Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  ‘Shoot to kill?’ I said, meaning the policy of utter eradication whenever we encountered them. Vicar shrugged. Then something occurred to me. ‘With technology like that, why not go viral? They could wipe us out in moments.’

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps some kind of societal taboo? Perhaps they see it as a form of suicide, but with this information we could certainly do it to them.’

  ‘If we hand this over then we can end the war?’ I asked.

  ‘If we hand this over then we provide our masters with the means to end the war,’ he said. He sounded doubtful. But this was a weapon; our masters liked weapons and they also liked victory. ‘And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the Earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword,’ Vicar said as he straightened up to face me.

  ‘I don’t understand any of that,’ I said.

  ‘War is loosed upon the land, the second seal is open,’ he replied, talking to me as though I were a particularly dense child. ‘Perhaps the war is the important thing. It’s the taking part that matters after all.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You mean they wouldn’t use this information?’

  Vicar just shrugged.

  ‘I don’t think we should give them the info,’ Morag burst out. Both of us turned to look at her. She looked frightened, as if she wished she hadn’t spoken. ‘I mean, would it be that easy? To reprogram their bionanites to attack them?’ She seemed to have a much better grasp of what was going on than I did.

  ‘It depends on how cooperative They’re being,’ said Vicar. ‘I hacked the creature, or rather it gave me entry, and with technology that sophisticated it should have taken me a lot longer. I should have needed to build a whole new set of equipment to translate the alien data and I should have had a tremendous fight on my hands against alien intrusion countermeasures.’ I still wasn’t following and it must have been obvious by the look on my face. There were rumours that certain technology would allow meat hacks through interface plugs, but if it existed then it was blacker than black. ‘All DNA is information, but before it died it made certain information compatible with my systems.’ This still wasn’t making any sense to me. I hated information technology.

  ‘You downloaded it,’ Morag said, surprising me again. Vicar nodded.

  ‘That was what the solid-state memory block was for,’ I said, pleased I could finally make a contribution to the conversation. Vicar nodded again.

  ‘It’s isolated in there. I’ve set up a routine that’s building it an environment.’

  ‘I want to speak with it,’ I said.

  ‘Then you talk with the adversary ...’ Vicar began.

  ‘And hear only lies,’ I finished for him.

  ‘He’s not like that,’ Morag said.

  ‘You are just a whore, one of his already, and you have been seduced,’ Vicar said, getting back into character. I couldn’t understand why Morag looked so upset. Surely she’d heard crap like this before, and probably worse.

  ‘Why do you talk like that?’ she asked. Vicar ignored her.

  ‘Religious mania,’ I answered for him. ‘A lot of hackers get it. They say they see things in the net, the face of God, shit like that. It’s the dislocation of net running, I think. It’s like isolation and they start to hallucinate. Something about it triggers the parts of our brain to do with religion; they all end up like this or madder.’ I left out that Vicar had been on Operation Spiral, an attempt by the UK and US governments to hack Their communications infrastructure.

  ‘There are things in the net,’ Vicar said quietly and then looked me straight in the eyes, his madness reflected in my black lenses. ‘And I do not believe in God.’ Suddenly his madness looked really sane in a way I could not explain, and this wasn’t the first time either. I remembered the coldness of space and the blood of humans on my hands. Despite the fact that Vicar was just looking into inhuman black lenses I broke eye contact first.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Preparation,’ he said. I decided it was a waste of time trying to get a straight answer from him.

  ‘I want to speak to it,’ I repeated. Vicar shrugged. He walked over to the workbench and held up a plug connected to the memory cube. I pulled a rusty folding chair over to the bench and sat down.

  ‘Take your time,’ Vicar said. ‘Your whore can work off some of your debt to me.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, my voice sounding cold even to myself.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Morag said timidly. I looked over at the frightened young girl and then back to Vicar’s leer.

  ‘I do. Vicar,’ I said. He ignored me. ‘Vicar,’ I said loudly and reached for his arm with my cybernetic right hand, exerting just a little too much pressure. His head snapped round to look at me. Why was I doing this? She was a hooker; what difference did it make to me if she went with Vicar? ‘I appreciate what you’ve done for us, I really do, but if you lay one finger on her I’ll take the laser to your groin. Do you understand me?’ I asked. He glared at me and then turned to Morag.

  ‘And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death.’ He spat at her. Morag looked like she was about to cry.

  ‘Pack it in!’ I told him. I looked at Morag stood in the chapel, wearing her working gear. Vicar was still staring at her, intimidating her. Presumably made easier by the fact that she was only wearing a basque, torn fishnets and panties.

  ‘Have you got any other clothes that Morag could wear?’ I asked him. He turned to look at me, an unpleasant grin on his face.

  ‘You want her for yourself, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Play the protective routine so you don’t have to pay? Is that it? Cheap bastard.’ I was tempted to hit him but we needed him. I leant in close to him, close enough to smell the gum disease.

  ‘Clothes,’ I said. Vicar directed Morag to some donated clothes he kept to hand out to his congregation and then plugged me in.

  I felt the familiar sense of floating and dislocation, loss of the sense of a physical self. The software he was using was the same as they used for the sense booths, sending information to my brain via my interface plugs to make the virtual environment feel real. It wasn’t like running the net - normally it would be completely safe, there were feedback safeguards in place - but the alien was an unknown. If it was as sophisticated as Vicar said, then perhaps I was in actual danger.

  The environment rushed up around me in a pixelated haze, the resolution slowly improving. It wasn’t the high-definition neon animation VR of the net but rather the more naturalistic realism of sense software. I felt familiar boots sink into familiar mud. I was on a plain surrounded by the sawn-off stumps of dead alien trees. I was wearing full battle gear, my Heckler & Koch Squad automatic weapon strapped horizontally across my chest.

  What the fuck was Vicar playing at? I was back on Dog 4. In the distance the horizon lit up in an artillery duel. Above me the bright lances of light strobed across the azure night sky, as our fleet and Theirs went at it in high orbit. A figure was making its way towards me through the dead forest. I tried magnifying my optics, unsure if it would work under the rules of this environment. It did and I was less than pleased to see Gregor making his way towards me. He was also in full battle gear, the hardened ceramic breastplate with kinetic padding and a suit of reactive inertial armour beneath it. His railgun was slung up on his right side on its gyroscopic mount. The entire right side of his body was a smoking mess, all but gone; he was practically walking on bone. I reached up to touch my face, expecting to find it also burnt but instead found the smooth hard flesh of skin and sub-dermal armour. It was just like Dog 4, just like my dream.

  I considered fir
ing a burst into the visage of my old friend, just to see what would happen, but found that I couldn’t quite bring myself to shoot at something that looked so much like him. It approached me and stopped. Its eyes were black pools with stars in them. I waited. Nothing.

  ‘Do you have to look like that?’ I asked. It looked too much like a failure, a mistake, a betrayal of mine.

  ‘This is yours,’ it said. It even sounded like Gregor. It seemed like the alien had control of the environment and had chosen it from my subconscious. This was worrying enough. The question was had it been trying to make me feel comfortable and chosen the wrong thing or was it trying to put me off guard, fucking with me?

  ‘Is there something else we could be?’ it asked, Gregor’s voice flat, no feeling. I nodded and watched it turn. The low, sleek, black, off-centre humanoid shape of a Berserk. Its multiple limbs ending in long powerful claw-like fingers except the one that wore the bulky weapon glove with its splinter gun and other Swiss Army Knife-like weaponry accoutrements. The only difference was that Berserks were matt black; this one seemed to reflect the light, and like Gregor’s eyes its skin seemed to contain the stars. It looked like a portion of space. That reminded me of the Ninja that had taken out the rest of the Wild Boys and infected Gregor.

  ‘Yeah, that’s better,’ I said. ‘Let’s not forget what we both are.’ It didn’t say anything. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘We are Ambassador. Though you make us look like murder/slaughter.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked, trying to make sense of his words, perhaps it was having to deal with Vicar but I was wishing that I could just have a normal conversation with someone.

  ‘We need peace,’ it said.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said sarcastically, and then wondered if it understood sarcasm. ‘Stop attacking us.’

  ‘We cannot, until you do. You will not listen.’ Suddenly I was moving towards it rapidly. Without seeming to have taken a step, it grew to fill my vision, and I hit it. It felt like I had flown through a thin veil of water and I was screaming as I seemed to fall through space. Quickly I managed to control myself and look around, rolling in apparent free fall as I did. In the distance I could see the blue marble of Earth. I could dimly make out the various orbital stations that formed a defensive ring around it. As a grunt there was no need for my spatial geography to be up to much, but I guessed we were in high orbit.

  I spun around but Ambassador, or whatever it was, was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw the burn; it was a pale-blue colour. It was one of Their ships. There was no doubt about that, though it was a configuration I’d never seen before. Roughly conical in shape, it looked like a series of separate, aerodynamic seed pods joined together, attached to a faster-than-light engine unit. It was difficult to make out, because it was set up for stealth, only the bum of the manoeuvring engines giving it away. Space seemed to pulse. I could not make out what was happening but I saw part of the craft seem to crumple, flame from within, briefly and silently blossoming, before being sucked out into the vacuum and disappearing. The craft seemed to fall apart but it was just the engine system being jettisoned explosively. Each of the pods was a separate stealth re-entry Needle. All of them were heading for Earth. Space pulsed again and again, the light from distant stars disappearing and then reappearing almost instantaneously as more and more of the re-entry pods crumpled and silently blew themselves apart.

  I had always found the silence of space battles eerie, a view I seemed to share with most of humanity judging by the rousing music and special effects they were enhanced with on news broadcasts. I finally worked out what the pulsing was. I traced it back and made out a stealthed craft, this time of human design but more sophisticated than most I’d seen. It was firing some kind of black laser, presumably similar to Their black light weapons. One after another, the re-entry pods were destroyed.

  Earth’s orbital defences probably would not even be able to detect this distant conflict. They did not seem to be fighting back. It looked like all of the pods were being destroyed but suddenly I found myself shooting through space. I did a bit more screaming before I managed to get a grip. I was in near orbit now. Just in time to see a damaged pod make it through the orbital defence cordon apparently undetected, which meant significant stealth tech, and flame flower briefly as it hit the atmosphere. I guessed it must have been read as a meteor or something. This was it; this was the craft I’d found in the park. The pilot was the creature that Vicar had downloaded. I felt disoriented to the point of nausea as I found myself looking at Gregor again on the plain of mud and dead trees.

  ‘Why won’t you let us talk to you?’ it asked. Did I imagine a tinge of desperation in its voice?

  ‘Aaagh!’ It took a moment to realise it was me screaming. I was in the church again, very sudden, real shock. I doubled over and retched, a little bit of bile dribbling out onto the floor. Someone had just yanked me out. Vicar was stood behind me, cable in one hand, a heavy-calibre automatic in the other.

  ‘What the fuck!’ I managed.

  ‘The red rider is here,’ he said, the mad glint back in his eyes.

  ‘What?’ I demanded.

  ‘The people you’re hiding from,’ Morag said. She had changed and was wearing some kind of hard-wearing but threadbare baggy trousers with many utilitarian pockets, a pair of boots which looked a little too big for her and a hoody bearing the logo of a band or music collective or product that I was unfamiliar with. She’d cleaned her make-up off and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She looked more like a young girl and less like a sex crime now.

  ‘Rolleston?’ I asked. Vicar nodded. I stood up, still feeling somewhat disoriented.

  ‘Well?’ Vicar asked.

  ‘It said it wants peace,’ I told him.

  ‘Lies,’ Vicar said, but even he did not sound sure of himself.

  ‘No,’ Morag said. She did sound sure of herself.

  ‘Was that thing set up for infiltration and assassination?’ I asked him. Vicar considered this.

  ‘Infiltration obviously, assassination I don’t think so, but it could be a psy-op,’ he said, and I knew he was right.

  ‘How long have we got?’ I asked. Vicar smiled.

  ‘They are nearly at the door.’ He handed me the solid-state memory cube that contained Ambassador.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I am going to try and slow up Rolleston and the Grey Lady for as long as possible. Take this to Pagan, tell him this is the path to the one true God,’ he said, as if that should mean something. ‘In Hull,’ he continued.

  ‘Hull’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘The Avenues. He’ll find you.’

  ‘Vicar?’ Rolleston’s voice asked smoothly from a nearby communicator. Vicar looked at me, his eyes almost sane. I nodded, unable to understand why he was sacrificing himself like this. I turned and headed for the hole in the stone floor that led down to some ancient crypt. I noticed that Morag was carrying a grey canvas shoulder bag as I stepped into the hole.

  7

  Dundee

  I reached up. Morag felt tiny between my metal and flesh hands; she seemed to weigh next to nothing as I lifted her down. The last of the light went as Vicar moved something very heavy over the hole. Darkness. Thermals did not help much as there was no heat down here. Then I made out the line of radioactive paint that pointed our way out. It was stale, cold and dry down here, the air thick with dust as I breathed in millennia-old dead people. I heard Morag whimper next to me.

  ‘Don’t worry, I can see,’ I said, not entirely meaning it. She jumped at the sound of my voice in the darkness, even though she was holding on to me. I could make her out silhouetted in the red, oranges, greens and blues of the thermographics. I felt a strangely voyeuristic thrill at the beauty of a person’s heat signature seen in the dark. I thought I could hear Vicar’s heavily muffled raised voice above me.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said and began pulling Morag down the radioactive line of paint, banging my
head and bumping into things as I dragged her after me.

  The exit was a tunnel of poured concrete that Vicar must have made himself. I could smell the unmistakeable odour of sewage and pollution that was the Tay at the end of the tunnel. I could see large rodent heat signatures in the tunnel and, beyond, black waters and the intermittent heat signatures of the Rigs.

  ‘Mind the rats,’ I told Morag, not so much a problem to my various layers but the diseases they carried would do the girl no good. I made enough noise going along to try and scare them. They ignored me. I was the trespasser in their world. The plastic and metal they weren’t interested in but they knew flesh. Eventually I ended up carrying Morag.

  At the end of the tunnel I peered out, looking for Rolleston’s people. We were beneath one of the raised toll roads, the multiple-lane motorway that headed out over the Tay towards Fife and more parkland. The water either side of the bridge was clear. The Rigs used to reach this far up the river, but like the old road bridge they had long since been rendered down into waste by metal- and concrete-eating microbes to make way for the toll roads.

  Out on the Tay, east of the new bridge, I could see a police riverine patrol boat making its way towards the far bank and the lights of Newport-on-Tay. On dry land behind us, beneath the toll road, were the various dregs of Dundee: junkies, the odd traditional drunk, trash burners and assorted homeless - people like us. They all looked authentic enough; that kind of resigned desperation is difficult to fake.

  ‘I’m going to have to put you down now,’ I told Morag. She nodded. There was a sucking noise as her boots sank into the soft, polluted, foul-smelling Tay mud.

  ‘Where to?’ she asked me. She was obviously afraid but coping well. It was a good question. I was dead. Rolleston would just hunt me until I was dead, and he had the resources to make sure it happened. I leant against the wall and lit up my penultimate cigarette, dragging down a lungful of the wasted sweet smoke, my internal filters already removing all the poisons. My life would be spent on the run. A series of near misses, each one getting closer and closer until the Major, or more likely the Grey Lady, got me. I looked down at the frightened young girl beside me. She looked back at me expectantly.