Veteran (21 page)

I ejected the spent cassette from my SAW and replaced it with another vacuum-packed two hundred rounds. It didn’t matter that Bibby Sterlinin was dead. It didn’t matter that the sum of the experiences that went to form her existence as a sentient being was over. It didn’t matter that the thrill-seeking corporate brat who could‘ve easily joined the Fortunate Sons or dodged the war altogether had been my friend and even on one very drunk occasion my lover. What mattered was we needed her ammunition.

‘Get her ammo.’ I said to no one in particular. If we’d had the time we would’ve stripped her of ware as per our standing orders. At least with the planet being evacuated the Carrion units wouldn‘t get to her and harvest her body for implants.

It hadn’t even felt like sleep. More like a broken machine running down, but the dreams had come anyway. I’d woken up alert, aware of the sled’s high-pitched whine. The internal clock in my head was at least working. I’d been asleep for just under eight hours. I couldn’t risk using my internal GPS in case its signal was traced, but that had to put us close to New York. I knew I was going to have to find a cyber doc.

I looked around the cargo hold. It smelt pretty ripe now. Especially as we hadn’t had time to clean up after the attack on the Avenues, and in my case I’d been dumped in what I could only assume by the smell was raw sewage.

Morag was asleep. Pagan was in a net trance, presumably working on his God program. I tried not to watch Morag sleep.

‘Rivid,’ I said quietly.

‘Yes, my friend?’ His amplified voice boomed out. Morag stirred.

‘I miss the Faroes?’ I asked.

‘Yes, we got fuel there, we didn’t stay long. You were very tired, I think.’ Even through the cheap Russian amplifier he sounded distracted. Morag was awake and bleary-eyed.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked him.

‘I am not sure,’ he said.

‘Whass going on?’ Morag asked sleepily.

‘I’ve been tracking something, a big signal currently twenty or so miles to our north. I detected it a while back and didn’t think anything of it, but it has changed its course to an intercept with us.’

‘Will it?’ I asked.

‘No, too large, too slow.’

‘Morag, can you link to Pagan and tell him we need him out here? What is it?’ I asked Rivid.

‘Not sure.’ The jolly Russian was gone; there was only concentration in his tone now. ‘The signal’s confused. They’re either trying to jam or it has stealth capability, sub-surface though.’ I didn’t like the sound of this. The capabilities involved were beginning to sound very military.

‘Could you—’

‘Multiple incoming! Secure for manoeuvres!’ the tinny amp suddenly screamed at us. We banked so suddenly I could have sworn I felt us touch the waters of the Atlantic. I heard servos whine as they struggled to open the hatches for the weapons pods.

‘Can we help?’ I shouted at Rivid.

‘Pagan, they are attempting to hack into my systems. I need you on comms!’ Rivid shouted. Pagan was still in his trance. I turned to Morag to find out why she hadn’t contacted him.

‘It’s all right. He knows and he’s on it. I’m going to help,’ she said, anticipating my question. Suddenly the bulkheads came to life. They were papered with a kind of thin viz screen. I could see various images from the cameras around the sled as well as sensor data. Heading towards us from the north were the contrails of two missiles. I’m not sure that witnessing the attack was doing my sense of helplessness any good.

‘Do you want me to jack into the weapons?’ I shouted over the sled’s screaming engines as we suddenly banked hard again. My only answer was a tirade of badly distorted Russian. I watched as beams of harsh red light from the sled’s laser anti-missile defences bisected the sky. It looked like a nearly constant grid of light as the missiles threw themselves into a series of defensive manoeuvres to avoid the lasers.

I knew that Pagan and Morag would be trying to repulse any electronic warfare attempts while simultaneously trying to jam or control the missiles. One of the missiles went up. All around me on the bulkhead screens everything seemed to be orange. The compression wave battered into the sled and I screamed, hating that I was in someone else’s hands. It was a conventional warhead but a large one. I thought the sled would flip. Instead it spun across the choppy grey Atlantic like a skimming stone thrown by a child. I still have no idea how Rivid managed to regain control of the sled. Though I couldn’t help but notice that the catheter had been used once he did. I knew how he felt.

‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ Rivid’s tinny-sounding voice screamed. Mid-spin I was vaguely aware of him launching several surface-to-surface missiles of his own. I knew he’d link to Pagan and have him provide electronic cover for them, jam our unseen enemy’s countermeasures so the missiles would have a chance of hitting.

The problem now was the second missile. Even if the laser or the chaff and decoys that Rivid was now firing off brought the missile down it was too close and would probably still destroy us.

‘Three, no four, craft have been launched. Copters by the look of it. Making heavy burn for us,’ Rivid said. I didn’t see what he was worried about. Surely the missile was the more pressing concern. I could see on the bulkhead screens the missile coming towards us and on the sensor display the four incoming copters. Judging by their speed their rotors were stowed and they were just using jets.

Then the missile just dropped into the ocean. A moment later there was an explosion but the water dampened much of the force. I felt the sled rise and buck violently from the underwater blast but Rivid rode it through.

‘Nice one, Pagan,’ I muttered to myself. Hacking a missile in flight was more than a little impressive.

Ahead of us the bulkhead screen showed what was left of Staten Island and Brooklyn. We were approaching the headland at over five hundred miles an hour, the copters gaining on us. I saw a missile lock warning appear on the screen and then another.

We were through the Narrows. I could see the copters clearly now on the screen. I recognised them as US Navy. A missile lock warning disappeared, presumably jammed, but I saw a blossom of flame from one of the copters as the remaining locked missile was fired. Chaff exploded from the sled and laser cut the air again. Ahead of us New York was a grey city of broken spires reaching out of the water.

Rivid banked suddenly. Again the craft was at ninety degrees to the dark water. My audio implants dampened the sound of railgun rounds bouncing off the sled’s armoured body. The laser caught and destroyed the incoming missile and I heard the pointless return fire of the sled’s own railgun.

Suddenly we were in New York. The light dimmed as we shot down lower Broadway, the ruined buildings too much of a blur to make out anything about them. I only barely caught the explosion behind us as one of the copters went up.

‘What was that?’ I asked, meaning the copter’s destruction.

‘One of the city’s SAM emplacements,’ Rivid answered. I wondered if they had a reason not to target us.

Rivid weaved in and out of the partially submerged buildings as railgun rounds and exploding rockets covered us in debris. We played hide and seek through water-filled steel and concrete-walled canyons. We were chased under bridges made of collapsed skyscrapers. I was able to get a look at the lean, predatory, insect-like form of the copters following us, their forward-facing twin railguns reminding me of mandibles.

In the middle of a rocket barrage Rivid mangled the front of the sled as he crashed through a pile of debris into a building. Fire chased us through deserted and destroyed offices and out the other side as we dropped back down into the water. He shot uptown again. The sled was slowing down; its handling seemed less smooth. There were still three of them on us. We’d seen other missile emplacements and various other defensive systems but it seemed that the inhabitants of New York were not going to provide us with any further help.

‘Jakob, my friend,’ Rivid’s voice slurred from the cheap loudspeaker. ‘Do you think this is our swansong?’ I assumed the question was pretty much rhetorical. I mean I could’ve asked to be let out, and the copters may not have noticed us, but that seemed unfair to Rivid, who was presumably only in this situation because of us.

‘You could let us out,’ I suggested, sounding like a coward and a hypocrite to my own ears.

‘You disappoint me,’ Rivid said. He sounded sad. ‘I thought we’d go out fighting, yes?’ Problem was I hadn’t done any. The last time I’d felt this helpless was during a disastrous night drop on Dog 4. We’d watched our assault shuttle being overtaken by other burning shuttles tumbling out of the sky. Shot down by Them AA emplacements.

Rivid didn’t wait for an answer. He banked tightly around the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 34th Street. The copters were back on our tail, kicking in their afterburners, as we crossed Sixth Avenue. Rivid throttled down hard, the damaged engines screaming as he cornered north onto Fifth Avenue so fast he went halfway up the wall of a building in a wash of water. He shot up Fifth, throttled back and turned into a crumbling debris-strewn building that looked like it was once some kind of multi-storey car park. He gunned the protesting sled up a spiral ramp, using the weight of the armoured vehicle to knock ancient burnt skeletons of cars out of his path as he made his way to the roof.

On the roof Rivid brought the sled to a halt.

‘This is your plan?’ I shouted.

‘There’s very little planning going on,’ Rivid had time to say as the first copter rounded the corner of Fifth some two hundred feet above us. I could hear the muted thunder of railgun rounds impacting on the sled’s armoured hull. Two, then three missile lock warnings appeared.

‘What’s going on?’ Morag shouted as she and a worried-looking Pagan came out of their trance. I could hear multiple supersonic bangs become one constant thunderous roar, my audio dampeners reducing the sound to a manageable level as Rivid fired the sled’s own railgun. I felt, heard and saw on the screen Rivid launch a surface-to-air missile as rockets exploded all around us and one finally hit. We were thrown about in our straps, and the sled shot back from the force and battered into a concrete pillar.

My head ringing, I only just caught the copter that had hit us disappearing back around the corner of Fifth Avenue followed by the SAM. The explosion blew the side out of the building on the corner as the burning copter dropped into the waters beneath it.

‘Yes!’ I shouted. Morag looked terrified.

Pagan glanced at her. ‘How many SAMs left?’ he shouted at Rivid.

‘That was it.’ There were still two more copters out there. ‘Still, not bad for a sled versus copter, I think?’

‘Pretty good,’ I said. I looked at the radar images projected on the bulkhead. The two copters were circling us using the surrounding buildings as cover. Presumably they were being a bit more cautious since Rivid had taken one of them out. I smiled, finding myself just across the road from the broken but unbowed and still impressive Empire State Building. In either direction I saw the bridges. They ran in a network all across Manhattan, spanning the canals of New York from the most structurally sound buildings. On Fifth I could make out small, fast-moving craft heading towards us from either direction.

These would be Balor’s people. I’d heard about these tactics: they preferred to do their fighting in the sunken maze-like warrens of the city streets.

Proximity warnings from the sled’s motion detectors showed there was movement all around us: from nearby buildings, on the bridges, climbing out of the water. The problem was they were probably just as pissed off at us as they were with the naval aviators. The only thing we had going for us was that the aviators were Fortunate Sons, else they’d be working for a living on the seas of Proxima at Barney’s.

Then something beautiful happened. The first copter came low out of 35th Street just north of us. Missile lock warnings appeared and the hull reverberated to the sound of railgun rounds. From the top of the building on the corner of Fifth and 35th I could see something thrown off the roof. It seemed to blossom and expand as it fell. It took a while for my brain to understand what it was, surprised as I was by this low-tech approach. It seemed to happen very slowly as the high-tensile steel net opened and landed on the rotors of the copter, tangling itself in them. The copter seemed to hang there for a while. I watched it try and fold its rotors away and move to jet, but the blades were too entangled. The copter dropped, battering itself off the side of the building in a shower of rubble, before disappearing into the water beneath.

Then I saw one of the most insane things I have ever seen. The final copter, its nose down, predatory, crept around the Empire State Building at about level with the sixtieth floor. I saw the missile lock warnings appear one after another. It was over Fifth Avenue now. Rivid caught what was happening on one of the sled’s external cameras and zoomed in so we could see perfectly. A figure exploded through plate glass sixty floors above the ground, about fifty-five storeys above the water. The three of us in the back watched in shock.

The figure cleared the sixty or so feet to the craft and grabbed the fuselage of the copter. Rivid closed in on the figure. It did not look human but I recognised the monster clinging to the side of the aircraft. I could see the terrified face of the jacked-in aviator. I could see where the monster’s claws had dug into the copter’s armour, providing him with purchase. Balor leant back. In his free hand he held some kind of collapsible spear. I watched as he rammed it through the armour and into the cockpit. I saw the pilot scream. Balor pulled his spear out through the hole he’d made. The copter lurched violently and began to spin towards the east side of Fifth away from the broken-topped Empire State Building.

We watched as Balor let go of the copter and dropped, positioning himself into a dive and disappearing beneath the water. Achingly slowly, the copter seemed to cross Fifth and fly into another building, transforming itself into wreckage before it plummeted into the water, bent and broken. That more than anything drove it home to me that Balor was maybe more than just a scary-looking cyborg.