I shoved both the pistols into my coat pockets and grabbed one of the guards’ M-19s. The palm link connected and ran a diagnostic of the weapon. It was fully functional but the magazine was empty, as was the grenade launcher. I started to reload. Morag was doing the same as Cat and Mudge covered.
‘There’s something there,’ Cat whispered as I felt my blood turn to iced water. We all looked up. I wanted to ask her if she was sure but that was a stupid question and wishful thinking. I put a fourth grenade, a stun baton, into the grenade launcher and chambered it by working the pump mechanism. Morag was moments behind me.
‘Mudge, watch our back,’ I told him as we knelt down behind the wreckage of the mech, looking to where Cat was pointing. I had my shoulder laser still scanning behind me.
It took me a moment, but then I saw it. It was strange, some kind of animal, moving on all fours, slinking carefully in the shadows about six hundred metres further down the main thoroughfare towards the docking area. Something made me glance to one side. I cycled through normal vision, lowlight and thermographic but could see nothing. I just couldn’t shake the feeling I was being stalked.
I glanced down at the wreckage of the mech.
‘Morag? Can you hack this mech’s systems?’ I asked.
‘It’s inoperative or I would’ve been able to pilot it,’ Cat hissed.
‘It might be compromised by Demiurge,’ Morag said. I didn’t like the idea of sending Morag anywhere near Demiurge but I was thinking that we were running out of options.
‘Hopefully not the operating system. I need you to hack in and release the smartlink safety on the autocannon,’ I told her tersely. Hoping there was enough of the old NCO left in me that she wouldn’t argue. She didn’t. Instead she slung her assault rifle and climbed into the mech cockpit. She ended up sitting on the torn-up corpse of the pilot while looking for a port.
‘He’s in the way,’ she complained.
‘It’s moving!’ Cat said. Her words were punctuated by a short burst of automatic fire.
‘Corpse hack!’ I told Morag, barely registering her look of horror.
Whatever it was came loping straight down the middle of the thoroughfare straight towards us. It was low and had the look of a predatory animal as it bounded in and out of pools of flickering light. I joined Cat in firing short controlled bursts at it. As it crested a pile of corpses less than four hundred metres away I saw how pointless the frangible rounds were. Nearly all were hitting it but they were just sparking off some heavy-duty armour.
Morag plugged herself into one of the dead pilot’s jacks. He was still connected to the mech. She went through his systems. It was like necrophilia but the mech twitched. I heard the hum from its auxiliary batteries and part of the cockpit lit up. Morag managed to move the pilot’s fingers to release the mech’s grip on the autocannon.
‘Cat!’ I scrambled over the wreckage of the mech and reached for the weapon. It was armed with an autocannon because a railgun, plasma weapon or heavy lasers would be more likely to breach something. Two hundred metres. It was going to be a bitch to aim. The autocannon looked like an oversized assault rifle. I grabbed the handgrip and tucked the butt under my arm. Most of my hand fitted into the trigger. One hundred metres. Cat grabbed the barrel and lifted it up trying to aim. Fifty metres. I pulled the trigger.
I screamed as I dislocated my right shoulder. The recoil shot the massive weapon back and out of my grip. Cat threw herself to the side, but the muzzle flash caught her and burned the right side of her body, setting the bodybuilder’s top she was wearing alight. We were going to die doing something stupid, something that had been my idea.
Still on fire, Cat grabbed the weapon again. It was on us. It leaped into the air as I rolled and grabbed the trigger with my left hand and pushed it down. I tried to keep it held down as the autocannon bucked all over the sand. The thing all but leaped into the weapon’s fire. Even the velocity of the twenty-millimetre rounds didn’t halt its pounce but it knocked it off kilter and into Cat, who in a feat of adrenalin-fuelled strength pushed it off. I had a moment to be appalled that this thing was still moving. It was a flailing mass of mechanical, armoured limbs, which were beating and clawing at the ground, kicking up a lot of bloody sand. I didn’t understand how it could still be moving. There was movement off to my right but I had no time to worry about that.
‘The cannon!’ Cat shouted. She grabbed the barrel of the weapon and practically held it against the creature. I managed to lift the butt off the ground and hold the violently kicking weapon as round after round flew into it until it stopped moving.
I didn’t have time to even look at what we’d killed as another one burst out of the wreckage of a bar to my right. It exploded though a neon sign in a shower of sparks. I heard Mudge firing his M-19 at it and saw the useless rounds spark off its heavy armour. My shoulder laser had time to stab out at it twice before it pounced and tore Morag out of the mech’s cockpit and slammed her into the wall. It landed on top of her and a bloody metal claw powered down into her torso. I was sure she was dead. Ignoring the agony of my dislocated arm I charged the monster, all eight of my nine-inch knuckle blades extended from my forearms. I shoulder-barged it, intent on knocking it off Morag and then dealing with it. It was like shoulder-barging a mech. It didn’t move. I stopped dead. It casually clawed me, tearing off half my face and sending me flying back through the air.
I landed in the sand and scrambled to my feet desperate to get it off Morag. I knew I was too late. I knew she was dead. With a scream Cat drove more than a foot of serrated pickaxe blade on the end of a miner’s multi-tool in through the creature’s cranium and down, deep into its brain. Cat twisted the handle and pulled it off Morag. It was only then she put her burning T-shirt out.
Morag was bloody, her right leg at an odd angle, but she was moving and moaning. Thank God she’d chosen to wear armour like me and unlike Cat.
I staggered to my feet looking around for more of them. My right shoulder was dislocated. That should be difficult when you’re an amputee. It was the join to the cybernetic arm, which was hanging off at an odd angle. The painkillers in my internal drug reservoirs were trying desperately to cope.
‘Er, Jakob?’ I heard Mudge say. I looked over to where he was kneeling by the twitching corpse of the thing that had attacked Morag. I was nauseated to see it wore a mask made of a flayed human face. Mudge was still covering us but he reached down and tore the mask off. I now knew what it was that had attacked us. Actually I knew who it was that had attacked us. They were friends of Mudge’s and mine.
‘Cat?’ I said weakly as I leaned heavily against the mech’s leg.
I was still scanning all around as was my shoulder laser, though the movements of its servos were sending little jolts of pain through my shoulder. Cat walked over to me, grabbed me and pulled the arm back into its socket. I screamed. My scream was answered. Wolf howls echoed through the rock passages.
I went over and knelt by Morag. Her leg was broken, her cheek was hanging off and her chest armour had taken a battering. There was some blood where the armour had been punctured but it looked superficial. She was out cold and there was nothing we could do for her now.
‘You know these guys?’ Cat asked.
‘Yeah,’ I answered.
‘You piss them off?’
‘They’re friends of ours, saved us from getting killed.’
‘So they with the Cabal?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Mudge said. He and Cat were covering as I checked their weapons. One had a laser rifle, which I threw to Cat. She collected the spare batteries and grenades while I covered her with the gauss carbine I took off the other one. ‘This isn’t their style. I mean it is and isn’t. I mean, did Vladimir seem the type to do civvies?’
I glanced over at Mudge and then went back to scanning the area. Vladimir was fun to be around if you were on his right side, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.
�
�They call themselves the Vucari,’ I told Cat. ‘They’re Spetsnaz.’
‘Oh perfect,’ Cat said. The Spetsnaz may not have been the best special forces in the world but they were one of the most feared. They were rumoured to recruit out of lunatic asylums. ‘Were they in colonial space when the Black Squadrons got there?’
‘No,’ I said. This had been bothering me. ‘They were sent out there like us.’
‘They changed sides?’ Cat asked.
Now I could see Vladimir happily perpetrating this massacre, particularly if someone owed him money, but changing sides? More than anything the Organizatsiya encouraged loyalty.
I checked their sidearms – more fucking ten millimetres. It figured. These guys liked to close with their prey and get their claws wet. I took them anyway, dropping the ones we’d nicked from the guards. We were now slightly better armed.
‘How many?’ Cat asked.
‘Squads of eight. Depends on how many squads,’ I told her. ‘Mudge, carry Morag.’ He protested that he wanted to be a shooter. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me. When you’ve completed special forces selection and training then you can be a shooter.’ He grudgingly picked her up.
We moved quickly. I wanted to get back to the ship and our gear and then look for Pagan, though I didn’t fancy his chances. I wondered if Demiurge had taken over the systems yet. Had God beaten him? God should have had the advantage. He should have had a lot more resources in terms of processing power and memory.
Cat was on point, I was at the back, Mudge was carrying Morag between us. She was better off unconscious the way her leg was hanging down. The side of my face that was hanging off was blissfully numb. We were passing another street that branched off deeper into the asteroid on our right.
‘People in the bar,’ Cat whispered.
I glanced down the street and saw the bar she meant. It had a flickering neon sign of a scantily clad woman done up like a Japanese cartoon character. I guessed this was more a brothel than a bar. Metal shutters covered the windows though several of them had been torn off. I could see numerous heat signatures inside the place.
As we continued towards the dock there was the sound of lots of guns firing long ragged bursts in our general direction. The fire was grossly inaccurate but forced us to take cover as we tried to push corpses up and into the way of the bullets. How can people still miss in the age of the smartlink? I wondered. And long bursts are just lack of self-control. This wasn’t the Vucari. They would be eating us by now.
‘We’re on your side, you stupid bastards!’ I screamed during a relative lull in the hail of fire.
‘Fuck you!’ came the heavily accented reply.
‘We just want to get across to the dock!’ I shouted back.
I was surprised when a man in a suit wearing dark glasses and holding a gun appeared in one of the windows and gestured for us to approach. I shook my head vigorously, hoping his optics would pick it up from there, and then pointed towards the dock. He continued gesturing.
‘Fuck this, let’s just go,’ Cat hissed.
‘Pagan!’ the man shouted.
I glanced between Mudge and Cat. Both of them nodded. We made a run for the brothel. As I was scanning all around us I was sure I saw movement in the pipework that ran above the major thoroughfares.
We leaped the window ledge and came barrelling into the Yakuza brothel. It was a fairly comfortable-looking affair for Freetown but I suspect that was more for the Yakuza who hung out there than the clientele. It had a central stage with a pole so the customers could see which of the desperate-looking male or female prostitutes they wanted. There was a bar and a set of metal stairs that led upstairs to the work booths.
The lights weren’t flickering in here; someone had got pissed off with them and smashed all but the red emergency lighting. The candles didn’t so much provide more light as fuck with the imminent and painful death ambience.
Most of the working boys and girls were sensibly cowering behind a makeshift barricade of overturned tables. I felt like joining them. All the Yak guys were toting guns and looking macho in pre-FHC-style suits, hats and shades. The weird thing was they all looked the same, even the girls. They had all been cut to look the same – like their leader, I supposed. Only which one was their leader? I guessed it was the guy stripped to the waist, all his tattoos on show. It made a degree of sense. He was the fattest. He was carrying a big sub-machine gun. It had a drum magazine and looked like a pre-FHC copy. I hated fashion guns. He also had a short straight-edged sword shoved through a red sash wrapped around his waist.
Mudge lay Morag down behind the barricade and then unslung his near-useless M-19. I passed my slightly less useless gauss carbine to him and he covered us as I knelt down next to Morag.
The fat, half-naked guy with the tattoos was speaking to me in rapid Japanese. I didn’t speak Japanese regardless of the speed.
‘Medpak?’ I asked and then used the universal bridge between cultures of speaking slowly and loudly. ‘First. Aid. Kit,’ I said, pointing at Morag’s wounds. For all the poor guy knew, I was trying to sell him Morag. Fortunately one of the hookers understood and a rudimentary medpak was slid across the floor towards me.
I winced as I heard the crack when I pushed Morag’s leg back into place. Well, roughly into place. I applied medgels to the break and then to her face. I didn’t want to take her out of her armour and check her chest wound unless I had to. I hooked her up to the medpak so it could drive the gels. Her vitals didn’t look great but she wasn’t dying.
‘Jake.’ Even under the circumstances Mudge’s contraction of my name still irritated me. I ignored him as I worked on Morag as quickly as possible. ‘Jake!’
‘What?!’ I swung my head round to look at him. When we’d come in I’d been so focused on seeing to Morag’s wounds I must have walked straight past Pagan.
He was in one of the comfortable chairs. He made it look somehow throne-like. His staff lay diagonally across him. Both he and the chair showed signs of receiving small-arms fire. He was injured but it looked like his subcutaneous armour had taken the brunt of it. However, he was juddering in the chair like he was being beaten, and blood was bubbling from his mouth and nose. I’d only seen this once or twice before. This was damage from biofeedback. He was in the net getting a right kicking from someone.
The Yakuza boss pointed at a thinscreen slowly peeling off the rock above the bar. It took me a few moments to work out what was going on. At first I thought it was some sort of animated Japanese entertainment viz. Then I realised.
It was showing a huge six-armed man/wolf creature surrounded by a nimbus of white fire. I had seen that fire before, when the angelic hacker Ezekiel had burned the net construct of the Warchilde to let Rolleston escape. I guessed the hacker running the demon-wolf icon was Bataar, the Vucari’s signalman. I remembered thinking of him as the high priest of a cult.
The nimbus of white flame acted as a shield against Pagan’s attack programs, which had manifested as a near-constant stream of lightning from the tip of his staff. The nimbus flared where the lightning touched it. The demon-wolf opened its mouth and breathed white fire all over Pagan. A wall of water shot from the rock floor to meet the white flame. The defence program was turned to steam and the white flame licked over Pagan’s screaming icon.
‘Can we get him out?’ I demanded. I wasn’t really sure who I was asking. I wasn’t sure how bad it would be to pull him out of a situation like this. I wasn’t really sure how to do it externally to someone using an internal computer.
Both icons were in a bad way, covered in burns and rendered blood. Surrounding the wolf was a mass of black tendrils that burned with black fire as they reached for Pagan. White light shone from behind Pagan, off-screen. I presumed this was God. Pagan was simultaneously trying to defend himself from the demon-wolf, attack it with lightning and fend off the black tendrils with momentary walls of fire.
The ripping sound of one hypersonic bang running into the next triggered
the noise dampeners on my ears and deafened anyone not similarly augmented. This was of less concern than the long burst of railgun fire that tore through the brothel at about chest height. It was like all the furniture in the room had taken flight and was then joined by spinning body parts.
Something wet hit me. The railgun fire stopped just as the flesh of a Yakuza gunman near me split into three and then exploded in superheated chunks as a burst of laser fire hit him.
One of the surviving armoured shutters burst inwards as a Vucari tore into the room. I just about had time to draw attention to myself by firing a short bust from each of my salvaged pistols into its face. My shoulder laser was more effective at charring head armour.
She grabbed me by punching her claws through the subcutaneous armour that protected my stomach, then picked me up, carried me across the bar and rammed me into the back wall. My shoulder laser kept firing point blank into her face, but her heavily armour-plated skull was resisting the beam. It did however burn the dead skin mask she was wearing off. That just showed me her blood-covered, rage-contorted features and her fucking big sharp teeth. She tore a chunk of flesh out of my left forearm. I knew I was going to die so I did something stupid. I grabbed the top of her maw with my left arm and tried to use all my boosted muscle to force her head back. She opened her maw to tear into me and I shoved my right arm into her mouth. She bit down on it, her teeth denting and starting to penetrate my cybernetic arm’s armour. I extended all four blades on that arm. All four of the razor-sharp, carbon-fibre blades extended into her brain. She shook, juddered and then slid to one side. Her claws tore out of my stomach and I screamed some more.
Mudge was riding another of the Vucari as it rampaged around the room killing nearly everything it reached out and touched with its claws. A gunman near me lifted his SMG to fire. He was going to hit Mudge. Somehow I had the energy to kick the gun out of his hand. Mudge was punching the Vucari wolf cyborg in the head with his bare hand. I wondered if the Vucari even knew he was there. Cat had the laser and was manoeuvring for a shot, but Mudge and the Yakuza were getting in the way.
War in Heaven Page 24