Veteran (41 page)

He was stalking from one side of the small room to the other like a caged animal. His eyes were black pools with no discernible iris. They looked like they were made of the same liquid that constituted the bodies of Them, like Morag’s had in my dream. He was taller, leaner, yet somehow much more powerful-looking, but his physiology was all wrong. He looked somehow lopsided, like he had too many bones in some places and not enough in others. His fingers were longer, with too many joints, and ending in long nails of what looked like black chitin. What I had initially thought was shoulder-length straight black hair I realised was tendrils of the black alien liquid. I tried to smother my disgust as some of his hair appeared to be moving independently. He kept his eyes on me as he stalked backwards and forwards. If he recognised me at all then he was pissed off.

‘Morag?’ I said. There was just the sound of crying. ‘Morag!’ I said more sharply.

‘Yes?’ she answered, taking heaving breaths.

‘I need you to get into their internal net and get me anything you can.’ Mudge drew up next to me looking through the glass at what had become of his friend. He was quiet for a while.

‘Shit,’ he finally said. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked as Balor, covered in blood, walked past us and up to the clear plastic window, staring at Gregor.

Finally I saw the net feed on my visual display flicker back to life. Black Annis standing in a landscape of blackened glass, obsidian, I think it’s called. Much of it was burning. The hag icon stuck out, her cold blue skin contrasting with the black and red background.

‘There’s not a great deal left,’ Annis’ modulated graveyard voice rasped over the comms net.

‘Pagan?’ I asked, still staring at Gregor, who was now staring back at Balor.

‘On it,’ Pagan said. Moments later I saw his idealised Druidic icon appear on the apocalyptic landscape of their internal net. I assumed the virtual flames were the aftermath of an attempted purge. I could see ghost-like shadows in ragged cowls drifting across the jagged obsidian terrain.

Balor turned to me, a bloodstained grin on his predatory maw.

‘I want to fight him,’ he said simply. I ignored him and turned to Rannu.

‘Bring one of the scientists over,’ I told him. All the scientists were kneeling down facing the wall, clutching their ankles. Rannu gestured at one of them with his gauss carbine and the young man staggered over to the operating table. I drew the Mastodon from its shoulder holster. I noticed he’d wet himself, another normal reaction to all of this. I was almost envious of his fear. Or would’ve been if it hadn’t been for the cold, clamminess and discomfort of wetting yourself. He was crying.

‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid you’re the hostage that has to die to make the others cooperate,’ I told him. It wasn’t that I wanted to shoot him; I just couldn’t see what difference one more would make.

‘No ... no, please, please don’t ...’ he managed to say before sinking to his knees. I needed him just this side of hysterical.

‘Then can you help me?’ I asked him. ‘We don’t have a lot of time, so the moment mine is wasted I have to kill you and start again, okay?’ My voice sounded even and reasonable. He nodded through the tears.

‘When you work on him out here,’ I said, tapping the operating table I was sat on, ‘how do you sedate him?’

‘We feed it with a special protein formula once a day. When we want to take it out we add programmed nanites to its food. They enter its system and send a signal triggering a kind of inert trance we’ve programmed into its bio ware.’

‘Call him
it
once more and I’ll fucking shoot you myself,’ Mudge snarled. I held up my hand. I looked at Gregor. He was standing still, just staring at Balor, his head moving slightly as he studied the heavy-conversion cyborg. I could no longer ignore the similarity between my old friend and one of Them. Was I looking at Gregor or just a facade the Ninja had made of its victim? I didn’t know.

‘We could try talking to him,’ Mudge suggested in a tone that implied even he didn’t believe that would work. I was also pretty sure that giving him his dinner wasn’t going to work either.

‘Let him out,’ Balor suggested. I ignored him and instead looked down at the terrified scientist kneeling in front of me.

‘What do you do if he breaks out?’ I asked.

‘He can’t; the containment chamber—’ he said, controlling his sobbing somewhat better.

‘Yeah, I get that,’ I said, interrupting him irritably. ‘But you’ll have contingency procedures should it ever happen.’ He thought about this. ‘I’m going to need to hurry you up,’ I said, waving the Mastodon at him.

‘We load the same nanite serum into hypodermics and shoot him with it.’

‘Outstanding. Mudge, help this guy find the serum and a dart gun please,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him out?’ Balor said. The excitement in his voice was nearly sexual.

‘Not to play with,’ I told him. He snorted in derision. ‘Rannu, move the rest of the prisoners to the opposite end of the room.’

‘You’re not keeping us in here if you open that room!’ An authoritarian female voice shouted. I turned to see a hard-faced, middle-aged woman, also wearing a lab coat, looking at me with only a trace of fear on her face.

‘Your choice is that or a bullet in the head,’ I said. She was right: I didn’t want them in the room, but I had no choice because I needed all my shooters in the same place.

‘Morag, Pagan?’ I said. On the net feed I could see them stalking through the burning obsidian ruins of a building that put me in mind of some kind of temple. They were collecting pieces of shattered obsidian that had moving arcane-looking symbols on them. Behind them I could see the smouldering remains of several of the cowl-wearing, ghost-like shadows.

‘We’re just about—’ Pagan began. The window went black and then it filled with static as the net feed was severed. I turned round to where Morag and Pagan were sitting on the floor against the wall. Morag was jerking and fitting, drooling blood from her eyes and ears. I swung off the table, bringing my Mastodon down to touch the head of the scientist in front of me.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know!’ he howled, obviously terrified and obviously telling the truth. I spun round, bringing the gun up to bear on the hard-faced woman who’d spoken up. She was looking my way as I walked towards her.

‘You! What the fuck happened to them?’

‘You wouldn’t shoo—’ The Mastodon went off, her head exploding all over a stainless-steel bench. The prisoners rather predictably started screaming.

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ I shouted uselessly. I was looking along the prisoners trying to see one who was obviously a signals person or a hacker.

Pagan came alive again and immediately turned to Morag. He connected a wire from one of his plugs to hers. It was the surge of anger at this repeat violation that reminded me of what had happened when Ambassador had tried to feed her all the information he’d taken.

‘Pagan, what’s happening?’ I asked, my revolver still extended. Rannu was trying to calm the prisoners, pushing the odd over-excitable one back down against the wall. Mudge was holding two dart guns in one hand and some very sturdy-looking hypodermic needles in the other. He was looking at Morag, his mouth hanging open in shock. Balor was still staring at Gregor. The net feed in my visual display was still just showing static.

Morag woke up screaming. Her eyes flickered open and they were full of blood. Pagan, his face gaunt and drawn, looked terrified.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked. Morag’s head twitched round to look at me. She said nothing but tried to clear the blood from her eyes. I turned to Pagan.

‘What happened?’ He just shook his head and looked over at Morag. Rannu was at Morag’s side, examining her eyes and ears. Pissed off, I holstered the revolver and unslung my shotgun to cover the increasingly nervous prisoners.

‘Jakob, if we’re going to do this then we need to do it now,’ Mudge said. Everything was unravelling: Morag was down, Rannu was distracted, Balor was doing his own thing and Pagan appeared to be in shock.

‘Pagan.’ He ignored me. ‘Pagan!’ I shouted. He looked up at me. ‘Get over here and cover them.’ He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. ‘Now!’ I shouted with the voice of a thousand parade grounds that all NCOs remembered. Pagan snapped out of it and took my place. I turned round and caught the dart gun Mudge had thrown to me. The hypodermic had less in common with a needle and more in common with a dart from a gauss weapon. I checked the guns. They were smartlinked and effectively gauss rifles. I guessed they needed the velocity to penetrate its - his, I corrected myself - thick skin or whatever passed for skin in his radically altered physiology.

‘Balor, get away from the glass,’ I told him but he ignored me. ‘Balor!’ It didn’t work this time. ‘Fuck it.’ I turned to the terrified scientist who’d given me the info. ‘You, open the door and then get to the back of the room with the others.’

He began to protest, as did some of the other prisoners.

‘Shut up!’ Pagan shouted. He still sounded scared. I didn’t have time to think about what had happened in the net.

‘Do it now!’ I shouted at the scientist and swung the dart gun around to point at him. He stood up and scurried over to a control panel. Some of his fellow prisoners were shouting at him not to do it. Pagan screamed at them again. Gregor had watched the scientist move over to the panel and had in turn stalked expectantly over to the door of his containment chamber. Balor turned and watched him go but thankfully stayed out of our field of fire.

‘Rannu, if you’re finished I could do with another shooter here,’ I said.

‘I’m taking Morag out of here,’ he told me. I wished I’d thought of that. There was the hiss of the door’s seal breaking and then it swung open. Gregor’s twisted silhouette stood in the doorway backlit by the harsh strip-lighting of his cell. He stepped over the lip of the door. I took an involuntary step back. He opened his mouth and screamed. It was like the sound of the spires in my dream, except he wasn’t singing, he was angry, and it was mixed with a very human scream of rage. Mudge and I fired. We both hit. Gregor didn’t seem to register the twin impacts. Both of us dropped the dart guns and moved back, bringing our own weapons to bear. The prisoners screamed and heedless of Pagan’s laser carbine began scrambling over each other to get to the door.

I think Balor thought it was Christmas. His trident extended, snapping into place as he moved purposefully towards Gregor. Gregor swung towards him. Even his movements were inhuman, his strange gait more like Them than us. Balor stabbed forward one-handed with his trident. The three-pronged weapon pierced Gregor’s chest though he gave no indication of noticing it. Balor forced him back into the corner by the open door. Roaring, Balor leapt into the air, his free hand swinging back as he prepared to claw the pinioned hybrid.

I saw Gregor’s black fingernails grow and solidify until each of them was an eight-inch-long black blade. With his right hand Gregor grasped the shaft of the trident and pushed it back, tearing it out of his flesh. His left reached up, moving with the sort of speed I’d only ever seen once before, on the night Gregor had been taken. He caught Balor’s wrist with his left and letting go of the Trident swung upwards with his clawed right hand. The blow tore into Balor’s heavily armoured stomach and chest, halting and then reversing his trajectory. Gregor clawed him with so much force that Balor went crashing back into the operating table.

Immediately Balor was up as Gregor closed on him. He swung with one clawed hand and then the other. He tore rents in Gregor’s skin, revealing black liquid below the surface that immediately started to knit the torn flesh back together. I think that was when I stopped believing that my friend was alive and that I was looking at anything other than an alien wearing the distorted and tortured flesh of Gregor’s body. I felt like he’d been hollowed out. I dropped the shotgun, letting it hang on its sling as I drew my Tyler, stretching it out in a two-handed shooter’s stance for maximum accuracy. I was going to kill this mockery and then kill every fucking person who worked here. I didn’t care if I was still here when reinforcements arrived; I’d kill as many of them as I could as well.

Balor was slammed against the stainless-steel wall. He howled as alien claws pierced his side, pinning him to the wall. I was about to fire when the pistol was forced up and Mudge was suddenly in front of him.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted.

‘It’s not him!’ I screamed in Mudge’s face, trying to break free.

Gregor staggered back for no good reason I could see. Balor used the opportunity to push him back further while repeatedly clawing him in the face. Each time Gregor’s distorted features were torn off, the black liquid began re-knitting the flesh and then Balor’s claws tore them open again. Gregor sank to the floor. I lowered my pistol, sure that Balor would do the job for me, but suddenly Gregor struck out. The blow sent Balor flying back into the air so high he broke through one of the hanging strip lights and slammed into the ceiling, before bouncing off the wall and landing on the ground.

Gregor stood up but swayed as his facial features reformed. Balor pushed himself to his feet and began striding towards Gregor. As Balor closed with him he swung out with his left with surprising speed. He caught Balor firmly on the face and picked him up off his feet again, sending him over a table and into the wall, hard enough to make a significant dent.

Balor threw the metal table aside and stood up. Gregor swayed again and then sat down hard. His eyes were still black pools but the expression on his face was one of confusion. Balor made for him again, presumably intent on finishing the job. Mudge let go of me.

‘No!’ he shouted at Balor. I wondered why Mudge had his AK-47 in his hands. Balor was ignoring Mudge. I watched in horror as Mudge shouldered the AK-47 and fired a three-round burst, staggering the pirate. Balor stopped and turned to Mudge. He looked furious. He looked inhuman. Gregor’s eyelids flickered and closed over the black liquid pools of his eyes as he slid to the ground. Mudge lowered his smoking AK-47. I saw him swallow before he turned and fled. Balor charged after him but I knew he had no chance of catching Mudge’s cybernetic legs.