The circle of guns broke as four people walked through the crowd towards us. The woman looked like she’d had a hard life. She probably wasn’t much older than me but she looked worn. She was muscle and hard edges in inertial armour with a sleeveless leather jacket over the top. When she turned to say something to one of the others I saw that the back of the jacket bore a stylised demon head with bulging eyes and a protruding tongue – gang colours of some kind. Half of her face and the visible skin on her arms were tattooed with swirling patterns that looked like they were trying to engulf her dark but still somehow sallow skin.
Next to her was the biggest hacker I’d ever seen. I could tell he was a hacker because of the mishmash of military and black-market tech that seemed to grow out of half his head. Despite his squat muscular bulk and the heavy G, he moved with a surprisingly easy, almost predatory grace. Like the others you could see where skin had tightened over food-starved flesh. His face and most of the flesh I could see was tattooed. It made him look somehow otherworldly. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket as well. All four of them did.
The other guy made me think of all the fun we’d had in Freetown Camp 12 with the Russians. While nowhere near as heavily modified as the Vucari, someone had given a canine look to his face. He had a protruding power-assisted jaw of surgical-steel teeth and a dog-like nose. His fingers ended in distinctly claw-like steel nails. He looked more dog than wolf but not like one of the friendly breeds. Tattoos ran up his cheek through long sideburns and bridged his forehead.
‘No,’ Mudge said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t like dog things.’
He may have been verbalising how we all felt after our run-in with the Vucari. It still wasn’t very diplomatic. The dog guy punched Mudge very hard. Mudge hit the ground.
‘That’s my other dog impression!’ the guy shouted at Mudge, who was trying to get to his feet. Cat grabbed the guy and did something complicated with his arms and neck, immobilising him. There was a lot of shifting about in the assembled circle of guns. Serious violence was imminent.
The other woman, little more than a girl, was the slenderest person there. I didn’t understand why the gravity hadn’t snapped her like a twig. She was pale, paler than the rest, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t a Maori despite the tattooed lips and chin. She had long, straight dark hair and couldn’t have been much older than Morag. Also, she wasn’t right. There was something not there about her, as if she was getting a different signal to the rest of us.
The hard-faced woman and the big hacker just stopped and gave us the eye. The pale girl walked straight up and started to inspect us.
‘Let him go,’ the hard-faced woman said to Cat.
Cat ignored her. Mudge was spitting out blood. Dog guy was struggling to get free; Cat was having none of it.
I turned to look at him. ‘Touch him again and I’ll hurt you, okay?’
The guy was furious at his helplessness. He just spat at me. I nodded to Cat, who cut him loose. That was good. We were acting the part of a together, properly functioning unit, even if we were really a mess. Dog guy turned to glare at Cat but said nothing.
‘That’s our Cat,’ I said, trying to break the tension. It fell flat.
The odd girl was next to me now, examining me. I turned to look at her.
‘You SF?’ the hard-faced woman asked. We didn’t answer.
‘They’re SF,’ the big guy said.
‘Well thank fuck. We’re saved,’ dog guy growled.
‘They transmitting?’ the hard-faced woman asked.
‘Not that I can tell. They seem to be running comms dark,’ the big guy answered.
‘Check their vehicles anyway.’
The hacker moved towards the FAVs.
I moved to intercept. ‘Hold on,’ I said, holding up my hand.
‘You’re transmitting, we’re fucked. We’ll have to run again and we always lose people when we run,’ the woman said.
‘We’re running comms dark,’ Pagan said. ‘We’re hiding from the same thing you are.’
The big guy stopped but glanced back at the woman. The pale girl was examining Morag now. Morag was smiling uncomfortably at her.
Mudge climbed to his feet, spitting blood. ‘Ow!’ he announced and lit up a spliff. There seemed to be no visible enmity towards the dog guy. Maybe after being blown up he didn’t care.
‘Couple of things you need to get used to. We are going to check your vehicles and we will be taking your food. You’ll get your fair share if we decide not to kill you and let you stay,’ the woman told me. ‘Big Henry, what’s the score?’
‘They were fighting the good fight when I found them,’ came the amplified reply from the mech.
‘You fighting the Freedom Squadrons?’ the big hacker asked.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Freedom Squadrons? We call them the Black Squadrons,’ I said.
‘Freedom Squadrons is what they call themselves. We mostly call them wankers,’ dog guy growled.
‘She’s really fucking with my calm!’ Mudge said, pointing at the pale girl, whose face was inches away from his as she studied him. Maybe he’d had enough of being kicked around after all.
‘Leave her be,’ the big hacker said. There was a dangerous edge to his voice that didn’t strike me as an affectation. I was pretty sure this guy knew how to look after himself.
‘You guys British?’ the woman asked. I nodded. ‘You in-country when this happened?’ I shook my head. ‘You point on an invasion?’ I shook my head. ‘Didn’t think so. Your food?’
‘Cat, Merle, give them half our ration packs.’
Merle’s head whipped round to look at me. He wanted to say something but was more disciplined. Mudge wasn’t.
‘Half our …’ Somehow he had the presence of mind to shut up when I glared at him. May as well try and keep up the pretence of professionalism.
‘Anyone tries to take more, shoot them,’ I continued.
The hard-faced woman gave this some thought.
‘Just so you know, when we need the other half we’ll take it, and if you don’t like it then we’ve got a long and proud history of cannibalism.’
There was laughter. From us as well. They just didn’t seem that scary after the Vucari.
‘Well, let’s hope we’re friends by then,’ I said. ‘You’re not checking the vehicles. We’re not transmitting. You can work that out yourselves. You’ll just have to trust us. We’ll pay for that trust in food.’
‘We can take—’ dog guy started, but the woman held up her hand and he was quiet.
‘Look, mate, I’m sorry about what he said, but we’ve had a bad time with some people that looked like you recently. We may be the only friends you’ve got down here,’ I said. It was a guess, but they looked in a bad way.
‘And we’re the only friends you’ve got, right?’ the big hacker asked. He had a point.
‘Assuming we don’t eat you,’ the woman said.
The place was called Utu Pa. A pa was some sort of Maori fortification and utu meant something between revenge and reciprocity. I’d done the introductions. They just gave us their call signs. I suspect the call signs had been their nicknames when they’d run as a gang together and were probably more meaningful to them than their real names. The hard-faced woman was Mother. She had been the senior NCO and now appeared to command the entire pa. The big hacker was called Tailgunner and with Mother drove the Bismarck-class mech. Dog guy was called Dog Face. That would be easy to remember. Some piece of shit had had him modified when he was still a kid to act as a human ratter. Apparently they had rats here on Lalande, which sort of impressed me. The pale girl went by the name of Strange. Again I didn’t think I was going to have a problem remembering that.
Big Henry, our saviour, had of course turned out to be very short. It was a typical squaddie naming convention. Not much bigger than a Twist, he moved with a particular waddling gate but was very powerfully built. A battered and ancient-looking bowler hat perched precariously on his mass of thic
k braided hair, which was pulled into a ponytail. His beard was braided as well and he had tattoos on what little hair-free skin we could see. He’d seemed the least hostile of the lot, but then he’d seen us fighting the bad guys.
After our initial chat Mudge had pulled me aside.
‘Half our fucking food!’ he demanded.
‘There’s more back at the cache, and Merle knows where there are more caches.’
‘Which could be compromised.’ Cat and Merle were acting as armed supervision as Mother’s people removed half our ration packs from the FAVs.
‘What do you want me to say, Mudge? Look at them. They’re fucking starving and we’re very low on friends here. Besides, I served with some Maori guys on loan from the Kiwi SAS. They were hard bastards.’
Mudge grinned. ‘Everyone seems hard to you.’
They were Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles, or a deserter element of them, an armoured cavalry unit. Mother and Tailgunner seemed to run things, backed by Dog Face and Big Henry. Strange was just local colour, I think. The infantry, tank and artillery crews they had with them, nearly all Maoris as well, called the five of them the Ngāti Apakura. It meant the Tribe of the Woman Who Urged Revenge. The Bismarck-class mech was also called Apakura. They called themselves whanau. As far as I could tell it meant family.
The five were close, very tight. They’d grown up on the streets together with no family but each other. They’d run as a gang because they’d had to. It was the street politics of victimise or be a victim. The street ate children who couldn’t find a way to protect themselves. They’d formed their gang, their tribe, and still wore their colours as patches on the back of their cut-off, armoured leather jackets.
Mudge had managed to find all this out while talking to Big Henry and some of the others in the camp who he hadn’t pissed off yet. I suspected he was relying on shared narcotics rather than charisma to make friends.
They’d learned to drive mechs in the mines. They’d piloted stripped-down mining versions – all the best parts had gone to the front to be used on fighting mechs – but the resources had to keep flowing. Big Henry had told Mudge that they’d lost as many people to mine accidents before they got drafted as they had in the war. The five were all that was left of their family. Christ knows how they’d managed to stay in the same platoon together all this time.
The Black/Freedom Squadrons were claiming to be the Earth government in exile. They’d turned up with Cronin at their head. It seems that despite what God had thought, Lalande and not Sirius had been their first stop. They’d laid a false trail for us. This made sense if what we suspected about the Citadel was correct.
The Freedom Squadrons had put out a story that we’d been a Them fifth column and had pulled off propaganda coups by making the Earth believe the war was over and taking control of the net with a Them virus. There’s even been edited footage of us taking Atlantis played on the vizzes. I felt used.
The Freedom Squadron called Demiurge the Freedom Wave. Sadly, calling something the opposite of what it was seemed to work in propaganda. People listened to names. It was much easier than studying actions. Cronin, the spokesperson for the so-called Earth government in exile, described it as the last defence against the Them computer virus, a sort of global comms net inoculation.
Tailgunner called it the Black Wave. He saw it for what it was and had isolated their systems and fled their pa or firebase after an encounter with what sounded like a Themtech-enhanced operator. I was impressed they’d shot down one of the Black Squadron’s next-generation assault shuttles with a mech.
Some other members of their unit had joined them and they had found other stragglers in the caves. Then people on the run from the Black Squadrons came looking for them. All in all, there were about two hundred of them. Mainly infantry, a few support, three tank crews, two of whom actually had tanks, and a self-propelled artillery crew complete with tracked SP gun. They also had almost enough APCs in various states of repair to move everyone if they had to.
It was a lot of mouths to feed. What they’d discovered early on was that if any of them got captured then they were compromised almost immediately. One of their people had gone missing while scouting for supplies. The next thing they knew their pa had been hit by a mixed force of NZ colonial regulars backed by the Black Squadrons. They’d only got away after a vicious firefight because they collapsed a tunnel after they’d managed a fighting retreat. Since then they’d been hiding in the deep caves. They moved every couple of weeks or if someone went missing, even if the poor fucker had just got lost. I figured that they were still alive because they weren’t important enough for Rolleston to deal with yet.
The whanau knew that Demiurge meant total surveillance in the areas that it controlled. This limited their options and meant that they had very little information about what was going on in the more densely populated areas above their heads. And of course it made getting food very difficult.
They’d managed a few raids for supplies but this wasn’t their kind of war. I didn’t doubt for a second that they were all very good in a stand-up fight, which was what they were trained for, but if the Black Squadrons were going to be fought it would mean using guerrilla tactics. Mechs just aren’t all that useful for that kind of thing.
On the other hand, they had wiped out any Black Squadron types they’d found in the deeper levels. Anyone who came looking for them for reasons other than joining was also killed. There was a problem with this tactic, however, a more concentrated form of what I’d been feeling. Anyone of us would kill Rolleston, Cronin or the Grey Lady as soon as look at them. The same went for any of the Themtech-enhanced arse-lickers here, but most of the soldiers were just normal draftees trying to stay alive. I didn’t like the idea of killing them but it was abstract for me. If some poor bastard was pointing an assault rifle at me it was always going to be him in the him-or-me stakes. The people here would know some of the guys they’d have to shoot. They’d recognised some of the people who’d attacked their pa with the Black Squadrons. The rest of the forces on Lalande and in the colonies would buy Cronin’s story – there was no real reason not to. That meant that they’d think that these guys, and us, were the bad guys. Not just the bad guys but species traitors who’d sold out all of mankind. Come to that, I was a bit worried about what would happen when the whanau saw through our disguise and realised that we were the people who’d released God into the net.
‘How come you just didn’t do as you were told? Make things easy on yourselves?’ I asked.
We were sitting in a circle next to the FAVs trying to make sure nobody nicked the rest of our stuff. Cat was actually on guard but she was still close enough to the conversation to join in if she wanted. Mother, Tailgunner, Dog Face and Big Henry were facing us over a camp stove. We were attempting to eat, but the sulphurous atmosphere made everything taste like farts to me. It didn’t seem to bother Merle. He was wolfing his food down.
Strange was standing just outside the circle we’d formed, in shadow between the pools of light provided by two of the portable lamps. Each of us was taking it in turns to be stared at by the girl. It was disconcerting. This wasn’t someone trying to be odd for the sake of it, or for effect like Mudge; this was someone who was damaged in some way. I noticed that Morag was spending a lot of time looking back at her.
‘We’re not very good at doing what we’re told,’ Dog Face growled. I think he was rueing the mess they found themselves in. I knew how he felt.
‘Why were all your mechs’ comms shut down?’ Pagan asked.
I watched them glance between each other uncomfortably. There was obviously something there that they didn’t want to talk about.
‘We were warned,’ Tailgunner finally said.
‘By who?’ I asked.
They didn’t answer. Close to starving or not, we couldn’t strong-arm these people. Normally I’d have been pissed off – after all we were all in the same shit – but I could see their point of view. This was a huge r
isk for them. For all they knew, we were the bad guys and the rest of our Freedom Squadron friends were on their way. We’d have to work for their trust.
‘We’re the ones,’ Morag said. Mother, Tailgunner and the others turned to look at her, confused. ‘We put God into the net. She’s not a Them virus; she just tells the truth.’
Merle was shaking his head and looking pissed off. Pagan turned to her but she ignored him. Mudge was grinning. Instead of earning their trust we could just make grandiose gestures, I thought. Morag may have been talking to Mother, Tailgunner, Dog Face and Big Henry but she was looking at Strange.
‘Have you got any vodka?’ I asked Mudge as what Morag had said started to sink in with our hosts.
‘What am I, your own personal off-licence?’ Mudge demanded.
‘I’m not wasting good whisky in this shit-for-atmosphere.’
To give Mudge his credit he went and got a bottle. He’d probably jumped with it and humped it all over hell’s creation.
Tailgunner and Mother were both still thinking it over. Mother didn’t look happy.
‘I thought you looked familiar. Changed your looks before you got here?’ she asked.
Morag nodded. Though that had been a waste of time if we were just going to tell everyone, I thought.
Dog Face was the first to get angry. ‘This is your fucking fault?’ he growled.
‘Yep,’ Mudge said proudly as he opened the bottle, took a swig and passed it to me. I passed it to Mother. She looked at it as if I was offering her a knife point-first but took it, wiped the top and took a swig before passing it to Tailgunner.
‘We may as well tell them everything,’ Morag said. There was resolve in her voice.
‘And if they’re the bad guys?’ Cat asked from behind us.
‘Hey, fuck you!’ Dog Face spat.
‘She’ll spank you again,’ Mudge said, presumably because he’d seen an opportunity to start an argument.
War in Heaven Page 34