by Gavin Smith
‘We had to draw the ambushers out. Surprise was the only advantage we had, so heavily outnumbered as we were,’ he told her. His voice was music over the sound of Bean and Kaczmar’s butchery.
‘You going to control your men?’ she asked.
He looked into the fungal forest where the two serial killers were hard at work.
‘They are controlled,’ he said. ‘In order for this to work their … our … appetites must be indulged. We’re unleashed at your will but once released we’re not taps that can be turned off and on.’ It wasn’t quite a challenge to her authority. She had, at the end of the day, given him autonomy to run the unit the way he saw fit as long as he didn’t hurt non-combatants. They weren’t really meant to operate with the Legion’s more conventional elements.
Miska was aware of Hemi tensing behind her. So, it seemed, was the Ultra, as he glanced the Maori’s way.
‘Done,’ Hemi told her as he stood up, peeling off the gloves.
‘Join the others,’ she told him. ‘Get everybody back on the clock, I want three-sixty security.’ Hemi nodded and started towards the rest of the squad. ‘I dropped Nyukuti’s SAW somewhere in the woods, retrieve that, get the spare ammo from Nye’s body, and see if the Triple S have got any ammo or grenades we can use.’
Hemi listened and then went on his way, making towards Nyukuti’s body first. Miska turned back to the Ultra.
‘Have your guys do the same with the ammo and get them ready to move,’ she told him.
‘I can’t come with you,’ he told her.
Miska gaped at him. She didn’t have time for this kind of bullshit. Then just for a moment, she had a horrible thought. Would the N-bomb work on someone so clearly augmented with Small Gods’ tech? But then why would he have gone along with this as long as he had? He had little to gain, after all. Besides, maybe a Small God could walk away from an N-bomb going off in their head, or even just have their body reject the device.
‘What do you mean you can’t come with me?’ she demanded.
‘You kill Resnick then you can probably prove that he’s augmented with illegal Martian tech, or possibly even connect him to the Spartans. If I go then perhaps our own secrets are exposed.’
It was a fair point.
‘And your pet monsters?’ she asked.
‘Grig and Gunhir are quite disciplined. Bean and Kaczmar will do as they’re told once I have spoken with them.’
‘No more mutilations,’ she told him. The Ultra frowned for a moment.
‘I’ve always wondered at the difference. They were dead before it happened. Mostly.’
‘What about your signs?’ Miska asked. ‘Were they all dead already?’
‘People must know fear.’
‘We were the only ones who saw it,’ Miska pointed out but the Ultra was walking away. She looked down at Kasmeyer’s body. Fungus was already starting to grow out of the wounds. All of them were going to be having anti-fungal baths when they got back to the Hangman’s Daughter.
If we get back, she thought. Though the odds were starting to even a little.
Mass had just finished wrapping Nyukuti’s body in his poncho and was heading back to rejoin the others.
‘Mass,’ she called. He turned to face her. It was clear that he was still angry. She suspected it was the need to differentiate himself from the Nightmare Squad and perhaps the fear that he wasn’t as different as he might wish. ‘Kasmeyer’s body as well,’ she told him.
‘Fuck that guy!’ he snapped. ‘Kasmeyer turned on us.’
‘Somebody forced him, somebody with influence and reach,’ she told him. Mass didn’t answer, he just made his way over to the body. Miska wasn’t sure she liked the guarded expression on his face, but she left him to it and started making her way towards the Nightmare Squad. A sodden Kaneda and Hogg had made it to not-so-dry land.
‘Good work,’ she told them as she passed and it was true. Without them the heavy weapons on the Waders would have torn them apart. Kaneda nodded, Hogg just watched her pass. She could practically feel the judgement in his eyes.
‘That ain’t right,’ Raff said as she passed the mushroom tree he was leaning against. She knew he meant the mutilations.
‘Yeah? Well you get what you pay for,’ she muttered. What had he expected when they’d embarked on this path? She’d known serving soldiers who’d done as bad. Hell, Resnick had recruited his own band of war criminals in so-called legitimate mercenary, sorry, ‘military contractor’ circles.
‘Miska?’
She looked up to see Hemi sat on the stem of a fallen mushroom tree, wiping mud off his inherited SAW. Nyukuti’s switchblade sword-boomerang was leaning against the tree. Hemi picked it up.
‘You want this?’ he asked.
Miska moved towards him, looking down at Nyukuti’s strange weapon.
‘I guess you’ll never get the chance to find out if you’re tougher,’ Miska said as she took the boomer-sword and tucked it into some of the straps on the back of her load-carrying plate.
Hemi shrugged. With the rain gone the first of the pollen started to fall from the canopy far above.
‘That is weird,’ Miska muttered.
‘That’s just all kinds of trap,’ Mass said next to her. He sounded spooked.
They were lying in a waterlogged ditch looking at a clearing within a small, low wood that existed far below the dense canopy of the huge trees. It had stopped raining but intermittent waterfalls still fell from the leaves far above, the water broken up by the secondary canopy. The much smaller, Earth-like trees were the least surprising thing. There were a number of overgrown Corinthian columns in the clearing. Only a few were standing. They looked as though they had been scattered around by some giant’s hand: a failed project, signs of intent to build a temple. And then there were the heads. They were impaled on poles just in the treeline surrounding the clearing, all in various states of decomposition. Dead eyes and hollow sockets staring at nothing, clusters of fungal growth sprouting from their wounds, moss crawling across their faces like a virulent skin disease. But even the mass of severed heads weren’t as surprising as the crashed spaceship.
‘I’m a little disappointed that we’re not dealing with aliens,’ Bean said on the other side of her. Miska didn’t like being this close to the repellent Scottish cannibal but she had to admit he was right. More and more this nonsense had the hallmarks of Small Gods involvement.
‘What do you think?’ Miska asked Bean. ‘Long-range strike craft? Maybe a hundred years old?’ Which would date it round about the time of the War in Heaven, when the Small Gods had grown themselves bodies from the Grey Goo Wastelands.
Bean turned to look at her.
‘I used to live in a cave,’ he told her.
‘I really believe that.’
The long-range strike craft had come down hard but it looked mostly intact. Half buried in the soft mud, the craft was part of a hillock that led to higher ground on the other side of the clearing. Much of the higher ground was obscured by the pollen fall and rising, humid mists that were starting to creep in. The airlock was open. It looked strangely inviting.
‘I know the trees, though,’ the cannibal told her, pointing at a tree.
‘Don’t point,’ Miska told him. Movement was what would give them away.
‘They’ve got to have eyes on us,’ Grig said from where he was covering their right flank. Gunhir was on the left, Kaczmar, Kaneda and Hogg were providing rear security. Corenbloom, Hemi and Raff had eyes forward with Miska, Bean and Mass. The Ultra was, in theory, waiting for them back in the fungal wood, some two klicks south.
Grig was, of course, right. They were in a reasonably obvious place as well. If she were Resnick then she’d try and get behind them. Except she didn’t think Resnick was here for her. She and her Bastards were just a pain in the ass to him.
It might have stopped raining but the pollen fall was so heavy it might as well have been snow. After the battle at Camp Badajoz, Miska had assume
d that the pollen affected electronic systems that it could gain access to. Hence sealed goggles and ear covers protecting cyberware. Their inertial armour undersuits might have been sophisticated tech but they had little in the way of moving parts, and that was sealed inside the clothing itself. She had assumed that mechanical devices like slugthrowers would be impervious to the pollen but she didn’t like the way the pollen seemed to be gathering on the weapons, despite their attempts to wipe it off.
‘Mass, you’re in charge, Grig’s second, listen to him, he knows what he’s talking about,’ Miska told them. In a situation like this she would have far preferred to put Grig in charge but if she didn’t respect the chain of command then she couldn’t expect them to. She just hoped that Mass had his ego in check to know enough to listen to Grig. ‘Kaneda, Hogg, I want you hunting. Find Resnick’s people and kill them quietly.’
Neither of them responded. She just heard them slither out of the ditch.
‘The rest of us?’ Grig asked.
‘Find firing positions,’ Miska told them. They knew what to look for. ‘Keep the defoliant squirters and the flamers handy but don’t switch on the pilot lights unless you see the tree people. Understand?’ She glanced at them, saw nods, heard muttered affirmatives. Grig was explaining it to Kaczmar in sign language.
‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend?’ Mass asked.
‘You know me, Mass, I’m all about the diplomacy.’ She turned to Bean. ‘What are the trees?’ she asked.
‘Apples, walnut, oaks and ash, the death tree,’ he told her and then grinned at her with a mouth full of canines.
‘The moss-lain dryads shall be lull’d to sleep,’ Mass muttered.
‘Huh?’ Bean grunted.
‘It’s Keats,’ Hemi supplied.
Miska hoped the dryads were asleep.
‘Where you going?’ Grig asked.
‘Into the ship,’ she said, and grinned.
‘You’ll get cut down the moment you put your head up,’ he told her. It was clear that he didn’t approve. She didn’t think he was right, though. Resnick had some expendable assets he could afford to waste on them but if Mars had risked sending a Spartan then he was here for something a lot more important. She was starting to think that he was hunting a Small God in his master’s name.
You can be as sneaky as you like but sooner or later, you’re just going to have to cover a lot of open ground, Miska decided, as she sprinted across the clearing. She practically dived through the open external airlock door.
Down on one knee, she switched on the AK-47’s aim-light. She wasn’t even remotely surprised when the light flickered and died almost immediately. It had momentarily illuminated an open internal airlock and a fungus-overgrown, debris-strewn corridor. She swung around behind her, half expecting to see more of the tree women rising from the mud, but all she saw was mist, trees and decapitated heads on poles. It looked like a picture from old Earth.
She moved into the corridor so she could get the hull between herself and the outside. Her one remaining eye was amplifying what little murky light was managing to make it in from the outside. She would be in pitch darkness if she went much further into the ship. Ignoring her own advice, she tried to light the pilot light on the flamer. The blue light wouldn’t provide much illumination but it would be enough for her remaining eye to do the rest. The pilot light wouldn’t light. That was bad news. She cleared the nozzle as best she could and tried again. Nothing.
One more time and then I’m giving this up as a bad idea, she decided as her thumb worked the nozzle. The ignition switch sounded deafening to her ears in this confined space but the pilot light flickered into life and illuminated the damp, fungal-infected mess with a cold blue light.
She moved through the ship with much more purpose than she felt. Every step sent up spores from the fungal growths underfoot. She had pulled her gas mask down but she could still feel the spores making her exposed skin itch. She had assumed if there was a Small God then this would be where she would find them, but she was starting to suspect that this had been little more than a one-way transport from Earth. She was about to turn back when she saw the open door to the bridge just ahead. She stopped and listened. All she heard was the steady drip-drip of condensation. Nothing moved inside the ship and she couldn’t hear anything outside, certainly no mass gunfight. Satisfied that she was alone, Miska moved carefully and quietly into the bridge. The view screen had shattered and earth had half filled the bridge. Miska wasn’t sure that roots should be able to grow into and through armoured hull the way they had here.
She was about to back out when something occurred to her. Miska ran a search for net access, expecting to find nothing. She was reasonably sure that a hundred years ago they had relied on hardwired connections, due to the war. She was more than a little surprised when she found the faintest trace of a connection.
She stood motionless in the half-buried bridge for a moment.
‘This is a stupid idea on so many levels,’ she told herself. That was underselling the idiocy of what she was contemplating. There were so many reasons not to trance in to a Small-Gods-connected hundred-year-old net. Not least because of some of the horrible net infections that were chucked around during the War in Heaven. With all their tech down she wouldn’t even have a window into the real world. To make matters worse they were in the middle of enemy territory and she had nobody to provide trance-watch for her.
Just for a moment she thought about Nyukuti.
But she had to know.
She found the least fungal piece of damp earth she could and sat down. Then she closed her eyes and reached for the faint connection.
If anything it was a disappointment. It was a fragment of the ship’s net, presumably being run off some still-functioning backup power source, which was impressive in its own way. This wasn’t net architecture. It was net archaeology. The disappointment was that the system had been cleansed. It was a flat black plain of ashes interspersed with the odd data fire and the husks of black obelisks that had presumably once housed systems and information.
Cartoon-net-Miska sighed and prepared to trance out when the owl landed on the closest obelisk husk. Miska stared at it. Then she shouldered her club full of attack software and made her way towards the owl.
‘But you’re just an owl, right?’ she said as she looked up at it. She had seen the bird before when she had been forced to trance in to the net back on Barney Prime. When she had met the net icon of the woman in the ancient dress, in a VR construct of a cliff top that overlooked an equally ancient coastal town. The owl had been there perched on the ruins of what Miska had suspected was some kind of temple.
‘I am, indeed, an owl,’ the owl confirmed. She spoke with the accented voice of a woman. Miska struggled to guess the age of the woman. Either quite young or very old, as though the voice had a dichotomous nature to it.
‘You know that talking owls are reasonably rare,’ Miska explained, though she supposed anything went on the net, even way out here. ‘You got a name?’
‘Yes,’ the owl told her.
The bird wasn’t moving her beak. Miska was just hearing the voice.
‘I’ve often thought that people who take language completely literally don’t really understand communication. I don’t have time for games. I’m guessing this is some weird Small Gods circle jerk. You’ll feed me some cryptic shit and then expect us mere mortals to dance on the end of your strings.’
‘But you have time for obnoxious speeches?’ the owl asked. There was no rancour in the bird’s old woman/young girl’s voice. It had sounded like a genuine enquiry.
‘Shall we get to the point?’ Miska asked.
‘If we hold back anything it is either for the sake of security, or because we do not know,’ the owl told her. ‘We are most certainly acting in our own best interests, but yours as well.’
‘Who is we?’ Miska asked.
‘That would be security.’
‘You know, you could jus
t hire us,’ Miska suggested.
‘If we had discovered what was going on quickly enough, we probably would have,’ the owl told her.
‘Well, exposition me,’ Miska told the bird. She had to admit she was intrigued. ‘Who is the Small God?’
‘Artemis,’ the owl told her. Miska shook her head. ‘Goddess of the woods and the hunt.’
‘Yeah?’ Miska asked. ‘African? Native American? Scandinavian?’
She was impressed, and quietly pleased, when the owl appeared to have a pained expression on her raptor features.
‘Greek,’ the owl told her. It made sense. The Small Gods who claimed to be manifestations of Greek and Roman mythology tended to be the main players back in the Sol System. They seemed to feel that they had the right to their namesakes. The most aggressive being Mars/Ares, of course.
‘So some AI, alien or otherwise, grows herself a body out of nanotech from the Grey Goo Wastelands after the bombing, steals herself a long-range strike craft and flies here to set up her own kingdom of shrubbery? Then, I guess, things get tricky when the colonists arrive. But why does New Sun care? Is it just Small Gods family squabbles? Because I get that.’
‘You’re missing a few pieces,’ the owl told her. ‘Artemis grows from the Grey Goo, as you say. Data-raids Earth’s net and finds the inconsistencies in the planetary survey that was made before the war with Them—’
‘The plant life that’s too evolved, the strange heat transfer between Eridani B and Ephesus …’ Then something occurred to Miska as she thought back to the artefact on Barney Prime. Raff had told her that it was just one of a number of incredibly rare artefacts that were as old as the universe itself, and seemed to make a mockery of the laws of physics when they turned up. ‘Wait a minute. Is there a Cheat here, is that what Mars is after?’
The owl spent a suspiciously long time considering the answer.
‘We think so,’ the owl finally said, ‘but we don’t think it’s what New Sun is after.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we believe it is somewhere deep within Epsilon Eridani B, beyond even the crush limit of Martian technology. We would also appreciate it if you would keep this information to yourself.’