War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

  Prime Minister Komali Akhtar had been waiting for us when we returned, as had Sharcroft. The welcome hadn’t been much better than the one I’d got when I’d returned after the mutiny on the Santa Maria. They were less than pleased that Morag had killed Cronin.

  I’d gone for them. Claws out. It was more a gesture. Mudge, Rannu and the others had made sure I couldn’t get to any of my weapons as we disembarked. I’d predictably screamed something about them selling me out. They’d been ready for me, and Mike and Lien, presumably on Akhtar’s instructions, had shown forbearance and not blown me away. There had then followed a very uncomfortable briefing. As much because half the people in the room couldn’t look at the other half, or maybe it was just me. Mudge and Merle had at least made up.

  I now had a beer in one hand and a very fine whisky in the other. Rannu and Mudge were sitting either side of me. Pagan, Morag and Merle had disappeared with Sharcroft. Despite the amount we’d drunk and Mudge’s presence, we were still pretty subdued. All of us were just looking down on Earth.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked Rannu. He pointed at Asia, just above the Indian subcontinent.

  ‘So you’re determined to be a prick just because you’re Mr Squid Face now?’ Mudge asked. I turned to look at him expecting to see a sarcastic smile on his face. He looked serious.

  ‘Do you not think she’s better off without me?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Mudge said. Rannu was nodding as well. The three of us lapsed back into gloomy silence.

  ‘It’s not enough, is it?’ I asked. Rannu and Mudge shook their heads. I turned to Rannu.

  ‘You need to go home,’ I said.

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘Did she tell you the plan for dealing with Demiurge?’ Mudge asked. Rannu gave him a warning glance.

  ‘I didn’t give her the chance.’

  ‘I wondered why you hadn’t killed Pagan.’ Then he told me.

  ‘That fucking bastard.’ Now I was really angry. Not the anger I was using for self-pity but the proper anger. The cold ball in my stomach that made me want to kill, that made it all right to kill. I just wasn’t sure who it was aimed at.

  I looked down at the world. I knew what was down there. I knew much of it was squalid, dangerous, violent and degenerate. I knew that the nice parts of it were pretty much only for the rich and powerful professional arseholes in the world, but twenty-two thousand miles up it looked peaceful. I knew that when Rolleston came with four colonial fleets we would be able to see the results from here. It wouldn’t look peaceful then. It would look rotten and diseased if he had his way. I knew he would come tomorrow. I think Rannu was right that there was no point trying to hide from this. Besides, what was I going to do? Go back to Dundee and crawl into a sense booth and wait for the end?

  ‘God?’ I sub-vocalised over my internal comms link.

  ‘Yes, Jakob?’ God sounded weary. Maybe frightened. They would have to brief him sooner rather than later. He would be expected to carry the fight. I guessed that they were leaving it to the last moment, as God would then broadcast the plan to everyone. If Rolleston had any resources in-system, and I assumed he did, then they would know and be able to tell the bad guys as soon as they arrived.

  ‘Could you tell me where Pagan, Morag and Sharcroft are?’ I asked. We had a lot to do.

  Sharcroft first. The echo of boots rung through the stark utilitarian corridor of the military port on High Pacifica. The place was packed with soldiers and spacecrew frantically preparing for the arrival of the colonial fleets. Security was high and frightened kids wearing military uniforms quickly stopped us at gunpoint. Whether it was us or the impending fight they were scared of was debatable.

  Sharcroft had relented to our repeated requests. I think as much because we were requesting a meet through public comms, which meant everyone had access to the requests through God. He still looked like the corpse of a fat exec riding the skeletal remains of a metal spider. He’d learned though: his besuited security detail looked like they knew what they were doing.

  ‘I don’t have a great deal of time.’ Despite the modulation of the chair’s speaker and his lack of animation, I could still pick up the anger in his voice. He thought we were prima donnas. Maybe we were. We were standing in the corridor to one of the docking areas. Beyond Sharcroft and his security detail, troops and gear were being loaded onto shuttles.

  ‘You should have been dead a long time ago,’ Mudge said as an opener.

  ‘Look, I don’t have time for th—’

  ‘Rolleston. The Cabal went to a lot of effort to hide things about him, didn’t they?’ I demanded.

  Sharcroft actually moved the multi-legged chair around to look at me better. There was no expression on his comatose features but a line of drool headed towards his Ivy League school tie.

  ‘I don’t see how this is relevant …’ the modulated voice started but there was something in it. He was unsure of something.

  ‘So we’re grasping at straws. You don’t have time; answer the question.’

  ‘Rolleston is younger than me but yes, he was with the Cabal from the beginning. We needed a true believer. He volunteered to be the test bed for the initial Themtech trials, except the most suicidal—’

  ‘Those you kept for Gregor?’ I asked.

  ‘There were others before him.’

  I tried to control my anger. We, all of us, were just resources to people like this. They probably didn’t even acknowledge us as the same species. No wonder Rolleston thought like he did.

  ‘Where’d you find him?’ Mudge demanded.

  ‘You know where, Mr Mudgie. British special forces.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Rannu said, shaking his head. ‘How could he hide that level of insanity? He had to have had someone run interference for him with the psychological profiles at least.’

  ‘You know that SF can’t take the time to run a profile on every person who joins,’ Sharcroft began.

  He was right. Anyway, lack of psychological fitness could be overcome with enough drugs and the humanity could be cut out of people with an abundance of cybernetics.

  ‘They did before the war,’ Rannu told him. I hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘This isn’t the time for secrets,’ Mudge said.

  ‘You have to understand we needed someone with a degree of moral flexibility,’ Sharcroft said.

  ‘Seriously, Sharcroft, we don’t care about justification, just explanations,’ Mudge told him.

  ‘We recruited him out of a very secure, very discreet and very expensive private mental hospital. He had done some things. His family had paid for the problems to go away and then they had him committed.’

  ‘So the Rollestons were a wealthy family?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but that is not his real name,’ Sharcroft said.

  ‘What is his real name?’ I asked. I never knew Rolleston at all. Maybe when Demiurge possessed me I’d had the smallest insight.

  ‘His real name is George Connington. I think his family own half of Buckinghamshire in England. The nice half.’

  ‘What’d he do?’ Rannu asked.

  ‘Giving his proclivities, I’m guessing he killed someone, maybe more than one.’

  ‘And had fun doing it,’ I said grimly.

  ‘He was recruited a long time ago and we just needed someone who could do the things we required.’

  ‘Without being bothered by what they’d done,’ I said.

  Sharcroft said nothing but even his inanimate form suggested impatience.

  ‘In fact you rewarded him with atrocities,’ Mudge said.

  ‘Look, people are desensitised to violence. We needed someone who would teach such object lessons that people would not dare oppose is. Now if there’s nothing else …’

  ‘Who’d know about him, his past?’ I asked.

  ‘Rolleston is well into his eighties,’ Sharcroft objected.

  Mudge was concentrating. ‘There’s a sister,’ he said. ‘Still ali
ve at the Connington estate in Bucks. She’s old enough. Looks like she’s another technological ghoul. She was on the periphery of the Cabal. Their father was a player before he died.’

  Thank you, God.

  ‘And now I really must—’ Sharcroft began.

  ‘Where are Pagan and Morag?’ I asked.

  ‘You must know I won’t tell you that.’

  ‘God, where are Pagan and Morag?’ I asked out loud.

  ‘Their most likely whereabouts is on board HMS Thunderchilde,’ God told me.

  This made sense. HMS Thunderchilde was a new super-carrier. It had been due to ship out to Proxima when all the unpleasantness with the Cabal had kicked off. Or rather we’d kicked it off. Most of the ships from the various fleets in-system were second generation or older. The best ships were used on the front line in the colonies. This meant that the Thunderchilde was the most modern and technologically advanced ship of its size and class in-system. Political wrangling aside, it was the most likely vessel to be used as the flagship in the coalition fleet that was rapidly being put together.

  I’d always wondered that the best ship in-system was from a developing country. It was the same in the colonies. Not enough money to make sure that the population is adequately fed but we do like our weapons.

  ‘We need a shuttle and we need to get on board the Thunderchilde once we’ve been back to Earth,’ I said. It was more of a demand.

  ‘Why would I divert much-needed military resources—’ Sharcroft began, definite anger in his modulated voice.

  ‘Because we think you’ve done the maths and I think you know that you can’t win. I think that you know that in order for Pagan’s plan to work you need to get close to Rolleston,’ Mudge told him. Sharcroft was silent for a while. He flexed the metal legs of the spider chair.

  ‘Why send you? You’re burned-out messes. I can understand why you’d want to go, but why wouldn’t we send the best of our still serving special forces?’ he finally asked. Despite this, I was pretty sure he was intrigued.

  ‘Rolleston’s got a god complex, and we tore down one of his temples. He wants us as much as we want him,’ Mudge told Sharcroft.

  ‘You think he’s arrogant enough to let you get close to him?’ Sharcroft asked. Mudge and I nodded. ‘And how do you get close to him?’

  ‘You must have been working on a plan,’ I said.

  ‘Obviously, but I want to know what you had in mind.’

  I told him.

  Strapped into one of the seats in the cargo bay of an assault shuttle. It had been a choppy ride but we’d levelled out now. Mudge had his eyes closed and was concentrating. Every so often I could see his lips moving as he talked silently to himself.

  I undid my straps and moved over to one of the windows. The shuttle was banking over London. It was a beautiful winter’s day. Pale sun, blue sky. Even the vast crumbling estates and long-abandoned suburbs looked tranquil from above. The centre of the city, with its promise of wealth and comfort, with its brightly glowing towers reaching for the sky, seemed so far removed from my life that it was more alien to me than Lalande or Sirius. The shuttle finished its turn and, as close as we were to the largest city in Britain, we were suddenly over green fields and bare winter woodland.

  Before the shuttle had actually landed, the private security detail were sprinting towards us. Mudge, Rannu and I walked down the ramp to find a lot of guns pointed at us. They may have been pissed off by the four deep holes that the shuttle’s landing struts had put in the lawn. In front of me was a huge old house made of grey stone with a lot of windows. In Fintry it would have housed hundreds, if not thousands of people. Here it just housed one and a lot of staff.

  I looked at the security detail. The guns they held were too expensive for use by front-line soldiers. I guessed because here they were protecting something valuable. I pointed up at the shuttle. ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’ The assault shuttle had enough firepower to level the house, pre-FHC or not.

  ‘What do you want?’ a voice used to giving orders demanded.

  ‘I want to speak to Charlotte Connington,’ I said.

  ‘Lady Connington is not receiving visitors today,’ the man answered. With his uniform-like suit and smart haircut he looked exactly the same as all the others.

  ‘Look, fuckwit, we’re not going to take much of her time, but we’ve come a long way and we’re going to speak to her. You decide if you all want to die and be responsible for the destruction of half the house first,’ Mudge said. The man did not look happy. I don’t think he liked the odds either. His frown deepened as he listened to some internal voice.

  ‘Did one of you order a delivery here?’ he demanded angrily.

  Mudge brightened. ‘Oh yes, that was me. Let them in.’

  The house was like one of the virtual museums I’d gone to when I’d been home-learning over the net as kid. Except this was real. Everything looked old, clean and expensive and yet the whole house seemed empty and still.

  We were escorted by a lot of security people up a redundantly large staircase and then another and then through lots of different halls until I was quite lost. I couldn’t see how people could live like this. I think the size of it would frighten me. It must be really lonely. They took us into a room. I wasn’t expecting one wall of the room to be made of glass. Behind the glass was earth. There were tiny burrows in the earth. I zoomed in. Ants. A massive ant colony. The other three walls were covered with old paintings of twisted landscapes, strange creatures and horrible things happening to people. The room itself was ordered and neat in a military style.

  ‘It’s like his mind,’ Rannu said.

  It took me a few moments to understand what he meant, but then I could see it as well. Rolleston grew up here. This was the environment he’d wanted to live in and nobody had told him no. The family had been rich enough to indulge his whims. I wondered at what point they realised that it was a mistake.

  ‘He’d trick me in here. Every time he’d say that he would be nice, and I wanted to believe him because he was my brother, and every time he’d hurt me or just terrify me.’

  The voice surprised me so much I reached for my laser before I saw the holographic ghost. The ghost had the body of a beautiful young woman in a very old-fashioned dress. A leather mask covered most of her head.

  ‘It got so Father or the staff punishing him made no difference. I think he enjoyed the attention in some ways. Once when he was twelve, the body of one of our housekeepers was found in the pond in the woods. None of the staff ever tried to punish him again. She’d been dissected. Even Father left him alone after that and I hid. I live in metal now deep in the earth. Where it’s warm and safe.’

  If this was the sister then she was well into her eighties. I did not want to think what it would have been like for her growing up at the mercy of Rolleston.

  ‘He would make his own worlds, mostly form-cracked, sense-porn environments with their content and safety restraints removed. Mother found them. Would you like to see one?’

  Another holographic screen opened. It was red, screaming and obscene. I felt sick. I wondered to what extent the atrocities committed by Them were watered-down versions of Rolleston’s fantasy life, taught to Them by the Cabal to keep humanity angry and wanting to fight. This was a world he’d made. Now that he’d had time to think on it, hone it, he wanted to make his world our world.

  ‘This was what broke Mother,’ the ghost of Charlotte Connington told us. ‘I am terribly sorry. Where are my manners? Could I get you some tea?’

  I think I managed to shake my head. Suddenly this house didn’t seem like a museum. It seemed like a beautiful trap, a gateway to hell. Our host couldn’t be sane.

  ‘Could you turn it off, please?’ Mudge asked in a small voice.

  ‘He can’t have my children. I have to tell Ash to kill the kids if he wins,’ Rannu said, turning to look at me.

  We were supposed to be used to this stuff. We weren’t. I wanted my eyes to have
unseen what I’d just witnessed, but they couldn’t. Even after being in the mind of Them, even after talking to the gods in the net, even after seeing Gregor’s final moments, Rolleston was the least human thing I’d ever known.

  ‘The asylum?’ Mudge managed to ask.

  ‘He had girlfriends, he had friends. One day he tried to amalgamate them all into one single suffering organism. He was quite the genius with biotechnology. I kept some of the vizzes. Would you like to see.’

  ‘No!’ Someone shouted. It was me.

  I zoomed in on the bookshelves. Books on biotechnology, on insects, on religion and atrocity porn disguised as reference texts. I remembered what it was like in his mind. The purity of it. None of it would have been enough for him. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if he won, if he wrote his fantasy large on the flesh of the Earth and the colonies, it wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to go out after Them. He’d have to go after the gods on the net. He’d have to find more to change and consume. He wouldn’t die. He wanted to write his name in obscenity across the stars. I wondered about all the times I could have killed him if I’d had the balls.

  ‘He tried again. He made a life from a fused-together organism of male and female before it expired in agony. It’s her you should feel sorry for.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked. Already knowing the answer.

  ‘The daughter,’ Charlotte told me softly. ‘Josephine.’

  I felt cold and sick, or sicker than I had already been feeling. Everything I knew about the Grey Lady changed.

  ‘He was born to all this. Why did he need more?’ Rannu asked in a small and very non-Rannu voice.

  ‘Some people just always want more. Nothing’s ever enough for them,’ Mudge said. In his own way Mudge was like that. Mudge looked pale, withdrawn and sounded a bit shaky.

  ‘He’s coming to visit soon but I think I’ll be dead. If I leave my corpse for him to play with perhaps he won’t follow me and drag me back.’ I looked at her. She’d said it in the matter-of-fact voice of a child.