Morag was on all fours next to me, having managed to roll me off her. She was gasping for breath like she’d been badly winded. Blood was pissing out of her nose but otherwise she seemed not much worse than she had moments before.
‘C’mon!’ Mudge screamed at me. He was trying to get a screaming Pagan over his shoulder so he could carry him.
Still dazed, I looked up to see Tailgunner and Cat on opposite rooftops firing back towards the main thoroughfare. I looked down the alleyway and saw the remaining Walker limp into the mouth of the alley. The multiple barrels of its rapid-firing railgun were already rotating up to speed. We were dead.
This was what Merle had been waiting for. The building hewn out of the rock on the corner of the alley had been blown open by missile fire. Merle appeared on the first floor, now open to the air, his plasma rifle at his shoulder, and fired it at almost point-blank range. He squeezed the trigger on the semi-automatic weapon again and again, firing the whole magazine into the mech. The plasma gun’s barrel glowed white hot. The front of the mech was wreathed in white fire that ate through armour plate. I think I saw Merle turn and run. I grabbed Morag and forced her to the ground and fell on top of her. Mudge dropped Pagan and threw himself on top of the screaming hacker. The mech blew.
‘That was fucking stupid,’ I heard Mudge say and start coughing. ‘He was in the army. He’s got more armour than me.’
This time I saw all black because we were buried. I felt like all the weight of the planet’s heavy G was bearing down on me. It seemed like the stone ceiling that replaced the sky in the cavern had landed on me. Boosted muscle, metal and a bit of screaming, and I managed to push myself up through the rubble. I saw light again. I spat dirt, blood and gravel out of my mouth and glanced behind me. The mouth of the alleyway was gone.
I reached down and dragged Morag’s limp body out of the debris. She was unconscious. My back felt like a whole load of stone had landed on it. Funny that. I overrode all the warning signs in my IVD so I could see better.
‘Move! We’ll cover you!’ Cat, from the roof. Christ, she was keen. Still she hadn’t just been blown up. She was right. The mechs were gone but the infantry would be in the alleys, trying to flank us.
The trucks were gone. Good, that was what this was about. Still, I didn’t want to die for a bit of food. I put a stim on Morag’s neck. She cried out as she was rudely pulled out of unconsciousness by the drug.
‘On your feet,’ I said.
There was just a little look of resentment from her before she realised where she was.
I retrieved my shotgun. Ejected the magazine, replaced it, ran a quick diagnostic. It was still working.
Morag staggered to her feet. Pagan was unconscious. I looked at Mudge’s blackened face.
‘I had to sedate him,’ he told me.
I helped sling Pagan across his shoulders.
‘C’mon!’ Cat shouted from above. She sounded worried but not rattled.
‘Air force,’ I said to Mudge. Mudge looked at me quizzically. I nodded at Pagan. ‘He was air force, not army.’ I had no idea why it was suddenly important to me.
‘You want to talk about this now?’ Mudge asked.
I shook my head. ‘Let’s go.’
If we were lucky we could get out of here without another contact. We’re never lucky. Even so, this was taking the piss.
Tailgunner took a hit first. A lump of his armoured combat jacket superheated and blew off. He went down, his chest steaming. Cat hit the ground, hiding behind the stone lip of the roof she was on. Morag cried out as she took a hit to the back, knocking her to the ground again. There was a smoking hole in the back of her armour. It had stopped most of the beam but I could see blackened and blistered skin through it. Mudge and Pagan were a two-for-one. Red steam jetted out of Pagan’s leg, the beam almost severing it. The beam then went through Mudge’s shoulder. Mudge cried out and dropped Pagan as he stumbled forward, his shoulder steaming red. The laser took me in the right shoulder, almost severing my cybernetic arm.
Rapid and accurate laser fire. I got a sinking feeling. I managed to bring the shotgun up to my shoulder, though it felt like my arm was about to fall off. There’s nothing like smelling your own cooked flesh. More painkillers, more stims, more red warning icons.
‘Fall back, now!’ I barked.
Morag was helping Mudge get the badly bleeding Pagan up and over his unwounded shoulder.
‘I can’t see them.’ Cat from above.
I was looking down the barrel of the shotgun. Where had the fire come from?
A figure was moving fast and low in the main thoroughfare. I triggered a burst from the shotgun but the figure had gone, disappeared into one of the cave-like buildings next to the ruins of the mouth of the alley. Above me Cat leaped over the alleyway to check on Tailgunner. It had all been going so smoothly. Well, it hadn’t really.
Mudge had Pagan over his shoulder now and was moving as quickly as he could manage. Morag was staying level, covering them. I was backing down the alleyway looking for the figure, knowing who it was but not wanting to admit it to myself. Above us, Cat hefted Tailgunner onto her shoulder and started jogging across the rooftops, easily keeping pace with us. What a fucking mess. How did they get to us so quickly?
The sound of gauss fire from behind. A shout of surprise from Cat. The sound of a body being dropped onto a rooftop. Answering laser fire from Morag. I started to turn.
Someone grabbed my shotgun. I shouldn’t be this easy to sneak up on. Not when I’m operational. The weapon was twisted, then wrenched from my grip and thrown away.
‘Hello, Jakob.’ Josephine, the Grey Lady, still wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was standing in front of me. Small wiry build, nondescript to the point of drabness. She wore an inertial armour suit and had the laser carbine she’d just used on us slung across her back. I just stared at her as I went through the clichés of my blood running cold and my mainly mechanical heart skipping a beat.
‘Run!’ I screamed at the others.
I took a step back and went for the Mastodon and my laser pistol. She moved too fast. Steely fingers hit my right wrist hard enough to affect a nerve point through subcutaneous armour and my laser pistol flew out of my hand as I lost all feeling in my fingers. Then she locked up my right hand, elbowed me in the face and bent the Mastodon out of my grip and threw it away. She chopped my neck with both her hands and kneed me in the chest, knocking me back into a wall.
I clenched my fists and all eight of my knuckle blades slid out of their forearm sheaths.
‘How’d you know?’ I asked, trying to buy time.
She just shook her head as if she was sad that I’d even asked.
I punched at her with the blades. She batted one bladed fist aside. She wasn’t even where I’d aimed the other. I stabbed air.
Fighting other operators, you don’t attempt kicks above knee height. Your legs may have the strongest muscles on your body, but kicks are slow and anyone with decent reactions who knows what they are doing will avoid or counter them. Josephine kicked me in the head, which snapped to the left as I explosively spat blood out. I felt bone and armour crunch and I went down on one knee.
I swung blindly with the claws at where I thought she was. She seemed to roll over my arm. She was now so close it felt intimate as she hit me hard enough to hurt through the armour in the chest, stomach, kidneys and groin. She was moving so fast I could barely register where she was going to hit next.
I tried to hook the blades on my right arm, the cybernetic one, into her kidneys. She stepped back, took my right arm by the elbow and wrist, and used my own momentum to push it up. Then she hooked one of her legs behind mine and stepped forward. I felt myself starting to fall back. She leaped up, adding her weight to my momentum, lodging her leg horizontally across my throat, and rode me to the ground. As I hit the rock, her leg crushed my windpipe. I was now using my internal air supply. My claws, held in place by her seemingly unbreakable grip, were stabbed into t
he ground with enough force to shatter the carbon-fibre blades.
I stabbed at her with the blades on my left arm. She leaned back, and I missed. Josephine grabbed the arm. I screamed as she struck my elbow, shattering it. My left arm was now useless and limp. Black scalpel-like claws shot from the fingertips of her right hand and she dug them into the wound in my right shoulder. More screaming, mine again. I tried to punch her with the broken blades on my right fist until she’d severed enough connections to the cybernetic arm and it went limp as well.
She was sitting atop me, leg still crossed over my neck. The only real option I had left was to try and buck her off. She was too far forward to hook with my legs, and I knew that would be ineffective and only cause me pain. I knew when I was beat, or maybe I didn’t, but I was beat now. She’d walked all over me. I hadn’t even landed a blow. Being beaten by a better opponent is one thing, but I felt helpless. She still wouldn’t look at me directly.
‘I don’t suppose you’d kill me?’ I managed through blood, grit and broken teeth.
‘I’m sorry, Jakob.’ She sounded like she meant it.
I was peripherally aware of a firefight and managed to turn my head. Further down the alley I could see Cat, Morag and Mudge firing at opponents who were out of view, their lasers and assault rifles being answered by what sounded like gauss carbines. There was the occasional explosion of a grenade. I watched as Morag went down in a hail of fire. The spray of blood told me that her armour was compromised. She hit the ground but I could see she was still moving. I had to help.
When the Grey Lady had hit me in the shoulder with laser fire and then dug her claws in, she’d torn the combat jacket. There was just about enough room to bring my shoulder laser to bear.
I think when the laser slid out on its servos Josephine was surprised enough to almost have a facial expression. For a moment I had her in the laser’s cross hairs superimposed on my IVD. The red beam stabbed out. Superheated air exploded. She grabbed the laser and shifted it slightly as she moved her head to the side. It missed. Then she tore it off my shoulder.
‘That’s the closest anyone’s come for a while,’ she mused.
I could still hear the gunfight. I guessed my friends were too busy to kill me like we’d agreed. I had the presence of mind to trigger the kill switch on my internal memory. Virtual flames burned away electronic data, hopefully leaving them nothing for the inevitable system violation.
Josephine took me by the hair and pulled my head up. On the wall behind her I could see a peeling thinscreen poster of Mudge. It was a screenshot from when we’d taken over the media node on the Atlantis Spoke. He was grinning, had a spliff in his mouth and was holding his AK at port. Across the poster, written in red, was the word RESIST. The Puppet Show had been disseminating the information we’d given them on the Cabal, the Black Squadrons and what had happened on Earth. I couldn’t help but smile. Mudge was the unacceptable face of the resistance. You had to laugh really, didn’t you?
I tried to move my head so I could see Morag but Josephine held me still. I felt her push the coma jack into one of my plugs. Felt the click as it slid home. The fight my security software put up was depressingly brief. Darkness.
15
Moa City
After darkness, hell. Slowly coming to. I could feel the pain through the fugue of painkillers, my IVD red with warnings. Hopelessness accompanied consciousness. Or in other words I knew I was fucked.
Opening my eyes was like tearing off a scab. Light was pain; focusing on my surroundings, making sense of them, wasn’t much better. Calum Laird may have been a cunt but I should have taken the job with him. He was an amateur compared to the other inhabitants of the cell I was in.
I was strapped into some sort of contoured vinyl couch, properly secured despite not having the use of my arms. I could feel a single jack in one of my plugs connecting me to some kind of medical suite. I was covered in medpak-driven medgels.
‘He seems to be healing quickly,’ Josephine said quietly. She was looking at the suite’s monitor.
It looked like your standard cell – stone walls, no windows, thick metal door. I reckoned it would have been quite roomy without the hulking, patchwork presence of Martin Kring. Even through the agony I still managed to find disgust for this murderous, so-called anti-insurgency specialist.
Kring was standing impassively next to an unhappy-looking Vincent Cronin, whose salon looks, smart suit that probably cost more than most made in a year and carefully cultivated corporate duelling scars all looked out of place in this dungeon.
And of course Rolleston. Still in uniform – crisp clean fatigues. Well built, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, every inch the suave officer. He had a patient, almost indulgent smile on his face beneath his pale-blue eyes. I’d seen matt-black plastic lenses with more feeling in them than those eyes. This was a moment of clarity. I wasn’t frightened; all I felt was an overwhelming hatred. It was all I could do not to scream my hatred and anger at him.
‘I don’t really feel that I need to be here for this,’ Cronin said to Rolleston, his annoyance obvious. ‘This is your department.’
‘I thought you might want to meet the man who caused us so much trouble. Besides, he will have information that will be of use to both of us. Don’t you, Jakob? Anyway, Jakob has an important lesson to learn.’
‘I’m not being funny, right, but either torture me or kill me because we’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ I said.
‘I find myself in agreement with him,’ Cronin said with a look of disgust in my direction.
Fuck you, suit. Things would be different if I wasn’t strapped down to this couch. With two broken arms. Surrounded by hard bastards.
‘I want to know why,’ Rolleston said.
Cronin turned to look at the Major. ‘This is a waste of our time.’
‘Leave if you want.’ Rolleston just kept staring at me.
‘Why what?’ I asked.
‘Why are you here? Why do you fight? Why did you try to pull down everything we tried to make?’ I stared at him like he was mad. I hoped he picked that up. ‘When you’re suffering I want you to remember that all you had to do was kill an alien and some whores and then go back to your miserable life a bit richer.’
‘Where do I start?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I mean, you get that you shouldn’t do the things you do, yeah?’
‘Get what you can out of him; we can break him now and get after the others,’ Cronin said. He sounded impatient but there was something else there. Nervousness? Fear?
Others? That meant some of them had got away. Rolleston glared at Cronin, obviously irritated by his indiscretion. Though I couldn’t see how it mattered.
‘You understand that you’re in no position to judge me?’ Rolleston asked.
I looked down at my broken, blackened and bloody body.
‘Well not at the moment, but give me a few days to get back on my feet and I’ll give you a square go.’ It was bravado I didn’t really feel.
Rolleston laughed as if we were two old army buddies sharing a joke. Then he reached down and placed his hand on my stomach wound. I gritted my teeth, rode out the pain, wished I had more drugs. His fingers elongated and burrowed through my flesh like razor-covered worms. I screamed and writhed on the couch. Rolleston tore his bloody fingers out of me. I saw them sway and writhe as they slowly returned to looking like fingers. The medical monitor was begging for attention, bleeping with urgency. I was gasping for breath. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers writhing through my guts. Control yourself.
‘Aaaah!’ Turn it into a laugh. ‘Yes! That’s the spirit! A little more torture, a little less fucking talk!’ Because false bravado was bound to see me through, though there was still no fear, only hatred and resignation.
‘Why?’ he asked again.
‘We’ve talked this to death!’ I shouted at him through a spray of blood and spittle. ‘Just fucking get on with it!’
‘Don’t give me orders, Jak
ob.’ Danger in his voice. He hadn’t liked that.
‘When did you get to like the sound of your own voice so much? You were always a cunt, but I just thought you were trying to get the job done no matter what. Now you’re a fucking psycho. The Cabal have gone. They’re over, dead. You’re just a broken machine following the programming of people who either don’t exist or have switched sides.’
The twitch on his face was instantly replaced by a calm smile. There was something there he hadn’t liked.
‘Humans are all biological machines. Everyone’s programmed. We call it growing up. All you are is malfunctioning pinkware,’ he said.
‘Fine, justify it how you want. It’s not difficult to work out why I’m here. This is just what people do when people like you try to make us live a certain way.’
It was a lie. I was here because of Morag and to a degree because I hated this guy. Want to rule humanity? Fine. But why did it seem that he was on a mission to make my life such a long bleeding streak of misery?
‘You’re angry you can finally see the strings?’ Josephine surprised me by asking. I don’t think I was the only one who was surprised.
‘As for what happened on Earth, you boxed us in. We were making it up as we went along. Just trying to survive. Can we get on with the torture now?’
Rolleston seemed to be giving what I’d said some consideration. ‘That’s what I thought – the spastic reaction of the frightened animal.’ So he hadn’t been giving what I’d said some thought. He just wanted to spin whatever I said until it suited what he wanted to hear.
‘While we’re having a nice little chat. What. The fuck. Are you doing?! You’re potentially going to kill millions of people. For what? Some abstract sense of accomplishment in the power game?’
I was finding impending death and torture quite liberating.
‘You know what you remind me of?’ Rolleston asked.
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