Veteran (54 page)

‘What do you think?’ I asked Mudge.

‘Well, they’ve stopped and locked us in for a reason,’ Mudge said. ‘I can’t think it’ll be anything good.’ In retrospect it was kind of obvious what they were intending to do. I think we knew at some level but were refusing to admit it to ourselves, though this wasn’t a problem for Vicar.

‘They intend to override the external airlock doors and space all here,’ Vicar said as he exited his trance.

‘What’ve you got in your head?’ the SEAL signalman asked.

Vicar ignored him. He gave time for denial mixed with assertions of his fragile mental health to run its course through the assembled soldiers.

‘You sure?’ I asked him. He nodded. It was enough for me.

‘Why?’ the other SEAL women asked.

‘There are too many here who know truths. The red horseman who is war and the devil who is lies are enemies of the righteous,’ Vicar said. It worried me that this made sense.

‘Rolleston?’ Mudge asked. I shrugged. People had overheard the question.

‘This is your fault?’ someone asked. I recognised him. He was Regiment and so were his friends.

‘Yeah turn on us, that’ll help,’ Mudge said.

‘It is my fault as well,’ Vicar said. ‘Though you deny me I have seen the face of the devil and God. I understood Their sacred geometry. I know the idolatrous cathedral of Their information architecture, a tool for evil to test humanity. It is the fruit on the tree, it is knowledge and will damn all.’

The worrying thing is I was beginning to wonder what if all the mad people weren’t mad. What if they just knew stuff?

‘Shut the fuck up, madman,’ someone in the crowd yelled.

‘You’re not listening, are you?’ the SEAL signalman said. ‘They want him dead because he knows things.’

Vicar nodded at the SEAL’s words.

‘So we offer you up; maybe they’ll let us live,’ the Regiment guy said. So much for regimental loyalty, I thought.

‘Yeah, that’ll work,’ Mudge said.

‘Worth a try,’ the guy said evenly. Here we go again.

‘Don’t be so fucking naive,’ Reb snapped. ‘People out there want to kill us and you want to start a fight in here?’

‘Yeah, if it gets us out of here,’ my fellow trooper replied.

‘The soldiers of Christ are a danger. We all know too much and we all fight with too much righteous fury. We are like a heavenly host: our burning swords will not become ploughshares,’ Vicar said, before turning to the SEAL signalman who‘d been drawing on his flesh with a shank only hours before. ‘They will have to send a signal to open the gates to the void. We will meet them in heaven with swords in our hand,’ he said, a fanatic’s glint in his eye. The SEAL seemed to give this some thought.

‘They’ll have thought of that. If the worst comes to the worst they can either blow open the doors or just jettison the whole module and let the life support run out.’

‘They’ve shut down the life support!’ someone shouted from the rear of the crowd. That would explain why my internal systems were assisting with breathing and it was suddenly getting very cold in here.

‘The best we can hope for is to delay them for a while,’ the signalman said.

‘We need to get through this airlock,’ Reb said, patting the airlock door for emphasis.

‘The only way through from this side would be to cut it or blow it; the mechanism’s fucked,’ the signalman said. We wasted some time making sure we didn’t have any explosives or cutting torches.

‘From this side?’ Vicar asked.

‘There’s a manual pump to open it on the ship side,’ the signalman said.

‘And I hold the keys of death and Hades,’ Vicar said. ‘One must cross over,’ he said. Everyone was staring at him now.

‘See if you can explain what you mean without pissing everyone else off with this religious bullshit,’ Reb said to him. Instead of answering he reached down the back of his soiled combat trousers and began ferreting around.

‘Have you got your hand up your arse?’ Mudge demanded incredulously.

‘You jealous?’ Reb asked, grinning, and definitely scoring points with me. With a grunt Vicar removed his hand from his combats.

‘You enjoy that?’ Mudge asked. Triumphantly Vicar presented us with a brown fist, which he opened to display a shit-covered piece of technology.

‘What is it?’ Reb asked.

‘It’s a lock burner,’ I said with a sinking feeling. Vicar tried to hand it to me but I recoiled from him. ‘Why the fuck are you giving it to me?’ I demanded, though I knew the answer.

‘He who overcomes will not be hurt at all by the second death,’ Vicar said.

‘Do you always carry a lock burner in your arse?’ Mudge asked.

Suddenly there were a lot of people looking at me expectantly. ‘Thanks for singling me out.’ I said.

‘We’re going to die in vacuum anyway.’ Mudge said.

‘You want to do it?’ I asked.

‘Fuck no. I’m not a rory tory combat soldier.’ Mudge said. I glared at him.

‘We don’t have much time.’ the SEAL signalman said.

‘Well then, you go and fucking do it.’ I said. I really did not want to and I didn’t understand why I was the one picked out. There were lots of special forces types here. It seemed that because Vicar had presented me with the lock burner everyone had decided I was the one.

‘Because you are the righteous—’ Vicar began. My blades slid out almost of their own volition, it seemed.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I spat at him. ‘One more religious piece of shit out of you and I swear you’ll meet your God right now.’

He stared into my black lenses. Suddenly there was no madness in those wild eyes. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said in careful and even tones. We seemed to spend a long time staring at each other, coming to some kind of unspoken agreement that I’m still not sure I fully understand.

‘Can you hack the external airlock?’ I asked. Vicar nodded. ‘Shit! Fuck!’ I shouted. I was really scared. ‘I’ll still have to fight my way to the other side of that door,’ I said, pointing at the internal airlock that led to the Santa Maria. Nobody said anything. ‘Does anybody even know where the Santa Maria’s external airlock is?’ I said. I saw that there was a text-file icon flashing on my internal visual display; it was from Vicar. I opened it, seeing a schematic for the Santa Maria with the external airlock highlighted. ‘If I manage to get the door open you can’t just kill everyone,’ I said to the pissed-off assembled squaddies around me.

‘If you get that door open just leave the rest to us,’ Reb said. I took one last look around, swore again and made my way towards the external airlock. I heard a soft thump as Vicar fell to the ground as he tranced in again.

I grabbed a fire extinguisher from its bracket on the wall as I strode past it. I saw the door to the external airlock slide open.

Augmented humans can last very briefly in vacuum. I had a small internal oxygen supply, a reinforced superstructure and internal systems that could, to a degree, cope with the bends. It was still the worst thirty seconds of my life. I can’t do it justice: the cold was so cold it burnt. My joints were agony. I used the spray from the fire extinguisher as propulsion. I don’t know how I managed to hold on and clamber up the
Santa Maria.
At one point I caught a glimpse of the stars. Against the curvature of the hull I seemed to be at an odd angle. For a moment there was peace and beauty. I was pretty sure I’d died.

I have no idea how I got to the airlock or how I managed to work the shit-stained lock burner. They found me sobbing, gasping and laughing hysterically on the floor of the airlock. Months later I’d see the footage at my court martial. I didn’t recognise myself. It was like a devil had been put in flesh that vaguely resembled mine.

My blades found their way into the stomachs of the two MPs. On the footage I watched this monster that looked like me get shot, get shot a lot, as he walked through the
Santa Maria,
killing everyone he found. I had been shouting one name over and over again. Rolleston. It wasn’t confirmed until the trial that Rolleston had given the order, but somehow I’d known and I’d been looking for him, but he wasn’t on board. It was a grinning blood-covered corpse that opened the internal airlock door to the cargo bay and collapsed.

Back home there were sirens for our welcome. We‘d talked about running but we had nowhere to run. Mudge had convinced us it would be okay. He’d broadcast the story as soon as we’d entered the Sol system. We were arrested when we docked at High Nyota Mlima but by then public opinion was with us and Mudge had arranged a lawyer for me through some media contact.

The riot on the
Santa Maria
that followed our escape from the hold wasn’t much better than my rampage. We were all dishonourably discharged but no further action was taken. We could’ve been shot for mutiny. We were in the wrong because there was no law or military regulation that said we couldn’t all be ejected into space. There is now. Mudge made sure, despite the Official Secrets Act, that Rolleston was disgraced. Though in the end that just seemed to drive him further into the black spectrum of covert ops.

When I met Vicar again in Dundee he was saner, but the one thing I remember more than any other thing about the trial was him - wild-eyed, drool dripping off his unkempt bushy black beard, screaming at Rolleston. It was the same thing over and over again. ‘I know where you live - where Satan has his throne!’

29

Atlantis

It was the speed of it that got to me. It wasn’t subtle. They weren’t trying to rescue anyone. They just wanted to kill everyone in here. At least I think they did.

Buck and Gibby had finally stopped playing and had grabbed their weapons as they turned towards the entrance to the docking arm. They’d booby-trapped the transport but that wouldn’t have proved much of a challenge to someone like the Grey Lady.

Mudge had his replica AK in hand and was making for cover. I had my shotgun to my shoulder and was moving low and quickly towards Morag and Pagan. The overpressure wave from the security door being blown in knocked me off my feet. Gregor remained in place somehow. He raised the Retributor railgun to his shoulder. I was starting to get up when they triggered the automatic grenade launchers. I’m not sure that even during the war I’d seen so many grenades go off at once. They fired flash grenades, EM charges and multi-spectrum hot smoke grenades.

All of us bar Morag had flash compensation in our eyes and dampeners in our ears. These can be overwhelmed with enough loud noise and bright flashes, and they were. Morag was blinded and deafened immediately. The hot smoke interfered with both the thermographics and low-light as our vision struggled to return. In theory the smoke should make things difficult for them as well. In theory.

Some of this I experienced; the rest of it we managed to piece together after the fact. I heard Gregor start to fire his Retributor as I was desperately waiting for my vision to return. There was an explosion behind me as the door to the airlock was blown open. That was okay; Balor was there.

My vision returned to a room full of hot smoke. I could make out Gregor as a warped silhouette. My dampeners managed to work enough to tune down the long hypersonic rip of the railgun’s rapid fire. I couldn’t see what he was firing at. Rannu could. He fired two grenades from the grenade launcher on his gauss carbine at the entrance hall before swinging around to fire at the door to the docking arm.

I was searching for a target through the smoke, my vision and hearing still not fully working. I could hear Mudge, Buck and Gibby firing into the docking arm; no return fire yet. Rolleston came stalking out of the smoke ahead of me. There was the bright white flash of his plasma gun firing. He seemed to stagger and stop. My mind couldn’t quite process the information, and I did something I hadn’t done since my first firefight: I froze. Gregor and Rolleston were exchanging shots. Gregor was putting railgun round after railgun round into the Major, and he in turn was putting plasma round after plasma round into Gregor. In silhouette I could see bits of flesh being blown off them but both remained standing.

Pagan shamed me into action. He appeared by my side, his laser carbine shouldered as he fired at Rolleston. I put my shotgun to my shoulder and finally triggered off a burst. Gregor dropped. I froze again. Rolleston moved very quickly through the smoke, wired so much higher than me. He fired the plasma weapon repeatedly but he was aiming past us. Behind me I heard a cry of pain.

‘Balor’s down!’ Mudge yelled. I almost gave up then, almost turned the shotgun on myself. Rolleston had put down our two scariest guys just like that.

Rolleston shifted his aim. I didn’t hear anything so it must have been the Spectre he fired. Later I’d find out that he’d put three short bursts into Rannu’s face. With a cry Rannu fell back against the wall, most of his face gone.

And only now did Josephine make her presence known. Mudge showed me the footage after. Buck was standing too close to the door to the docking arm - rookie error, but then he was a pilot. Josephine had come through low. A swirl in the smoke that you had to look hard to see, she was wearing some form of reactive camouflage. She kicked low from the ground. Her foot went through Buck’s shotgun, snapping it. The force of her kick picked him up off his feet and sent him crashing against the wall.

Still crouched low she kicks Mudge in the knee; his fast, pricey prosthetic leg snaps like a twig. He falls to the ground, triggering off a burst at her as he does, but she’s not there any more. Disturbances in the air show her pouncing onto Buck as he tries to get up. Her hand becomes outlined in blood as it rapidly pulls back and strikes him in the face again and again. Her fingers break through his dermal armour and pierce his brain. Only then does she think to bring her laser carbine to bear.