War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  I saw the gauss carbine I’d given Mudge lying on the ground. I dived towards it, grabbed the weapon and rolled up.

  ‘Mudge, get off!’ I screamed. Mudge slid off the Vucari and curled up in a defensive ball close to its feet. I fired the gauss carbine. Cat fired the laser. The armour-piercing, electromagnetically propelled darts tore into the monstrous cyborg but they weren’t doing enough damage. Cat was hitting the Vucari and superheating armour and flesh, blowing bits off it, but the thing was withstanding the fire, its animal-like howls of pain matching the screams coming from the net feed on the thinscreen.

  The Vucari bolted, sprinting out into the street through the wreckage of the armoured shutters. Cat chased it. She was insane. I followed her. I think her actions shamed me into it. Cat was firing burst after burst at the thing as it climbed up a stack of street bunks. The metal frames of the bunks bent and buckled with the Vucari’s weight as it sprang up. I raised the gauss rifle to my shoulder. The smartlink showed me the grenades in the carbine’s underslung launcher. The Vucari weren’t screwing around with stun batons. Fortunately the smartlink translated from Russian to English.

  I fired the first grenade. Its velocity took it through the bunks to the rock wall and the fragmentation grenade exploded. Wreckage rained down on Cat and I as the force of the explosion blew the wolf cyborg across the street and into the opposite wall. It bounced off the rock and landed in the street ahead of us.

  It tried to get up. I was angry now. Why had they done this? Why were they forcing us to kill friends? This was exactly what I had never wanted to do. These were good people – I mean they were all borderline psychos, but they were good people. Actually there was nothing borderline about them. I fired a second grenade. The flechettes tore into it, most of the needles sparking off now severely compromised armour. It tumbled back into the sand. It was still moving. I fired the third grenade from the hip. The cross hairs on my smartlink told me where it was going to hit. The thirty-millimetre, high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade went through its chest cavity and exploded. I was too close. The force of the explosion knocked me on my arse, battered my teeth together and a bit of Vucari shrapnel tore the side of my head open and almost took my ear off.

  Cat came to stand by where I was sitting on a Belt zombie’s corpse. She was looking all around.

  ‘You getting up?’ she asked.

  Cat and I stepped back into the brothel. Mudge was leaning on the bar. He had the M-19 in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. It looked like something had hit him hard enough in the side of the head to stove in part of his subcutaneous armour and he had a ragged tear in his chest.

  ‘Na zdorovye,’ he said bitterly.

  He took a long swig from the bottle, winced and then spat out a tooth. I glanced over at the Vucari I’d killed. I remembered her name now. It was Andrea. When we’d taken them to get drunk after they’d saved our arses she’d swapped oral sex jokes with Bibs. These people had gone toe to toe with Them when nearly out of ammunition to save us and this was the thanks they got. Why the fuck had they done this?

  I’d almost forgotten Pagan. I glanced up at the thinscreen. The wolf-demon was still. It seemed suspended from a tree of thorns that had grown through its flesh. I caught a momentary glimpse of Pagan’s icon on the screen, which looked ragged and half torn apart. I briefly wondered why they had to make the virtual damage look so gory in their fake world. Pagan’s icon disappeared. Tendrils covered in black fire swamped the place where he’d been. The white glow that I’d come to connect with God seemed to recede and disappear.

  ‘Jesus, that hurts. When’d I get shot?’ Pagan asked. Pain filled his voice. Real Pagan didn’t look much better than virtual Pagan. He was lying on the ground. Railgun fire had destroyed his chair. He was lucky it hadn’t torn him apart. There was blood all down his chin and beard from where it had drooled out his mouth and nose. Blood was also running out of his ears. I knew that you had to take a serious amount of biofeedback for that to happen. Then he had the bullet wounds on top of that.

  ‘Has Demiurge taken the station?’ I asked. My voice sounded dead even to me. As if I didn’t care. I glanced over at Morag. She was still unconscious.

  Pagan shook his head. ‘Not yet, but it will,’ he said and then started speaking rapidly in Japanese to the Yakuza. The surgical clones looked to their boss. He hesitated as long as face dictated and then nodded. The gunmen went running from the brothel.

  ‘You speak Japanese?’ Pagan ignored my stupid question. Later he would tell me that he’d worked extensively with the Japanese Special Forces Group on Barney’s. ‘Where’s it getting all its processing power and memory from?’

  Pagan turned to look up at me. He look tired and in pain.

  ‘Good question. They came on a long-range strike craft. There’s only so much Demiurge that could fit into the systems of a craft like that. God here in the camp should have easily outbid it in terms of power. As soon as it kicked in all the docked ships switched off their net links to the station. All the in-system ships will be carrying God. If they add their memory and processing power then we should be able to beat Demiurge.’

  ‘“Should”?’ He shrugged. ‘Won’t most of them have left as soon as they realised something was wrong?’

  ‘Several tried. One of the first things Demiurge went for was the camp’s external weaponry. Two tramp freighters and a factory ship were blown apart.’

  I tried, I really tried, but this news did nothing except make me feel increasingly numb.

  ‘Those ships’ captains have got a lot to lose if they switch on their comms and Demiurge wins.’

  ‘That’s why Itaki’s people –’ he nodded towards the Yakuza boss, who was standing in the middle of the carnage trying to make sense of it ‘– will be doing the persuading, at gunpoint if necessary.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked.

  He started to shake his head but winced at the pain.

  ‘No. I can’t fight that thing and neither can Morag.’ Then there was a look of momentary panic. ‘Where’s Morag?’ I pointed at where she was lying on the ground among the metal kindling that had once been a makeshift barricade.

  ‘She all right?’ he asked.

  Not really, but I nodded.

  Cat joined us. She had succeeded in removing the railgun harness Andrea had been wearing. The railgun had folded up snug along her back when Andrea had fought like an animal. Cat had linked to it, run diagnostics and was now putting the harness on.

  ‘What now?’ Cat asked.

  ‘Back to the ship,’ I said.

  ‘I know where your brother is,’ Pagan told Cat.

  Bollocks. Cat turned to look at me. I sighed and glanced down at Pagan.

  ‘It’s what we came here for,’ he said.

  Mudge joined us, catching the gist of the conversation. ‘Look at all the free stuff we got,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Be a shame to come all this way and not get him,’ Pagan said.

  ‘With their weapons we’re hunting them,’ Cat said.

  Pain cut my bitter laugh short.

  ‘Dream on. These guys lived for fighting Them hand-to-hand. One at a time nearly killed us, and we only got away with it because they seem to have gone fucking mad.’

  ‘Four down though,’ Cat said.

  ‘Five,’ Pagan corrected her. ‘There was no way their hacker walked away from that.’

  ‘He could already be dead,’ I pointed out. Meaning Merle.

  ‘Scared?’ Mudge asked. He was goading me.

  ‘Mudge, will you just fuck off,’ I snapped. ‘The adrenalin combat junkie act is wearing a bit fucking thin.’

  Mudge looked pissed off and for once didn’t say anything. Still it was a Chinese parliament and I’d been outvoted.

  ‘Okay, we go and get him,’ I agreed. ‘Mudge, stay here and look after Morag.’

  ‘What? I piss you off so you go off and play with your soldier mates—’

  ‘Yes—’
I started.

  ‘And I get saddled babysitting your ex?’

  ‘Mudge! Wind your fucking neck in!’ I shouted, finally losing my temper. I don’t think it was Mudge I was angry with. Well not just Mudge. ‘Stay here, look after Morag, and if anything happens to her don’t be around when I get back!’

  We stared at each other for a while. The hookers and the Yakuza had turned to see what the commotion was about. Mudge somehow thought better of saying anything and stalked over to where Morag was lying on the ground. I think I’d managed to alienate everyone now.

  ‘I hope this guy’s worth it,’ I muttered to Cat.

  ‘He’d best be better than James Bond,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Who?’ Cat asked. I’d no idea what he was talking about either.

  This was bullshit. I did not want to be doing this and we had better things to do, like making sure Morag was okay, if I was honest. Moving deep into the bowels of an asteroid mining camp looking for incredibly dangerous Russian special forces operators was not high on my list of priorities. I respected Cat wanting to help her brother, I really did, and if he was one of ours then it would be right to come and get him. We didn’t know this guy, however, so this wasn’t our problem. Besides, if BPIC took back control of the station we could be right back where we were to begin with. Except the next guy might not want to gloat and be so sloppy with his computer security.

  BPIC didn’t have much use for long-term people containment. It was expensive and tied up resources. They had a lock-up for when Belt zombies, usually newcomers who hadn’t had the life sucked out of them, got out of hand. Anything deserving more long-term punishment got dealt with summarily. It normally involved an airlock. After all they were pretty much the law out here.

  We found Merle’s cell. It was a laser-cut hole in the stone not much bigger than a man. It had a smaller hole in the bottom of it to drain waste and a very solid, thick titanium hatch at the top. Pagan once again proved how clever he was by calling it an oubliette. It looked like a hole in the ground to me. It was empty.

  The lights were still flickering in this part of the station and we hadn’t seen corpses for some time now. We’d just found lots of blood, bits of torn flesh and drag marks. I think we were close to the various life-support systems. The only sound was the loud humming of a lot of machinery.

  Cat, armed with Andrea’s railgun, and I covered while Pagan investigated the hole in the ground with the French-sounding name.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I told Cat. I couldn’t see any way he could get out of that. Someone had to have opened it. That someone was probably a very dangerous, heavily augmented Russian cyborg.

  ‘Not Merle,’ she said with some conviction.

  ‘Even if he got out, if he’s been in there for any amount of time then he’ll be in no physical state to help us,’ Pagan told her gently.

  ‘If he’s high value then BPIC could have moved him,’ Cat said, but I could hear the doubt in her voice.

  ‘I don’t think he would have been a priority for BPIC today. I don’t think they even have a frame of reference for what happened here,’ Pagan said.

  ‘This isn’t a good spot for a conversation,’ I hissed. This place was seriously messing with me. As that thought crossed my mind a howl echoed through the rock corridors. All of us froze.

  I’d heard wolf calls before, real wolves, when I was growing up. The calls the Vucari had used earlier were most likely for intimidation value. After all, they could probably communicate between themselves via Demiurge’s control of the net. This was different. There was something mournful and desperately sad about the noise.

  ‘I think we should go,’ Pagan said.

  ‘He’s here and he’s alive—’ Cat started.

  ‘Is that just intuition?’ Pagan demanded. ‘There’s taking a risk and then there’s courting trouble.’

  I knew they were waiting for me to make a decision. I couldn’t say why I decided to push on. I wanted to leave and wasn’t sure of the advantage of continuing to look for Merle. I don’t think Merle was the reason I decided to push on, however. There was just something about that howling.

  ‘We go on.’

  Pagan didn’t argue; he knew better than to do that in a situation like this.

  I don’t know what the stone chamber where we found Vladimir had been used for initially. I think there was some kind of machinery buried under the pile of corpses. We’d been passing when another mournful howl had alerted us to his presence. I’d entered first. I checked all around looking for more of them. There could be some hiding in the corpses but if so thermographics wasn’t picking them up. I pointed the gauss carbine up the mound to the figure sitting on top. Pagan and Cat were in after me. They were too professional to say anything but I could tell they were horrified by what they saw. Pagan still had the presence of mind to turn his back on the atrocity and cover the door. It took a degree of balls to turn your back on something you know to be that dangerous.

  ‘What are you doing, Vladimir?’ I asked quietly, trying to force down my rising gorge. He was crouched on top of the pile of bodies tearing gobbets of flesh from them and putting them in his mouth and chewing. His expression was pained, like a spoilt middle-class kid forced to eat something he didn’t like. A lot of what he was eating was just tumbling out of his mouth partially chewed. I think it was the noise, the tearing sound of skin and meat, which jarred my already frayed nerves the most.

  He turned to look at me, wearing someone else’s face. He was covered from head to foot in other people’s blood. It should have been horrific, and it was, but there was something pathetic and pitiable about him as well. He’d got his wish to feast on human flesh but it didn’t look as if it was to his taste. This was a warewolf reduced to a ghoul, a mere carrion eater. He seemed tired as he took off the face.

  ‘My friend,’ he said sadly. He continued tearing off lumps of flesh. There was something compulsive about the behaviour. ‘I have betrayed everything.’ He tore off more flesh.

  ‘Why?’ was the best I could do. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had before Cat tried to waste him. He ripped off another lump of flesh.

  ‘If he does that one more time …’ Cat growled.

  ‘This isn’t you,’ I said.

  He stopped chewing and looked at me.

  ‘We both know it is. We are always surprised by what we are capable of …’ Then he tapped his armoured skull with the tip of a bloodied claw. ‘When we serve something bigger than us.’

  ‘Has something made you do this?’ Pagan asked. He did not look at Vladimir; he was still covering the door.

  ‘I do not know you that you should address me with such familiarity,’ Vladimir replied, a predatory smile on his face. His mock haughtiness was like a ghost of his old self. ‘I always wanted to be a monster. It’s much easier than trying to be good.’

  ‘Are you slaved?’ I asked, though I’d seen nothing in any of the Vucari’s plugs.

  He stared at me. It was all I could do to return his look.

  ‘Do you owe me a debt?’ he asked.

  I didn’t want to answer that. I couldn’t see any form of repayment of my debt that was going to be good. I swallowed hard, trying to ignore the acid burn of rising bile in the back of my throat.

  ‘Yes,’ I finally managed.

  ‘I cannot do it myself,’ he said. He sounded almost solemn.

  The glimpse of his face I caught as he pounced was of a mask of hatred and insane rage. We all fired. The railgun kicked up a storm of dead flesh. Despite the ordnance he took a long time dying.

  I felt nothing as we probed deeper into the complex. Pagan was freaked but I didn’t care any more. All I could think of was that someone had done this to Vladimir. I wasn’t sure how but I was pretty sure who.

  We were crossing a metal bridge over a deep pool of water that had been cut from the stone of the asteroid. The pool was part of the water supply. A thick carpet of algae covered the top of the pool to help with oxygen generation. T
he flickering lights in this section were ultraviolet to stimulate algae growth.

  The UV made the blood-soaked Vucari that dropped from the ceiling wearing someone else’s face seem surreal. I think Mudge would have enjoyed the experience. It didn’t seem real to me. The Vucari landed between Cat and me. Cat’s blood looked black in the UV as he tore a claw up her back. The blow lifted her off her feet and sent her sprawling to the metal. As it turned to face me I threw myself back, trying to bring the gauss rifle to bear. I knew that behind me Pagan would be swinging around to fire but then the Vucari stiffened. Blood, his own, dribbled out of his mouth and he fell forward. There was a piece of jagged metal sticking out the back of his neck between the armour plate on his skull and the armour plate on his back. Even allowing for getting the metal between the two plates, it still would have to be pushed in with a lot of force to penetrate the subcutaneous armour. I had to admit I was impressed.

  Standing behind the fallen Vucari was a naked man about my size. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was breathing hard and his right hand was bleeding badly. There was no body fat on him at all and he looked malnourished. I saw the high cheekbones that could make features like his look cruel but now they just added to his gaunt appearance. His hair was a dirty matted bird’s nest. His skin was as dark as Cat’s and there was more than a passing resemblance though he had a smaller build. The thing that got me the most however was his eyes. They must have been designed to look like the real things but I’d never seen implants like that. They had seemed intense in the pictures but now they managed to look simultaneously cold and somehow insane.

  He spat on the corpse. Some feeling flickered inside me.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

  He ignored me. He wrenched the metal shank out of the Vucari, turned him over and pushed the dead skin mask off his face. I recognised this one as well. His name was Vassily.