Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  ‘Assuming you’re right,’ I said to Pagan and Morag, ‘what does that make Gregor?’

  Pagan shrugged. ‘At a guess, a hybrid trying to find a way to facilitate communication.’

  ‘Hands across the stars, beautiful really,’ Mudge said.

  ‘That’s some guess,’ I said.

  I received an encrypted comms burst from Pagan; ‘It is and isn’t. I believe that MacDonald was a physical version of what is happening to Morag. In effect Morag is a beta and cerebral version of MacDonald.’ I stared at him.

  Morag saw me staring and turned on Pagan. ‘You think I’m a hybrid?’ she demanded. Pagan looked shocked and then appalled.

  ‘You broke that?’ he asked. His voice sounded small. He was genuinely scared. ‘How could you have broken that?’ he said more to himself than any of us. From what little I knew of hacking, if she had done what Pagan said she’d done then it was possible, hard but possible. The thing was it took a very long time. Morag stood up. She had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Is she an alien whore?’ Buck asked, pointing at Morag. This time he wasn’t quick enough to get out of her way. I heard his nose break and saw blood squirt down his beard.

  ‘Fucking bitch!’ he howled.

  ‘Here we go again,’ I muttered.

  Buck reached for one of his revolvers. Rannu had a Glock in each of his hands. One was pointing at Buck, the other wasn’t exactly pointing at Gibby but was close enough for Gibby to get the message.

  Morag turned on Rannu. ‘I told you I can look after myself!’ And she stormed off. Rannu let her get a way off and then started to follow at a safe distance, which I had to admit made me feel a little better. Mudge watched them go.

  ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘What you want to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I want to go and get Gregor but I want to do it on more than the say-so of a teenage whore,’ he said. I felt angry but I felt more tired. I reached into what was left of one of my pockets, removed another stim patch and slapped it onto the wrist of my left arm.

  ‘Feeling all right?’ Mudge asked.

  ‘Brilliant. Don’t call her a whore again,’ I told him.

  ‘Your judgement’s affected. You’re not thinking straight.’

  ‘Fucking bitch broke my nose,’ Buck whined. We ignored him.

  ‘That’ll be the radiation sickness,’ I said.

  ‘No, that’ll be the girl,’ Mudge said. Gibby was watching us intently. ‘Look, even if she’s right and Gregor’s a hybrid, so what? That doesn’t mean he’s benevolent, that doesn’t mean he’s Gregor. It means you’ve got a trained special forces soldier with some of the capabilities of one of Their Ninjas. You want to release that?’

  ‘No I want to go and see it, him. Look, if that’s the case they’ll have him contained. We’ll put him out of his misery. It won’t be like Dog 4,’ I said. Mudge considered this and pointed after Morag.

  ‘We don’t even know whose side she’s on,’ he said. I think on some level I knew he was right. I also thought that this was one of the reasons I liked Mudge: he could be a wanker but he did force you to look at the truth.

  ‘I trust her,’ I said. It sounded false even to me and I wanted to believe it.

  ‘No, you want to fuck her, which is different.’

  ‘You fucking pussy,’ Buck said, pinching his nose to stem the blood.

  Mudge looked up at the cyberbilly. ‘What?’

  ‘You go into Atlantis, what’s the worst that happens?’ he asked. ‘You get killed.’

  ‘No,’ Mudge corrected him. ‘The worst that happens is we get captured, get put into a sense booth and tortured for the next hundred years.’

  ‘So we shoot ourselves first,’ I said, grinning. ‘We’re not doing anything better.’

  Mudge sighed and went to get another beer from Gibby’s cool box. ‘I really, really want to die of liver failure,’ he said as he opened the beer and downed it in one before helping himself to another.

  ‘You still have your original liver?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said. Which would mean his artificial liver would be much more efficient at breaking down alcohol, like mine. It still let you get drunk because if it didn’t the British army would’ve mutinied in its entirety years ago, but it stopped the alcohol from doing permanent damage.

  ‘So how are you going to die of liver failure?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m going to try very hard,’ he said. ‘We’re going to need Balor’s help.’

  ‘To die of liver failure?’ I asked, momentarily confused. Like I said, I wasn’t feeling the greatest. Mudge stared at me like I was an idiot.

  ‘We’ll help,’ Gibby said. I looked up at him in surprise, as did Mudge.

  ‘The hell we will!’ Buck shouted.

  ‘Oh come on now. Buck, she’s not the first whore who bust your nose,’ Gibby said.

  ‘Could everyone please stop calling Morag a whore?’ I said angrily.

  ‘Yeah, thanks for the offer, guys. You were so helpful the last time,’ Mudge said sarcastically.

  ‘You know we didn’t have a choice. You had to follow Rolleston’s orders when he gave them as well,’ Gibby said.

  ‘He’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Can we leave them somewhere dangerous?’ Mudge asked.

  ‘Fuck them!’ Buck shouted. He looked appalled at Gibby. ‘We ain’t helping them.’

  Gibby turned on him. ‘We sold them out, man, you know that.’ Buck said nothing. ‘We have to make this right.’ Buck looked like he was about to argue but didn’t. Gibby had surprised me. I could understand me and Mudge and even Rannu being up for this. Mudge had his loyalty to the Wild Boys and Rannu to the Regiment, and that was something that rightly or wrongly we were indoctrinated with. Presumably Gibby had similar loyalty and indoctrination, but not to us, and that wasn’t what he was talking about anyway. He wanted to help us because he thought it was the right thing to do. He had nothing to gain from it. I wasn’t used to that kind of morality. Most of the time it was every man for himself, and most of the time it had to be that way to survive. The surprising thing was that Buck seemed to agree with Gibby, even though he was pissed off about it. I wondered where these two had picked up their values. Maybe they weren’t quite the arseholes I’d taken them for. We could probably use them if we were going to Atlantis - if nothing else, we’d need taxi drivers. I was beginning to form a plan but I’d need more intel.

  ‘Mudge?’ I said after thinking for a while.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can you stop trying to piss everyone off?’

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling. I looked over at Pagan. He was quiet and I assumed he’d been in the net, but he hadn’t. He looked scared.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked him. He just looked at me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d asked me to burn Morag at the stake.

  I found Rannu standing away from one of the fires. Casually concealed.

  ‘Where is she?’ I asked. He nodded at the fire. Morag was standing by the fire but away from the rest of the people warming themselves. I walked towards her.

  ‘Jakob?’ Rannu said. I turned on him, assuming he was about to say something about Morag.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I spat. He was mostly getting my spite from the previous conversation with everyone. Rannu remained as impassive as ever.

  ‘I was going to say ... the sickness,’ he said.

  ‘What about it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s no way for a warrior to die.’ I wasn’t sure: maybe he looked sad or maybe it was the flickering shadows thrown by the fire.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And call me a warrior again and I’ll shoot you in the back just to prove a point.’ Rannu smiled. ‘Can you leave us?’ I asked him. He seemed to ponder my request and maybe he was considering me and the kind of person I was. Whatever he was thinking, it seemed like a long time before he nodded and walked back towards Gibby’s car.

  ‘Hey,’ I said as I approached the fire. Morag looked up
; she’d obviously been crying.

  ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Come to spend some time with the hybrid whore? Give me five hundred euros and I’ll suck your cock.’ She turned back to the fire blinking away tears. With impact-resistant plastic instead of eyes, I wasn’t able to cry; hearing that I wished I could. I sat down cross-legged next to her and drew a burning stick from the fire, using it to light a cigarette. I thought about what had happened. She was eighteen years old, and a group of men with a combined age of over one hundred and fifty had effectively ganged up on her to give her a hard time. That wasn’t what it had seemed like at the time, but in retrospect that was what had happened. Why would they, why would we, do that?

  ‘They’re frightened,’ I said, looking up at her. She glanced down at me but went back to staring in the fire. ‘We’re frightened,’ I corrected myself. ‘Well maybe not Buck and Gibby; they’re just arseholes.’

  ‘Mudge is as well.’

  ‘Yes, but he’ll die for you,’ I said with certainty.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He’s just like that with his friends. I suspect he tries to keep their numbers low by behaving like a prick, and he’s also frightened.’ She turned and looked at me.

  ‘Do you think I’m a hybrid?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re prettier than Them,’ I said, and straight away knew I’d said the wrong thing. How was it she was eighteen and smarter than me?

  ‘And that’s it, isn’t it? I shouldn’t fucking bother trying to make things better for myself or anyone else. I should just lie on my back and be happy with the ... the ... fucking commodity that I’ve got, yeah?’ she spat.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tell me something, Jakob. Do you miss me being afraid? Do you miss the frightened little made-up girl-whore you found on the Rigs?’

  I hadn’t realised until she said it that it wasn’t the hooker I missed, but the feeling that I was protecting her, looking after her. It must have been written all over my face.

  ‘You cunt,’ she said, shaking her head, and turned to walk off. I sat up slightly and swept the legs out from under her. She cried out as she landed on the concrete on her arse. We were beginning to draw attention from some of the others around the fire. I stared at a couple of them; my eyes would’ve been black pools not even reflecting the flames. People went back to their own business. I hadn’t been paying attention and only just managed to block Morag’s straight-arm strike.

  ‘Okay, great, Morag. You’ve got some hand-to-hand softskills, we’re all very impressed.’ I turned to look at her. She was angry now.

  ‘Out of my league, am I? Want to teach me a lesson in helplessness? Do you not think I’ve had enough of those?’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ I shouted more out of desperation than anything else. ‘What do you want me to do about it? Sometimes we’re all going to be helpless in situations that we can’t do anything about, and in the circles you’re travelling in at the moment I’m afraid you’re going to meet a lot of people more dangerous than you.’

  ‘Only physically,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t so long ago that you were the helpless one and it was me that was doing the rescuing and, guess what? We managed it without violence.’ She was right. The hackers were the dangerous ones; all I was was a weapon.

  ‘And we’re back to where we started. We’re scared of you,’ I said softly, and lapsed into silence. We sat there staring at the fire for a while. Eventually Morag produced my bottle of whisky from her bag.

  ‘You left it back at Crawling Town,’ she said, taking a swig and passing it to me.

  ‘That was careless of me.’ I took a long pull. I welcomed the burn down my throat; my stomach was less sure but I bit down on the nausea. I reached into my pocket for one of the pills that Papa Neon had given me to help cope with the symptoms, keep me going to the last. I hoped that Morag hadn’t noticed. I washed it down with another pull of whisky.

  ‘You want to fuck me,’ Morag said. It wasn’t a question, she almost sounded resigned. I shook my head. I was starting to feel angry.

  ‘What am I supposed to say to that?’ I asked her.

  ‘You could admit it - admit that you think I owe you.’ I turned to look at her. She was watching me, the glow of the flames reflected on her pale skin.

  ‘I want you. You don’t owe me a fucking thing,’ I said and got up. I wasn’t sure who I was more disgusted with. Yes, I was. It was me. How was she supposed to respond to this? How was I any different to any of her old johns? I was just another dirty old man and I needed to stay away from her. I started to walk away.

  ‘I’m not an alien,’ she said. I stopped. ‘Bring the whisky back.’ I sat back down, weak in every way. ‘Will you hold me?’ she said. I pulled her close. Was this what I wanted? She felt so small and vulnerable. I realised that I didn’t want her to be scared or hurt. That was pretty much the best I could do. I didn’t know what it meant. ‘We talk, or we try to,’ she said, confusing me.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, wondering if she meant us.

  ‘Ambassador.’

  ‘You realise you can do things you shouldn’t be able to,’ I told her. She looked up at me.

  ‘I’m good, I mean really good. It’s not just Ambassador; I was born for this,’ she said.

  ‘I believe you, but Pagan’s not just professionally jealous, he’s genuinely scared. He thinks that Ambassador is, I don’t know, changing you or controlling you.’ She didn’t say anything. ‘Morag?’

  ‘Ambassador’s just information,’ she said. ‘Pagan thinks I’m possessed or something.’ She was hiding something. ‘He thinks I’m the Whore of Babylon,’ she finally said.

  ‘Huh?’ I asked, sounding ever so intelligent.

  ‘That I have truck with demons.’

  ‘You mean Them?’

  She nodded. Well she did have truck with Them. We were just gambling that They weren’t as bad as we thought They were. Even though that flew in the face of everything I knew about Them.

  ‘It’s a hacker myth, a son of anti-Messiah who betrays us to Them. Judas to the entire human race. Vicar said the same thing,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘ "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication." It’s from the Christian Bible, Revelation. I looked it up,’ she said, her voice flat and emotionless. Fucking hacker religious mania. Fucking Vicar.

  ‘Vicar was always quoting from Revelation. Besides, he was insane.’

  ‘You know, I don’t think he was,’ she mused. ‘Papa Neon said something similar when you were out of it. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I got the reference.’

  ‘What the fuck has voodoo got to do with Revelation?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as voodoo, that was made up for the vizzes. Papa Neon practises a religion called Vodou.’ The word sounded the same to me. ‘Which is west African religious practices influenced by Catholicism.’

  ‘Really embracing the religious side of hacking, huh?’ I asked.

  ‘He sees Loa, spirits in the net, and talks with them,’ she continued.

  ‘And they’ve been talking about you?’

  ‘Apparently.’ How could I tell her that this was all bullshit? That it was just one story feeding another. We weren’t much beyond burning witches. How much pressure could we bring to bear on this one teenaged girl?

  ‘And Pagan thinks you’re this ... ?’ I didn’t want to use the word.

  ‘Whore? Everyone wants to call me a whore.’ As if she didn’t have enough to deal with at the moment. ‘He hasn’t said as much but I can see it in his eyes.’ Then she looked a little embarrassed. ‘Besides, I know he’s been researching it in the net.’ That was odd.

  ‘And he doesn’t know you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope.’ That meant that she had outwitted an experienced hacker like Pagan. Spied on him and hadn’t been caught. No wonder he was frightened
. No wonder we all were.

  ‘Morag, do you think Ambassador has changed you?’ I asked more forcefully than I’d meant to. She looked up into my lenses.

  ‘Of course it has, how could it not? And the cyberware in my head’s changed me, and you’ve changed me, and Pagan’s changed me. Ambassador doesn’t control me, he’s so gentle. I don’t think I could explain what it’s like talking to him.’ This was beginning to sound worrying.

  ‘Ambassador’s in the cube, yeah?’ I asked, trying to keep the mounting concern out of my voice.

  ‘I think there’s a ghost of him in my neural ware.’ My eyes widened. ‘Relax,’ she said, seeing my response. ‘Its scary, a bit, but all he does is help me with the things I can do. He doesn’t control the way I feel or how I think.’

  ‘He?’ I asked. She shrugged.

  ‘Just started thinking of him like that.’ I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about this. I was pretty worried and also jealous of the incredibly intimate relationship she had with this male entity.

  ‘So you want to have me thingied?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That thing where they drive demons out.’

  ‘Exorcised?’ I’d seen it done in the schemes and the Rigs. Usually some wannabe hacker, who’d gotten in over their head when they’d had their first vision and brought something back in their cheap neural ware. Sometimes their religious revelations were just too much for them to handle.

  ‘Yeah, I really do,’ I said honestly.

  ‘Why?’ she asked as she took the whisky bottle back from me and took a swig from it. I couldn’t help but think of that as a dumb question.

  ‘What do you mean why? You have an alien living in your head,’ I said, sounding more reasonable than I felt.

  ‘So? You didn’t have time to get to know me before, so maybe me is me and Ambassador.’ This was making my head hurt. ‘I’m hoping that’s the Morag you want. Unless you’re like every other fucker, and you don’t know me, and you’ve just made this image of me in the shape of what you want in your head.’ She was looking at me accusingly.

  ‘Fucked if I know, darling,’ I said laughing. ‘As far as I know it’s you I want.’