War in Heaven (27 page)

‘I want a go!’ Mudge shouted as we watched three surfers jump from the bridge we were on. Two of them almost immediately wiped out. One of them didn’t come back up as we crossed.

‘Focus,’ I told him.

I was trying to decide if it was any more dangerous or stupid than scheme racing. Probably not, but then I’d done that for money. Or at least I’d thought I had.

‘Me too,’ Morag said. I could hear the excitement in her voice.

We found her in another, narrower canyon. She was on a bridge, board ready, about to jump. We tried to approach her but armed surf tribespeople stopped us. The fact that they were carrying guns suggested they were police.

I opened my mouth to shout to her but Pagan put his hand on my shoulder. Mudge was shaking his head as well.

She looked much as she had, except instead of exo-armour she was wearing a shorty wetsuit. I could see a lot more of her now. She had the sort of body that looked like it had worked hard all her life, all hard muscle and very little fat. Her head was still completely shorn of hair. Her skin looked a darker shade of brown, almost black, but that may have been the shadow down here away from the sun.

If she knew we were here then she gave absolutely no indication of it. She glanced behind her at the bore wave. To me it looked like a near-solid wall of water. Gripping her board, she jumped.

As one we moved to the edge of the ledge we were standing on. She surfaced momentarily, lying flat on her board, carried along by the fast-moving water, then disappeared again as the wave reached her. Cameras on remotes followed her progress. There was a thinscreen stuck to a smooth part of the canyon wall showing the footage. She rode the wave. There was no look of joy or pleasure on her face like I’d seen on some of the others, but instead a look of intense concentration. She was working at it.

It was going well until she tried to climb the wave. To me it looked like she just didn’t have enough room for the manoeuvre she was attempting. The tip of the board hit the canyon wall, snapping off, and the force of the wave catapulted her into the air. She hit the rock with enough force to make all of us flinch.

‘Oh well, that was a waste of time,’ Mudge said.

‘Shut up, Mudge,’ Morag told him.

We found her sunning herself on a rock outcrop higher up and further along the canyon. The impact had cut her head open and split her subcutaneous armour. I was pretty sure I could see the bone-white of skull. Most of her skin was missing down her right side, scraped away down to the armour. She may have cleaned her wounds but she hadn’t dressed them yet.

There were a few other people around. I was supposed to be checking all around us but found myself polarising my lenses and looking up the rock walls at the sliver of blue sky above.

‘Hello, Cat,’ Morag said to her. Cat Sommerjay, ex-C-SWAT commander from the Atlantis Spoke, opened one of her eyes. She cast a black lens over us.

‘I’m not interested,’ she said.

‘We’re paying,’ Morag said.

‘I had a job.’

Through no real fault of her own, concrete-eating microbes had been used twice on the Atlantis Spoke on her watch. This had resulted in the most amount of damage done to a spoke since the fall of the Brazilian Spoke during the FHC.

‘Look, we’re sorry about—’ Morag started.

‘Sorry?’ Cat sat up, opening both eyes to look at us. ‘Sorry! I’m fucking unemployable thanks to you people. Two major terrorist incidents on my watch, in a spoke. Have you any idea how fucking hard I worked to get to the head of that team?’

‘That why you’re down here trying to kill yourself?’ Mudge, the diplomat, asked. Cat turned to give him a proper NCO glare. He didn’t flinch.

‘No, asshole. I had some back pay due and I always fancied giving it a go.’

‘So why aren’t you dressing your wounds?’ I asked despite my better judgement. She turned to look at me. ‘No, you’re not trying to kill yourself, are you? Just enjoying a little pain.’

She turned angrily to grab her towel. I may as well have been asleep. She made it look natural but I still should have known better. I think Pagan started to move. Cat grabbed the huge pistol from under the towel. From sitting she rolled to her feet. She had the pistol in a two-handed stance and I found myself looking down the bore of a very large barrel.

It was a tunnel-rat pistol. Often they had to squeeze into small places, so they needed pistol-sized weapons with a lot of stopping power. It was an IMI Void Eagle chambered for caseless .50-calibre rounds. She had a small microwave emitter fitted under the barrel designed to ‘cook’ a Berserk – mess it up just long enough to empty the magazine into it. You needed balls to hunt Them with just a pistol, even one this big.

We spread apart to make it difficult for her to target all of us. Even Morag. I was pleased that we’d worked together long enough that this was instinct. I was less pleased that the gun appeared to be pointing at me.

‘I’m pretty sure a round at this range will pop his skull off. All of you stop moving.’ As she talked she was looking quickly between all of us. She was just slightly too far away for me to try a disarm even with my enhanced reflexes. The more I was seeing of Cat, the more I was convinced that Morag had chosen well. Assuming she didn’t just shoot me. ‘Give me a good reason not to,’ she said. I couldn’t at that moment think of one.

‘You’re right. You don’t owe us shit; we owe you. So unless you want money we can’t offer you anything,’ I said.

Just for a moment her eyes flickered back to me. That was a mistake.

Morag and Mudge drew on her. Now she had two much smaller automatics pointed at her. When had Morag got so fast?

Cat just grinned wickedly. ‘Aim for the wounds, boys and girls, because that small-calibre shit is just going to be flattening itself against my armour while I kill Jakob here.’

‘Fucking army,’ Pagan said, shaking his dreadlocks despairingly. ‘I suppose having a drink and talking about this before we all decide to kill each other is out of the question.’

‘I’m still not hearing a good reason not to kill you,’ Cat said.

Some of the locals were taking an interest. This wasn’t good. Four obvious outsiders picking on someone who looked like she belonged. People were beginning to edge towards us. So far none of them had drawn guns.

‘You stuck up for us. You didn’t raid the node like you were ordered. You must have believed in what we were doing,’ Morag said. There was a kind of pleading in her voice. She really didn’t want this to turn bad. She wanted Cat on board. I was just very eager not to get shot.

‘Maybe. But tell me – do you ever think through your actions? The cost to other people.’

‘Now wait a minute. We risked a lot. We were trying to help,’ Pagan said. Now he was getting pissed off. He had a point. From our perspective the whole thing had been hard, dangerous and painful from start to finish.

I didn’t like how the crowd was getting larger and closer.

‘“We”? Think further out. I mean did you even get what you wanted?’ she asked. ‘Are you here to ask me to cause more mayhem with you?’

Mudge started grinning.

‘Right again,’ I said. ‘We didn’t think it through enough. We’re trying to make it better if we can. If that’s possible. Cat, you losing your job was pretty much the least of it.’ I could see her finger on the trigger. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like she was starting to squeeze it. ‘But things had to change, and I think you know that. In fact I know you know it because of the decisions you made on the day.’ She was just looking at me now. I couldn’t read her expression but hydrostatic shock from a ballistic injury hadn’t sent my head tumbling through the air, which was good. ‘We’re cunts, I’ll admit that …’

‘Good of you,’ she said through gritted teeth.

‘But we’re not the bad guys, and I think you know that. You can take it out on us if you want.’ She said nothing but a minute change in her expression suggested she was about to shoot me. I think we’d significantly underestimated how pissed off she was. ‘But you don’t have to!’ I added desperately.

‘Cat, please,’ Morag pleaded. I think that was probably more useful than my whole we-are-cunts speech.

‘If she shoots you, can I have your bike?’ Mudge asked.

‘Fuck you, journo, you’re next,’ Cat said, but I was sure I saw the trace of a smile.

‘You’re better off shooting the girl first – she’s faster.’

‘Mudge,’ I said exasperated, shaking my head. Pagan and Morag were both smiling.

‘What? I’m just saying. It’s tactical advice,’ Mudge said defensively.

‘All right. I’ll listen but I reserve the right to kill you later,’ Cat said.

‘I suspect there’s a queue,’ Pagan muttered, glancing around at the crowd.

‘Okay but before you do, you should know that this job looks like a one-way trip,’ I told her.

Mudge, who was still pointing his gun at Cat, turned to look at me. Pagan was shaking his head.

‘Good negotiating,’ Mudge said incredulously.

‘No, she needs to know,’ Morag told him.

Cat was looking between Morag and me.

‘At least you’re honest. I’m going to put my gun up and then you two put yours …’ Mudge and Morag were already holstering their weapons. ‘Never mind.’ Cat lowered the Void Eagle and let it hang at her side. The crowd seemed disappointed. I wondered how much blood in the water was enough for them.

‘Are you going to want more shooters?’ Cat asked.

‘Depends,’ I said. ‘We need reliable people who we can work with.’

‘That could be hard; you did just point out you’re a bunch of cunts.’

‘Jake was speaking for himself,’ Mudge said.

‘No, he was talking about you as well,’ Morag told him.

‘That hurts. There’s just no need for that.’

‘How do you guys get anything done?’ Cat asked.

‘We wait for a lull,’ Pagan told her.

‘Did you have anyone in mind?’ I asked.

I was exasperated and a little embarrassed about the banter. At the same time it was a good way to wind down the tension.

‘Maybe, but as well as a fuckload of money—’

‘You did hear him say that this was a one-way trip?’ Mudge asked.

‘Which none of you believe.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I told her. It was true. I really didn’t fancy my chances on this one. I just didn’t see how we could pull it off and get away with it.

‘I’ll want something else,’ Cat told us.

Cat was enough of a pro to know that we couldn’t brief her until we were in a reasonably secure place. She also wouldn’t tell us what she wanted – for the same reasons, I guessed.

She agreed to act as a guide for us around the arms and tech bazaars, which were held in large caves or under colourfully dyed tents. Because we were outsiders we decided to stick together while we were buying what we needed. This meant that Cat, Mudge and I were bored stupid while the techno-geeks got their stuff, but once they’d done that we got to buy guns! And other gear we’d need as well. I was a little bothered by how enthusiastic Morag was about buying weapons.

It was past midnight by the time we left. We found a different place to camp from where we’d been the night before. We ate, shared some more sour mash and then got some sleep. I wondered to what degree we’d been watched and by whom.

The next few days were spent going through the gear. Where possible we’d bought three of everything. We’d managed to get most of what was on our list, though we’d made a few compromises. We checked everything for bugs and found a few, then stripped down and cleaned everything and tested it. I insisted that everyone familiarise themselves with and test-fire their own weapons. We’d bought enough ammunition to overthrow a small country.

Morag had picked a BAe laser carbine for her long. Pagan had turned in his old laser rifle for the newer carbine as well. This made things easier as they would need the same parts and took the same batteries. I was surprised by how good Morag was with the carbine. It was easy to hit things with a laser but we were running small-unit drills and, skillsofts or not, she was picking things up quickly. Pagan had said that she pretty much only needed to be told something once, and then she could not only do it herself but also make connections between other things she had learned and how they fitted together. It was something called eidetic memory. It made her very easy to teach.

Then came the modifications. Going under the knife again. I felt like I had precious little flesh to offer but our bones and musculature needed to be denser. We would need to take nearly constant supplements there to upkeep this process. Ugly reinforcements now stuck out of our spines like dorsal armour on prehistoric lizards. They were supposed to be easily removable, but seeing the metal fused with bone and flesh sticking out of Morag’s back looked so obscene it made me want to vomit. I wanted to tell her to look at what she was doing to herself. Did she want to end up like the rest of us? Mechanical monsters designed to feed a war machine. But I knew her response, I knew her resolve and I think she had her own concerns.

The final modifications were to our respiratory systems. We had a corrosion-resistant coating sprayed down our windpipes and into our lungs. It made us gag and it felt like drowning. We also had heavier-duty, corrosion-resistant filters implanted into our existing systems. Both the coating and the filters would need to be replaced regularly. We were taking a large supply with us. When that ran out we’d have to forage for more. Assuming we lived that long.