Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  ‘Don’t threaten my people,’ I told Rolleston evenly. He ignored me. Ash took a few more steps forward. ‘Ash,’ I said warningly.

  ‘Have a look around you, Rupert. I see a lot more of us than there are of you,’ the Brummie said. I closed my eyes momentarily. Rolleston smiled. Bran lazily brought her Bofors laser carbine up to bear on Ash. I heard the rest of the squad bringing weapons to bear on Rolleston and Bran.

  ‘Now why don ‘tyou just calm down?’ I heard Gregor say from behind me. Rolleston was just smiling. He looked perfectly calm.

  ‘You can’t win this.’ I told the Major.

  ‘Yes, Douglas, I can and will,’ Rolleston said. His voice was cold but the smile hadn’t left his face. ‘This will soon become a farce,’ he added.

  ‘She can’t get all of us,’ I said.

  ‘She can with my help, though that won’t concern you as I’ll take you out first.’ Again there was no trace of doubt in his voice; he just sounded bored.

  ‘Why don’t you be reasonable about this?’ I asked him. I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as the Major was.

  ‘I am. I’m not going to court-martial and shoot Ms Broadin.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ Ash said unhelpfully. Rolleston was still staring at me, his cold blue eyes looking into my matt-black lenses. He seemed to be telling me that this was a no-win situation. I seemed to believe him. That’s when I sold the squad out.

  ‘We’re going,’ I said to the sounds of incredulity behind me. ‘Put your weapons up.’

  There was something wrong with Buck and Gibby, other than them still being here. Attached to Royal Air and Space Force 7 Squadron, British special forces bus drivers, they were on loan from 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the ‘Night Stalkers’ as they preferred to be called.

  The two Americans barely looked like pilots. They were both jacked into the heavily modified, stealth-outfitted Lynx VTOL gunship. Gibby piloted the bus and Buck was co-pilot and gunner. The pair of them were all hair, leather, ratty dreadlocks, cybernetics, tattoos and old-fashioned, wide-brimmed cavalry hats that had no place in the cramped interior of a gunship. They looked more like a pair of cyberbilly degenerates, both their artificial eyes covered with cheap plastic sunglasses. The pair of them were much higher than the nap-of-the-Earth flying their bus was throwing us through.

  Gibby had tricked out the cockpit with a keyboard. What plugs of his weren‘t wired into the gunship were wired into the instrument. Buck had slaved the gunship’s weapons into his guitar and the pair of them accompanied our trip with the pounding, rhythmic, harsh strain of ancient country and metal riffs.

  Had I not been so tired I would’ve questioned the stealth benefit of playing retro at high volume. On the tail of the irregularly shaped craft one of them had written, ‘Jesus Built My Gunship’. Buck and Gibby were the kind that loved the war. To them it was just one long drug-induced guitar solo of miniguns and chaos surfing.

  We’d taken more speed, more Slaughter, more ammunition and then out again. In the gunship nobody said anything, we were all too tired despite the amphetamines and Slaughter. The drugs woke up the body but our consciousness and the meat and metal of our bodies were two very different things. None of this was real. It was just bad news, drugs and dislocation.

  Nobody would meet my eyes. I couldn’t blame them. I’d sold them out. We’d talked about it in the past. At what point do we say no? At what point do the orders become so psychotic that we can’t follow them? If ever there’d been a time we, I, should’ve said no that was it. The reason I hadn’t said no was simple: fear. I tried to tell myself it was for the squad, that I really believed that Rolleston and Bran would’ve killed us all and I did believe that.

  Rolleston did not strike me as the sort of person who bluffed or took risks beyond what his profession asked of him. He was too controlled for that and Bran may as well have been a force of nature. Besides, even if we had managed to take out Rolleston and Bran, what then? We were still more than eight light years from home on a planet that was about to be overrun, and sadly our only hope of getting off the world was the same military organisation that had put us in harm’s way in the first place. At the back of my mind, however, was the nagging doubt that I’d done it because I didn’t want to die. I’d bottled it.

  In the short Sirius night we were aware of rather than saw the huge organic armoured advance on either side of us. None of us really wanted to look too hard.

  ‘Listen up,’ I said. The six remaining grudging faces of the Wild Boys turned to face me. Grudging except for Gregor; there was no judgement there. He was there for everyone in the squad, even when they fucked up. I looked at them and despite my fatigue I managed to feel something, regret for putting them back on the line and the need to try and make amends.

  ‘We’re going in hot. We will find the best place we can to hole up. Wait the least amount of time possible to make a bad impression and then call for extraction. We are not fucking around out there and we are certainly not hunting a Ninja. You see, hear, feel anything that strikes you as Ninja-like, or even if you just get a little bit scared, we are out of there, okay?’ There were nods of agreement and even a few muttered affirmatives. Normally we’d hold a Chinese Parliament and refine the plan but nobody cared.

  Across my internal comms link Buck sang some garbled slang and American military terminology at me that led me to believe we were approaching the LZ. I felt the four vectored thrust engines power back and saw the miniguns begin to rotate in their ball turrets.

  ‘Jake?’ I arched an eyelid open and saw Morag looking down at me, concern on her face. I felt somewhat in awe that she could still be bothered to care about anything.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ I said. I opened the other eye and searched around for a cigarette. Then I remembered I couldn’t smoke and wondered if the captain would actually throw me out of the sub if I sparked up again.

  ‘What?’ she asked, sounding slightly confused.

  ‘Jake, my name’s Jakob.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘One I like, the other I don’t. It makes me sound American.’ She stood up and smiled.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. I’m just not,’ I said. I was never great when I was woken up. Something that even twelve years in the service never quite overcame.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah? Why?’ I asked, knowing why.

  ‘You looked like you were having a dream,’ she said.

  ‘Know any vets who don’t have problems sleeping?’ I asked. Suddenly her eyes looked haunted.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The bad ones.’ This war just reaches out and touches everyone. She shrugged it off quickly. ‘We’re here.’

  9

  Hull

  It was brown, very brown. It took a while to focus and realise that I wasn’t just looking at a plain of mud, though the only difference was the swell, as far as I could see. There wasn’t much in the way of landmarks to help either. Lincolnshire, although one of the least affected eastern counties after the Final Human Conflict, was pretty much a featureless green and grey.

  There was the ruin of the Humber Bridge, two partially collapsed towers, steel, wire and concrete protruding from mudflats. Then there was Hull, the old port overrun with the brown waters of the Humber, not deep enough to cover it, just enough to turn it into an ugly mudlike industrial Venice that nobody wanted.

  The submarine had broken the surface and we were walking along the deck to a rickety-looking, plastic-hulled water taxi that, despite the calm water, still looked like it was being too ambitious coming out this far. Morag and I clambered into the unsteady craft and waved at the Russian sub captain, who just glared at us. She knew we were going to cause her trouble. The boat headed away from the sub, towards the east of the city.

  If our boatman thought anything strange about his human cargo and their manner of arrival he didn’t say anything; perhaps he did this all the time.
Then again perhaps he didn’t say much at all. He was old and quiet, his face craggy and impassive. He seemed to show no sign of cybernetics (possibly he was old enough to have avoided the draft); his clothes were warm and well looked after, if somewhat threadbare.

  The old man piloted us through abandoned half-submerged docks. Through streets of deserted factories, probably abandoned years before the waters rose, a testament to a very distant past. Everything was eerily still. The only sound was the gentle lapping of the waters. This was the ghost of a city long gone. It was hard to believe that anyone lived here at all, but then that was the thing about Hull: it gave you a chance to opt out if you didn’t like the way things were going. Come to Hull and you got left alone because nobody wanted it.

  We floated underneath the support of an old bridge, its road surface now under the water. We passed an old commercial section and on to what must have once been quite a wide road. Either side of it was a mixture of shops and housing. Now it was all deserted of course. Or almost deserted; on my thermographics I could see human-sized heat sources here and there. Presumably pickets for the Avenues. I didn’t see the point in saying anything. The boatman wasn’t talking and probably knew about them and all it would’ve done was make Morag uneasier.

  We headed down the turgid brown water in this wide street for just over a mile and turned right into another similarly wide road, the ghosts of bars and shops on either side. Morag grabbed me by the arm. The people watching us were becoming more obvious.

  ‘I know,’ I said quietly. The boatman’s craggy face was as impassive as ever. Ahead of us I could see something stretched across the channel/street. I magnified my vision and made out a net of vicious-looking spiked chains stretched across the water, blocking our way. On the right-hand side the chain disappeared into a house that presumably contained some kind of winch mechanism. On the left was a building that looked like an old hotel or apartment complex. Sticking out of that building from a hole cut in the first-floor wall was a rickety-looking jetty.

  ‘Is this the Avenues?’ Morag asked. The boatman inclined his head once, signalling affirmative. There were figures moving all around the area. Many of them seemed to be going about their everyday lives but a fair few were taking an interest in our little boat.

  Off to my right, behind the chain, I could make out an area of open water, broken where stumps of dead trees breached the surface. The water looked cleaner there and it seemed to have been cordoned off with some thin plastic material that formed a wall to keep the dirty water of the Humber out. I assumed it was some kind of farm for fish or maybe kelp.

  To the left I could see a water-filled road lined with partially submerged terraced houses. An ancient, battered and rusty sign on the end house read ‘Marlborough Avenue’.

  The boatman brought the boat to a halt about ten feet away from the jetty. Stood on it was a kid probably not much older than Morag. He had bad skin, a haircut that looked like someone had torn chunks out of his scalp, a badly decorated armoured leather jacket and a powerful hunting carbine that may have been older than the boatman. There was no sign of any cybernetics on him that I could see. He was unaugmented and judging by his age, a draft dodger. Good for you kid, I thought, best of luck. Up until he pointed the carbine at me. I wondered if there was a place you could go and not get guns pointed at you.

  ‘That’s close enough,’ he said somewhat predictably. ‘What do you want?’ I decided to let him have some time staring at my polarised lenses.

  ‘We’re here to see Pagan,’ I finally said.

  ‘What about?’ Now to be fair to him he may have just been doing his job or he may have been bored, but it seemed to me that I had put a lot of time and effort into getting this far and I couldn’t be bothered with this crap any more.

  ‘Just go and get him will you?’ I told him brusquely. The kid smiled.

  ‘No,’ he said slowly, as if talking to someone a bit slow. ‘I said—’

  ‘I heard what you fucking said, kid. Look, we could have some kind of alpha male competition here that I win because I’m more violent, and then you feel humiliated and have to go and do the thing that I’ve asked you to do anyway. Just fucking tell Pagan I’m here and let him do the thinking for you,’ I told him irritably.

  ‘Good conflict resolution skills,’ Morag muttered. I thought about the conflict resolution skills I’d learnt at Hereford. I wondered why so many people feel they have to force you to hurt them in order to just get them to be reasonable. Do they think courtesy to a stranger is a sign of weakness? Sadly, maybe it was. To the kid’s credit he didn’t look flustered; in fact he lowered his carbine.

  All I really saw were teeth, big sharp-looking steel teeth. I was vaguely aware of the hugeness of the mouth that had broken the water and the power-assisted nature of its jaws. I heard the resounding snap as its jaws slammed shut in a demonstration of power inches away from our boat, showering us all in the brown muck of the Humber. I instinctively scrambled away from it, as did Morag. The boatman tried to make sure we didn’t capsize the craft.

  ‘Fucking dinosaur!’ I screamed, dragging my pistols free of their holsters. Morag looked shaken; I was too busy with my own panic to register if she’d screamed. The cybernetically augmented alligator, which was so large it had presumably grown up on a steady diet of growth hormones, sank beneath the brown water with the sort of disgruntled dignity of a predator denied its prey.

  ‘Vicar sent us to see Pagan. Just tell him Vicar sent us, please!’ Morag said to the kid. Many of the people on the Avenues side of the chain who had been watching us were laughing now. I suspected this son of thing had happened before. The kid was speaking to another armed man back in the old hotel on the corner of Marlborough Avenue. Then he turned back to face us.

  ‘I know it may be galling for you to be questioned by someone of my age, but I live here, so when you come to visit, behave or you will get eaten.’ This kid may not be quite the punk I’d taken him for.

  ‘It’s a fucking dinosaur,’ I managed again. I watched nervously as another armoured reptilian back broke the surface of the water. There was more than one of those things. The other man nodded to the kid, who turned back to us.

  ‘Okay, you can come in, but try not to behave like wankers, okay?’ Morag nodded and smiled. I glared resentfully for a bit and nodded. It was going to take a little while for my bravado to return after my run-in with the alligator. It didn’t seem to matter how well trained you are, or how much cybernetics you have, I reckoned, at some level humans are just scared of big lizards. We clambered onto the jetty.

  ‘I’ll show you the way,’ the kid said and smiled at Morag. I’m not sure if it was some protective instinct, jealousy or just the urge to smack the smug little bastard in his pus that I felt. ‘My name’s Elspeth, by the way.’ Fortunately he’d turned away and didn’t see Morag and I trying to stifle laughter at this.

  Elspeth led us through the building that I had initially thought was a hotel. Now I thought it must have been something more institutional. The whole place smelled of damp and the low-tide stink that I was already used to from living on the Rigs. We clambered up some stairs and onto the roof. From there we could see all the way down Marlborough Avenue.

  ‘Pagan lives on Westbourne,’ Elspeth said as if that should mean something to us.

  The water came up to about the halfway mark on the ground floors of the pre-Final Human Conflict terraced houses. Most of the buildings were three or four storeys high, many of them with balconies or large window ledges, almost every single one of which had some kind of garden on it, most growing vegetables to my untrained eye.

  I assumed that the majority of these buildings once had attics, but the roofs had been removed, flattened and then used as farms. Some of them were planted with crops and vegetables. Others had chickens, sheep and even a few cows and pigs grazing on them. There was even what looked to be a small orchard on one roof. All the houses had been shored up with material salvaged from the deserted rest o
f the city.

  Between the two sides of the street, over the turgid Humber water. were a series of scratch-built, rickety-looking catwalks. Many of them had solar panelling strung between them. I could also see the smoke of stills and hear the rhythmic thump of alcohol-burning generators, and on some of the roofs small wind turbines added to the electricity generation.

  ‘We’ve also got some wave-powered generators further out in the Humber,’ Elspeth said. He was obviously proud of his community. Morag was looking around in awe. I saw some more of the clean-water pens fenced off from the dirty river.

  ‘What are you fanning there?’ I asked.

  ‘Not sure in that one. We’ve got different ones, a fair amount of kelp, various types of shellfish. We’ve had less luck with fish though.’ I was impressed despite myself. This was quite an undertaking. ‘There’s more pens back in Pearson Park,’ he said, gesturing back to the open body of water that we’d seen on the way in. ‘And more at what used to be the Spring Bank West Cemetery.’

  I’d also noticed the trunks of dead trees sticking out of the water, but these had been carved into various shapes and forms. I was looking at one that seemed to be an angel holding a globe. It looked ancient and pitted.

  ‘Those were sculpted before the FHC and the rivers rose. We’re doing our best to maintain them,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, almost involuntarily. The practical side of me was saying that they had more pressing things to do. Elspeth just looked at me disdainfully as he took us out over the river on a corroded metal catwalk that shook with every step. It probably would’ve bothered me if I hadn’t lived on the Rigs. We passed by a couple of cows that paused from grazing to look up at us with their sombre, watery eyes. We crossed from the roofs of Marlborough Avenue and onto the roofs of what was presumably Westbourne Avenue.

  The set-up of Westbourne Avenue was pretty similar only more of the rooftops seemed to be given over to greenhouses and what looked to me to be hydroponic gardens, though again they’d had to scavenge what gear they could find.