood in the flames. They engulfed him but he wasn’t burning like human flesh would.

  ‘Break the fifth seal, Jakob.’

  Despite myself I was backing away from the flames. I could feel the heat from them, virtual or not.

  ‘They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the Earth and avenge our blood?” Break the fifth seal, Jakob, because Rolleston will surely break the sixth.’

  I was retreating from the flames. So Vicar had finally reverted to type. Except he wasn’t roaring and screaming, eyes rolling; he seemed calm and sane though he was burning like paper.

  ‘Have you had a religious experience, Jakob? A visitation, an epiphany.’

  ‘It was bollocks, a hallucination, like all of you.’ Even I wasn’t sure I believed that.

  ‘I know where Satan has his throne, Jakob. It makes the Atlantis facility look like some back-alley harvester operation.’

  ‘Where?’ I demanded.

  ‘Lalande 2, the Citadel.’ Then he started to laugh. ‘We have made a covenant, you and I. I need you to seal it!’

  ‘How?’ I was shouting now, as the roar of the flames was so loud. The church was burning like paper. Vicar told me how.

  I was sitting on the floor next to Vicar’s bed. I couldn’t look at him and do this. The stench of the place really hit me this time – old blood, fear, sweat, shit, piss – it was an abomination.

  If I was going to do this then I had to do it now before I lost the nerve. I stood up and walked away from the bed. My shoulder laser unfolded itself and pushed its way through the shoulder flap of my coat. The targeting window appeared in my IVD. I thought it would be easier using the shoulder laser, not pulling the trigger myself. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see my friend reduced to so much bloody steam, scorched flesh and bone. The problem with the targeting screen is it doesn’t matter if your eyes are closed or not. The bang of the superheated air particles was obscene, as was the flash of red light in the dark warehouse.

  I hadn’t wanted to kill any more, and now I had. A friend of mine. Vicar was like everyone else, just another one of Rolleston’s victims.

  As I headed for the door my flash compensators kicked in as high-powered lights stabbed in through the dirty windows and the slightly ajar door. I’d been aware of company since I’d come out of the sense trance. They weren’t quiet. I couldn’t be bothered to wait for them to come in and get me and couldn’t think of a way out. I decided to get it over and done with.

  Outside was very bright. There were lots of flashing lights, sirens and shouting people with guns. It reminded me of docking at High Nyota Mlima, the tethered space station at the top of the Kenyan Spoke, after the mutiny on the Santa Maria.

  As I followed the shouted instructions and walked forward, hands held high, a couple of things bothered me. Where were Vicar’s guards? I sank to my knees as ordered, the advancing C-SWAT team covering me all the time. I felt notorious. That lasted until I was kicked down onto my face and my hands secured. And how could Vicar have known about what I saw in the Dog’s Teeth? I was trying to forget what I’d seen myself.

  Then of course the inevitable kicking began.

  6

  Somewhere in the Midlands

  I’d taken worse beatings but it was pretty extensive. When they got tired of bruising fists and feet on subcutaneous armour they started to use sticks. My internal systems make me resistant to shock but they can be overloaded, like the Wait did in Crawling Town. They had a go at overloading my systems. Pretty much my only ray of light was when a few of them managed to electrocute each other. My biggest complaint was the poor quality of the threats. They had a limited repertoire mainly based around anal rape.

  I tried not to rise to any of it. Regiment training was to try and remain as passive as possible. I pretty much had to use all my self-control to not take the piss. I suppose I should’ve been angry with them, but if somebody had done to a Wild Boy what I had done to those four police just outside Pitlochry we would have made sure they wound up dead.

  Bruised and broken, I hit the floor of the cell with sufficient force to cause me to blow blood out of my mouth and nose. All in all I think I’d come off lightly, or maybe I was just getting used to barely being able to move because of the pain. I noticed I’d spat blood over a pair of expensive-looking shoes.

  ‘I’ve killed people for less,’ a broad cockney voice said. I looked up at the owner of the voice with the one eye I could still open. Even that hurt.

  ‘Isn’t that just the kind of thing that people say?’ I asked. Or at least I tried to, but it came out a slurred dribbling mess.

  She was quite a small Asian woman, wearing a very smart-looking skirt suit. About half of her body was obviously cyb
ernetic reconstruction. Something pretty bad had happened to her in the past. She also looked very familiar.

  A solid white guy wearing a suit and carrying one of the new gauss PDWs and a wiry Chinese woman dressed and armed similarly stood either side of her. They were obviously bodyguards but unlike most bodyguards weren’t just a status symbol. I knew they knew what they were doing.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ the Asian woman asked.

  ‘You look familiar.’ I was drooling blood as I spoke. ‘Are you in the vizzes? Immersion porn?’ The bodyguards were trying not to smile. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be a smart-arse; I was just confused. Though why I thought a porn star would visit me I don’t know. ‘I know who they are though. Lien, Mike,’ I said by way of greeting to the bodyguards. They were both ex-SBS. I’d known them briefly on Dog 4 but I think they’d spent most of their time on Proxima. Mike nodded to me.

  ‘All right, Jake,’ Lien said, her Scouse accent still strong. ‘You look like shit.’ I managed to give her the finger but only because I used my cybernetic arm.

  ‘My name is Komali Akhtar. I’m the prime minister,’ she said as if that should mean something to me. It did at least explain where I knew her from.

  ‘So you don’t work in porn then?’

  ‘No, Sergeant Douglas, I do not.’ Her voice was becoming more brittle.

  ‘In my defence I am at a funny angle,’ I slurred.

  ‘Get him on his feet,’ she told Mike and Lien. They ignored her. Good for you, I thought. When working close protection your job is to keep the principal safe, not to fetch and carry. When it comes to the principal’s safety they do what the bodyguards say, not the other way round.

  Akhtar sighed, but to her credit she leaned down and helped me to a bench despite the fact I was covered in blood. Lien watched me very carefully and made sure she always had a clear shot.

  ‘What happened to you then?’ I said, approximately.

  ‘Pressure crushed my sub like an eggshell on Proxima,’ Akhtar answered matter-of-factly.

  ‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She looked me in the eyes. ‘Sorry? I’m one of the luckiest people alive today. At that depth in those oceans I should be dead. I thank Allah every day for my continuing existence.’ I guess that made sense. Everything I’d heard about Proxima suggested it was a nasty place to do business.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been following your career. Your terrorist act—’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I interrupted her. I’d spoken with enough feeling to spit blood all down my chest.

  ‘Excuse me?’ She did not sound happy. If she had been a Royal Navy sub captain and, if I remembered correctly, a scion of one of the more powerful Hackney families, then she almost certainly did not like being interrupted like that.

  ‘We weren’t using fear to make a political point; we were trying to use truth to make a point, and we’d largely been backed into a corner.’

  ‘Semantics.’

  ‘Either that or it’s spin to call us terrorists.’

  She regarded me for a moment, very much the officer about to bawl out an uppity NCO or whatever they called them in the navy. She decided to let it pass and continue.

  ‘Regardless of the nature of your acts, your accomplishments are quite impressive bearing in mind the odds you were up against.’

  ‘Didn’t we pave the way for your career?’

  ‘Your brawling with the police is less so,’ she said, ignoring my comment.

  ‘They deserved it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘There’s no fucking maybe about it.’

  ‘Did you vote?’ Her question took me by surprise.

  ‘What the fuck has that got to do with it?’

  ‘We all watched your broadcast. We all heard what was said – Mr Mudgie’s speech about democracy. If you truly do want to change things, then you have to take an interest. Otherwise Mr Cronin was right: you are purveyors of chaos just trying to tear things down.’

  I looked at her for a long time. She was like the few good officers I’d met in my time. You trusted her. Admittedly you trusted her because you knew where you stood, not because you thought she had your best interests at heart.

  ‘You let them beat me, didn’t you?’ I asked, smiling.

  ‘Of course. You may not like the police but we will need them. Your beating was their price for you not being killed resisting arrest.’

  ‘Did you pull the MI5 team out of the warehouse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Vicar was more likely to talk to you.’

  ‘Going to torture me for information too?’

  ‘That was a decision made by the Cabal, not me.’

  Which was fair. She hadn’t even been in office at that point.

  ‘So what do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to go and help your friends. Cause problems for the Cabal again.’

  ‘Why me? Don’t you have a country’s armed forces under your command?’

  ‘Yes, and everyone will be doing what they can, but you’re rather good at annoying the Cabal.’

  I smiled at this. It hurt.

  ‘You speaking to all of us?’

  ‘As many as I can.’

  ‘One-on-one briefings?’

  ‘You and your friends have been the most effective thorn in the side of the Cabal.’

  This wasn’t making sense. My career as a so-called terrorist celebrity aside, she was too high up and I was too low down.

  ‘You have other people with our skill sets. You’re not telling me something, and unless you level with me you can go and tell the police that we’re not finished and I think they’re a bunch of pussies.’

  I noticed Mike smile. Akhtar gave this some thought. The silence seemed to stretch out. This gave me time to consider just how much pain I was in. It was a lot, and this was despite the near-constant drain on my internal drug reservoirs.

  ‘We’re desperate,’ she finally said. This I believed. ‘What I tell you now cannot be repeated.’

  ‘If I go back to work with Pagan, Morag and the others, it will be discussed with the team.’

  She gave this some more thought. I think she was warring with years of experience and training that emphasised the importance of secrecy. At the same time I was warring with years of being sent out on jobs with not nearly enough information.

  ‘You understand how this battle will be fought, don’t you?’ she finally said.

  ‘Fleet and net,’ I said. ‘They have the fleet, but if I understand the God versus Demiurge equation properly then we have the processing power to make God more powerful than Demiurge, which will have to rely on the processing power in the four colonial fleets.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ She said. This was new. ‘In theory we have the processing power but since God was released most governments have been isolating their systems and taking their resources off the net.’

  Then it hit me.

  ‘And they won’t want to share because it means that they have to let God in again.’ I groaned.

  ‘Which means that Demiurge may well have the processing power to win the conflict. Basic divide and conquer.’

  The short-sightedness of it beggared belief.

  ‘What do they think is going to happen?!’ I demanded angrily.

  ‘You have to remember it’s still an unseen threat.’

  ‘They’ve lost contact with all four fucking colonies!’

  ‘Obviously you are preaching to the converted here. There’s more,’ she said. I waited. I had the feeling I was going to be told more stuff which would make me feel angry and powerless at other people’s stupidity. ‘Earth’s defences are not as impregnable as people have been led to believe.’

  I felt my heart sink. I had known that the Earth’s home system fleet was made up of earlier-generation ships that had survived service in the colonies. I knew the ships were neither as s
ophisticated nor as many as the ships of the colonial fleets. We had, however, been brought up to believe in an impregnable fortress Earth with its surrounding cordon of orbital weapons platforms.

  ‘You mean it’s a lie?’ I demanded.

  ‘Not exactly. It’s the same problem. It’s hard enough to get everyone to co-operate out in the colonies fighting Them, but when it’s on our doorstep, when the stakes are so much higher …’

  ‘Because people think they’ve got more to lose, never mind the squaddie in the fucking colonies!’

  ‘They want to look out for themselves, and understandably so.’

  ‘So the problem is there will be no cohesive defence?’

  Akhtar nodded. ‘And some may wish to come to terms with the Cabal.’

  ‘That means total control!’ I couldn’t believe this.

  ‘They may prefer that to what they see as total destruction.’

  ‘Brilliant. So what do you want me to do? Go and die under an alien sun for governments too stupid to work together?’

  ‘Yes.’ And again she seemed deadly serious.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Not a lot in it for me.’

  ‘True,’ she agreed. This was weird.

  ‘You should work on your motivational speaking.’

  ‘Do you want me to lie to you?’ She had a point.

  ‘Maybe soften the blow a bit.’

  ‘You’re fucked.’

  ‘Yeah, now you’re getting it.’

  ‘I want you to sell your lives dearly. I want you to cause them as much trouble as you can. If you think you can provide us with intelligence safely then do so because we need any we can get, but most importantly I want you to raid, sabotage, assassinate and do anything you can to damage their resources and delay them. And when they catch you, and they will, I want you to make sure you kill yourself and destroy your internal memory before you fall into their hands.’

  ‘You realise that the people we’re talking about are just like you and me but have been misled by Rolleston and Cronin?’

  She looked me straight in the eyes when she answered. ‘Yes. It’s something I have given a great deal of thought to. If you can think of another way …’