‘And nudity. That’s brilliant, Mudge. Thanks.’ He was getting closer. ‘Don’t hug me …’ Naked Mudge gave me a hug. Morag was laughing and Pagan was smiling.
‘So is your holiday over?’ Pagan asked as I patted Mudge on the head and tried to disentangle myself while getting the minimum of paint on me.
‘Yeah. I didn’t enjoy it. The world is still full of arseholes and now they’re queuing up to meet me.’
‘You look like you shouldn’t be out on your own,’ he said.
‘There’s an argument for that.’
I glanced over at Sharcroft. As ever, his corpse-like pallor betrayed nothing. I looked back to Morag, who was gazing at me coolly. She hadn’t rushed over to hug me, but neither had she started shouting at me, which I considered a small victory.
‘Is there someplace we can talk?’ I asked.
Pagan nodded and we followed him. Mudge leaped up onto a desk and started dancing.
‘I should be kept apprised—’ Sharcroft started.
‘Fuck off unless you want to get shot,’ I told him. I wasn’t just being obnoxious; I was eager to make sure I remembered just who the enemy was.
Pagan led us into a smaller chamber. It was pretty much empty except for a plain desk, two uncomfortable-looking skeletal chairs, a high-resolution monitor, a holographic projector and some thinscreens. It had a similar metal mesh around it to the main room outside but something about it looked makeshift, scrounged and scavenged.
‘You do this?’ I asked. Pagan and Morag both nodded. ‘Look, I haven’t—’
Morag turned round and glared at me and held a finger over her lips. I felt very green just then. Pagan and Morag swept the place for bugs and found a couple.
‘Little pricks.’ Pagan cursed into the bug before turning to me. ‘In the minute or two we came out to speak to you.’
They both then checked us and took a couple more off me that must have been slipped in when I was being searched. I felt more embarrassed.
‘But I thought this was a what-do-you-call-it cage?’ I said.
‘It is. These are recorders.’
He stamped on them. Morag set up a white-noise projector.
‘Fuuuck!’ Mudge screamed and turned to glare at her. ‘What a fucking comedown. What did you do that for?’
She gently slapped him on the side of the face. ‘Focus, Mudge.’
Then Morag took my head in her hands and kissed me. It’s difficult to describe how good it felt. Afterwards she looked up at me. I could see myself reflected in her replacement eyes. I was a mess but I’d looked a lot worse. Then she hit me squarely on the nose. She was a lot faster and stronger than she had been. It actually hurt. A lot. I reeled back, more from surprise than anything else, and grabbed my nose. She was staring at me, arms crossed.
‘What?!’ I managed.
‘Since talking to you does no good, I thought I’d demonstrate how pleased I am to see you and how pissed off I still am with you.’
Pagan was grinning. Mudge was looking pained. ‘Always the negativity with you two,’ he said despairingly, shaking his head.
‘That may be partially my fault,’ Pagan said.
‘Well I may fucking punch you back.’ I’d been having a much better day until about thirty seconds ago.
‘I merely expressed the opinion to Morag that when you returned we might not have time for her and your normal decision-making process.’
‘Oh brilliant. So now we’ve moved up to violence?’ I asked Morag.
‘Only when talking doesn’t work,’ she said, grinning at me. How very Dundonian, I thought. I blamed Rannu completely for the speed and the strength of the punch. ‘Besides, you’ve been a dick and you’re not taking over.’
‘I’m not here to take over, and where’s Rannu? I want to discuss his hand-to-hand training.’
Pagan and Morag exchanged a look. I groaned inwardly.
‘He went ahead,’ Morag finally said.
This was bad news. I’d had a feeling he would probably go ahead but was hoping that he hadn’t. We could have used him, regardless of what we were going to end up doing.
‘Okay, my suggestion is this: we talk broadly about objectives, we discuss the operating conditions, terrain and details en route, where nobody who can overhear will be able to do any damage. Agreed?’
Morag looked to Pagan. I managed to suppress irrational feelings of annoyance and jealousy. Finally Pagan nodded.
‘Yes!’ Mudge shouted enthusiastically.
‘Where are we going?’ Please not Sirius, please not Sirius, please not Sirius.
‘Lalande,’ Pagan said.
‘Oh well, at least it’s not Proxima,’ I said.
Lalande was a red dwarf system. The only planet that almost supported life was Lalande 2, which was a tidally locked, high-gravity, mineral-rich hellhole. The only place more inhospitable was Proxima, with its frozen wastes and toxic oceans.
‘And Rannu’s gone ahead?’
Morag and Pagan nodded. I wanted to ask what he was doing. I wanted to ask if they had protocols for meeting him, but I did not trust the environment so this wasn’t the place.
‘Are you happy that I handle the security element?’ I asked Pagan and just about in time remembered to look at Morag as well. I left it unsaid that I was assuming they were planning some kind of witchcraft for the mission and would have their own information warfare agenda. It was Morag who nodded. ‘And I’m assuming that we’re all broadly on the same page as regards our general objectives?’
Fuck up the enemy as much as possible and see if we can learn anything while doing it. What would be more difficult was coming up with a way to safely transmit any useful intelligence back. The pair of them nodded again.
‘No,’ said Mudge.
‘You’ll like it,’ I assured him.
He seemed happy with that.
Morag tapped me on the head. ‘There’s something in there I want,’ she said. I guessed she was talking about the information exchange between myself and whatever was calling itself Nuada in the mind of Them.
‘I’m getting a little tired of being poked and prodded, and you couldn’t find anything before but you’re welcome to try again. I’ve got something for you.’
I found the file that Vicar had given me in his sanctuary and tried to send it to Pagan and Morag. It bounced. Both of them were looking at me like I was an idiot.
‘You’re in an information quarantine,’ Morag said, using the tone that young people like to use when their elders are being stupid.
‘Where’s it from?’ Pagan asked.
I told him. Even Mudge looked at me seriously when I mentioned Vicar’s name. His camera eyes revolving one way and then the other in their sockets.
‘He’s alive?’ Pagan asked. I could hear the emotion in his voice.
I shook my head. Pagan covered his eyes with his hands. He hadn’t been this emotional before but I think he’d prepared himself that time. The hope that I’d hinted at was just a bit too much for him. I hadn’t realised they were so close. I felt like an utter shit at my pang of jealousy as Morag gently pulled Pagan’s head down towards her shoulder and held him. Through the jealousy I managed to wonder how someone who’d had her life managed to care about other people. Where had she learned that?
‘I’m all right,’ Pagan finally said.
I decided to spare him the grizzly details, which conveniently meant omitting who it was that actually killed him.
Morag let Pagan go and grabbed a double jack cable and moved towards me.
‘You’re not supposed to—’ Pagan started.
I guessed there was some kind of protocol involving a separate and isolating device, but it was too late. I felt the disconcerting click of the jack being slid into one of the four plugs on the back of my neck. Somehow it felt even more intimate than the kiss. Hopefully it wouldn’t be followed by a punch. I saw the notification of the connection on my IVD. I sent the file. The connection was severed. Morag concentrate
d for a moment.
‘It’s fine,’ she told Pagan. ‘I knew he wouldn’t poison me.’
Pagan admonished her for not following proper procedure. He then demonstrated it by having her put the file into a stand-alone system, where they used the touch screen controls on the monitor to run a diagnostic on it before Pagan jacked in and stored it in his internal systems as well.
I wasn’t paying that much attention. Morag had left me a text when we’d connected. I wished I’d thought of something like that but then I probably wouldn’t have known what to say. On the other hand, I really hoped it wasn’t a revenge virus. This was a black op; I briefly wondered if they had access to slaveware. I decided to trust her and open the message. Besides, I was pretty sure that slaveware would come in a much bigger file. It simply said, ‘You’re an arsehole but I missed you.’ I think I must have sagged as the tension drained from me. Morag glanced up at me and then turned away smiling. I found Mudge looking at me, grinning.
Yeah, I felt much better. Except for the guilt about sleeping with Fiona.
‘Mudge,’ Pagan started. Mudge’s head jerked around and his lenses refocused on him. ‘You filming now?’ Pagan asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Okay, you can’t do that. It’s a huge security risk.’
‘I’ve got a kill switch set up with extensive parameters on it. Anything happens to me, it runs a firestorm through my memory. I can also trigger it with a thought. Then of course I tell them everything I know because they’ll probably torture me and I can’t think that’d be good, probably quite painful.’
I was smiling at this. Pagan looked like he was getting ready to lecture.
‘Don’t exaggerate, Mudge,’ I said. ‘You’d sell us out for some good weed.’
Mudge pretended to give this some thought. ‘That’s unfair, man. Maybe some good coke or a mind-blowing psychotropic, depending on my mood.’
‘Look, this is very amusing but he’s a—’ Pagan started.
‘He’ll be fine,’ I assured Pagan, who didn’t look very assured.
‘People keep on forgetting what I do for a living. I’m not just another numpty with a gun. You do your job and let me do mine. You might see me as a risk but believe me, it’s just as important. Or do you want this place to remain secret? Sharcroft to remain secret?’ Suddenly Mudge wasn’t playing the stoned buffoon.
Pagan still looked unconvinced. Morag put a hand on his arm.
‘How can you doubt him?’ she asked.
‘He told all last time.’
‘Look, I’m as unhappy about it as everyone else—’ I started.
‘Bollocks, you love it,’ Mudge interrupted.
‘But his timing was good. Though that does remind me. If we’re going into a high-surveillance environment—’
‘Possibly total surveillance,’ Pagan said.
‘Then we’re going to need to look very different.’
‘We know,’ Morag said.
‘We need to put together a list of everything we need,’ I said. I’d started one in my internal systems.
‘We have. We’ve given it to Sharcroft. He said he’d take care of the resources side,’ Morag said smugly.
‘Then we need to ignore it and set up another one, get way too much money from Sharcroft and buy multiples of each item we need,’ I told her.
I was trying not to turn this into one-upmanship, mainly because I didn’t want to get hit. Morag looked at Pagan uncertainly.
‘He’s probably right,’ Pagan eventually admitted.
‘And Pagan, you should know better. Particularly as I’m betting it’s what Rannu did.’ Pagan nodded a little sheepishly. ‘We also need a place to pick it up which is not heavily watched over by the almighty. Speaking of which, any information on Cabal agents? Anything we have to watch out for while we’re shopping?’
At this Pagan looked exasperated.
‘Sharcroft’s not been particularly open about this,’ he said.
‘Let me guess – operational security?’ I asked.
Pagan nodded. ‘From what we’ve managed to garner, there was a purge based on what he knew, but some of them got away. I think he’s also playing counter-intelligence games with them.’
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted something more direct and final. I didn’t think we could afford to play around like that, but then I’d never had the patience for intelligence games.
‘The problem is he’s too much of an old-fashioned spy, or rather too much of an old-fashioned spymaster,’ Pagan finished.
‘Well, we may need to show him the difference between operational security and what he’s running the operation for in the first place.’ So we could do our job. We were also going to have to dissuade him from constantly trying to bug our gear. Though we’d still need to continue checking it.
‘Infiltration?’ I asked. At this Pagan looked a little uncomfortable.
‘OILO,’ he said. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
‘Into high G? Are you fucking nuts?’
‘Cool,’ Mudge said.
‘Look, I know rock-ape combat air controllers live for this shit, but it’s fucking dangerous at the best of times. What are you doing – reliving past glories?’
Pagan shrugged. I think he knew Orbital Insertion Low Opening was mad. ‘Can you think of a better way?’
Now I had to admit that he was right.
‘I don’t want to die in space,’ I muttered to myself.
‘You are such a fucking pussy,’ Mudge told me. I nodded.
‘How do we get there?’ I was unhappy and trying to change the subject.
‘NSA frigate, stealth bird,’ Pagan told me. I was already shaking my head. Pagan was starting to look a little put out. ‘Then what?’
‘Smuggler, a good one. We need to control as much of this as we can and take as much of it away from Sharcroft as possible.’ For this mission there was no such thing as paranoid. Pagan looked like he was about to argue but didn’t. ‘We need more shooters,’ I said.
‘Well, we’ve been looking for replacements for you,’ Morag said. I smiled at her but with the best will in the world she was not going to know as much as us about the special forces community.
‘I’ve been thinking about that, since you mention it,’ Mudge said.
‘In your state of mind? We’re not taking any dragons or talking goldfish,’ I told him.
‘Very fucking funny.’
‘We got a list from Sharcroft of active and inactive members of the community. A bit of a risk, but everyone I know is past it,’ Pagan said and ran his fingers over the monitor’s touch screen, opening the file. Mudge and I just looked at him. ‘I’m not,’ he added defensively.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ Morag said, and we didn’t mean to ignore her exactly.
‘Harry in Blue Troop,’ Mudge suggested. I took the monitor from Pagan and input Harry’s full name. He’d been a good soldier and was easy to get on with.
‘Dead,’ I told Mudge.
‘Yeah? Where?’
‘Sirius, two weeks after we shipped out.’
‘Them?’
‘No, accident. Looks like a mech stood on him.’
‘Fucking cavalry,’ Mudge said, shaking his head. ‘What about Crazy Shirley?’
‘What, that lunatic from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment? Wasn’t she the only girl you ever slept with?’ I asked.
At the time I wasn’t sure why Morag was looking so pissed off but even she turned and looked at Mudge askance.
‘You have to understand she’s really butch,’ Mudge said defensively. ‘She took me.’
‘Too much information,’ Pagan told him.
I’d finally remembered her proper name and found her on the list.
‘Still there, so we’ll be fighting her,’ I said.
‘Shit,’ Mudge said sadly. ‘What about Toadstool?’
‘As a source for drugs?’ I asked but checked. ‘Dead. Overdose.’
‘Fuck. Combine
?’
‘The American guy?’
‘Yes, an American,’ Morag said, but we were distracted.
‘Dead. Orbital strike,’ I told Mudge.
‘Boom-Boom?’
‘Dead. Shot down in an assault shuttle.’
‘Did you know anyone with a proper name?’ Morag asked acidly.
A frightening amount of the people I knew vaguely or by reputation were either dead or still in theatre. That meant they were now working for Rolleston and Cronin. A few that we came across had been ‘tasked’, which I guess meant that they were doing the same sort of stupid thing as we were. This went on for a while until I saw the dawning of an idea spread over Mudge’s face.
‘I’ve had an awesome thought,’ he said. I looked at him expectantly. ‘Vladimir.’ He was grinning.
‘He’s a fucking lunatic. Maybe more so than Balor,’ I said, though despite myself I could see the appeal of it. The Spetsnaz warewolf was a good fighter and his insanity might actually be a boon. ‘He’s an officer. Do you think he’ll play along?’ I was checking the list to see if it carried info on Russian special forces. It did but it was sparser.
‘Yeah, if we pay him in cooking ethanol or something.’
I was pleasantly surprised to find Vladimir in the list. There was a link to the rest of the Vucari. They weren’t in theatre, which was a relief. They were however tasked. I was getting tired of this.
‘They’re off dying somewhere else,’ I told Mudge.
He looked crestfallen. On the plus side, I could imagine the Vucari making the Black Squadrons utterly miserable before they got caught. I didn’t like to think about the cost for the poor bastards who got caught in the middle but I hoped the Russians got to eat a few of the true believers.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger tiredly and put the monitor down.
‘Finished your little trip down squaddie memory lane?’ Morag asked testily. I couldn’t quite work out how we’d managed to piss her off this time.
‘Hey!’ I started. That wasn’t fair. We’d discovered that we’d lost some people we knew. Mind you, we were used to that.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said through clenched teeth.
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