War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

I reached the first trench. The defenders were still recovering from my initial frag. I sensed rather than heard Pagan, Mudge and Rannu run in behind me. I fired a flechette grenade. This was just slaughter. The soldiers in the trench were trying to work out what the fuck was happening to them when razor-sharp needles tore through cheap armour. The shaking had stopped. I fired at anything still moving with the SAW. Next to me Pagan and Mudge were subduing their own trenches.

  ‘Clear!’ I shouted. It was less fact and more a signal to move on. I turned to run into the vehicle bay. I heard the unmistakable hypersonic roar of a Bofors railgun and glanced over at the trench Cat was subduing. She’d painted the ice red. There were no bodies, only flying body parts.

  There was movement behind me. I swung around to bring the SAW smoothly to my shoulder. Sprinting out of the mist came a Steel-Mantis-class scout mech. It was Strange in the Atua Kahukahu. She’d named it for the vengeful spirit of a dead child. She’d advanced ahead of the other three mechs. Shit! That meant that we could have made the attack with the stolen exo-armour and not have lain in our own piss for more than a day.

  By the doors we tore the reactive camouflage gillie suits off. If we couldn’t see each other then we’d do more harm than good. The blast doors were still closing ponderously slowly. Inside the vehicle bay it was raining as plasma fires burned through ice. The walls and the ceiling were melting but I knew it was just superficial damage, even though most of the huge bay was burning. The missiles had veered to the left and the right at the last moment to give us a clear central path. Rannu was already sprinting across the bay towards another, much smaller blast door. We followed, moving rapidly, weapons at the ready. Any movement that wasn’t us got shot. We weren’t taking chances.

  The scout mech’s twin rotary railguns destroyed any significant resistance. Strange swivelled the mech with economical grace, located points of enemy fire and tore them apart with short, disciplined bursts. She targeted the more heavily protected points. The short-range missile battery on her right shoulder fired its payload in one go. The missiles shot off in different directions and protected firing points and heavy-weapons emplacements exploded.

  A burning light mech strode out of the plasma fire on our left. As one, Mudge, Pagan, Rannu and I triggered vertically launched Laa-Laas from one of the twin tubes attached to our packs. Four missiles hit the mech, exploding all over its already weakened body. The long-legged war machine toppled backwards and plasma flames consumed it.

  Ahead of me Mudge was firing on the run, aiming his converted AK-47 at the catwalks that surrounded the vehicle bay. As Rannu reached the closed blast door he pulled the smart frame off his chest webbing. At a command sent through his palm link, the frame expanded. He attached the frame to the door and then turned, weapon at the ready. The rest of us reached the door and did the same.

  This was the tricky part – the waiting while the microbes ate at the armour plate of the blast door, making us a man-sized hole to get through. When I looked behind me everything was fire. The main blast door entrance to the bay was about to shut. Through the crack I could just make out the Apakura. They had begun to counter-attack. It looked like every inch of the Apakura was either exploding or burning. It was wreathed in fire. Yet its belly guns were still firing; the huge impacts of its mass driver could still be felt. Chunks of ice fell from the ceiling with every hit. I watched it fire the rest of its missiles. Then the doors closed. Moments later we felt the missiles’ impacts. I glanced up at the scout mech next to me firing burst after burst. I’m not sure what response I expected from the composite and metal shell of the mech.

  ‘We’re through,’ Rannu shouted. As soon as the hole appeared we’d started taking fire from the corridor on the other side. Cat poked her railgun round the corner and fired but quickly had to take cover.

  ‘Strange!’ Cat shouted. The mech turned and knelt, putting one of its rotary railgun arms through the hole. I heard the rip as one hypersonic bang mixed with the next and I saw Strange move the arm about. When she’d withdrawn Rannu poked his head around the corner.

  ‘Clear!’ he shouted.

  Strange was trapped in the vehicle bay. Atua Kahukahu was way too large to get through the hole and the external doors were shut.

  ‘Exit the mech! Come with us!’ Morag shouted. I could hear the desperation in her voice. The mech shook its head-shaped sensor array. I knew that the girl had had a short and tragic life. Now with the rest of her family almost certainly dead, it looked like it was going to come to a short and violent end. ‘Please!’ Morag begged. Strange’s sprint had been incredible. She’d made this part of the operation so much easier. She may have been a murderous disturbed mess, but she did not lack courage. Or maybe she wanted to die. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t leaving the mech.

  ‘We don’t have time for this. Move!’ Cat screamed at Morag.

  We were through into the corridor. Advancing at a fast walk in two lines, Alpha team and then Bravo. Anyone who showed their face got shot. We passed the remains of the defenders that Strange had subdued. They were a sticky carpet and wallpaper. Humans reduced to their constituent parts at hypersonic speed. Pagan and Morag used their laser carbines to burn out any security lenses we saw.

  We reached a second blast door. Merle used his smart frame with the microbes we’d taken from the Cemetery Wind caches. The rest of us covered our rear as the microbes did their job, exchanging shots with those defenders brave enough to poke their heads out of cover. Mudge’s leg was bleeding badly and he was moving with a limp. He’d taken a shard of ice in the initial bombardment. We covered Rannu while he rapidly applied an anti-coagulant/septic spray to the wound and affixed medgels and a pak.

  As soon as the microbes had cut through, the defenders on the other side of the blast door and those behind us decided to mount a two-pronged attack.

  Morag fired a frag grenade from the underslung grenade launcher on her laser carbine through the door and then ducked back into cover. Cat took hits as she stepped through the hole in the blast door, firing her railgun in a long burst. Merle followed her through and then Morag, firing three-beam bursts from her laser. Rannu fired a grenade at the defenders behind us and then Mudge and I laid down a withering hail of fire as Rannu and Pagan stepped through the hole. I snatched a frag off the front of my webbing, primed it by hand and threw it back down the corridor before stepping through the hole. Mudge backed through the hole firing.

  In the next corridor Cat, Merle and Morag were already advancing in line, firing short bursts and single shots at anything that moved in front of them. Pagan, Rannu, Mudge and I followed, frequently checking behind us.

  Two blast doors in, we were well and truly trapped in a huge building full of thousands of angry, frightened, well-armed people and probably members of the Black Squadrons too.

  The isolated system had to be well defended, which meant going deep into the building. Which meant going through secure points like the blast doors. The microbes were the only things that could be trusted to go through them reliably but they took time. Presumably guided by Demiurge, the defenders soon caught on to this. They would be waiting for us every time we reached a door, and every time we got through. At each door we met more resistance as they became more organised.

  We were starting to see individual members of the Black Squadrons now. We could recognise them by the way they carried themselves and their gear. Despite their reputed healing abilities they seemed as reluctant to get hit as any other soldier. Particularly when they had rail or plasma weapons fired at them.

  All of us were wounded now. Cat, always first through to suppress the opposition, was bleeding badly from multiple wounds but still up and fighting. For once I hadn’t been hit too badly and adrenalin and drugs kept me soaring above the pain.

  We found it when we got through the final blast door and into the central protected area of the Citadel. At first I thought the ice was black, but it was transparent. On the other side of the ice were what looked like
veins, arteries and other body parts all connected to form some massive organism. It was unmistakably Themtech but transformed into what looked like a warped version of some kind of Earth biology. The warm wind blowing through the corridors made me feel like I was being breathed on. The organs behind the ice seemed to move and beat with some kind of inner pulse. Despite the fact that we were in a combat situation all of us slowed.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Cat wondered.

  ‘It’s processing machinery for the raw materials that the roots gather – air, heat, sewage, etcetera,’ Pagan told us.

  ‘We need to keep moving!’ Merle snapped.

  ‘Trippy,’ Mudge said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. He sounded subdued. I glanced over him. He did not look happy.

  We were close to the conference room now. We moved through more corridors surrounded by the organic machinery. I wondered how people could even think of this mockery as life, let alone make it work on such a scale. But none of what I had seen prepared me for what was round the next corner.

  We rounded the corridor and this time, sunk into the ice, we saw people. All of them looked like they had once been hackers. All of them had been shorn of their hair and were naked. All of them were inside the ice of the walls and ceiling and connected through their plugs, and more obvious violations of their flesh, via tendrils to the machinery.

  Again we slowed. During the war They had committed atrocities because They did not understand the concept of a war with rules, but not even They had come up with anything this sick. I saw Morag stare at the frozen hackers, her recent tough-girl persona close to cracking.

  This drove home something that I had suspected since I’d been captured, something I should have realised after Gregor. Rolleston was completely insane. Even Merle looked disturbed.

  ‘What is this?’ Rannu asked. I could hear his desperation to make sense of this, but there was no sense to be had.

  ‘There are few quicker ways to move and process information than the human brain. It’s always been the hardware that’s the problem,’ Pagan said quietly. For some reason I really hated Pagan for knowing this.

  ‘You mean this is part of Demiurge?’ Morag asked. Pagan swallowed and nodded. ‘But that means that if they do this on a large scale, then …’ Her voice just trailed off.

  ‘They’ll have access to a lot more processing power and memory than we could ever hope to marshal,’ Pagan said. Because no sane person or organisation would do this, he’d left unsaid.

  ‘Shut up!’ Merle hissed. Pagan’s head jerked round to look at the other man. ‘They have ears.’

  Then there was laughter. It really fucked with my calm. I didn’t want to be here. Many eyes were opening and trying to move in sockets to look at us through the ice. Mouths moved where they weren’t frozen over. ‘You will all suffer. You will all watch each other suffer,’ they said. Multiple agonised voices speaking as one.

  ‘We need to move.’ I couldn’t remember hearing fear in Mudge’s voice before.

  ‘The best you can hope for is that this will be done to you,’ the voices said. Then they started naming people we knew and describing what was going to be done to them. They started with Mudge’s mum.

  ‘Move, now!’ Cat barked, but she sounded disturbed as well.

  The next corridor was the same and then the next. After that we weren’t even walking on ice; it was like we were walking through the veins of the beanstalk root system we’d seen in the fissure.

  The entrance to the conference room looked more like a sphincter than a door. We were down to our last smart frame of microbes. Mudge was carrying it but he wasn’t sure where to put it. All of us were surprised when the sphincter just opened. Cat and Merle, backed by Morag, advanced cautiously into the room. Pagan and I followed with Rannu and Mudge watching our backs.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ I heard Cat scream. I had a moment to register the large room. I had this odd thought of a cybernetic room in which high tech had been mixed with the living organism of heavily modified, organic Themtech. It was like modern corporate architecture had caught a disease. One of the Citadel’s roots grew through the room. In the centre was a long table made out of a single slab of thick granite.

  Sitting at the table apparently as surprised to see us as we were to see him was Cronin. Standing behind him was Kring. They looked like they hadn’t even realised the base was being attacked. Both were covered in some kind of thick viscous fluid that they had been trying to wipe off themselves and both started moving as we entered, simultaneously seeking cover and reaching for weapons. They were fast.

  As they moved I was surprised to see Cat and Merle shift aim to something at the other end of the room. I brought up my SAW to shoot at Kring, who I reckoned would be the bigger threat. He disappeared behind the granite table as I fired a burst. Sparks flew off granite.

  Cat and Merle advanced quickly, Merle firing his plasma rifle and Cat her railgun, seemingly at the wall. Behind me I heard Rannu and Mudge firing rapid bursts and a grenade detonate. Morag and Pagan were firing at the walls, ceiling and table. I knew that they were taking out anything even remotely resembling a sensor or lens. Some of the things they were targeting looked like growths.

  That left me with Kring and Cronin. I moved forward, firing diagonally across the table. Now I could see what Merle and Cat were firing at. There were things growing out of the walls. They looked like deformed Berserks. They had human-looking, screaming mouths in their bodies but the heads of animals. Some were covered in spikes and other less pleasant features and they were growing from the organic parts of the room with surprising speed.

  Kring just stood up. I shot him. A lot. He staggered but the enormous cyborg was standing up to the gauss-boosted fire of a long and accurate burst from my SAW. He raised both massive fists, a PDW in each. That was fine. I was happy to take low-powered rounds on my armour and swap shots with him. Then my world became fire. Every round exploded fiercely, blowing off chunks of my armour and kicking me back into the soft organic tissue of the wall. I was vaguely aware of the granite table breaking in two from the force of his fusillade.

  The lunatic was firing concentrated explosive rounds. They were expensive and dangerous to use, and he was using them in a fast-cycling automatic weapon. Red icons erupted all over my IVD. I slid to the ground. The table blocked his line of sight. Kring was firing indiscriminately. He stood and took any fire aimed at him, staggering as shot after shot hit him. I couldn’t figure out who else was firing. The room seemed to fill with rapid explosions. Then I realised he was firing at the twisted Berserks growing out of the wall.

  I tried to roll onto my knees but hands burst out of the floor to grab me. I was screaming now as some kind of pincer-like claw tried to prise armour and flesh open. My blades extended from my knuckles and I stabbed them viciously into the floor, tearing at it. The partially formed Berserk mutant went limp, succumbing to the ferocity of my attack. There were more growing out of the wall all around us. Another grenade went off somewhere behind me. Now there were black beams and shards in the air just like back on Sirius. I saw Pagan go down as explosions rolled over him. Then I saw Rannu stagger in the doorway as he was back-shot. Mudge’s head whipped round. It looked like a black beam had taken half his face off.

  I’d had enough. On one knee I fired a thirty-millimetre HEAP grenade at Kring. As I did, Cronin shot me with a gauss PDW. He got me in the arm. It penetrated hardening inertial armour and then my subcutaneous armour, tearing into actual flesh.

  Kring dodged to the side, the HEAP hitting the wall just behind him. The explosion knocked me back to the ground. The table slid across the floor towards me. Kring was thrown forward over the wrecked table. I felt the organic floor moving beneath me.

  Back up onto my feet. I fired a burst at Cronin. He dived for cover behind the table. He was fast for an exec. I pointed the SAW down and fired another burst into the ground because the floor just wouldn’t stop moving. Bringing the SAW back up, I was appalled to
see Kring standing again. He dropped the two PDWs and drew two Benelli shotgun pistols. I risked a burst; he staggered slightly, and I hit the ground again. How much fucking damage could this monster take?

  Morag was down! No, it was okay, she was tranced in. That was trust in this environment. Everyone else was fighting the Berserk mutants growing out of the floor, the ceiling, the walls.

  Heavy-calibre hit after hit on my chest armour and helmet. Almost cracking the armour. There was more pain, more red icons on my IVD. Where the fuck was the fire coming from? Kring. His shotgun pistols were firing saboted gyrojet rounds with smart miniature warheads. Money truly was no object for these guys. The gyrojet rounds would track me regardless of my cover and I couldn’t take much more.

  I staggered to my feet, taking more hits. I fired my last grenade at him. He dived out of the way and the blast knocked me off my feet again. Still at least I wasn’t getting shot. Then I did something really stupid. I charged.

  I’d hoped to surprise him. I jumped onto the broken table and ran across its sloping surface, firing. The expression on his mismatched face with its bulbous fish eyes didn’t even change. He grabbed me as I closed. At least he had to drop the shotgun pistols. He lifted me off my feet and slammed me into the wall. He then threw me into the ground. He didn’t drop me. He threw me. The wind was knocked out of me.

  My SAW was hanging loose on its sling and was just getting in the way. Fighting for breath, I dragged the Void Eagle out of its holster and fired it repeatedly at point-blank range into Kring. The shots staggered him and I managed to fire about half the magazine before he slapped the gun out of my hand. Something clawed through the floor, tearing through my inertial and subcutaneous armour and ripping flesh out of me.

  Kring reached down and dragged me to my feet. I extended my claws. He hooked a punch into my chest. As he hit me, his now-spiked cybernetic fist was propelled forward into my chest by a jackhammer-like pneumatic action. My breastplate and subcutaneous armour cracked, the force of the blow causing internal damage. I spat blood onto his Hawaiian shirt.