War in Heaven (46 page)

The Bismarck was basically a heavily armed weapons platform slung between four heavy-duty, insect-like legs. With a three-hundred-millimetre mass driver and two heavy missile batteries as well as various point-defence and anti-personnel weapons, its firepower was something to be respected. But it would be nearly useless in this kind of war. They had all the toys, but this was a hard planet to forage for food on. These people looked like they were starving. Compared to them, I just felt healthy and well fed.

We climbed out of the FAVs into a circle of gun barrels. I tried my best don’t-fuck-with-us look, but as the adrenalin wore off the high G settled on me like a dead weight around my shoulders, pressing down on a sore spine. I spat. My throat felt red raw and the spittle had a pink look to it.

‘So, are we hooking up with the local resistance or being robbed?’ Cat muttered under her breath.

‘Who’s in command?’ Pagan asked.

Nobody said anything. Most of the people around us were Maoris and had the squat powerful build of people born to high gravity. Except their bodies had started to waste. Many of them had tattoos that looked like they’d crawled onto their faces. The Landsknecht mech that had brought us in still towered over us.

‘I think we should give these people food,’ Morag said.

Pagan hissed at her to be quiet. Cat and Merle looked less than pleased with her suggestion.

Generator-run portable lights and free-standing lamps lit the cavern network. There weren’t enough of either to completely light the place and much of it remained in darkness. There were laser-cut niches in the rock that seemed to be bunk spaces. I’d find out later that they were called miner coffins and in the early colonisation period were where dead miners were left in state until they could be disposed off. There were a lot of them.

The circle of guns broke as four people walked through the crowd towards us. The woman looked like she’d had a hard life. She probably wasn’t much older than me but she looked worn. She was muscle and hard edges in inertial armour with a sleeveless leather jacket over the top. When she turned to say something to one of the others I saw that the back of the jacket bore a stylised demon head with bulging eyes and a protruding tongue – gang colours of some kind. Half of her face and the visible skin on her arms were tattooed with swirling patterns that looked like they were trying to engulf her dark but still somehow sallow skin.

Next to her was the biggest hacker I’d ever seen. I could tell he was a hacker because of the mishmash of military and black-market tech that seemed to grow out of half his head. Despite his squat muscular bulk and the heavy G, he moved with a surprisingly easy, almost predatory grace. Like the others you could see where skin had tightened over food-starved flesh. His face and most of the flesh I could see was tattooed. It made him look somehow otherworldly. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket as well. All four of them did.

The other guy made me think of all the fun we’d had in Freetown Camp 12 with the Russians. While nowhere near as heavily modified as the Vucari, someone had given a canine look to his face. He had a protruding power-assisted jaw of surgical-steel teeth and a dog-like nose. His fingers ended in distinctly claw-like steel nails. He looked more dog than wolf but not like one of the friendly breeds. Tattoos ran up his cheek through long sideburns and bridged his forehead.

‘No,’ Mudge said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t like dog things.’

He may have been verbalising how we all felt after our run-in with the Vucari. It still wasn’t very diplomatic. The dog guy punched Mudge very hard. Mudge hit the ground.

‘That’s my other dog impression!’ the guy shouted at Mudge, who was trying to get to his feet. Cat grabbed the guy and did something complicated with his arms and neck, immobilising him. There was a lot of shifting about in the assembled circle of guns. Serious violence was imminent.

The other woman, little more than a girl, was the slenderest person there. I didn’t understand why the gravity hadn’t snapped her like a twig. She was pale, paler than the rest, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t a Maori despite the tattooed lips and chin. She had long, straight dark hair and couldn’t have been much older than Morag. Also, she wasn’t right. There was something not there about her, as if she was getting a different signal to the rest of us.

The hard-faced woman and the big hacker just stopped and gave us the eye. The pale girl walked straight up and started to inspect us.

‘Let him go,’ the hard-faced woman said to Cat.

Cat ignored her. Mudge was spitting out blood. Dog guy was struggling to get free; Cat was having none of it.

I turned to look at him. ‘Touch him again and I’ll hurt you, okay?’

The guy was furious at his helplessness. He just spat at me. I nodded to Cat, who cut him loose. That was good. We were acting the part of a together, properly functioning unit, even if we were really a mess. Dog guy turned to glare at Cat but said nothing.

‘That’s our Cat,’ I said, trying to break the tension. It fell flat.

The odd girl was next to me now, examining me. I turned to look at her.

‘You SF?’ the hard-faced woman asked. We didn’t answer.

‘They’re SF,’ the big guy said.

‘Well thank fuck. We’re saved,’ dog guy growled.

‘They transmitting?’ the hard-faced woman asked.

‘Not that I can tell. They seem to be running comms dark,’ the big guy answered.

‘Check their vehicles anyway.’

The hacker moved towards the FAVs.

I moved to intercept. ‘Hold on,’ I said, holding up my hand.

‘You’re transmitting, we’re fucked. We’ll have to run again and we always lose people when we run,’ the woman said.

‘We’re running comms dark,’ Pagan said. ‘We’re hiding from the same thing you are.’

The big guy stopped but glanced back at the woman. The pale girl was examining Morag now. Morag was smiling uncomfortably at her.

Mudge climbed to his feet, spitting blood. ‘Ow!’ he announced and lit up a spliff. There seemed to be no visible enmity towards the dog guy. Maybe after being blown up he didn’t care.

‘Couple of things you need to get used to. We are going to check your vehicles and we will be taking your food. You’ll get your fair share if we decide not to kill you and let you stay,’ the woman told me. ‘Big Henry, what’s the score?’

‘They were fighting the good fight when I found them,’ came the amplified reply from the mech.

‘You fighting the Freedom Squadrons?’ the big hacker asked.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Freedom Squadrons? We call them the Black Squadrons,’ I said.

‘Freedom Squadrons is what they call themselves. We mostly call them wankers,’ dog guy growled.

‘She’s really fucking with my calm!’ Mudge said, pointing at the pale girl, whose face was inches away from his as she studied him. Maybe he’d had enough of being kicked around after all.

‘Leave her be,’ the big hacker said. There was a dangerous edge to his voice that didn’t strike me as an affectation. I was pretty sure this guy knew how to look after himself.

‘You guys British?’ the woman asked. I nodded. ‘You in-country when this happened?’ I shook my head. ‘You point on an invasion?’ I shook my head. ‘Didn’t think so. Your food?’

‘Cat, Merle, give them half our ration packs.’

Merle’s head whipped round to look at me. He wanted to say something but was more disciplined. Mudge wasn’t.

‘Half our …’ Somehow he had the presence of mind to shut up when I glared at him. May as well try and keep up the pretence of professionalism.

‘Anyone tries to take more, shoot them,’ I continued.

The hard-faced woman gave this some thought.

‘Just so you know, when we need the other half we’ll take it, and if you don’t like it then we’ve got a long and proud history of cannibalism.’

There was laughter. From us as well. They just didn’t seem that scary after the Vucari.

‘Well, let’s hope we’re friends by then,’ I said. ‘You’re not checking the vehicles. We’re not transmitting. You can work that out yourselves. You’ll just have to trust us. We’ll pay for that trust in food.’

‘We can take—’ dog guy started, but the woman held up her hand and he was quiet.

‘Look, mate, I’m sorry about what he said, but we’ve had a bad time with some people that looked like you recently. We may be the only friends you’ve got down here,’ I said. It was a guess, but they looked in a bad way.

‘And we’re the only friends you’ve got, right?’ the big hacker asked. He had a point.

‘Assuming we don’t eat you,’ the woman said.

The place was called
Utu Pa
. A
pa
was some sort of Maori fortification and
utu
meant something between revenge and reciprocity. I’d done the introductions. They just gave us their call signs. I suspect the call signs had been their nicknames when they’d run as a gang together and were probably more meaningful to them than their real names. The hard-faced woman was Mother. She had been the senior NCO and now appeared to command the entire
pa
. The big hacker was called Tailgunner and with Mother drove the Bismarck-class mech. Dog guy was called Dog Face. That would be easy to remember. Some piece of shit had had him modified when he was still a kid to act as a human ratter. Apparently they had rats here on Lalande, which sort of impressed me. The pale girl went by the name of Strange. Again I didn’t think I was going to have a problem remembering that.

Big Henry, our saviour, had of course turned out to be very short. It was a typical squaddie naming convention. Not much bigger than a Twist, he moved with a particular waddling gate but was very powerfully built. A battered and ancient-looking bowler hat perched precariously on his mass of thick braided hair, which was pulled into a ponytail. His beard was braided as well and he had tattoos on what little hair-free skin we could see. He’d seemed the least hostile of the lot, but then he’d seen us fighting the bad guys.

After our initial chat Mudge had pulled me aside.

‘Half our fucking food!’ he demanded.

‘There’s more back at the cache, and Merle knows where there are more caches.’

‘Which could be compromised.’ Cat and Merle were acting as armed supervision as Mother’s people removed half our ration packs from the FAVs.

‘What do you want me to say, Mudge? Look at them. They’re fucking starving and we’re very low on friends here. Besides, I served with some Maori guys on loan from the Kiwi SAS. They were hard bastards.’

Mudge grinned. ‘Everyone seems hard to you.’

They were Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles, or a deserter element of them, an armoured cavalry unit. Mother and Tailgunner seemed to run things, backed by Dog Face and Big Henry. Strange was just local colour, I think. The infantry, tank and artillery crews they had with them, nearly all Maoris as well, called the five of them the
Ng
ā
ti Apakura
. It meant the Tribe of the Woman Who Urged Revenge. The Bismarck-class mech was also called
Apakura
. They called themselves
whanau
. As far as I could tell it meant family.

The five were close, very tight. They’d grown up on the streets together with no family but each other. They’d run as a gang because they’d had to. It was the street politics of victimise or be a victim. The street ate children who couldn’t find a way to protect themselves. They’d formed their gang, their tribe, and still wore their colours as patches on the back of their cut-off, armoured leather jackets.

Mudge had managed to find all this out while talking to Big Henry and some of the others in the camp who he hadn’t pissed off yet. I suspected he was relying on shared narcotics rather than charisma to make friends.

They’d learned to drive mechs in the mines. They’d piloted stripped-down mining versions – all the best parts had gone to the front to be used on fighting mechs – but the resources had to keep flowing. Big Henry had told Mudge that they’d lost as many people to mine accidents before they got drafted as they had in the war. The five were all that was left of their family. Christ knows how they’d managed to stay in the same platoon together all this time.

The Black/Freedom Squadrons were claiming to be the Earth government in exile. They’d turned up with Cronin at their head. It seems that despite what God had thought, Lalande and not Sirius had been their first stop. They’d laid a false trail for us. This made sense if what we suspected about the Citadel was correct.

The Freedom Squadrons had put out a story that we’d been a Them fifth column and had pulled off propaganda coups by making the Earth believe the war was over and taking control of the net with a Them virus. There’s even been edited footage of us taking Atlantis played on the vizzes. I felt used.

The Freedom Squadron called Demiurge the Freedom Wave. Sadly, calling something the opposite of what it was seemed to work in propaganda. People listened to names. It was much easier than studying actions. Cronin, the spokesperson for the so-called Earth government in exile, described it as the last defence against the Them computer virus, a sort of global comms net inoculation.

Tailgunner called it the Black Wave. He saw it for what it was and had isolated their systems and fled their
pa
or firebase after an encounter with what sounded like a Themtech-enhanced operator. I was impressed they’d shot down one of the Black Squadron’s next-generation assault shuttles with a mech.