War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  The space around High Pacifica was very busy with everything from military shuttles like ours to net tugs pulling in chunks of refined asteroid from orbital refineries, as well as interplanetary traffic from the rest of the system.

  We made our way as inconspicuously as we could to an outbound tramp freighter with parts going to Freetown in the Belt. Cat and I all but sat on Mudge to make sure he didn’t call attention to himself.

  The freighter was called Loser’s Luck and I was astonished it was still holding together. It had a mainly Indonesian crew who we’d paid enough to leave us in peace and hopefully not tell too many people that we were travelling with them. We still were not discussing the details of our mission, however. I think what bothered me the most was that I’d found myself in yet another poorly heated, thin-walled cargo hold far too close to the vacuum and radiation outside.

  The flimsy cargo hold was yet another reason why I was less than pleased when 10mm rounds started sparking off the metal around me. This was foolishness, however. There are few man-portable weapons powerful enough to get through even the cheapest cargo hull. Still, getting shot was no fun.

  I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention and it was pretty much the last thing I had expected. It was just like being rapidly punched with extraordinary force. She nailed me in the chest with a three-round burst, tight grouping. The integrity of my armour held, but warning icons were already appearing in my IVD as I rolled backwards off the crate of supplies I’d been lying on. The second burst caught me painfully in the left leg below the knee before I managed to get into cover.

  I drew the Mastodon and my TO-5 laser pistol. I wasn’t sure what was happening or who was shooting. Mudge had been sitting on a pile of gear opposite, reading. Pagan was tranced into his own systems – I assumed working. Cat was checking the gyroscopic mount for the railgun and Morag had just wandered back from the galley.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ Morag shouted and fired again. It was suppressing fire. It worked. I kept my head down. Then again, maybe she was just firing out of anger or frustration.

  ‘Morag?!’ I said incredulously. This was a completely new phase of our relationship and I wasn’t very happy about it.

  ‘Put the gun down,’ I heard Mudge say. I continued cowering behind the crate. I really wasn’t sure what to do. Had she really been trying to kill me?

  ‘Fuck off, Mudge!’ Morag said, and there was another burst of armour-piercing, explosive-tipped bullets.

  ‘Morag … what the fuck?!’ I managed. There was the sound of a scuffle. I dared to poke my head over the crate and saw Mudge grappling with Morag. Now Mudge is no slouch in a fight. I’ve seen him take special forces operators on without a trace of hesitation. He mostly lost, but he was game and reasonably skilled. Morag straight-armed him in the throat, pistol-whipped him and then side-kicked him so hard that he was knocked off his feet and slammed into the hull wall.

  I threw myself behind more crates as she turned and fired again. I caught a glimpse of her face contorted with anger.

  There was the sound of another scuffle. I heard Morag cry out and then a thump as someone hit the floor. I risked looking again. Morag was lying next to Mudge rubbing her wrist. Cat was standing close to where Morag had been, making the Sig safe. Cat was glaring and Morag was staring at me with so much hatred I was beginning to think I’d rather be shot.

  ‘What did you do?’ Cat demanded.

  I was pretty much struck dumb for the moment. Apparently being shot was my own fault. Pagan had been tranced in though the whole thing, completely oblivious.

  ‘Its okay. There are other guns,’ Morag spat. She sounded really angry.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ Mudge asked. ‘Can I go back to my book or is there more imminent gunplay?’

  ‘More imminent gunplay,’ Morag told him.

  ‘Can we not shoot at crates full of munitions?’ Cat said, sounding more reasonable, but then she went back to glaring at me.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded, finally mastering speech again.

  ‘How could you, you piece of shit?!’ Morag hissed at me. She looked like she would be holding back tears if she could still cry.

  ‘I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about!’ I shouted.

  I was holstering my guns when the portable monitor landed on the crates I’d been using as cover. I glanced down at the image. I didn’t need to run the viz to know what the story was. The frozen image at the start of the viz was me on top of Fiona, whose features had been obscured. I felt the sick feeling of being found out. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in a while because I hadn’t really cared about what I’d done and how it would affect others for a long time. It was like ice had replaced sluggish blood in my body. I felt pressure in my chest, as if someone was slowly but surely crushing my augmented heart.

  ‘It’s all over the net,’ Morag said more quietly now. ‘The crew were laughing about it in the galley when I went in.’

  ‘You bastard,’ Cat said.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Cat,’ I said, but I was trying to think of something sensible to say.

  Mudge walked over, picked up the monitor and spent a few moments tapping at it and scrawling through the story. I steeled myself for some inappropriate and insensitive attempt at humour.

  ‘It’s a slander piece. It’s designed to undermine what we did in Atlantis. These things are easy to mock up,’ he said. I couldn’t quite work out the significance of the look he gave me.

  ‘But it’s not mocked up, is it?’ Morag asked quietly.

  ‘No,’ I said. Mudge shook his head sadly.

  ‘She looks so fucking trashy,’ Morag said, trying not to sob. Then she stared at me, angry again. ‘But I guess she was a step up from an ex-whore from the Rigs, aye?’

  I felt like I’d been stabbed. I think I would have preferred stabbing. I was almost looking around for an airlock to leave by.

  ‘Morag, don’t say that. She was horrible …’ I started and then realised that wasn’t a good thing to say. Mudge almost flinched.

  ‘But you’d rather fuck her than stay with me. Thanks, Jake. I feel much better now.’ The anger was easier to deal with.

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. Look, I thought you’d gone …’

  ‘I hadn’t gone anywhere; you left us.’

  You shit, I told myself.

  ‘I thought that we … that you …’

  ‘How did you put it? “We’re off to die under some alien sun”? Morag’s gone; let’s have sex with some trashy blonde.’

  ‘Look, Morag, I’m sorry, but I’m new to all this, I really am. I’ve never—’

  ‘And I fucking have?!’ she screamed at me. ‘I may have been a fucking whore but at least I know not to fucking cheat on the person you love!’

  When she realised what she’d said she looked stricken. I think the last thing she needed now was to show any vulnerability. Unfortunately dry sobbing racked her small frame. The sort of crying that made your implanted eyes hurt. I foolishly moved towards her.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ she screamed. The anger was back and seemed even more intense. I actually took a step back at the look of blazing hatred on her face. ‘I swear to God, you come anywhere near me and I will find a way to fucking kill you!’ At this she stormed out of the hold.

  Cat gave me one last baleful look and went after her.

  I slumped against the cold of the hull’s external bulkhead. I could feel the nothingness on the other side of the metal. I felt hollow. I felt like I did before all this happened except I didn’t think the respite of the sense booths would help now.

  ‘I’m sorry, man …’ Mudge started.

  ‘Not now.’ Then I realised what he’d said. ‘Oh.’ Mudge was being sympathetic, time to buy a lottery ticket.

  ‘Was it a bad night?’

  ‘Yes, I guess. I’ve had worse. You know, I just didn’t think. I never really had to before.’

  ‘I can sort of see how it went down, but she’s never go
ing to get that. I wouldn’t try trancing in anywhere soon though. For what it’s worth, I think her expectations are pretty high. You should get what you can when you can from this world.’ I wasn’t sure if that was what Mudge believed or just what he wanted others to think he believed.

  So this was their revenge. But whose? I couldn’t really see it as being Calum’s. Surely he wouldn’t want his daughter splashed all over the net like that. Even with her features distorted it wouldn’t take God long to work out who it was if anyone asked. Alasdair? Maybe, but how did he get the footage? Then again, maybe people like that shared these things – what did I know? Fiona herself? Would she get off on this kind of notoriety? I thought maybe she would.

  Mudge said, ‘I’ve never really got this. It’s a fucked-up world in a fucked-up system. Every one of us does fucked-up things, most people just to survive. Everyone I’ve ever met has a kink and the more straight-laced the person seems to be then the dirtier their kink tends to be.’ I started to protest. ‘Let me finish. See, this is about what we did and God. The subtext is, how dare we sit in judgement on our masters when this is how we act in private? How can people in this world be shocked by this? I mean it’s taking the piss. The thing is, is any of it anyone’s business?’

  ‘Someone’s just done to me what we did to everyone.’

  ‘We didn’t put cameras in people’s bedrooms.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s all right then. How many people do you think we’ve killed over shit like this?’

  He paused for a moment and then said, ‘Look – cheating aside, and I can’t quite make up my mind if Morag’s being unfair or naive – I think maybe all this stuff – who we really are – should all be out there and we shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed of it. I mean, who’s this supposed to shock? This doesn’t shock; it titillates. We should be shocked that people kill each other to feed their kids. We should be shocked that vets serve our race and then all the systems that were forcibly implanted in them are harvested and they’re left crippled. We should be shocked at the disparity between the poor and the rich—’

  ‘Mudge.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. I got a little carried away. That said, I’ve got the name of the so-called journalist, and I’m going to do something bad to him when we get back.’

  ‘He’s one of many and we’re not coming back.’

  Mudge just looked at me for a while, the camera lenses that were his eyes whirring one way and then the other.

  ‘Thanks for trying,’ I finally said.

  ‘Want me to talk to her?’ he asked.

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Want to get fucked up?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not going to.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Pagan asked, coming out of his trance. He was looking around at the scorch marks on the hull and the holes in some of the crates.

  ‘Morag and Jake’s relationship has entered an exciting new phase. Now they’re using firearms as a method of conflict resolution.’

  ‘What? What did you do?’

  I sighed.

  ‘Jakob fucked some trashy blonde. It’s all over the net.’

  ‘Oh.’

  So that was day one of our trip.

  And then things got really difficult. We hadn’t been given much room on the freighter because the crew wanted to give most of their hold over to more lucrative machine parts. This meant that Morag and I were forced into close proximity. She wasn’t speaking to me at all but she was giving good glare. Sometimes she used night vision to glare at me in the dark as I slept. She did this with sufficient intensity to wake me up. This meant a shitty atmosphere and I felt sorry for the other three.

  We still weren’t in a position to talk about or otherwise prep for the mission, which meant we were bored. This was time I’d hoped to spend with Morag. Instead I tried to avoid everyone, which can be difficult in the confined space of a ship.

  I had thought to practise my trumpet but apparently it echoed. It made me even more unpopular with the others and resulted in threats from the crew. Pagan offered to set up a virtual practice programme in one of the spare memory cubes. However, if Morag found out I would be taking my life in my hands as she could easily hack the program into a death trap.

  She was really, really hurt. I’d really fucked this up. Even though I’d known what I’d done was wrong, I had completely underestimated the effect on her. Which meant that I’d completely underestimated Morag’s depth of feeling for me. I’d found out just in time to twist it.

  I tried to keep my mind off it. I couldn’t. I tried a lot of wishful thinking, how things could have played out differently. That was probably the most pointless exercise I engaged in. I tried to work out how I could fix things. That was more wishful thinking. I was probably going to die on Lalande and all I could think about was Morag. Though I was coming to terms with dying on Lalande.

  I wanted to escape. More than anything, I wanted the booths or to climb into a bottle of whisky. Mudge, who was spending most of his time on psychotropics, which were his drug of choice for travelling, was more than eager to join me. But I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why.

  Was she being unreasonable? Maybe the shooting was. Was she being naive? I don’t know. I couldn’t see the situation through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old. The whole thing was new territory for me, and with her background how naive could she be? I just knew that I was causing her so much pain. I could see that in unguarded moments, when she wasn’t putting on a brave face to get through the day. When she wasn’t hiding behind a wall of hate for me.

  Pagan and Cat came and found me. I was hiding in another hold, close to the engines. Listening to them reverberate though the ship’s steel superstructure. For some reason I wanted to look outside even though I hated space.

  I didn’t like the look on either of their faces. Pagan’s expression seemed one of reserved concern. Situations like these are difficult for most British people. Well maybe not Mudge. Cat, on the other hand, looked at me like I was something unpleasant she’d found crawling through her pubic hair.

  ‘We have some concerns,’ Pagan said.

  It was not a good start to the conversation.

  Cat snorted.

  ‘Pagan, really ask yourself if this can’t be done at another time,’ I suggested, failing utterly to keep the edge out of my voice.

  ‘Because this soap opera’s going to work fine on the ground,’ Cat said. ‘This shit will get us killed in Freetown, never mind our fucking destination.’

  She was right of course. With men and women fighting together it was inevitable that they’d form bonds – people fighting together had always formed bonds. The rule was, never get so close to someone that it screwed you up in the field. This had always been easy for me. I’d seen lovers torn apart and mangled by war, same as I’d seen good friends. Fortunately, after a while you get numb to this. The fear, the drugs, the fatigue all chip away at anything inside that makes you care. All the hand-wringing and dry tears are for when you’re out of danger and have time to reflect. The people who can care through all this are few and far between and die quickly, often at their own hands. I had a feeling that Morag could be someone like that.

  She would compromise me and I would compromise her, even when/if she didn’t hate and possibly want to kill me.

  ‘This situation’s untenable,’ Cat continued.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ Pagan began. ‘We’ve accomplished quite a lot with—’

  ‘A completely dysfunctional unit?’ she asked.

  ‘You knew who you were getting involved with when we asked,’ I told her.

  ‘They fight a lot,’ Pagan pointed out. ‘Though the gunplay’s new.’

  ‘Look, this isn’t Delta Force or your professional and well-resourced C-SWAT team; we’re doing our best here—’ I tried.

  ‘It’s just not good enough.’ Both of us were staring at her.

  I turned to Pagan. ‘You agree?’

  ‘Well not quite. But she’s right, this is a
mess …’

  ‘You can’t go into the field with someone you’re that emotionally tied to,’ Cat continued.

  ‘But you want to go in with your brother?’

  ‘My brother’s a prick.’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing this.

  ‘Then why are we wasting time going to get him?!’ Maybe I was just looking for an excuse to get angry.

  Cat shrugged. ‘Because he’s my brother and he’ll be useful. It’s not just you and Morag.’

  ‘What then?’ I could see where this was going. I’d heard it a lot when we were back in the Regiment.

  ‘Mudge,’ Pagan said. I turned and fixed him with a glare from my lenses. He at least had the decency to look guilty.

  ‘Have you forgotten the broadcast? Fuck. He made us rich, and no matter what he has always been there.’

  ‘No doubt …’

  ‘You just don’t fucking like him because he says whatever he damn well pleases and always tells the truth,’ I said.

  ‘Very admirable I’m sure.’ There was a trace of irritation in his voice. ‘It’s not that; it’s the drugs. We’re going on what could be a very long-term mission.’

  ‘So? Mudge has done long-range recon. He always takes enough and can find more …’ I was about to say ‘between jobs’. There wasn’t going to be a between jobs.

  ‘Remember the Dog’s Teeth? How he was? He’ll end up withdrawing, and that will make him combat ineffective. It’ll make him a liability.’ He was right. I was so used to Mudge’s presence I think I’d tried to force this from my mind. More than anything I needed him here at that moment.

  ‘And you bring this up now?’ I demanded angrily.

  ‘I had misgivings, but what with the situation with you and Morag as well … we’re struggling, man.’

  ‘So what do you want to do? Scrub the mission? Because if you both want to call it quits and turn around I have no real objection.’

  They looked at each other.