War in Heaven (3 page)

After a worldwide televised argument with Rolleston and Vincent Cronin, the Cabal’s corporate mouthpiece, the good Major and the Grey Lady made a concerted effort to kill us. In Buck’s case they succeeded. In what felt like a one-sided exchange of violence it also appeared that the Major was somehow augmented with Themtech. He was pretty much walking through railgun fire.

A lot of pissed-off people’s secrets had been revealed. There were also a lot of people baying for the Cabal’s blood. As most of the Cabal were fat old men being kept alive by machinery they weren’t too hard for the vigilante crowds to deal with.

Ambassador had told us that They wanted peace. We wanted peace. Hurray, the war’s over. Except Rolleston and Cronin got away. They escaped in next-generation frigates using Themtech, supported by frighteningly good hackers who we think were using technology derived from Project Demiurge. The frigates, which we’re now apparently calling the Black Squadrons, made for the four colonial systems of Sirius, Lalande, Barnard’s Star and Proxima. We believed they planned to take over the comms networks in each system with Demiurge, which would mean that they controlled the information in them, which would in turn help them take command of humanity’s colonial military. We also thought they were going to try and use a Themtech-derived biological agent developed by Project Crom to infect, subjugate and control Them in the Sirius system. And that is how I ended up going back there, my least favourite place but where my mind kept returning to.

We went to the Sirius system for other reasons. Maybe it was because I was dying of radiation poisoning at the time or maybe it was just because Morag really wanted to go. I was surprised by how it was actually worse this time than all my previous visits. Suited in Mamluk exo-armour we performed extravehicular activity – we exited a perfectly functional spacecraft and infiltrated the Dog’s Teeth. The Dog’s Teeth is an asteroid belt and was home base to the largest concentration of Them in the Sirius system. Our plan was to find the Crom virus/spores and stop them from infecting Them.

Morag had a different plan. With the remnants of Ambassador living in her neural cybernetics, she wanted to communicate with Them. She left us.

What we didn’t know was that when Rolleston attacked us in the Spoke he had infected Gregor with Crom. He had effectively turned Gregor into a slave plague-bearing weapon. We got compromised. The billions of Them there decided to kill us. That I understood. Gregor attempting to assimilate and warp the flesh of Them and infect Them with the Crom virus so they could be controlled by Rolleston and Cronin was more of a surprise.

Balor died. He finally opened his bad old eye. Whatever weapon he had behind the patch nearly succeeded in killing Gregor. Nearly wasn’t enough. Still, the old monster had given himself the warrior’s ending he’d always wanted. It was Gibby who killed Gregor. He was flying the
Spear
, our ship. He’d forsaken stealth and flown into the Dog’s Teeth taking fire every inch of the way but managed to make it to Gregor and detonate his payload and engines. Sanitising the area. I’d never seen anything like what Balor or Gibby had done. I thought the days of actions like that had long since gone, if they’d ever really been.

So instead of looking at peace we were looking at war between humanity. More than two hundred and fifty years after we swore we’d never do this to ourselves again. After we’d decided that the cost was too great we were looking at one half of humanity fighting the other. And it was our fault. Actually it wasn’t; it was the Cabal’s. It was Rolleston’s and Cronin’s. We were just the catalyst.

Gregor’s betrayal had hurt. A lot. But even though the monster had had his warped features, it had been Rolleston’s demon – he had been programmed. My friend hadn’t done this. My friend had died in the Spoke when Rolleston had stabbed him in the head and injected Crom into his hybrid physiology. Rolleston had tried to kill me so many times. He badly needed to die. It wasn’t so much revenge, though that would be good. It just really needed doing, though not by me.

We’d played long odds and won. Or some of us had. By ‘won’ I mean we were still alive. We were on the eve of a new war between humans, but my fight was over. We’d more than done our bit surely? Someone else’s turn. It wasn’t just that I was tired of it, though I was. It was that I knew I was about one gunfight with someone who knew what they were doing from being dead. I’d never had much luck, none of us had – there wasn’t much around – but I’d pushed what I had way too far.

Morag disagreed. She wanted to see this through to the end. She used words that only the young and terminally optimistic use, like responsibility. Or maybe she wasn’t optimistic. Maybe she wanted to die. After all, she’d been sold into a life of prostitution by her mum for crystal. She’d had even less luck than the rest of us. Why push it? But she did. I couldn’t do it any more. I thought she would cry when I told her that. I didn’t want to make her cry, though God knows I’d done enough of that. It’s just nice to know there’s someone who cares enough, about anything, to still cry. But her eyes were cybernetic now. Like the rest of us, this never-fucking-ending war was making her sell her humanity piece by cybernetic piece.

My war was over.

Well maybe there was just one last bit of business. One of the tribes of Crawling Town were a bunch of pricks called the Wait, a skinhead monastic order originally from Oregon. They followed some bullshit pre-FHC credo to do with racial purity. For some bizarre reason they seemed to think that the white race is different from all the others. As if we didn’t have enough reasons to kill each other – food, money, anger, etc. – we apparently have to go and invent completely spurious ones.

These arseholes were led by a nasty, should-have-been-aborted, piece-of-shit hacker called Messer. He’d decreed that I wasn’t racially pure. I’m a quarter Thai and three-quarters Scots, more proud of both now. His response to my lack of purity was to crucify me on the back of a dune buggy and have me taken for a ride through a high-radiation nuke crater. I caught a big dose. He’d killed me slowly. Left me to die painfully of radiation poisoning.

Morag, Pagan, Mudge and Rannu rescued me with the aid of some of the lords of Crawling Town. One of these was Papa Neon, head of Big Neon Voodoo, the most powerful gang in Crawling Town. The other was Mrs Tillwater, a borderline serial killer and possible cannibal. She ran the First Baptist Church of Austin Texas, which, despite the name, was also a gang or possibly a woman’s auxiliary, maybe both. Because the Wait were a Crawling Town gang the rescue took the form of diplomacy. Well, diplomacy through the medium of gun-pointing and threats. We weren’t allowed to deal with the Wait violently because we were outsiders.

Mudge, Rannu and I were here to remedy their existence. My last battle.

A car appeared out of the dust in front of us. I braked slightly, watching the ghost of the sensor reading of the large truck directly behind me on the topographic map overlaid on my IVD. I didn’t want it to get close. The car in front demonstrated why.

I watched the driver swerve to avoid the huge armoured wheel rolling through the dust on his right side. He overcompensated, misjudging his clearance on the left, and ended up caught between two of the wheels on one of the Wait’s military-surplus personnel carriers. The car, which looked way to fragile to be out here, got snarled up in the armour plate and dragged up into the wheel arch. Trapped between the two wheels it was crushed like an egg.

It was very fast. Mudge was watching with rapt attention. Pieces of the car rained down on our own vehicle. I checked the map and moved the steering wheel just enough to avoid hitting the wreckage still caught up in the personnel carrier’s wheels. I gave the car a command through the link jacked into one of the four plugs on the back of my neck. It accelerated slightly, keeping us out of trouble.

You had to know how to drive to be in the middle of the city-sized convoy that was Crawling Town. If you drove on the outskirts then you risked being picked off by the scavengers that accompanied it.

‘Shit,’ Mudge breathed. ‘Want me to drive?’

‘I’d like you to learn properly,’ I answered back. Sounding surly to myself.

Mudge glanced over at me. ‘What’s your problem?’

The last time the Wait had got the drop on me. Now we were ready for them, armed. I had Rannu, an experienced and capable ex-SAS operator, and Mudge, who’d gone out with us enough that he may as well have joined the Regiment, backing me up. We were going to do this clean. Get rid of some completely excess humanity before the lords of Crawling Town even knew we were there. So why was I so pissed off.

‘God?’ I sub-vocalised. Mudge was watching me.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Mudge asked. That pissed me off.

‘Yes, Jakob,’ God answered. He was everywhere now. To me he sounded like a hundred soothing mellifluous voices talking to me at once. The amusing thing was that all the Wait had to do was ask God where we were, and under the parameters of behaviour that we’d set up God would have to tell them. We were hoping that the Wait had not thought to ask. Though if I’d pissed off someone with my skill set I’d be asking pretty regularly.

‘I told you I quit,’ I snapped at Mudge. I shouldn’t be having nicotine withdrawal because my internal systems should have scrubbed the poison out, but I still badly wanted a cigarette. Mudge’s desperate chain-smoking, drinking and doing drugs wasn’t helping. It was like he was making up for lost time. After all, despite his repeated requests to synthesise them, smokes, drink and drugs had been in short supply back in the Sirius system. Even food had been trial and error and not something I enjoyed thinking about.

Of course, I could check to see if anyone was asking about us. Checking on operational security in a world that didn’t have any, thanks to us. That would have made sense.

‘Where is she?’ I asked. Or instead I could pine for my estranged not-quite-girlfriend.

‘I do not know,’ God answered. So much for omniscience.

‘Quitting is a mistake,’ Mudge opined. ‘We all need coping mechanisms.’

‘Is that not quite difficult for you? To not know?’ I sub-vocalised to God.

‘You talking to Rannu?’ Mudge asked.

‘No. Has it occurred to you that you have too many coping mechanisms?’

Mudge’s features suddenly brightened.

‘It does suggest a certain amount of effort on her part to avoid surveillance,’ God answered.

‘Could she have left the system?’ I was worried she would try and go to one of the colonies in a misguided attempt to help.

‘Prostitutes!’ Mudge shouted, much to my irritation. ‘After we’ve killed these cunts we should go and find some hookers! Some really dirty ones.’

My jaw clenched and my cybernetic hand tightened its grip on the steering wheel, crushing it slightly.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,’ Mudge said without the slightest hint of contrition. He had been thinking; he had been looking for a response.

‘As I told you before, Jakob, I do not believe she could have left the system without me knowing.’

‘So where do you think she is?’ I asked. Trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

‘Again, the data I have suggests that she is in New Mexico somewhere.’ The good thing about God was that he never got impatient, no matter how many times we had this conversation.

‘Are we doing this or do you just want to talk to God about your ex-girlfriend?’ Mudge asked, an edge in his voice.

‘She’s not—’ I started.

‘Your girlfriend or your ex? Focus, Jake.’ Mudge always used the contraction of my name when he wanted to get a rise out of me.

‘We’ve got arseholes to kill.’ I ran my fingers through my hair. Was it still my hair?

‘Jake?’ Mudge asked.

‘Abort. Abort. Abort,’ I said over the tac net.

‘Fuck’s sake!’ Mudge slammed his fist down on the dash before angrily taking another swig from his now nearly ever-present bottle of vodka.

‘Say again, over?’ Rannu was too professional to let his surprise be heard over the comms.

‘Abort. Abort. Abort,’ I repeated.

Mudge shook his head. ‘You are such a fucking pussy.’ He seemed genuinely angry with me. Instead of caring I slewed the car violently to the right, slipping it under the trailer of an articulated lorry. Mudge shouted out in surprise.

‘Let’s get out of Crawling Town,’ I said over the tac net.

‘Roger that, over,’ Rannu answered.

‘God,’ Mudge said loudly, ‘could you play my friend’s ever-so-pathetic most recent conversation with you back, please?’

Every single fucking time. I had started grinding my teeth since I’d quit smoking. I was doing it now. The recording of my conversation with God started over the car’s speaker system. I began to drive even more erratically. Mudge swore as he spilled vodka all over himself.

When we’d discussed the idea of God and what he should do – always telling the truth, complete transparency – it had seemed like a good idea. No privacy whatsoever was less good. We’d also completely underestimated the annoying uses that Mudge could put God to.

‘So where we going? New Mexico?’ Mudge asked scornfully. The drive through the city-sized convoy had taken a while despite my suicidal speed and manoeuvring. Even then we’d only got clipped a couple of times. On the way out some of the outriding parasites had shown an interest in us. They got less interested after I’d sideswiped a trike into some wreckage.