Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  ‘ I know how to pilot a Wraith,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘How?’ I asked, as I looked suspiciously over at Rannu. He remained impassive as ever.

  ‘Softskills. I’ve run simulations.’ I was glaring at Rannu now but I turned back to Morag.

  ‘I’ve tried to tell you before, softskills aren’t the same. Even if they’re properly integrated they just give you the basics. You need experience and training, like I said. If we have to be thinking about you as well as what we’re doing we’re just going to get ourselves killed. We’re going to have to look after Pagan when he’s tranced anyway. One we can handle, two we just don’t have the shooters for.’

  ‘So let me do the running, and keep Pagan as backup for me and as an extra shooter. I’m faster than him anyway.’ She turned to look at Pagan. ‘I’m sorry but I am.’

  ‘You mean you’re better than me,’ he said. Morag didn’t answer.

  ‘Look. Doing a run in combat is different—’ I began.

  ‘Actually it’s not,’ Pagan said. ‘Once you’re in the net you’re in. Doesn’t matter what’s going on in the real world, you get hit, you get hit.’ Morag grinned triumphantly. I glared at Pagan.

  ‘Look, Morag,’ Mudge said. ‘You’re good at what you do, real good, but you’ve never seen combat. You don’t know how you’ll react. You may freeze up. It’s not just your life on the line; you could get us killed as well. When I first saw combat I used to piss myself all the time and shake like a leaf for several hours after.’

  ‘You’ve stopped doing that?’ I asked Mudge. "Cause I was little worried that you might drown in your Wraith.’ Mudge gave me the finger and then considered what I’d said.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ he finally allowed and then turned to Morag. ‘Look, darling. I don’t doubt you could do this given time, and I’d happily walk into a firelight with you, or at least as happily as I’d walk into any firefight, but this is just a bad job to learn on.’

  ‘She won’t freeze up. I’m happy to stake my life on it,’ Rannu said. I felt anger surge through me.

  ‘You are. What you don’t have the right to do is stake mine and everyone else’s here on it,’ I snapped at him. I was furious that he was encouraging Morag.

  ‘If we’re talking about dropping people from the mission, what about you?’ Rannu asked quietly. I felt like he’d punched me again.

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m one of the most experienced soldiers here and I’ve done breaches before. Not to mention I was piloting Wraiths before you lost your virginity, sunshine.’ I was trying not to shout.

  ‘You piss blood this morning?’ Rannu asked. I stopped. I felt cold, and he was right, I had.

  ‘He’s right,’ Mudge said. ‘You’re pretty much being kept upright by drugs and the metal and the plastic in your body.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I snapped.

  ‘So will she,’ Balor said. I was astounded. I turned on Balor and Rannu.

  ‘You guys know better!’ They didn’t say anything. ‘You know what this will be like and you know you can’t do it—’

  ‘Without training and experience,’ Morag said sarcastically. I turned to her.

  ‘Do you really think I’m just saying this to be a cunt?’ I demanded. ‘Fine. You want to go? How about this? Let’s say you manage to pilot a Wraith adequately, let’s say you don’t freeze up and get the rest of us killed, you ready to kill someone else?’ I was shouting now. ‘Because I’ll tell you: the men and women we’ll be shooting at and who’ll be trying to shoot us, they won’t be bad people. They’ll be just like us, probably nice people just trying to make a go of it, do the best they can. The kind of people you could happily go for a pint with if we weren’t so busy trying to kill each other. Instead you’ll see their faces for a very long time, and then, worse, they’ll all begin to look the same to you. So you tell me, you ready to kill?’ She looked up at me. I could see the resolve - her face may as well have been made of stone.

  ‘I’m ready to do what’s necessary,’ she said and believed it. ‘I think what’s down there is important.’

  ‘The kinship you feel for Gregor isn’t real; it’s Ambassador playing tricks on you,’ I told her. She looked like I’d just slapped her. She opened her mouth to retort.

  ‘She’s right,’ Pagan said sadly from behind me. I turned to look at him. ‘She’s better than me. She should do the run. I’ll act as another shooter and watch her when she’s tranced and provide backup in the net if it’s needed.’ At that moment he looked like a beaten man. Desperately I looked to Buck and Gibby, who just shrugged. After all, they had the easiest part of the job.

  ‘You all going to die anyway,’ Buck said.

  ‘She doesn’t even have boosted reflexes,’ I said, pretty much as a last-ditch objection.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said. I swung back to look at her.

  ‘When did this happen?’ I demanded.

  ‘A week ago, when we started prep,’ she said.

  ‘Are they integrated?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ It was Rannu who answered. For a moment I was speechless.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing to yourself?’ I asked her, shaking my head.

  ‘Jakob,’ she said softly, ‘it’s none of your business.’ It had gone very quiet in the room. I could feel everyone looking at the pair of us. ‘And I’m going,’ she said with finality.

  Just a little drug deal first, then I started looking for Morag. I finally found her in what looked to be an old function room on the upper floors of the Empire State Building. It had long fallen into ruin but somehow much of the wood panelling had survived. You could still see some of the fading art-deco patterns on it. More surprisingly the chandelier still hung from the ceiling. Most of its crystals were long gone but those that remained reflected the light from outside.

  She was sitting on the window ledge oblivious to the drop. Ironically, for an ex-Para I’d never really liked heights despite the fact I’d done several orbital low-opening drops in my time. Much of New York was dark at night because it was uninhabited, but central Manhattan was lit up in all sorts of garish colours, huge spotlights stabbing up into the cloudy night sky. Morag was unintentionally dramatic, framed by the huge window with no glass in it, her loose-fitting clothes blown by the wind as she looked out over the city.

  I walked over to the window but stayed several feet back from it and lit up a cigarette. She glanced up at me.

  ‘You going to tell me this is dangerous?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m assuming you know that. Question is are you doing it for effect?’ Irritation passed over her face and she turned back to the view.

  ‘I’m doing it because I like it here.’

  ‘Can you see why I said the things I said?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because you feel you have some kind of proprietary relationship to me. Though you’d probably describe it as caring.’

  ‘Proprietary relationship?’ I enquired, grinning.

  ‘Talking to Mudge too much recently,’ she said. I couldn’t see her face but I was pretty sure she was smiling too.

  ‘Yeah? I’m surprised you’re not using fuck as a comma rather than words like proprietary.’

  ‘Oh, I think he just talks like that for the benefit of all his soldier friends,’ she said. We lapsed into silence for a while, both looking out over the city. I tried to ignore the feelings of nausea, fatigue and weakness that washed over me.

  ‘Morag, I’m sorry, really sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said.

  I know it’s not true. I was just freaked out and scared.’ It was pretty much the fullest apology I’d ever given. She let out a short, bitter laugh.

  ‘Well I guess you need the training and the experience to handle a lover with an alien in her headware,’ she said, still not looking at me. I didn’t really know what to say to that. I realised that this was all new to her as well and probably a lot scarier as she was experiencing it all directly, but she was finding a way to cope
and I’d freaked out. She turned to look at me.

  ‘You had a dream,’ she said. ‘You acted like a bastard because you had a dream, that was all.’

  ‘You know it wasn’t a dream, or maybe it was but it was the truth as well. But you’re right and I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘I accept your apology but I need you to stay away from me,’ she said and turned away. Maybe I was imagining her tears.

  ‘So what now? Rannu? Balor? Mudge?’ It was almost an instinct to say something stupid and hurtful. The words were out before I’d thought them through. Morag swung off the window and stood in front of me. Blinked-back tears turned to anger now.

  ‘Has it occurred to you that I’ll do just fine on my own? Don’t you get it? I’m helping you now. With what I know, what I can do, I could set myself up anywhere and look after myself a fuck of a lot better than you could look after yourself when we first met,’ she said, and she was probably right. ‘Thank you for believing me when we met, thank you for protecting me when I couldn’t, Jakob, but things have changed.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll try—’ I began but she cut me off.

  ‘Tomorrow you just concentrate on your job, because if you’re worrying about me then you’re going to get everyone killed.’

  I just stood there feeling foolish. It looked like it was starting to rain.

  ‘Please go,’ she said. I did.

  22

  Atlantis

  I would’ve been gratified by how ill Morag looked if f hadn’t been the only one who’d thrown up so far. I put that down to dying as I was pretty used to turbulent transport flights. The magnetic storms caused in a binary system like Sirius were considerably worse than anything the Atlantic could throw at us. Still it was a rough crossing, I thought as I retched into the waste-paper bin that seemed already half filled with my vomit, as the wind and rain battered us around over the ocean. I was really pleased that Buck and Gibby had had the time to set up the transport so they could control it through their interfaces and musical instruments. My head seemed to throb with every beat of the country and metal they were playing.

  The transport flyer Mountain Princess was effectively a small warehouse with enough vectored thrust engines to make it fly. Basically it was the same principle as the gunships that Buck and Gibby had flown with the 160th but with none of the elegance or performance. Which was one of the reasons we were being battered around so much. We were also pretty low, but not because we were trying to avoid detection as we were showing up on Atlantis air traffic control as a supply transport from a nearby ore ship. Someone Balor assured us was a good friend of his captained the ore ship, though to me the captain looked like she owed Balor and was shit scared of him.

  ‘Jake!’ Mudge shouted across the cargo hold. I looked over to him; he was beckoning me over. Despite my misery I managed to stagger to my feet and make my way across the hold with my bucket of sloshing vomit. ‘Do you want to see the Spoke?’ he shouted at me over the roar of the engines and the storm. I don’t know why he was shouting as my audio dampeners were breaking down the noise and filtering what he was trying to say clearly. I was about to tell him that I wasn’t bothered but decided why not and followed him into the cockpit.

  Buck looked ridiculous staggering from side to side in the cockpit, trying to play his electric guitar and not pull the wires out of his neck port. Gibby looked less so as his fingers played across his keyboard, a look of concentration on his face. Outside windswept rain battered the cockpit’s windscreen so hard we could have already been underwater. Below us I saw the white heads of a fierce high sea.

  The only other Spoke I’d ever seen had been the Kenyan Spoke, from where I’d shipped out and been brought back to in restraints as a mutineer. They always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Maybe it was the humbling nature of such a feat of engineering. I wasn’t use to seeing a structure that completely filled my horizontal field of vision, and that was just the base of the elevator.

  Atlantis climbed out of the ocean along the equator roughly halfway between Africa and South America. The Spoke had been built on a similar principle to the pyramids that they’d had in Egypt before the FHC Crusades. Build a big enough base and you can make a building any size. The roots of the building went down deep into the Earth’s crust and were designed to be strong enough to resist seismic events much like the Pacifica Spoke and the Spokes in southern Asia and South America.

  The spokes were basically city-sized buildings that sheathed the carbon nanotube cable that supported the up and down Mag Lev lines. The end of the carbon nanotube was tethered to an asteroid counterweight, but lying some way beneath that was High Atlantis, Atlantis’ orbital equivalent and one of the space entrepots for Earth.

  The elevators were huge multi-storey affairs. They were capable of hauling bulk cargo such as the resources of the Belt that were delivered to high orbit by enormous industrial mass drivers. There was a channel in the solar system that was a nearly constant stream of huge lumps of ore. From high orbit a huge fleet of tugs manoeuvred them into place at High Atlantis and other High ports and sent them down to the surface to be delivered by freight mag lev trains, airship or, for the poorer countries in the northern hemisphere, old-fashioned surface ship.

  Tonight Atlantis was receiving a thorough battering from an angry Atlantic Ocean. I watched as high waves broke themselves on the Spoke’s thick, reinforced, chemically treated concrete walls. It was covered in lights both for the huge landing decks that seemed to sprout from it and as navigation aids for aircraft. Despite the weather, we were far from the only aircraft in the sky around Atlantis tonight. Everything from aircars to shuttles, for people who didn’t want to travel at the comparatively leisurely rate of elevators, was in the air around the Spoke. Illumination was also provided by the huge viz screens attached to the walls, many of them obscured by the fierce sea, which beamed out near-constant adverts to the network of surface vessels docked at this deep-water port.

  I could see Gibby’s throat moving as he sub-vocalised. Presumably he was in contact with Atlantis air traffic control. Buck leaned over to me.

  ‘Two minutes,’ he said quietly, my audio enhancements picking up what he said. I nodded and moved back into the cargo hold, pushing Mudge in front of me. We’d run the final diagnostics not ten minutes ago, made any final last-minute adjustments to the Wraiths and stowed our gear. None of us had had the slightest idea what was in the oversized metal coffin that Balor had brought on board, but as I came back in I noticed it was open and everyone else was standing around it. I staggered over to the others.

  Looking in the coffin, suddenly my nausea was forgotten. I turned to Balor.

  ‘You brought a shark?’ The coffin was a cryogenic storage box that was going through a rapid defrost program. Inside the box, through the cold smoke of the liquid nitrogen, I made out the form of a heavily armoured, cybernetically augmented twelve-and-a-half-foot-long shark. Balor was breathing in a funny way, and it wasn’t just because he was using his gills.

  ‘Are you linked?’ I asked incredulously. Balor just smiled. I suspected he had a remote biofeedback device that connected him and the shark, similar though not as intense as the one that Morag and I had used. It wasn’t a threat to our comms discipline because nobody would have a reason to use it. What it did mean was that at some level Balor was thinking and behaving like a shark. My day just kept on getting better and better.

  ‘That thing’s not going to attack us is it?’ Mudge asked. If they were linked I was more worried about Balor attacking us.

  ‘Magantu,’ Balor said proudly.

  Morag looked up at him sharply. ‘That’s your girlfriend!’

  ‘That’s just something you tell people for effect, right?’ I asked him. He ignored me and just kept breathing funny. Fuck it, time for a little cocktail. Some of the sickness pills, a stim or two, some amphetamines to help the stims along - don’t want to fall asleep - and then some of the old red. Trying to make sure that nobody else notic
ed I sent a blast from the inhaler up each nostril. Tasted something I haven’t tasted since I was naked, cold and covered in blood on the Santa Maria. The perfect complement to my boosted nerves. Street level, none of the military-grade stuff any more, a bit rough round the edges but I could still feel the blood roaring in my ears.

  We’d been over the plans so many times I didn’t need to tell anyone what to do. We climbed into our Wraiths. Each of us was wearing inertial armour, as in the Wraith’s cramped confines there was no room for any heavier armour. I leant back and felt the four studs slide into the ports at the back of my neck. With a thought I started the armoured exoskeleton up. It didn’t make a sound but it fed information on its systems straight to my internal visual display. In the cargo bay of the transport, Mudge, Rannu, Pagan and Morag did the same thing.

  I strapped myself into the machine, slipped both my feet into the control slippers in the lower thighs of both the slender, twelve-foot-tall mech’s legs. My hands slid into the control gloves at the bottom of the upper arms of the mech. The palm link for my smartgun linked to the Wraith’s primary weapon system, the modified Retributor rail-gun, the oversized pistol grip for which was in the mech’s right hand.

  The Retributor was a 20-millimetre, chain-fed railgun that we’d turned into a steel gun. All that really meant was that we’d pressurised the barrel to keep water out, used barrel inserts to reduce the calibre to 12 millimetres and used longer, more hydrodynamic rounds, or harpoons as they were nicknamed.

  I calibrated the smartgun. The interface software was turning the Wraith into an extension of my body, making allowances for differences in perception. Suddenly I was twelve feet tall. I missed this, or maybe that was the electrical fire of the Slaughter in my synapses.

  I stood up, swaying slightly. It had been a while and we were in heavy air. The normally sleek and elegant lines of the Wraiths were made ridiculous by the EM and heat-retardant foam we’d strapped to them. I switched on the acoustic decoy designed to fool Their scanners into thinking we were some kind of fauna, maybe a small whale or something, I wasn’t sure.