Veteran

by Gavin Smith

  Rannu, his face still covered in a medpak, was running Morag through extra-vehicular-activity combat simulations for the Mamluks. I didn’t like the idea, but if she was coming she should at least be as ready as we could get her.

  As soon as we’d set sail Gibby had begun tinkering with the LRSC’s controls. I didn’t like space travel at the best of times, so Gibby mucking around with the Spear’s controls while we were moving faster than the speed of light did not go down well - especially when he accidentally managed to shut down life support for two hours - but he seemed to have everything working now. He rarely slept as he was speeding most of the time, and you could usually hear his strangely subdued and melancholy music drifting through the ship.

  I’m not sure what Mudge was doing, probably masturbating and recording it with his eye lenses again, and I was busy dying. So we all kind of had something to do, but what we couldn’t do was plan. Gregor had been very insistent but vague about what the plan was. All we knew was that it would be EVA, my least favourite things to do. But we couldn’t work on the plan while we were under sail, while we had eight days to do so, because Gregor was in a fucking cocoon. This pissed me off and not just because it was deeply not normal.

  Mudge had discovered it on our first day under sail. It had taken him quite some time to convince us it was real, as he’d been taking recreational psychotropics at the time. Eventually he showed us footage he’d shot in the engine room. It was a huge, resinous-looking pod held upright in the corner by the power-containment equipment. Some power lines had been spliced into the cocoon. Gibby checked the systems and confirmed a significant power bleed. I was too sick to go and look myself, or rather I was saving all the best drugs for the job, but from the footage the pod looked to be about eighteen feet tall.

  Gibby reviewed the security-lens recordings from the engine room. The grainy low-quality picture showed Gregor entering the engine room. He was naked, his huge off-kilter physiology making it seem all the more obscene. He was carrying a tool kit. People like Gregor and I knew our way around an engine room because we had been trained to sabotage them. He uncoupled a very heavy gauge power cable. All of us then winced and were thankful for the low quality of the image when he pushed the cable into his flesh where the base of a human spine would be. It looked like he’d dislocated his arm several times to get the cable in place. Then he’d just leant against the wall. That got boring so we fast-forwarded it.

  ‘He’s got a big cock,’ Mudge said. We all turned to stare at him. ‘I’m just saying,’ he said defensively. We turned our attention back to the image. Gregor was shaking. His flesh beneath the skin seemed to be writhing, flowing and bulging of its own accord as his shaking began to look like a serious seizure.

  ‘What’s that?’ Morag asked, and then made a disgusted noise. Gregor was producing a substance that looked like viscous black bile. Before long he was vomiting it all over himself. We were all disgusted, but of course we all kept watching. The black substance adhered to him and solidified into the hard resinous substance of the cocoon. Soon he was covered in the cocoon, only his head, a fountain for this black vomit, showing. Eventually that was covered as well. We were quiet for a bit, just looking at the image of the solidifying cocoon.

  ‘What’s the chance of him becoming a butterfly?’ I asked. Mudge started giggling, seemingly uncontrollably.

  ‘What the fuck’s he doing?’ Gibby had asked. He was strumming one of Buck’s guitars. We were all in the quarters that Morag and I shared. I was propped up and coughing blood into a bucket every now and then. The interface that Gibby had set up meant that he could pretty much control the ship from anywhere on-board.

  ‘Maybe he’s just sleeping?’ I suggested. ‘Conserving energy?’ I realised how weak this sounded.

  ‘He’s drawing a lot of energy,’ Gibby pointed out.

  ‘Which he has to use for something,’ Pagan said thoughtfully.

  ‘This is quite interesting,’ he finished and lapsed back into silence. Morag, Rannu, Gibby and I all looked at him expectantly. Mudge was examining his own stomach.

  ‘And?’ I managed before coughing racked my body again.

  Pagan looked up, his thoughts disturbed. ‘Basically, They are, as far as we can tell, autonomous colonies of what we consider to be naturally occurring nanites, right?’

  We all nodded as if we knew what he was talking about. Mudge nodded very enthusiastically.

  ‘Well, presumably he’s using the energy to manufacture more of... well, himself, I guess,’ Pagan said. ‘But I am guessing.’

  ‘So it’s a transformation?’ Morag asked. Once again, although Gregor sounded and to a degree thought like my friend, I was having it driven home just how alien this thing actually was.

  ‘I would imagine so,’ Pagan said.

  ‘Butterfly!’ Mudge added.

  ‘Into what?’ Gibby asked, running his fingers up the fretboard of his guitar.

  ‘Butterfly!’ Mudge interjected again. Morag tried to kick him.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Pagan answered.

  ‘A warrior,’ Rannu said. He sounded pretty sure of himself.

  Pagan shrugged. ‘Perhaps. It would certainly be a form that will be of use to him, and hopefully us, for whatever this mission will involve. Perhaps he’s disguising himself as one of Them, I don’t know.’

  ‘What if he wakes up and decides he wants to eat us all?’ Gibby asked. ‘Or insem ... insem ...’

  ‘Inseminate us?’ Morag asked.

  ‘Yep,’ Gibby said.

  ‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

  ‘Or eat us then inseminate us?’ Gibby suggested. We just looked at him.

  ‘There’s very little on this ship worth inseminating,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Hey!’ Morag objected.

  ‘I’d inseminate you,’ Gibby said. He was largely going through the motions of banter. He knew what was expected of him but his heart wasn’t really in it. Morag smiled and I glared at him.

  ‘Thanks, Gibby. That’s sweet,’ Morag said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, letting out an exaggerated sigh. ‘There’s very little worth inseminating on this ship bar Morag, as I’m too sick. Basically, I think you’re safe except from maybe Mudge.’

  ‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

  Gibby glared at him. ‘I want you to know I’m heavily armed.’

  ‘It is a serious point ...’ Pagan said.

  ‘What, Mudge inseminating Gibby?’ I asked, unable to help myself. Pagan tried to ignore me.

  ‘I mean what comes out of the cocoon and whether or not it’s going to be hostile to us.’

  ‘Why wait until now?’ Morag asked. ‘Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to take us out.’

  I wondered if her life had become so strange that things like someone cocooning himself were becoming commonplace to her.

  ‘Besides, we’re well armed,’ I pointed out. Even as I said this I knew what a stupid thing it was to say.

  ‘Did you see him on the Spoke?’ Rannu asked. Everyone went quiet. I didn’t really have an answer, or rather I did, but I didn’t think they wanted to hear that we’d all just get killed.

  ‘So what do we do?’ Gibby asked after an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘We wait,’ Morag said. She sounded a lot less troubled by this than I was.

  ‘But we don’t know what Gregor has planned. We don’t know where Crom is going to be or how he intends to deal with it or even get to it. We don’t know if the Black Squadrons will be there or anything,’ I said. I was pissed off about this. If Gregor wanted to turn into a beautiful butterfly he should’ve done it on his own time.

  ‘Where are we going to arrive?’ Rannu asked Gibby.

  ‘Far side of Sirius, way beyond fleet-controlled space and deep in Them space. Gregor gave me the coordinates. He also said we had to be very quiet when we got there.’

  ‘We’re going to the Teeth?’ Pagan asked. Gibby nodded. There was an uneasy silence in the cabin t
hat I decided to break.

  ‘Well, we know it’s going to be a stealth operation,’ I said, and that was about it. That was about all we knew. I was doing my second least favourite thing, space travel, on my way to do my least favourite thing, EVA, to my least favourite place, Sirius, deep inside territory controlled by a whole alien race that was still hostile towards us.

  I was listening to the spacecraft. That’s kind of a contradiction. It was very quiet, though you could feel the hum of the power plant throughout the vessel, but it was something you were more aware of than could actually hear. Every movement made a kind of booming echo through the skeletal black metal of the ship’s interior.

  I was just lying there, listening and dying. It was a bad day. I’d had two heart attacks despite the augmentations to my heart. Any time I’d tried to speak I just coughed up blood, and during one particularly bad fit of coughing I’d actually managed to bring up a component of my artificial lung. Rannu had kept me alive - it turned out that he was a pretty accomplished medic. I was alive because of Rannu, the automed and Mudge’s ad hoc narcotic pharmacy.

  We were four days in and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to Sirius, let alone back to Earth. I hadn’t been expecting Balor when the door opened. I’d seen very little of him on the journey. He’d mostly been working on the Dog Soldier and I reckoned his warrior credo didn’t cope well with weakness like mine. I think he thought I should have walked out into the wilderness to die so I could stop using up the tribe’s valuable resources. I also think the kicking he’d got at Rolleston’s hands had given him a fright. I looked at his chest. They had rebuilt his chest armour on the Atlantis Spoke, recreated it as well as they could. I wasn’t entirely sure it matched the rest of his skin. Still, he’d brought a bottle of good whisky and I was determined to have some of that regardless of how bad I felt and how much damage it did.

  He lit a cigarette for me. Again I was determined to smoke it even though I knew it meant coughing up blood. How stupid am I? I managed to hold it between my lips and inhale a bit before Balor had to take it away. I must’ve looked awful. I was pretty much a hollow sack of skin full of disintegrating internal organs and machinery. The strange thing was, it wasn’t pity or sympathy or disgust I saw on Balor’s face, it was resolve and something else, maybe fear. I took a sip from the whisky; it didn’t even taste nice any more. It just hurt. What a waste.

  ‘What’s this, my wake?’ I asked. He didn’t smile. That worried me.

  ‘You’re going to die,’ he said.

  ‘No shit,’ I replied, wondering where this was going and getting ready to call for help.

  ‘You shouldn’t have to die like this,’ he said. I said nothing; I just stared at him. He drew his dive knife from its ankle sheath and placed it on the table next to the automed. Next he drew the shotgun pistol and placed that on the table. Finally he took an antique, stainless-steel pill box from the pocket of his cut-off combat trousers and placed that on the table as well. I looked at the three items and then back up at Balor.

  ‘Everyone feels sorry for you but nobody is prepared to do anything about it,’ he said. I struggled to sit up. If Mudge was going to get me up for the job it had better be one hell of a drug cocktail. I looked him straight in his one good reptile-styled lens.

  ‘I’m going to die on the job just like everyone else,’ I said. ‘If I wanted to be killed I’d do it myself. Understand?’ Balor said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. He was gauging me, sizing me up, trying to come to a decision.

  ‘What ...’ he began, and then stopped.

  ‘What if I’m too weak to do my job?’ I finished for him. He nodded. ‘I’m dead anyway, so you don’t have to worry about looking out for me, but if I can pull a trigger I’ll help where we’re going. But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?’

  Balor shook his head, his sensor dreads whipping round as his head moved. ‘I don’t like seeing a warr—’

  ‘Soldier,’ I interrupted. He looked at me quizzically. ‘I am, or I was, a soldier, and a reluctant one at that. Don’t give me any of this warrior bullshit; you save it for Rannu.’

  ‘I don’t like seeing a soldier this way,’ he said. I managed another sip from the whisky and then refilled the glass with some of my blood. I looked back up at Balor, sitting huge and impassive next to my bed.

  ‘You’re really scared of me, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I mean this.’ I gestured down at my sore-covered wreck of a body. ‘This is pretty much your worst fear, isn’t it?’

  He didn’t say anything. It hit me then that like all the other soldiers who dressed themselves up like monsters, Balor was overcompensating, running from something, hiding from something. He was just better at it than the rest.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked. ‘Out of all of us you’ve got to have the most to lose - maybe Mudge now, but he’s too fucked to care.’

  ‘Loyalty,’ he said.

  ‘Oh bullshit. You want to do a dying man a favour then, don’t fucking lie to me.’

  He glared at me. I think I’d made him angry, and not the mock anger he play-acted with his cronies; I’d genuinely hit a raw nerve.

  ‘Because I think we’ve changed something,’ he finally said through gritted rows of shark-like teeth.

  ‘You don’t sound pleased about it,’ I replied.

  ‘I am. It’s why we’re warriors after all,’ he said. I didn’t follow him but I was sick of hearing all this warrior self-justification bollocks.

  ‘Don’t fucking start with that warr—’ I began.

  ‘No, you be quiet,’ Balor said. ‘I don’t care what you think of my beliefs, but is that not what all the fighting and killing was for? Isn’t that why all those marines on Atlantis had to die? Aren’t we trying to make things better? Isn’t that our job as the strong? Isn’t that what you told Cronin?’ he snarled. ‘The world without war, the world you’re trying to build, has no place for someone like me,’ he said finally. That stopped me.

  ‘What about Rolleston and the Black Squadrons?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘Believe it or not,’ he said evenly, ‘despite what you’ve seen me do, I don’t really have much of an appetite for killing humans.’

  ‘You’ve come here to die?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I’ve come here to die in a way that people will talk about for ever.’

  ‘You want to go out in a blaze of glory,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘That is why, more than anyone else, Mudge must live.’

  ‘So he can tell your story.’ Balor nodded. ‘And you don’t want me around because despite what you’ve done to your body and your head, you don’t want to be reminded that you are still human and human flesh is weak,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t need to.’

  ‘I’m worried that you will risk the mission—’

  ‘You’re on a fucking suicide run, pal. You don’t give a shit about the others - you’ve just fucking said that. You know the score. You know how we do business. What’s your motto, by guile not strength? We’re going in quiet and you want to make a fucking spectacle of your death!’

  ‘I’m trying to offer you a way out,’ he growled.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Morag asked from the open doorway. I hadn’t even heard her, though Balor must have. Neither of us said anything. For no good reason I suddenly felt guilty. I think I saw a trace of guilt on Balor’s face too, but who can tell? Morag took in the gun, the knife and the pill box.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she demanded, asking us both.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  Morag turned to glare at Balor. Balor stood up, his enormous scaled bulk seeming to fill the cramped cabin. Morag moved into the room, Balor towering over her.

  ‘Were you going to kill him?’

  ‘I offered him a way out,’ he growled again. Morag looked angrier than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘A way out? A fucking way out!’ she screamed at him. ‘Why can’t you say
kill, or even better, murder?’

  ‘Morag ...’ I started, but she’d grabbed Balor’s shotgun pistol and held the heavy pistol in an unsteady two-handed grip. Balor reached out to take the pistol. The report was deafening in the confined space. Or at least it would have been if we didn’t all have audio dampeners now. The recoil sent Morag sprawling back into the bulkhead, the gun clattering to the deck. Buckshot was suddenly ricocheting all around me, flattening against my subcutaneous armour. There was a black scorch mark on Balor’s chest from the pistol’s fierce muzzle flash. He barely took a step back. She’d shot him in exactly the same place that Rolleston had. Scorched his nice new rebuilt armour.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Morag said, much more out of shock at what she’d done than fear of Balor. Balor bent down and retrieved the shotgun pistol and grabbed his dive knife and pill box from the table. I don’t think this had played out the way he’d envisaged. It was difficult to tell with his inhuman face but I think he was embarrassed. Mudge and Rannu were at the door. Rannu had removed the medpak; half of his face was angry red new-growth skin. He had a gun in each hand and Pagan was behind him. Balor made to push past them.

  ‘Balor,’ I said quietly.

  He stopped and turned to look at me.

  ‘Balor, if I live long enough I’ll go down with you.’ He gave this some thought and then nodded before turning. Mudge and Pagan moved out of the way. Rannu just stared at him.