War in Heaven (40 page)

‘Spacesuit set up for stealth. I had the maths on a program in my internal systems.’

‘What distance?’

‘Fifteen thousand metres.’

‘The slightest miscalculation,’ I said. I had absently picked up one of a pair of punch daggers and was toying with it. It looked like it was made from black glass. It had some kind of channel leading to the point of the blade.

‘So I didn’t miscalculate. Don’t touch that; it injects a pretty virulent neural toxin.’

For fuck’s sake, I thought, who was this guy? There was no doubt about it – if he played with us then he’d be an asset.

‘Are these glass?’ I asked.

‘Dayside obsidian, volcanic glass from Lalande 2. Sharp as glass but comparable to steel in toughness. Now put it down.’

I put the punch dagger down.

‘So how’d you get in?’ For obvious reasons airlocks, along with the engine room and then the bridge, tended to be the highest-security areas of a ship. On most military and high-security ships you couldn’t access the airlocks externally. I’d only been able to use the airlock on the
Santa Maria
during the mutiny because it was a civilian ship and I had a hacker as good as Vicar backing me up.

‘I spent seven hours stuck to the hull of the ship drilling through it. I nearly froze to death. I sent through a modified snake with a lock burner on the end. The lock burner had a pretty sophisticated spoof program added to it. The spoof program was probably the biggest outlay. It told the ship’s systems that the airlock was still closed. The snake was flush with the drill hole. I just kept on adding sealant around the crack while feeding it through.’

‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that,’ I said. What he’d just told me had huge ramifications for spacecraft security.

‘You guys did it to that star liner back in the twenties, didn’t you?’ He was right: the SAS had attached a vacuum-proofed cargo module to a sensor blind spot on a hijacked luxury system cruiser and cut through the hull to deal with a group of so-called post-human terrorists. I’d studied it in Hereford while I was training. It was one of the few successful boarding actions in space warfare history. Normally the speeds and distances involved were too great. Ships got destroyed before they were boarded or they surrendered. Surrender hadn’t been an option fighting Them.

‘Different circumstances. The ship was docked when they attached the container; also ship security was much more rudimentary then.’

‘So what? You thinking of robbing a ship?’

‘No, I just like knowing how to do things.’

Again he seemed to be studying me. Finally he nodded.

‘Yeah, me too. We done bonding?’

I nodded. ‘Unless you want to let me play with your guns.’

‘Go away. I’m busy.’

The whole trip had been subdued. That happens when people are sure they’re going to die. You either get subdued or overcompensate, but even Mudge couldn’t be bothered with overcompensation.

On the seventh night we had some drinks and some forced conversation. Bar last-minute checks we were as ready as we were ever going to get. Nobody had wanted to hear me play my trumpet. They backed up their opinions on the matter with threats of violence. I didn’t think this was fair. I was sure I was improving.

Mudge confused me by presenting each of us with little animatronic action figures of Major Rolleston, the Grey Lady or Vincent Cronin. I got Rolleston.

‘What the fuck’s this?’ I asked. It was grotesque.

‘Voodoo?’ Pagan asked, laughing.

‘Let’s just remember how big these people are, shall we?’ Mudge told us. ‘This is how the children of Earth look at them, not fucking scary at all.’

‘This is weird,’ I said. Cat was nodding.

Morag held up her little Grey Lady. ‘I don’t know. I think I feel some voodoo coming on,’ she said.

Pagan couldn’t wait to go back to his compartment and trance in with Nuiko, who was with us as a nearly silent holographic ghost whose arms were her crab-like servitors. I wanted her to join us and relax but instead she was the perfect host. She had just as much to lose as the rest of us, except that she would be waiting on her own in the dark. If I was honest with myself, which apparently I didn’t like being, then I would have to admit that Nuiko still made me nervous. It wasn’t just that I’d never managed to have what I would describe as a conversation with her, but that for some reason she reminded me of the Grey Lady. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was the averted eyes.

I wondered how Pagan had managed to break through the polite and distant reserve that she wore as armour. But time can be made to do strange things in sense environments. Perhaps he’d been courting her for months instead of days. I wished him well but worried about the wrench of having to leave her to go and die. Maybe I should have tried to be a bit more optimistic.

Likewise Mudge was in a hurry to disappear into his compartment with the white-noise generator and Merle. He didn’t even get too fucked up, for Mudge. His choice of drug was some low-key euphoric and he only managed a bottle and a half of vodka. He still managed to fall off the catwalk into the crates. I guess appearances have to be maintained.

This left Cat, Morag, so much accompanying awkwardness it seemed to have its own palpable presence in the hold, and myself. Cat sipped from a beer as she peeled the last of the medgel from her wounded back. Occasionally she’d look between Morag and me, smile and shake her head.

Morag didn’t say much and still wouldn’t meet my eyes. In fact some of the time I think she was having a sub-vocal conversation with someone else. Though I couldn’t think who.

‘Well, as much fun as this is, I’m going to get some rack time,’ Cat announced. I’d no idea why she didn’t just say sleep, which would have been more economical. ‘Try and keep it down.’

‘You too,’ I said inanely.

She glanced back at me before disappearing into her compartment. That left Morag. I felt nervous and uncomfortable. I couldn’t read Morag’s expression.

‘I’ve been talking to God a lot,’ Morag said after the silence had stretched on for so long I had considered fleeing back to my compartment.

God, I had forgotten all about him. No, I hadn’t. I’d ignored him, pretended I’d had no time because his problems were so big that I could barely understand him. Talking to God had become too complicated, too difficult. Another friend I’d let down. Tried to hide from. Was he even a friend? I’d had a part, however minor, in his creation, his birth.

‘How is he?’ was the best I could manage.

‘He’s not good, but then you know that. Worse now since he’s met his younger brother. Since Demiurge hurt him, God knows first hand that he wants to commit deicide and hates him. Did you know that? They programmed Demiurge for hate. Why would you do that?’ Her tone was flat. No emotion.

I had no answers for her.

‘I was thinking about what Pagan said about Cronin and Rolleston being programmed, being malfunctioning tools of the Cabal. Just another weapon in the arsenal,’ she continued.

I was lying on the catwalk looking up at the curve of the
Tetsuo Chou
’s hull. I propped myself up and took a swig of Glenmorangie and passed the bottle to Morag. She accepted it, wiped the top of the bottle and took a swig herself.

‘They could have designed them for anything. They could have made Rolleston want to protect, to help. They could have made Cronin want to try and make things better for everyone. Surely that would profit everyone in the end? Instead only a few can profit because control is what’s important. Instead they program for hate. I just don’t get so much suffering for such abstract reasons, and I think we’re going to die because of it,’ she finished.

I had nothing for her. Nothing I could tell her. When she said that she thought she was going to die I felt cold. I felt something bad happen to my stomach and bile burn the back of my throat. It had been Morag who had thought it was going to be all right going to Maw City.

‘I think maybe it’s always been that way,’ I said. ‘Powerful people make decisions and others pay for them. The decisions are either incomprehensible to most people, who just want food, shelter and safety for them and theirs. Mudge reckons it’s simpler than that: he thinks it’s all lies to justify greed. Or possibly sexual inadequacy.’

There was neither warmth nor humour in her smile. She rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow so she could look at me.

‘God, I hate you,’ she said. I preferred it when she was shooting at me. ‘We are not all right. Things are not good between us, and what you did was fucked up for so many different reasons.’

I couldn’t look at her. Even looking away it was like her eyes were burning me. They were judging me. I had been found wanting and couldn’t face their glare. I heard her start to cry. I turned back to look at her. Her face crumpled as she let out a dry sob. I sat up as she crawled over to me. I held her so tightly it must have hurt her. I felt her shake with each sob. She bit me, dug her nails into me.

‘I promised myself I would be strong,’ she finally said, angry with herself. ‘It’s not me. It’s Ambassador. He’s so lonely. So far from his people.’

She was carrying the pain for two.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

She looked up at me. ‘You bastard!’ she spat, so angry again. ‘I hate you and I think you’re the only thing I have really got out here. You know what I did back in Trace’s office …’

‘You saved us, then again with the mech,’ I said.

She hit me. She put power into it but it was at an awkward angle; I was still holding her.

‘You put me into a corpse, back in the Freetown, that mech driver you made me jack into, you fucker. You put me into a corpse after I’d killed for the first time. I killed and then you made me feel the consequences in a dead man’s head.’

I stared at her, appalled. I felt like all the blood was draining from my body, leaving a bag of skin filled with metal and plastic. I’d had no idea.

‘And you’d already made it so I couldn’t talk to you about it.’

She’d killed on the Atlantis Spoke as well, when she’d hacked their systems and used automated weapons to take out a Walker, but it hadn’t been so immediate. She didn’t watch the consequences in front of her eyes. She didn’t end up wearing their blood, and as a result I don’t think she’d faced up to it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up.

‘This is very fucking touching, but some of us are trying to have sex!’ Mudge shouted from his compartment.

Morag’s head whipped round at the voice. She looked so angry, searching for someone to blame. I don’t know why Mudge and Merle had turned off the white-noise generator but I knew why Mudge had shouted. He wanted us to know that everyone not tranced in would hear us. It was a warning. Moments later Morag understood.

‘C’mon,’ she said and took my hand. Hers felt tiny surrounded by the composite material of my prosthetics. The tactile sensors offered my nervous system the facsimile of touch as she dragged me towards her compartment.

Inside was dark. Various things were scattered around on the floor, and I’m sure I stood on some of them as she dragged me down to sit on the smartfoam mattress. I switched to lowlight and illuminated her in green as she came towards me with a jack, reaching behind my neck for one of my plugs. I caught her wrist in my hand.

‘Are you going to kill me?’

She shook her head but didn’t get angry.

‘Let go of me now.’ I did. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? Now we do what I want to do.’

I felt the jack click into my plug. I watched Morag disappear.

I knew this place. It was a jazz club in New York from about a hundred years before the FHC, before the city was flooded. It was called the Cotton Club and at the time booze had been illegal. So of course it flourished. All the greats had played here: Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.

The place was subtly lit, filled with smoke. Tables were set around a dance floor in front of the raised stage. More intimate booths were set into the wall. There was a fully stocked bar against the back wall. The place was empty. Like the tea room, even the smell was right. Or at least how I imagined it would have smelled – wood with alcohol soaked into it, tobacco smoke.

‘I made this for you. I played down some of the more racist parts of the decor,’ Morag said.

I turned at her voice. She was dressed like a flapper. She wore a tasselled dress that came down to just above her knees, some sort of fabric skullcap/hat thing and a string of pearls.

I looked down at myself. I was wearing spats and a linen suit of the era. I even had a hat. Morag would tell me the hat was called a panama.

‘When?’ I asked.

She looked away from me. In here she – we – could cry.

‘After I found out.’

‘Why?’

She smiled as she wiped away the tears. ‘So you could practise without the others killing you.’

I smiled. ‘Can I hold you?’

She did nothing, said nothing for what seemed a very long time, and then she nodded. I moved to her and wrapped my arms around her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve no reason, no excuse; all I’ve got is that I love you and I won’t hurt you again.’