by Gavin Smith
‘Why don’t I just stay out here?’ Gregor came back.
‘Because you may as well see as much of the fun as we get a chance to have,’ I answered. Moments later I saw Gregor move back into the studio and kneel down by the entrance to the reception area, the massive Retributor at the ready.
I could see a comms icon flashing on my internal visual display. It was the re-routed comms line from the reception desk. I opened it up and routed it over the tac net to Gregor, Rannu and Balor. The comms icon I saw was of a hard-faced black woman. She was dressed in the lightweight hard armour and inertial undersuit common to SWAT and Cyber SWAT units. Her eyes were black polarised lenses, her hair shorn down to stubble. I reckoned she was short and stocky like many special forces operators.
‘I don’t have time for this. You don’t have any hostages so we’re going to come in there and get you out,’ she said in an American accent. I considered asking her where she’d been, but for a job this prestigious I figured her for ex-Delta. She reminded me of Ash.
‘I’m in love,’ Balor muttered.
‘And you are?’ I enquired politely. She seemed to consider this. My feed from one of the crawlers showed her some way back surrounded by a group of similarly armoured figures. They had an armoured ram tank specially designed for use in the Spoke. Behind that I could see African-made, Praetorian powered-armour suits. I could also see Praetorians and a number of police gunships hovering around in the air outside the node.
‘Watch Commander Cat Sommerjay,’ she said. ‘Now stop fucking around, Sergeant Douglas. If you don’t come out now then all you’ll get is dead, you know that.’ So she knew who I was.
‘Getting a lot of pressure to breach?’ I asked. ‘People want you to come in before you’re ready?’ She hesitated. That was good, that meant she cared about her people.
‘Sergeant—’ she began.
‘Just call me Jakob,’ I said.
‘You smooth bastard,’ Gregor said. I glared at him. I seemed to have pissed off Cat - as I found myself thinking of her.
‘Look, arsehole,’ she snarled. ‘I’m not the fucking negotiator. You want to make friends, you shouldn’t have hung up on him. Either you come out or we come in, your choice.’
‘I’m definitely in love,’ Balor confirmed. ‘Let’s surrender.’
‘Look, Cat,’ I said. ‘We haven’t killed anyone, we’re contained and we will only fight to protect ourselves. We need a little time and then I promise you we’ll surrender,’ I said, trying not to think about my promise to Gregor. Cat opened her mouth to reply but stopped, looking irritable.
‘Wait a second,’ she said, and her comms icon froze on hold.
‘What was that?’ Balor asked.
‘At a guess, a priority comms override from the Cabal,’ Gregor said.
‘They want her to breach,’ I said, glancing over at Pagan and Morag and wishing they would hurry up.
‘Good. I want to meet this woman,’ Balor said.
‘Won’t your shark be jealous?’ I asked.
‘Magantu is very understanding,’ Balor said seriously.
‘And would have trouble swimming this high,’ Gregor said. We really weren’t taking our imminent deaths seriously enough.
‘The good news is she doesn’t strike me as the sort of person Rolleston can push around,’ I said as Cat’s icon came back to life. She didn’t look happy.
‘You need to come out now,’ she said.
‘The people who’re pushing you to breach are going to get a lot of your people killed before you get us. You know that and there’s no need for it,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I know that, but I’ve been given some very compelling reasons to come in and get you,’ she said. As a commander, and she struck me as an ex-NCO not an officer, I could tell she didn’t want to come in here. I wondered what she’d been told. Had she been told that we had an alien virus and an alien? Had she been told that we were in league with Them? ‘Is it true that Balor is in there with you?’ she asked.
I saw Morag and then Pagan come out of their trances, blinking and looking around. Buck and Gibby began to play. It was a slow and faintly sinister piece.
‘Yeah,’ I told her. ‘He’s our hostage.’ My comms icon presumably transmitted the smile on my face. Well, I was smiling until I saw Balor glaring at me.
‘Look, you know they’ll never let you broadcast, yeah?’ she said. I looked over at Morag, who gave me the thumbs up.
‘Too late,’ I told Cat. ‘You’ll want to see this.’
I switched on my net feed.
26
Atlantis
What did it look like? Everyone in known space must’ve seen it by now. If they didn’t see it when it happened, and you pretty much had to be in a coma to miss it, then they would have seen vizzes. What the vizzes couldn’t capture was that it looked different to all of us. The software that translated its net-born image to our minds translated it differently for each of the millions of people seeing or experiencing it. In other words it was personal for all of us.
The feed that Morag sent me seemed to be from outside the net construct of the Spoke. The virtual representation of the Spoke looked like a tall fairy-tale tower made from partially solidified water, the whole thing flowing like a waterfall. The studio looked like a pre-fall art deco cinema made from neon liquid. The liquid motif was shared with many of the businesses in the virtual Spoke. Its outgoing broadcasts were represented by fast-moving neon streams of the same liquid. Pagan hung in mid-air, level with the broadcast node. He was surrounded by what looked like air disturbances, his hair blowing in an invisible wind. He held his staff over his head; his eyes rolled back and the lightning of aggressive information exchange played around the staff. He shouted and babbled in some ancient pagan glossolalia as he cast his programs preparing the way for God.
We watched as Black Annis walked through Pagan’s storm. The Spoke’s defence programs, manifesting themselves as water spirits, were buffeted out of the way by the storm or raked by Annis until they became puddles. High above Pagan and Annis I could see the Spoke’s hired guns descending clothed in various water-borne mythological icons. I watched as they were blown and buffeted by Pagan’s storm, their own attacks swept aside by the defensive software in the storm.
The cinema’s walls of water parted for Annis. She was holding what looked to me like an old-fashioned jack-in-the-box. I could see her blue-skinned clawed hands winding it up as she strode into the lobby of the cinema construct and laid the box down on the consensual floor.
Pagan finished his incantation and let out a primal-sounding scream. He slammed his staff down; it seemed to rupture the very air in an explosion of lightning, illuminating the invisible air spirits of the Spoke’s more subtle defence programs, sending them tumbling down. From the base of Pagan’s staff a rupture of lightning coursed through the air towards the cinema into the tower of water. Annis bathed in the pale light of neon and lightning and stepped back from the jack-in-the-box as Pagan’s lightning, the activation code, reached it.
I watched the jack-in-the-box bulge and crack. I saw impossibly bright light beneath the cracks and rents in the bulging box. And here’s the thing that doesn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t in the net; I was just watching, but I somehow felt it. Just like everyone else. Or maybe it was just everyone else I was feeling, because at some level or another we are connected to the communications infrastructure of our race. I saw the jack-in-the-box finally rupture and burst. It was like the amorphous mass of tentacles and pseudopods that I’d seen in my dream of the initial attack on Them. Except these weren’t black, they were formed of bright white light and all colours and were beautiful. The tentacles shot out everywhere, faster and more numerous than my mind could understand, in every possible direction and some directions I suspected weren’t possible.
I could hear Morag and Pagan laughing and then Pagan was crying. I wasn’t sure if it was in the net or in here with me. They were sending me more feeds from the net
, vizzes from all over the information shadow-world. I saw images of God surging down every highway, road, street, alleyway, passage and into every site and net construct. I saw the shocked expressions on some of the better-rendered icons. Shock turned to either panic or awe. I guess it depended on how they wanted to look at God. I watched the informational reflection of our world light brightly up.
Then came the response. Every kind of probe, analytical program, communications program and of course the inevitable attack programs. From lone panicking icons to concerted government and corporate attacks. It was natural, I guess. After all, these people had a lot to lose and they had just had the depths of their systems violated. Now every secret they had was common knowledge. It still looked somehow petty and vicious to me. Like insects stinging a mountain. It was only then I wondered if business as we knew it could continue, or government or society. I guess the attack programs were used in self-defence, but somehow they looked ignorant and brutish. I was beginning to think I’d spent too much time around Pagan and I was becoming a believer.
And then Mudge’s grinning, drunk, high features appeared on every visual display screen, from monocle heads-up displays to giant hologramatic displays projected into the sky. From apartment viz screens to the huge screens on the side of advertising zeppelins. His image would be glowing out of the screens attached to the side of Big Neon Voodoo’s trucks. Somehow I knew that Papa Neon was dancing on the top of one of his lorries. Mudge was made a giant on the side of all the Spokes, his features looking out over savanna, ocean, jungle and mountains. From slum bedsits to upscale Ginzas, from corporate office walls to the fortress mansions of the super rich, from inside classrooms to inside governments. It was reaching the orbitals now and soon the Moon, then Mars, then the Belt and ever outward. Beggar, criminal, soldier, labourer, wage slave, corporate, officer, executive, minister, presidents: all of them were seeing Mudge’s grinning face. He was the harbinger of God, or even the other way around. I started laughing but it quickly turned into a hacking bloody cough.
In my mind’s eye I could see the ranger and his girlfriend in their flat just off the Ferry Road. McShit and his Twists watching this on the Rigs. The refugees from the Avenues, the quiet family that ran Fosterton, Rivid in his sled somewhere, crowds of silent pirates in Times Square, Crawling Town becoming motionless except for Papa Neon’s dance, and everyone in this Spoke from High Atlantis in orbit to the Mag Lev stations deep in the crust of our world.
I felt something against me and looked down to see Morag hugging me fiercely, laughing, tears in her eyes. I was laughing as well, though my plastic eyes were unable to cry. I held her tightly.
‘Welcome to the first day of the rest of your revolution!’ Mudge screamed at the whole system. I found this even funnier. Gibby and Buck’s music reached a crescendo, washing over me before they cranked it down again. Rannu was smiling serenely. Pagan was hugging Balor, who looked triumphant. Gregor leant against the wall, looking tired and relieved.
We’d done it. Now we had to see just what we had done exactly. Mudge was striding around the studio like the revolutionary degenerate I was suddenly aware he was born to play.
‘Bring up the Cabal,’ he said. On screens across the world, and in orbit milliseconds later, small split-screen windows appeared, showing a variety of ancient white guys being kept alive by machinery in various secured locations around the world and in orbit. I began checking through the windows. Where was he?
One of the studio walls had become a viz screen. I shut down my internal one and concentrated on that. I could still see the astonished-looking comms icon of Cat Sommerjay.
‘Morag, the SWAT commander outside this studio will be getting screamed at by someone to breach and kill us. Can you tap into that?’ I asked.
Morag looked up at me and smiled. ‘You don’t get it do you?’
In the background I could hear Mudge explaining the Cabal to humanity and how they started the war. Text files scrolled down the screen, audio files were played and then viz footage was shown of the attack on Them. Mudge was making it clear that all the evidence was there for review by everyone.
‘Nothing is secret; there is no cryptography. You want to hear it, ask God,’ Morag continued.
No privacy, I suddenly thought. What had we done? I opened the tac net. ‘God?’ I said uncertainly.
‘Yes Jakob?’ A thousand soothing mellifluous but alien voices asked me quietly. It sent a shiver down my spine.
‘Watch Commander Cat Sommerjay will be receiving orders regarding us. I’d like to hear them if I may.’
‘Certainly,’ God said. Mudge was still passionately explaining the intricacies of the conspiracy.
‘Breach! Breach now! That is a direct order! I want every one of them dead seconds from now,’ Rolleston screamed at Cat. I’d never heard him sound so angry.
‘Hello, Major,’ I said, smiling. I also sent the feed to Mudge and requested God for a visual on Major Rolleston. There was a moment’s silence from Rolleston. His icon didn’t register shock, I wonder if he had when he saw my face.
‘Oh, well done, Sergeant. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?’ he said, and I found myself hearing it in stereo. I looked up to see that we had appeared on the big screen; our conversation was now being broadcast to the entire system. I wasn’t overly happy about this. Suddenly I felt very self-conscious and a lot more nervous than I would have had I been just walking into a firefight.
The picture of Rolleston was not his comms image but rather security lens footage of him and the Grey Lady strapping armour on. They were in the hold of what looked like a military assault shuttle. I sent a request to God asking them where they were. The reply was pretty much instantaneous. Rolleston and the Grey Lady were on an assault shuttle, part of HMS Vindictive’s complement. They were skimming across the Atlantic from a ship intercept. They’d been out looking for us. We’d always known that they’d be looking for us, but the imminence of their ETA, now it was a cold hard fact, turned my blood cold.
‘Congratulations on compromising every military operation currently running. I wonder how many people you’ve murdered today?’ he asked. I saw Rannu look over at me. Another ramification I hadn’t considered. I’d just burnt every deep-cover operative in-system. ‘Not to mention opening up our entire defence system to Them. But I’m assuming that’s your intention,’ he continued before addressing Sommerjay. ‘Watch Commander, I believe you have been given an order. Let’s see what we can do to contain this situation before the entire human race has to pay the price.’
‘Sir, I’m afraid in all conscience I cannot follow that order,’ Cat replied. She also appeared on the screen, and like me she looked very self-conscious.
‘What has your conscience got to do with it? You will obey an order given to you by your chain of command.’
‘With all due respect, I am not a lawyer, but if what I’m seeing is true then it would seem that my chain of command is compromised and somebody is going to have to answer for crimes against humanity,’ she said.
‘Yes, and they are in that node,’ he said, sounding irritated. In some ways I was impressed by the way he could continue this discussion while getting kitted up. I saw him strapping on the various different weapons that he would be using against us in the near future. I thought about going over our response plan again but they all knew the score. Besides our comms were compromised just like everyone else’s now.
‘I’m afraid we will have to wait and see what happens when the dust settles,’ Cat replied.
‘The dust settling, as you put it, may be the destruction of our race. They have one of Them in there and they have released a Them virus that has taken control of the net. How much damage are you going to let them do?’
‘God?’ Mudge asked. ‘Have you taken control of the net?’
God’s mellifluous multiple tones seemed to float from every device capable of producing sound. ‘No, Howard, I have not; the capability of the net is still tota
l. All I have done is make access available to every single piece of information there is.’
‘Are Earth’s defences still in place and under the control of humanity?’ Mudge asked.
‘They are indeed,’ God answered.
‘Excellent,’ said Rolleston and then went quiet.
‘I think you should be aware that Major Rolleston has just sent a heavily encrypted message to the Kenyan Orbital Weapons Platform, JuuJuu Nyota, ordering them to fire a particle-beam weapon at your position,’ God said, a little too calmly for my taste. ‘He has the authority to do so,’ he added.
‘Well fucking stop him then!’ Mudge shouted.
‘I am sorry, Howard, but due to the parameters of my programming I cannot interfere with human actions beyond making all information available,’ God said.
Mudge turned on Pagan. ‘See? I fucking told you! Who doesn’t believe in an interventionist God now, you cunt!’ he demanded before turning back to the screen.
‘Humanity must have free will,’ Pagan said somewhat weakly.
‘Do you not think that being destroyed by a particle-beam weapon will impinge on my fucking free will? Not to mention all the people living in this Spoke! Besides,’ he pointed at Rolleston’s image, ‘that prick isn’t fucking human!’
‘Mudge! There are children watching,’ Balor admonished.
Despite the fact I was about to die I took a moment to stop and stare at Balor. Mudge’s face had gone red and veins were popping out on his forehead. I looked over at Pagan and Morag. Morag was already tranced in but Pagan was shaking his head.
‘We don’t have enough time,’ he said. I knew that comms messages from Atlantis to JuuJuu Nyota and Kenya would be shooting backwards and forwards in the net, including threats of reprisal from the Atlantean authorities.
‘This is Air Marshal Kaaria of the Kenyan Orbital Command. Major Rolleston’s order has been countermanded. We will not, repeat not, be firing upon Atlantis, nor does Kenya in any way pose a threat to the Atlantis Spoke, its interests or its people.’ I looked up at the screen to see a solid-looking African in his early sixties looking out of the viz screen at us. The screen split to show Rolleston.