Veteran (35 page)

‘Huh?’ I asked, sounding ever so intelligent.

‘That I have truck with demons.’

‘You mean Them?’

She nodded. Well she did have truck with Them. We were just gambling that They weren’t as bad as we thought They were. Even though that flew in the face of everything I knew about Them.

‘It’s a hacker myth, a sort of anti-Messiah who betrays us to Them. Judas to the entire human race. Vicar said the same thing,’ she said.

‘When?’

‘ "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication." It’s from the Christian Bible, Revelation. I looked it up,’ she said, her voice flat and emotionless. Fucking hacker religious mania. Fucking Vicar.

‘Vicar was always quoting from Revelation. Besides, he was insane.’

‘You know, I don’t think he was,’ she mused. ‘Papa Neon said something similar when you were out of it. He tried to pass it off as a joke but I got the reference.’

‘What the fuck has voodoo got to do with Revelation?’

‘There’s no such thing as voodoo, that was made up for the vizzes. Papa Neon practises a religion called Vodou.’ The word sounded the same to me. ‘Which is west African religious practices influenced by Catholicism.’

‘Really embracing the religious side of hacking, huh?’ I asked.

‘He sees Loa, spirits in the net, and talks with them,’ she continued.

‘And they’ve been talking about you?’

‘Apparently.’ How could I tell her that this was all bullshit? That it was just one story feeding another. We weren’t much beyond burning witches. How much pressure could we bring to bear on this one teenaged girl?

‘And Pagan thinks you’re this ... ?’ I didn’t want to use the word.

‘Whore? Everyone wants to call me a whore.’ As if she didn’t have enough to deal with at the moment. ‘He hasn’t said as much but I can see it in his eyes.’ Then she looked a little embarrassed. ‘Besides, I know he’s been researching it in the net.’ That was odd.

‘And he doesn’t know you know?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’ That meant that she had outwitted an experienced hacker like Pagan. Spied on him and hadn’t been caught. No wonder he was frightened. No wonder we all were.

‘Morag, do you think Ambassador has changed you?’ I asked more forcefully than I’d meant to. She looked up into my lenses.

‘Of course it has, how could it not? And the cyberware in my head’s changed me, and you’ve changed me, and Pagan’s changed me. Ambassador doesn’t control me, he’s so gentle. I don’t think I could explain what it’s like talking to him.’ This was beginning to sound worrying.

‘Ambassador’s in the cube, yeah?’ I asked, trying to keep the mounting concern out of my voice.

‘I think there’s a ghost of him in my neural ware.’ My eyes widened. ‘Relax,’ she said, seeing my response. ‘Its scary, a bit, but all he does is help me with the things I can do. He doesn’t control the way I feel or how I think.’

‘He?’ I asked. She shrugged.

‘Just started thinking of him like that.’ I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about this. I was pretty worried and also jealous of the incredibly intimate relationship she had with this male entity.

‘So you want to have me thingied?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘That thing where they drive demons out.’

‘Exorcised?’ I’d seen it done in the schemes and the Rigs. Usually some wannabe hacker, who’d gotten in over their head when they’d had their first vision and brought something back in their cheap neural ware. Sometimes their religious revelations were just too much for them to handle.

‘Yeah, I really do,’ I said honestly.

‘Why?’ she asked as she took the whisky bottle back from me and took a swig from it. I couldn’t help but think of that as a dumb question.

‘What do you mean why? You have an alien living in your head,’ I said, sounding more reasonable than I felt.

‘So? You didn’t have time to get to know me before, so maybe me is me and Ambassador.’ This was making my head hurt. ‘I’m hoping that’s the Morag you want. Unless you’re like every other fucker, and you don’t know me, and you’ve just made this image of me in the shape of what you want in your head.’ She was looking at me accusingly.

‘Fucked if I know, darling,’ I said laughing. ‘As far as I know it’s you I want.’

‘Well that me comes with an alien in my head, so judge me like you would anyone else you meet. Decide whether you trust me or not,’ she said, and I realised I did. Despite the fact that I probably didn’t trust anyone else other than maybe Mudge. ‘You realise you’re probably the first man I’ve ever actually wanted to have sex with?’ she said. I had to laugh. ‘Don’t laugh at me, you bastard.’ She slapped me on my bandaged wound. My scream caused a lot of the assembled cyberbillys to look our way. Morag was giggling.

‘You shouldn’t say things like that to men,’ I said through gritted teeth as the pain subsided.

‘Why not?’

‘Makes us even more full of ourselves.’

‘I want to be honest,’ she said. ‘Because I need you to know that and bear it in mind.’

‘Half my skin’s falling off,’ I said.

‘Somebody had just set your head on fire the first time I met you; besides, your skin’s not that pretty anyway. Just put it down to me being less shallow than you are.’ And then she kissed me. ‘We need to go somewhere,’ she told me.

I was searching through the boot of our car for the bivouac and the ultrasound rat deterrent. Isn’t romance in the wasteland grand? I found what I was looking for and closed the boot. Mudge was stood there.

‘Pagan okay?’ I asked.

Mudge nodded. ‘We’re getting drunk, taking the night off. You?’

‘Same. We need some privacy.’ Mudge smiled.

‘What, you don’t want Rannu to come and watch you? Hell, Buck and Gibby would probably join in if you ask them nicely enough.’

‘Well, I’m never going to have another erection,’ I said.

‘Probably sterile from the radiation as well,’ Mudge said grinning. Then it hit me: what if I wasn’t capable? Mudge must’ve read the expression on my face because he started laughing.

‘You utter bastard.’

‘Funny thing is you probably would’ve been fine if I hadn’t put the idea in your head,’ he said, laughing more.

‘I will be fine,’ I insisted, but this just made him laugh harder. I turned to walk off.

‘Hey, Jake.’ He knew how much I hated that name.

‘What?’ I said, turning on him, but he was serious now.

‘You sure about this, man? She’s very young.’ I thought for a while. Maybe I was being selfish, but I would be dead soon anyway - that was assuming we didn’t get killed by Rolleston or anyone else. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t. I guessed my motives were about as pure as you could hope for in the situation. Not that pure, but I didn’t think I was taking advantage.

‘Yeah,’ I said. Mudge nodded. I turned to head back to the fire and Morag.

‘Jake?’ I stopped and took a deep breath before turning back.

‘Mudge, you’re preventing me from getting to a beautiful young woman who wants to have sex with me.’

‘Despite the fact you’re half man half tarmac at the moment?’

‘I can shoot you. Besides, you should be down on your knees thanking God for people who’ll have sex with ugly men,’ I said. He grinned, then his face hardened again.

‘When we’re done with all this, we’re going to come back here, to Crawling Town, take care of unfinished business, yeah?’ I could’ve told him that he didn’t have to but it would’ve been a platitude and it would’ve pissed him off.

‘Yeah,’ I told him.

It was on the second floor of one of the terraced flats near a big hole in the floor. It wasn’t the most romantic place ever. We were after all in the middle of a polluted wasteland. I put down a groundsheet and set up the bivouac. Morag switched on a lamp - she didn’t have my low-light vision after all - and unrolled two of the sleeping bags and connected them together.

‘Do you want to know me?’ she asked as she pulled something out of her bag. I took a closer look. It was a highly illegal biofeedback device, basically a box with eight wires extending from it, each wire ending in a plug. They were used either to enhance sex or as a torture device. The box was effectively a small sense machine. Each of us would feel what the other one did. It was about the most intimate thing I could imagine. I could fight in a hundred different firefights but it took a teenaged girl to really frighten me.

‘Where’d you get that?’ I asked.

‘New York.’ That figured. I swallowed and then nodded.

It would be a waste of time trying to describe what it was like to be surrounded by her and then feel what she felt, to feel every touch and its reflection echoing. We remained joined after, just holding each other. It was the release I’d sought but never received from the booths, the loss of self but without the dislocation. It felt like becoming more than just me.

It was only after that it occurred to me that I had given Ambassador access to me. It was only in the morning that my mind had to sabotage this. I guess I just couldn’t accept something so good happening to me.

21

New York

I could hear Them singing. How could I hear Them singing in vacuum? It wasn’t in my ears. It wasn’t even in my head. It sounded like wind blowing through impossibly loud chimes, somehow discordant and beautiful at the same time, a choir of off-key angels.

They/It was beautiful as well. From where I hung in space I could see Their spires rooted deep into the asteroid, towers of a bioluminescent, coral-like material. They looked like a huge and perfectly still, tranquil city. I hung in space, naked and whole, no machinery in me any more, watching Them/It.

A whisper that came from deep within imparted to me that this was Them, that this was all They were. That this had been Their existence and They had been content because They had never known or wanted more.

I thought I could watch Them for ever and listen to Them for ever. Something at the back of my mind wondered how I could be in vacuum again and not be dying. I saw a flash image from a nightmare. Cold, so very cold, veins exploding, blood leaking around the plastic that filled my eye sockets. Gone again as I forced it down, a memory from another time, another life, and I just hung there and watched and listened.

I didn’t know how long I’d hung there, never growing bored or restless, and I don’t know what made me first realise that something was wrong. Maybe it was an old instinct. I looked around as much as my fixed position in the sky would allow. Eventually I found some of the stars were missing then more as the craft came closer. I recognised the configuration if not the actual ship itself. It was a light cruiser, the sort that had been manufactured around eighty to a hundred years ago. Because of the prohibitive cost of spacecraft many were still in service today. Though huge and seemingly ungainly, I’d always thought spaceships strangely graceful. Its manoeuvring thrusters silently and continually corrected the cruiser’s course.

This was a warship, a human one, and I could see what was about to happen. I started screaming at it - somehow I could hear my own voice - but it did no good. The barrage of missiles had so far to fly it was like they were moving in slow motion, their engines burning harshly. The red light of laser batteries stabbed out, joining the cruiser to the beautiful alien spires again and again, scarring and burning wherever they touched. It was the cruiser’s particle-beam weapon pulsing blue and white every time it was charged that did the most damage. I watched spires split and burst and float into space and then the rockets blossomed, covering the alien city in the brief fires of their plasma warheads.

Ice clung to my face from tiny frozen teardrops. I could not understand this. There was no point. It seemed like an attack on something beautiful for the sake of it. The worst of it was that I could still hear them, the same way I had heard their singing, but they weren’t singing any more.

The asteroid seemed to spin in front of me. It took a moment to realise that it was me who was moving. We were on the opposite side of the asteroid. The cruiser was above me now, making minute alterations with its thrusters to hold it in place. From its hold came two heavily armed assault shuttles - again they were older models. The assault shuttles escorted a much larger transport shuttle. I couldn’t remember the designation for the transport shuttle but it was one of those models that was basically an engine and a cockpit with a framework in the middle that could be filled with modular cargo loads. In this case it carried a portable base set up for deep space.

I watched as the assault shuttles landed and a squad of exo-armoured troops disembarked from each, setting up a perimeter for the transport shuttle. The base was tethered and set up. It was a large one but I couldn’t make out what it was for. It wasn’t a mining operation; besides the Belt resources were nowhere near exhausted and much easier to get at. It wasn’t an OP, as they’d destroyed the only other thing on the asteroid. It was too small for a garrison and didn’t have enough spacecraft with it, and the cruiser was a much better choice for a base.

I had no reference for time but it seemed to me that the base was set up very quickly, or rather the bare amount of set-up was done and it was abandoned. The transport shuttle and one of the assault shuttles were left there as the final assault shuttle took off. They’d also left all the exo-armoured troops on the asteroid. Then something really weird happened. The assault shuttle did not dock with the cruiser. Instead it set another course away from the asteroid at maximum burn. The cruiser began firing its escape pods on the same trajectory as the assault shuttle.

There was obviously some concern from the troops still on the asteroid. Then they started firing. Whatever they were firing at was behind me. Still floating in space though I was, I managed to swing round. Over the small horizon of the asteroid I saw it come. It looked like an oil slick, as it seemed to surge across the cold rock. It was huge, covering the ground, I could see splashes from where the armoured troops’ railgun rounds impacted, but it still came on, tendrils and pseudopods reaching for the soldiers. I recognised this black liquid - it was what I’d seen beneath the chitin of a thousand berserks. It was the same stuff the Ninja had been made from when it had forced its way into Gregor, violating my friend, and it was the same material that had made up Ambassador. The city was Them.