War in Heaven (39 page)

I glared at him but gave him a beer as he sat down somewhat gingerly on the metal grid of the floor. He lit up a cigarette, just to annoy me, and then set up a white-noise generator. It was pretty much the only way we could have a private conversation short of hard-wiring ourselves together.

‘That is one angry man,’ Mudge said.

‘That why you’re walking funny? Is this adrenalin fucking?’

‘Always.’ He raised his bottle to me and took a long drink.

‘You realise he thinks you’ve just come in here to boast to your mates,’ I said.

Mudge just smiled and shrugged but then suddenly became more serious. ‘Why are you giving me such a hard time?’

‘You know what I said about the drugs was for show, right?’ He nodded. ‘Though they have a point. We could be there for a very long time depending on how long this war goes on.’

‘I’ve never not held up my end and you’ve got no right to question that,’ he said.

This was about as serious as Mudge got. I nodded.

‘I know that. But mate, Trace’s office. I mean, what the fuck were you thinking?’

‘What? The guy was a prick.’

‘Morag shouldn’t have been able to do that hack. We should be dead, and we would be if she hadn’t noticed the wireless link.’

‘Look, nothing’s changed, man,’ he said, but he was looking down. He wouldn’t meet my lenses. We can replace our eyes with bits of glass and electronics, but body language seems to be hard-wired in with the original flesh.

‘Yes, it has. You seem more …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Desperate.’

Mudge shrugged, drank some more beer but still wouldn’t look at me. ‘Mudge, you’re an enormous pain in the arse—’

‘You want to talk about pains in the arse?’ he said, grinning. I realised I’d chosen the wrong words.

‘I mean you’re a difficult guy to be friends with sometimes …’ I started. He looked at me, his face getting angry around his camera eyes.

‘Fuck you, Jakob, you sanctimonious prick! You think it’s easy being your friend? All the fucking whining, hand-wringing, moralising, the fucking sitting in judgement …’

I leaned back on the bed. I tried not to take what he said personally. There was obviously something he needed to get off his chest and we were in the lashing-out part of the conversation.

‘I mean, just try and live a little. It might be a shitty world but try and take what you can from it.’ He’d trailed off a bit towards the end and wouldn’t look at me again.

‘What I like about you is you tell the truth. That’s why we didn’t double-tap you and leave you in a ditch when we met you. Don’t start lying now. Not to yourself.’ I took another beer and watched him.

‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with me.’

‘Are you on a suicide trip?’ I asked. It took him a long time to answer. If he was I couldn’t let him take the rest of us down.

‘No more than normal, I think. My body’s an amusement park, and risks need to be taken, otherwise we might as well be living in a bubble like those Cabal old boys.’

‘Then what?’ I asked.

Again he gave this some thought before answering.

‘You ever think about the things we’ve done?’ he asked.

‘I feel like mostly I’m reacting.’

‘I went from reporting in a war zone to patrolling and raiding with you guys to fronting for God on system-wide viz and netcast …’ Once again he trailed off and drank some more beer.

‘Okay, put like that it sounds pretty intense, but that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

He looked up at me again. ‘How am I supposed to beat that?’ he asked.

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

More than ever he sounded like a junkie looking for another fix.

‘The things I’ve done, the way I’ve lived, how am I supposed to go back to a normal life, whatever the fuck that is? I mean, we’ve done whatever the fuck we wanted.’

That wasn’t the way I felt at the time we were doing it.

‘You sound like Balor.’

‘No, it’s different. He wanted to be remembered. He thought he was some ancient hero, or maybe villain. I just want to feel. I need sensation but I think we’ve upped the game so much that I can’t get …’

‘The next fix?’

He looked away.

‘Maybe. I don’t want to die but life without sensation is death to me.’

I was trying to mask my contempt for this. I’d always known that Mudge was a middle-class thrill-seeker. He wasn’t the only one I’d come across when I’d been in the SAS; nearly all the officers were like that to a degree. What I couldn’t rationalise in what Mudge was saying was the disparity. This was a guy who was so bored that he did this for fun. The rest of us had to fight all the time just to eat. It was only my knowledge that he was a moral person that kept me speaking to him. That and what he’d said about sitting in judgement.

‘You don’t fancy the quiet life? Maybe just unwind, take a breather if we survive this?’

‘No, and neither do you.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.

‘See, this is what pisses me off about you. You lie to yourself. You’re no different. Your retirement ended with you being beaten up in police custody and where are you now? Right back here with the rest of us. Why? Because you need it. Why do you think Cat got fired and started canyon surfing? Or Merle tried to rob a precious metal freighter in flight? Because there are easier fucking ways for him to make money.’

If he was right, and maybe he was, then my need was buried deep in my subconscious. I thought I wanted the quiet life. On the other hand, the way I’d gone about my Highland idyll was arguably confrontational, and here I was again. For a while now I’d been wondering if there was some deep-down part of me that was highly masochistic.

‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go down onto Lalande just to look for bigger and better thrills, Mudge.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And Trace’s office? That would have been a shitty way for us to die after doing the things we’ve done. What were you thinking?’

‘I don’t know that I was. I wanted to see if we could get away with anything. Somehow I knew we’d be all right.’

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Caution was as much a part of these operations as risk, if not more so.

‘Look, man, I’ll be all right. I’ll reign it in. Take the right drugs to calm it down, okay?’ I nodded.

Mudge got up, belched loudly and scratched himself before nicking another bottle of beer and leaving my compartment. For the first time ever I found myself unable to trust him.

Still he’d left his white-noise generator, which gave me the chance to practise the trumpet without being assassinated.

By day six we’d almost managed to get rid of the smell of the anti-corrosion treatment. Day six was mostly going over weapons and personal loads that we’d already gone over on Earth. We were just trying to maximise what we took while staying under the weight allowance.

I don’t know about the others, but I was becoming tenser as the drop got closer. There were just too many unknowns and the drop was so dangerous that it would be easy to die before we even got planet side. Tempers seemed only a little more frayed. That may have been helped by half of us being loved up. Morag still wasn’t talking to me. She seemed a little less hostile, however.

Before we left the Freetown Camp Merle had kicked up a huge fuss about getting his gear back. Cat had brought some stuff for him with us but he’d insisted on getting his own gear back. There had been some violence involved. When he got his stuff I could see why.

Merle was down on the cargo bay cleaning his weapons on top of one of the crates. He was obviously aware of my presence but was ignoring me. All his gear was custom and expensive. Like Cat he had a Void Eagle set up in a Tunnel Rat configuration with the Tunnel Rats’ insignia on the handgrip.

He also had a CEC plasma rifle. Most plasma weapons are big and heavy and tend to be used as squad support weapons by military units from countries that can afford to equip their people with them. I didn’t like them because they were semi-automatic and, particularly for a support weapon, I preferred something that could lay down a lot of fire, like a railgun. Still their one-shot kill capability was impressive. Similar to the weapon that Rolleston carried, the CEC was only slightly heavier than most standard assault rifles. It was also very expensive.

‘Those what I think they are?’ I asked, pointing at two ten-millimetre pistols lying next to the Void Eagle. I climbed down from the catwalk to get a better view.

‘Twin Hammerli Arbiters. They were our grandpappy’s. Cat was pissed when I got them but I was always a better shot. I’m pretty sure he stole them. He certainly took enough lives with them.’ He spoke without looking up at me.

The Arbiters were supposed to be the most accurate and were definitely the most expensive fully automatic, production ten-millimetres ever made. I’d never seen one before, let alone two. Their grips were moulded to the shooter’s hands and the barrels seemed to slant forward, which was something to do with their recoil compensation.

‘Can I handle them?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, still not looking up from the somewhat archaic-looking rifle he was cleaning. I was a little put out but could understand why he didn’t want anyone touching them. Had they been mine I certainly wouldn’t have been parachuting into a corrosive environment with them.

‘That’s a hunting rifle, isn’t it?’ Again the rifle looked expensive. Parts of it were made out of wood. It also looked slightly oversized.

‘It’s a gauss rifle version of an old Mauser customised by Holland & Holland of London,’ he said, still not looking up.

‘Never heard of them.’ I shrugged.

‘No, you wouldn’t have. I never fancied lugging around one of the bigger rail sniper weapons for accurate work. This nearly matches their range and is more accurate. I can fire it semi-automatic or single shot for accuracy with a secondary electronic reload mechanism.’

‘Why?’ I may not have liked being in the military, despite what Mudge thought, but we all liked the toys and I was intrigued.

‘Because a self-loading system will always knock you off slightly. Obviously its smartlinked but it also has an on-board gyroscope. I can switch between hyper and subsonic for silent kills and it fires a .465-calibre penetrator round which will put most people and Them on the ground. The wood furniture is cut from Lalande ghostwood, which is very dense, hard-wearing and of course resistant to the corrosion. It’s also got a smart trigger.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said. Smart triggers enabled you to fire a weapon with a thought. They required an awful lot of discipline to avoid negligent discharges and were highly illegal. Still there had always been rumours of them being used by the darker black ops types. Merle held the weapon up. It didn’t have a trigger.

‘The very action of pulling the trigger can affect your aim. Your Grey Lady’s a sniper. She’ll have a smart trigger on her weapon, I can almost guarantee it.’ I started to ask him something. ‘No, you can’t handle it. It’s probably worth more than all the money you’ve made in your life. You didn’t come here to talk about my guns. What do you want?’

‘Well I didn’t, but they’re still pretty impressive.’

He finally looked up at me. ‘Have you come to ask about my intentions regarding Mudge? I’ll still kill him if he fucks us up.’

‘Fuck that. He can look after himself. How’d you hijack that ship?’ I asked. He regarded me impassively just long enough for his strangely intense implant eyes to start making me feel uncomfortable.

‘Why?’

‘Curiosity.’

‘I’m a very private person, your intrusion the other night notwithstanding.’

‘Yeah, I get that. You don’t like playing with others, do you?’

‘Nobody else around, then you’ve less chance of getting killed over somebody else’s stupid shit.’

‘Or have someone dragging your arse out of your own stupid shit. But my question?’

‘Is it relevant to anything? See, I can’t think of a single good reason to tell you.’

‘You want and need our trust,’ I said.

He leaned back and studied me a bit more closely.

‘This a price?’ he asked. I shrugged. ‘Okay. I had an automated program that I could plug into the ship’s systems. It would crack the security and remote-pilot the ship to … somewhere else.’

So he’d been working with others. That made sense.

‘How’d you get in? Because you didn’t do it in the camp – the security’s far too high for EVA.’

‘Maybe if I’d had the best stealth stuff, but yeah, the camp was more trouble than it was worth. Just outside the camp’s security perimeter I had another craft match acceleration and trajectory.’

‘Okay. Difficult flying but okay. So how’d you get on board?’

‘I compressed-gas-squirted ship to ship,’ he told me.

‘Bollocks.’ Space was extremely big; it only needed the slightest variation in speed and he would have missed. The maths alone involved in something like that was staggering. The margins for error were tiny. He shrugged again, giving the impression that he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.