‘This is very fucking touching, but some of us are trying to have sex!’ Mudge shouted from his compartment.
Morag’s head whipped round at the voice. She looked so angry, searching for someone to blame. I don’t know why Mudge and Merle had turned off the white-noise generator but I knew why Mudge had shouted. He wanted us to know that everyone not tranced in would hear us. It was a warning. Moments later Morag understood.
‘C’mon,’ she said and took my hand. Hers felt tiny surrounded by the composite material of my prosthetics. The tactile sensors offered my nervous system the facsimile of touch as she dragged me towards her compartment.
Inside was dark. Various things were scattered around on the floor, and I’m sure I stood on some of them as she dragged me down to sit on the smartfoam mattress. I switched to lowlight and illuminated her in green as she came towards me with a jack, reaching behind my neck for one of my plugs. I caught her wrist in my hand.
‘Are you going to kill me?’
She shook her head but didn’t get angry.
‘Let go of me now.’ I did. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Now we do what I want to do.’
I felt the jack click into my plug. I watched Morag disappear.
I knew this place. It was a jazz club in New York from about a hundred years before the FHC, before the city was flooded. It was called the Cotton Club and at the time booze had been illegal. So of course it flourished. All the greats had played here: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
The place was subtly lit, filled with smoke. Tables were set around a dance floor in front of the raised stage. More intimate booths were set into the wall. There was a fully stocked bar against the back wall. The place was empty. Like the tea room, even the smell was right. Or at least how I imagined it would have smelled – wood with alcohol soaked into it, tobacco smoke.
‘I made this for you. I played down some of the more racist parts of the decor,’ Morag said.
I turned at her voice. She was dressed like a flapper. She wore a tasselled dress that came down to just above her knees, some sort of fabric skullcap/hat thing and a string of pearls.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing spats and a linen suit of the era. I even had a hat. Morag would tell me the hat was called a panama.
‘When?’ I asked.
She looked away from me. In here she – we – could cry.
‘After I found out.’
‘Why?’
She smiled as she wiped away the tears. ‘So you could practise without the others killing you.’
I smiled. ‘Can I hold you?’
She did nothing, said nothing for what seemed a very long time, and then she nodded. I moved to her and wrapped my arms around her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve no reason, no excuse; all I’ve got is that I love you and I won’t hurt you again.’
She looked up at me. ‘Why are you sorry?’ she asked. I opened my mouth to say for cheating and then closed it again.
‘I’m sorry I abandoned you,’ I told her.
I should have trusted in her, been in this from the start. She nodded and pushed me away.
‘People – men – have hurt me before, I mean physically. I’m used to it. Is this what you want? Because we can do it in here. It’s okay in here. It’s not real.’
I looked at her in horror. She held her arms out away from her body and suddenly she was drenched in blood. I stumbled away from her, horrified. I bumped into a chair and fell back onto the floor. I wanted to vomit.
‘No, Morag, please!’
I wanted the image gone. It felt like a horrible warning from the future, the sum result of Morag’s association with me. Her bloodied visage walked towards me and I recoiled from her. I didn’t think she was really offering this. I wanted to think it was a lesson, but maybe it was revenge. My back hit the wall and I curled up and closed my eyes.
‘It’s all right.’
I felt hands caress my face but it really wasn’t okay. I opened my eyes and she was kneeling over me unbloodied. I was weeping. The tears felt wet and real on my skin. They were a release, a relief.
‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I said.
I watched her face harden as anger swept across it like a storm.
‘Are you going to leave me again?’ Through gritted teeth.
‘No, never. It’s just that I can’t take you into these places, see you hurt, get you killed. I’ll get everyone killed worrying about you. I don’t care. I don’t care if they win, if we live in some dictatorship; I just want you to be safe,’ I told her, still weeping.
Her face softened. ‘You know how selfish that is, don’t you?’
I nodded through the tears. ‘What are we going to do?’ The desperation in my voice shocked me.
She sat down cross-legged next to me. She didn’t hold me. I felt like a child. She stroked my hair.
‘I think the Cabal knew that Operation Spiral wasn’t going to work,’ she said. I stared at her incredulously. She wanted to talk about this now? She ignored my look. ‘I think they knew it was going to kill or drive mad everyone involved, but they needed some research data so they made a human sacrifice for the knowledge they wanted. Maybe the information was spiralling around Vicar’s or some of the others’ heads.’ I started to say something but fingers brushed against my lips to silence me. ‘It was in the files in Limbo. Somehow they hadn’t made the connection. Elspeth McGrath. She either died then in Their minds or she was unfortunate enough to spend time in an ongoing psychotic episode, trying to destroy herself while they opened up her mind as a sense simulation so they could better look for the information they needed. I was the lucky one. I was pretty.’ I looked at her, horrified. She looked back at me, straight in the eyes. ‘I wonder what you were doing when I found that out?’
I couldn’t speak for a while. Despite the artifice all the moisture had gone from my mouth.
‘Revenge?’ I finally croaked.
Another smile devoid of humour.
‘No, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t care. We just have to do what we can to make things better.’ The steely resolve that I’d first noticed back in Dundee was there.
‘Why? You don’t owe the world a fucking thing.’
She looked down at me. I think I saw pity in her eyes then.
‘But that means you doing your job. Do you understand me?’ I nodded weakly. ‘No, I don’t think you do. Jakob, I love you as much as I hate you right now, and I think the hate will die, but if you put us at risk – if you don’t do your end – then you need to know I’m a witch. I’ll tear your mind out, imprison you in an electronic hell and leave you a mindless husk. Do you understand me now?’
I once went into vacuum unprotected. I wasn’t as afraid then as I was now. She was looking straight into my eyes. I wanted to turn away. She turned away first.
‘Because I need you and I’m frightened of dying,’ she said.
I tried swallowing but it wasn’t really happening. ‘Can you promise me something?’ I eventually managed to say.
I flinched away from her look of fury. ‘I don’t owe you a thing!’ she spat at me.
I nodded, trying to placate her. ‘I know, I know, but please, I need it. Morag, I’m not as strong or as honest as you. I need this, I need it to do what you ask.’ I had nothing but contempt for the person saying this. I heard the weakness and the betrayal that weakness implied in my voice. She’d had more than enough and I needed more. I felt like a parasite.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘If we get through this, if somehow we live and we’re not slaves, then we stop. We make our deal with whatever gods, but we don’t do any more of this dangerous stupid shit. We settle down, we find other ways to help that don’t involve guns and violence. Please promise me.’
I needed this more than I’d ever needed the escape of the booths, the whisky and whatever other crutches I’d relied on in my hol
low empty life. It made me realise how little I’d had in my life.
She nodded. She was crying, though somehow she was smiling as well. She reached down to hold me. She held me for a long time. When she was ready she kissed me fiercely. We didn’t make love – that needed trust – we had sex, and she told me that was all right because in here it wasn’t really real.
Later as she seemed to sleep, though I wasn’t sure what that meant in here, I practised the trumpet. I had used the sense environment’s parameters to make the instrument quiet and soft so as not to wake her.
I sat on a chair on the wooden boards of the stage and looked around the club. Smoke and dust eddied in pale beams of light. Our fantasies may have less jagged parts than real life, but we worked hard at them to make them as real as possible. I sometimes wondered if we locked ourselves in prisons of our own entertainment because it was easier than trying to do something, anything. Was this how the Cabal had got us in the first place?
I was going to have to find a place far, far away from the rest of my thoughts to put all this – the hope of some kind of life and the fear of what could happen to Morag. For once, I thought as I played, I needed to not let Morag down. I had to be what she needed. I also needed to try and live for myself.
I finished a slow bluesy piece and looked up. She was awake and watching me. I couldn’t read her expression.
The sex may not have been real, but when we jacked out of the sense simulation she lay in my arms and I held her as she slept. Through the fabric of her T-shirt I could feel the metal of the spinal supports that violated her flesh. They may have been temporary but to me they felt like another little bit of her humanity lost to metal.
I couldn’t sleep. I opened up my internal comms and requested a link.
‘God?’
‘Yes, Jakob.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know, Jakob.’
‘You’ll tell the rest of you.’
‘Of course, Jakob.’
We made God. More to the point we made God tell the truth, and now we spent all our time hiding from him.
11
Lalande 2
This was a stupid way to die. I should have accepted Mudge’s offer of drugs.
Nuiko had shown us the star. Lalande 21185 was small, about half the size of our sun, and despite its red colour there was something dead-looking about it. It was like a ghost sun burning weakly. Lalande 2, however, was very large and looked like a black planet with a corona of heat perpetually on its horizon. It was partially eclipsing the star.
Nuiko had triggered a heavy burn as close as she dared to Lalande 2. Systems are nearly impossible to defend because space is big. Planets are much easier to blockade. That was the second most dangerous part of her job. She had to bleed off any residual heat and get the signature of the Tetsuo Chou down as low as possible as we approached what we assumed would be the planetary defences. We were flying blind to an extent and active scans would be suicide. We assumed the planetary defences would take the form of automated sensor and weapons satellites as well as elements of the Lalande fleet. We were hoping that the Orbital Insertion Low Opening pods, if detected – most likely during entry – would be thought of as meteorites. If not then we wouldn’t know much. We’d just cease to exist when the orbital weapons hit us.
The most dangerous part of her job would come when she had to open the cargo airlock and have her remotes throw us out. This would mess with the stealth signature of the ship and make her more susceptible to detection.
Exiting the Tetsuo Chou was going to be the trickiest part for us as well. Not that there was anything that we could do about it in our cocoons of heat-resistant foam and acceleration-resistant gel. It wasn’t just a case of being thrown out of a spaceship; we had to be pushed out at just the right velocity and just the right angle for entry. The maths involved was pretty heady. A mistake and we could burn up on entry or bounce, which would send us skimming over the atmosphere to end up in a low orbit until we ran out of air.
I’d done my fair share of parachute drops, though mostly we were inserted by assault shuttle, gunship or more rarely copters. I had done HALO jumps, mainly out of the back of assault shuttles, but I’d only ever done two OILOs before this and I hadn’t enjoyed them. Wrapped in the scan-absorbent and heat-resistant foam and surrounded by the gel designed to help you cope with the G forces, I could never shake the feeling I was the yolk of an egg being thrown at a stone in a fire.
The G force slammed into me. It was like someone massaging me vigorously with sledgehammers. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough to cause me to black out. I was panicking, which was irrelevant, as I couldn’t move. In the unlikely event I survived, I just wouldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even manage to scream as I entered the atmosphere. It was like hitting a solid wall. I had a moment to think my spine had broken and then, finally, I mercifully blacked out.
I knew I was dead when I came to. Beyond the faceplate of my environment suit I could see the gel bubbling. I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be happening. I was covered in sweat. This was the hottest I’d ever felt. I’d felt cooler when I’d been set on fire in Dundee. We’d fucked up. A stupid, stupid way to die. I should have just put the Mastodon to my temple and saved myself the pain. I’d seen people burn to death. At least that way it would be quick.
When I saw the cocoon burning away and the gel start to drain out I knew it was all over. Prat that I am, I didn’t pay any attention to the altimeter readout on my IVD. I had a jack from the parachute rig plugged into a port on the environment suit, which was in turn jacked into one of the plugs in the back of my neck.
Then the cocoon was gone. The chemical catalyst had started to dissolve the material of the cocoon as soon as we’d hit the atmosphere. I was falling far too fast. I understood everything in terms of flashes of dark ground, fast-moving cloud, a horizon of red light and then the stars again. Occasionally I could see other figures falling like I was.
I had to stop tumbling. Anger replaced panic as I desperately tried to remember my parachute training. I was supposed to be good at this. This is what we’d been trained for.
I managed to steady myself and get into the star position. I was free-falling looking down at shallow contours of dark rock and a storm front sweeping rapidly over them.
I felt heavy, like a lead weight, and all my movements seemed slow. The ground was coming up too fast. The urge was there to open the chute but I resisted it. Low opening, particularly with these scan-transparent stealth chutes, would minimise our chances of being detected. It would also give the corrosive storms that racked Lalande 2’s barren surface less opportunity to kick us around and less time to eat away at our chutes. Still it seemed like I was falling far too fast.
The ground disappeared as black cloud swept across it at a frightening speed. I had time to glance around and count four other people falling through the alien sky reasonably near before the cloud engulfed me. Then I was falling blind. Relying on the altimeter readout on my IVD. The number on the readout was counting down too rapidly for my taste.
Two thousand metres came and went so quickly I only just had time to pull the chute at fifteen hundred. A moment of fear as the upward yank didn’t feel as pronounced as I was used to but information from the interface showed that everything was okay. I glanced up, hoping to see a fully deployed canopy, but the thick cloud obscured it. Then the storm really started to knock me around.
Pagan and Merle were old hands at this; Cat had a little less jump experience than me; but Morag and Mudge had to rely on skillsofts and training simulations. It felt like I had to rely on every bit of training and experience that I could remember and fight the chute all the way down, using the interface and the chute’s on-board intelligent systems just to make sure I was mostly pointing down and not getting tangled. Fuck knows where I was going to land. At least I was moving at a speed I felt more comfortable with, but I still felt heavy and sluggish.
Out of the clouds and
I could see narrow corrosion canyons in the dark scarred landscape, the horizon obscured by violently swirling cloud. Both the chute and myself were still wrestling with the wind. I was receiving warning icons from the environment suit’s temperature sensors. We were too deep in Nightside. There would have been ice below us if there had been any surface moisture.
I glanced up above me at the enormous canopy of the chute. Its translucence made it difficult to pick out against the backdrop of permanent night. I looked around and could make out another four parachutists and was pleasantly surprised to see one of the cylindrical drop containers had managed to track us. We had dropped six in the hope that one might stay with us. Because we couldn’t transmit without opening up comms systems to Demiurge, each cylinder chute’s intelligent system had been rigged up to a lens designed to track other parachutes by sight. Each of the containers had a timed explosive charge. If we didn’t get to them very quickly then the container and its contents would be destroyed.
I wondered who the missing parachutist was. We were all steering our chute rigs closer together now and closer to the container, all fighting the wind. It didn’t feel like the controlled graceful drop of parachuting; it felt like the ground was trying to suck me towards it. Every movement of my lead-like limbs was a painful exertion.
I hit the ground hard and got dragged along it for a while. The rock seemed to radiate cold despite the environment suit’s internal heater. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to trigger the chemical catalyst that would dissolve the chute before I hit the quick releases. Then I tried to get up.
I was used to carrying a lot of gear for extended periods in the field. I had the artificially boosted strength and stamina to manage it, and I had the fitness. Or rather I’d had the fitness. I’d done the maths and reduced my load by what I’d thought was enough to counteract the effect of 1.5 G. The problem was, it had been a long time since I’d carried a full infantry load. Arguably I’d been abusing myself somewhat since then as well. I couldn’t get up.
War in Heaven Page 30