War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  If he was right, and maybe he was, then my need was buried deep in my subconscious. I thought I wanted the quiet life. On the other hand, the way I’d gone about my Highland idyll was arguably confrontational, and here I was again. For a while now I’d been wondering if there was some deep-down part of me that was highly masochistic.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go down onto Lalande just to look for bigger and better thrills, Mudge.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘And Trace’s office? That would have been a shitty way for us to die after doing the things we’ve done. What were you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know that I was. I wanted to see if we could get away with anything. Somehow I knew we’d be all right.’

  I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Caution was as much a part of these operations as risk, if not more so.

  ‘Look, man, I’ll be all right. I’ll reign it in. Take the right drugs to calm it down, okay?’ I nodded.

  Mudge got up, belched loudly and scratched himself before nicking another bottle of beer and leaving my compartment. For the first time ever I found myself unable to trust him.

  Still he’d left his white-noise generator, which gave me the chance to practise the trumpet without being assassinated.

  By day six we’d almost managed to get rid of the smell of the anti-corrosion treatment. Day six was mostly going over weapons and personal loads that we’d already gone over on Earth. We were just trying to maximise what we took while staying under the weight allowance.

  I don’t know about the others, but I was becoming tenser as the drop got closer. There were just too many unknowns and the drop was so dangerous that it would be easy to die before we even got planet side. Tempers seemed only a little more frayed. That may have been helped by half of us being loved up. Morag still wasn’t talking to me. She seemed a little less hostile, however.

  Before we left the Freetown Camp Merle had kicked up a huge fuss about getting his gear back. Cat had brought some stuff for him with us but he’d insisted on getting his own gear back. There had been some violence involved. When he got his stuff I could see why.

  Merle was down on the cargo bay cleaning his weapons on top of one of the crates. He was obviously aware of my presence but was ignoring me. All his gear was custom and expensive. Like Cat he had a Void Eagle set up in a Tunnel Rat configuration with the Tunnel Rats’ insignia on the handgrip.

  He also had a CEC plasma rifle. Most plasma weapons are big and heavy and tend to be used as squad support weapons by military units from countries that can afford to equip their people with them. I didn’t like them because they were semi-automatic and, particularly for a support weapon, I preferred something that could lay down a lot of fire, like a railgun. Still their one-shot kill capability was impressive. Similar to the weapon that Rolleston carried, the CEC was only slightly heavier than most standard assault rifles. It was also very expensive.

  ‘Those what I think they are?’ I asked, pointing at two ten-millimetre pistols lying next to the Void Eagle. I climbed down from the catwalk to get a better view.

  ‘Twin Hammerli Arbiters. They were our grandpappy’s. Cat was pissed when I got them but I was always a better shot. I’m pretty sure he stole them. He certainly took enough lives with them.’ He spoke without looking up at me.

  The Arbiters were supposed to be the most accurate and were definitely the most expensive fully automatic, production ten-millimetres ever made. I’d never seen one before, let alone two. Their grips were moulded to the shooter’s hands and the barrels seemed to slant forward, which was something to do with their recoil compensation.

  ‘Can I handle them?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, still not looking up from the somewhat archaic-looking rifle he was cleaning. I was a little put out but could understand why he didn’t want anyone touching them. Had they been mine I certainly wouldn’t have been parachuting into a corrosive environment with them.

  ‘That’s a hunting rifle, isn’t it?’ Again the rifle looked expensive. Parts of it were made out of wood. It also looked slightly oversized.

  ‘It’s a gauss rifle version of an old Mauser customised by Holland & Holland of London,’ he said, still not looking up.

  ‘Never heard of them.’ I shrugged.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t have. I never fancied lugging around one of the bigger rail sniper weapons for accurate work. This nearly matches their range and is more accurate. I can fire it semi-automatic or single shot for accuracy with a secondary electronic reload mechanism.’

  ‘Why?’ I may not have liked being in the military, despite what Mudge thought, but we all liked the toys and I was intrigued.

  ‘Because a self-loading system will always knock you off slightly. Obviously its smartlinked but it also has an on-board gyroscope. I can switch between hyper and subsonic for silent kills and it fires a .465-calibre penetrator round which will put most people and Them on the ground. The wood furniture is cut from Lalande ghostwood, which is very dense, hard-wearing and of course resistant to the corrosion. It’s also got a smart trigger.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said. Smart triggers enabled you to fire a weapon with a thought. They required an awful lot of discipline to avoid negligent discharges and were highly illegal. Still there had always been rumours of them being used by the darker black ops types. Merle held the weapon up. It didn’t have a trigger.

  ‘The very action of pulling the trigger can affect your aim. Your Grey Lady’s a sniper. She’ll have a smart trigger on her weapon, I can almost guarantee it.’ I started to ask him something. ‘No, you can’t handle it. It’s probably worth more than all the money you’ve made in your life. You didn’t come here to talk about my guns. What do you want?’

  ‘Well I didn’t, but they’re still pretty impressive.’

  He finally looked up at me. ‘Have you come to ask about my intentions regarding Mudge? I’ll still kill him if he fucks us up.’

  ‘Fuck that. He can look after himself. How’d you hijack that ship?’ I asked. He regarded me impassively just long enough for his strangely intense implant eyes to start making me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Curiosity.’

  ‘I’m a very private person, your intrusion the other night notwithstanding.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that. You don’t like playing with others, do you?’

  ‘Nobody else around, then you’ve less chance of getting killed over somebody else’s stupid shit.’

  ‘Or have someone dragging your arse out of your own stupid shit. But my question?’

  ‘Is it relevant to anything? See, I can’t think of a single good reason to tell you.’

  ‘You want and need our trust,’ I said.

  He leaned back and studied me a bit more closely.

  ‘This a price?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘Okay. I had an automated program that I could plug into the ship’s systems. It would crack the security and remote-pilot the ship to … somewhere else.’

  So he’d been working with others. That made sense.

  ‘How’d you get in? Because you didn’t do it in the camp – the security’s far too high for EVA.’

  ‘Maybe if I’d had the best stealth stuff, but yeah, the camp was more trouble than it was worth. Just outside the camp’s security perimeter I had another craft match acceleration and trajectory.’

  ‘Okay. Difficult flying but okay. So how’d you get on board?’

  ‘I compressed-gas-squirted ship to ship,’ he told me.

  ‘Bollocks.’ Space was extremely big; it only needed the slightest variation in speed and he would have missed. The maths alone involved in something like that was staggering. The margins for error were tiny. He shrugged again, giving the impression that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.

  ‘Spacesuit set up for stealth. I had the maths on a program in my internal systems.’

  ‘What distance?’

  ‘Fifteen th
ousand metres.’

  ‘The slightest miscalculation,’ I said. I had absently picked up one of a pair of punch daggers and was toying with it. It looked like it was made from black glass. It had some kind of channel leading to the point of the blade.

  ‘So I didn’t miscalculate. Don’t touch that; it injects a pretty virulent neural toxin.’

  For fuck’s sake, I thought, who was this guy? There was no doubt about it – if he played with us then he’d be an asset.

  ‘Are these glass?’ I asked.

  ‘Dayside obsidian, volcanic glass from Lalande 2. Sharp as glass but comparable to steel in toughness. Now put it down.’

  I put the punch dagger down.

  ‘So how’d you get in?’ For obvious reasons airlocks, along with the engine room and then the bridge, tended to be the highest-security areas of a ship. On most military and high-security ships you couldn’t access the airlocks externally. I’d only been able to use the airlock on the Santa Maria during the mutiny because it was a civilian ship and I had a hacker as good as Vicar backing me up.

  ‘I spent seven hours stuck to the hull of the ship drilling through it. I nearly froze to death. I sent through a modified snake with a lock burner on the end. The lock burner had a pretty sophisticated spoof program added to it. The spoof program was probably the biggest outlay. It told the ship’s systems that the airlock was still closed. The snake was flush with the drill hole. I just kept on adding sealant around the crack while feeding it through.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ I said. What he’d just told me had huge ramifications for spacecraft security.

  ‘You guys did it to that star liner back in the twenties, didn’t you?’ He was right: the SAS had attached a vacuum-proofed cargo module to a sensor blind spot on a hijacked luxury system cruiser and cut through the hull to deal with a group of so-called post-human terrorists. I’d studied it in Hereford while I was training. It was one of the few successful boarding actions in space warfare history. Normally the speeds and distances involved were too great. Ships got destroyed before they were boarded or they surrendered. Surrender hadn’t been an option fighting Them.

  ‘Different circumstances. The ship was docked when they attached the container; also ship security was much more rudimentary then.’

  ‘So what? You thinking of robbing a ship?’

  ‘No, I just like knowing how to do things.’

  Again he seemed to be studying me. Finally he nodded.

  ‘Yeah, me too. We done bonding?’

  I nodded. ‘Unless you want to let me play with your guns.’

  ‘Go away. I’m busy.’

  The whole trip had been subdued. That happens when people are sure they’re going to die. You either get subdued or overcompensate, but even Mudge couldn’t be bothered with overcompensation.

  On the seventh night we had some drinks and some forced conversation. Bar last-minute checks we were as ready as we were ever going to get. Nobody had wanted to hear me play my trumpet. They backed up their opinions on the matter with threats of violence. I didn’t think this was fair. I was sure I was improving.

  Mudge confused me by presenting each of us with little animatronic action figures of Major Rolleston, the Grey Lady or Vincent Cronin. I got Rolleston.

  ‘What the fuck’s this?’ I asked. It was grotesque.

  ‘Voodoo?’ Pagan asked, laughing.

  ‘Let’s just remember how big these people are, shall we?’ Mudge told us. ‘This is how the children of Earth look at them, not fucking scary at all.’

  ‘This is weird,’ I said. Cat was nodding.

  Morag held up her little Grey Lady. ‘I don’t know. I think I feel some voodoo coming on,’ she said.

  Pagan couldn’t wait to go back to his compartment and trance in with Nuiko, who was with us as a nearly silent holographic ghost whose arms were her crab-like servitors. I wanted her to join us and relax but instead she was the perfect host. She had just as much to lose as the rest of us, except that she would be waiting on her own in the dark. If I was honest with myself, which apparently I didn’t like being, then I would have to admit that Nuiko still made me nervous. It wasn’t just that I’d never managed to have what I would describe as a conversation with her, but that for some reason she reminded me of the Grey Lady. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was the averted eyes.

  I wondered how Pagan had managed to break through the polite and distant reserve that she wore as armour. But time can be made to do strange things in sense environments. Perhaps he’d been courting her for months instead of days. I wished him well but worried about the wrench of having to leave her to go and die. Maybe I should have tried to be a bit more optimistic.

  Likewise Mudge was in a hurry to disappear into his compartment with the white-noise generator and Merle. He didn’t even get too fucked up, for Mudge. His choice of drug was some low-key euphoric and he only managed a bottle and a half of vodka. He still managed to fall off the catwalk into the crates. I guess appearances have to be maintained.

  This left Cat, Morag, so much accompanying awkwardness it seemed to have its own palpable presence in the hold, and myself. Cat sipped from a beer as she peeled the last of the medgel from her wounded back. Occasionally she’d look between Morag and me, smile and shake her head.

  Morag didn’t say much and still wouldn’t meet my eyes. In fact some of the time I think she was having a sub-vocal conversation with someone else. Though I couldn’t think who.

  ‘Well, as much fun as this is, I’m going to get some rack time,’ Cat announced. I’d no idea why she didn’t just say sleep, which would have been more economical. ‘Try and keep it down.’

  ‘You too,’ I said inanely.

  She glanced back at me before disappearing into her compartment. That left Morag. I felt nervous and uncomfortable. I couldn’t read Morag’s expression.

  ‘I’ve been talking to God a lot,’ Morag said after the silence had stretched on for so long I had considered fleeing back to my compartment.

  God, I had forgotten all about him. No, I hadn’t. I’d ignored him, pretended I’d had no time because his problems were so big that I could barely understand him. Talking to God had become too complicated, too difficult. Another friend I’d let down. Tried to hide from. Was he even a friend? I’d had a part, however minor, in his creation, his birth.

  ‘How is he?’ was the best I could manage.

  ‘He’s not good, but then you know that. Worse now since he’s met his younger brother. Since Demiurge hurt him, God knows first hand that he wants to commit deicide and hates him. Did you know that? They programmed Demiurge for hate. Why would you do that?’ Her tone was flat. No emotion.

  I had no answers for her.

  ‘I was thinking about what Pagan said about Cronin and Rolleston being programmed, being malfunctioning tools of the Cabal. Just another weapon in the arsenal,’ she continued.

  I was lying on the catwalk looking up at the curve of the Tetsuo Chou’s hull. I propped myself up and took a swig of Glenmorangie and passed the bottle to Morag. She accepted it, wiped the top of the bottle and took a swig herself.

  ‘They could have designed them for anything. They could have made Rolleston want to protect, to help. They could have made Cronin want to try and make things better for everyone. Surely that would profit everyone in the end? Instead only a few can profit because control is what’s important. Instead they program for hate. I just don’t get so much suffering for such abstract reasons, and I think we’re going to die because of it,’ she finished.

  I had nothing for her. Nothing I could tell her. When she said that she thought she was going to die I felt cold. I felt something bad happen to my stomach and bile burn the back of my throat. It had been Morag who had thought it was going to be all right going to Maw City.

  ‘I think maybe it’s always been that way,’ I said. ‘Powerful people make decisions and others pay for them. The decisions are either incomprehensible to most people, wh
o just want food, shelter and safety for them and theirs. Mudge reckons it’s simpler than that: he thinks it’s all lies to justify greed. Or possibly sexual inadequacy.’

  There was neither warmth nor humour in her smile. She rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look at me.

  ‘God, I hate you,’ she said. I preferred it when she was shooting at me. ‘We are not all right. Things are not good between us, and what you did was fucked up for so many different reasons.’

  I couldn’t look at her. Even looking away it was like her eyes were burning me. They were judging me. I had been found wanting and couldn’t face their glare. I heard her start to cry. I turned back to look at her. Her face crumpled as she let out a dry sob. I sat up as she crawled over to me. I held her so tightly it must have hurt her. I felt her shake with each sob. She bit me, dug her nails into me.

  ‘I promised myself I would be strong,’ she finally said, angry with herself. ‘It’s not me. It’s Ambassador. He’s so lonely. So far from his people.’

  She was carrying the pain for two.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  She looked up at me. ‘You bastard!’ she spat, so angry again. ‘I hate you and I think you’re the only thing I have really got out here. You know what I did back in Trace’s office …’

  ‘You saved us, then again with the mech,’ I said.

  She hit me. She put power into it but it was at an awkward angle; I was still holding her.

  ‘You put me into a corpse, back in the Freetown, that mech driver you made me jack into, you fucker. You put me into a corpse after I’d killed for the first time. I killed and then you made me feel the consequences in a dead man’s head.’

  I stared at her, appalled. I felt like all the blood was draining from my body, leaving a bag of skin filled with metal and plastic. I’d had no idea.

  ‘And you’d already made it so I couldn’t talk to you about it.’

  She’d killed on the Atlantis Spoke as well, when she’d hacked their systems and used automated weapons to take out a Walker, but it hadn’t been so immediate. She didn’t watch the consequences in front of her eyes. She didn’t end up wearing their blood, and as a result I don’t think she’d faced up to it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up.