War in Heaven (58 page)

We were running over scarred Earth, through scrub foliage, what was left of landscaped gardens run wild for fifty years, past the rubble of cave-like mansions cut out of the stone, our gauss carbines at the ready. I could hear the gunships and copters in the air now. Just think about the job, nothing else. The Demiurge-controlled remotes would be the biggest threat.

Normally we’d stay away from people but the crowds milling near the huge bonfires were our best hope. I veered across rubble-strewn, battle-scarred ground towards a massive pyre in front of a large mansion of hard stone rising out of the ground. For some reason it reminded me of a burial mound. There was a huge effigy illuminated by the flames, made demonic by the red flickering light. I couldn’t make out what it was but it looked vaguely humanoid with horns. It appeared to be constructed from whatever expensive salvage they could find from the destroyed houses of the rich.

All around the fire I could see the silhouettes of people with their hands held high, swaying in the light to the hypnotic heavy rhythm of some kind of music too contemporary for me to know. The chanting came from them, not the speakers. Still running, I glanced across at Rannu, who shrugged. There were more spotlights now from the searching gunships. It was not the lights that worried me but the thermographics.

Rannu and I ran to the back of the mansion and vaulted in through a hole in the rock that still held the remains of a stained-glass window. No time to check inside – gunships too close. If they came for us then Rannu got a burst in the head before I turned the carbine on myself. It wouldn’t be suicide; it would be a sound tactical decision and a little self-preservation. What we had left of ourselves.

Lowlight illuminated the cavernous room. I’m sure the rich people who owned this place would have been horrified by what had happened to it. There was a noticeable seam of some kind of metal running through the wall. Bits of it had been chipped away over the years. The floor was covered with ground mats and military sleeping bags. There were the remains of food. I was tempted to eat some of it; Rannu was more than tempted. There were empty alcohol bottles and containers that once held narcotics. Slogans had been painted on the wall but a crude mural of a black sun dominated the room. I’d see the black sun before, in my dreams. Below the black sun, in what looked like blood, was scrawled T
HE
B
LACK
W
AVE
. It seemed a little contradictory to me.

Rannu was taking small but eager bites of some vat-grown confection.

‘Rannu?’ I said slowly. He looked up and then saw what I was looking at. Overhead I could hear a gunship. ‘I think these people worship Demiurge.’

‘They are here for you?’

Our carbines swung up to cover the figure in the doorway. Seeing I had him, Rannu swung around to check behind us. More figures appeared at the glassless windows and at the other doorways into the room.

‘We’ll kill a lot of them and then ourselves before they get us – understand me?’ I told Rannu and meant it.

I was suddenly overcome by revulsion and anger towards these people. They had run out on their mates and then voluntarily chosen to worship Demiurge, and they knew it was bad. They called it the Black Wave, not the Freedom Wave.

The man doing the talking was tall and had the solid build of an ex-soldier. He was wearing a long coat, combat trousers and boots, and the rest of him was completely swaddled in old-fashioned bandages. The bandages had symbols written all over them. I’d known enough signal-people to realise that the symbols were religious or occult. He held a staff that looked like it was made out of scrap metal. The head of the staff was beaten into the shape of a goat’s head.

I glanced around at the rest of the people slowly surrounding us, courting gunfire. All of them were swaddled in bandages. At the very least their faces were covered, but many were swaddled from head to feet. Some, but not all, had symbols painted on the bandages.

‘We are not going to harm you. All of us are unarmed,’ he told us.

It was disconcerting. The bandages made him faceless, made him look like an old-fashioned casualty, a ghost from a historical war. Maybe he was. He was right though. The closest thing any of them had to a weapon was the goat-headed staff he was carrying.

‘Fine. Well we’ll just hide here for a bit, you don’t grass us up, and then we’ll move on. Okay?’ I said.

I was still pointing the gauss carbine at his face. He hadn’t wavered. Deserter he may have been, but he wasn’t a coward. I couldn’t say the same for the rest of them. There was a lot of very nervous body language.

‘Why don’t you let us help you?’ he asked. His voice was cultured, educated, privileged. Equatorial Africa, I suspected. It sounded like he came from money.

‘Why would you do that?’ I asked.

‘We help everyone who comes here. We’re the last port of call for the desperate.’ I could hear a degree of self-deprecating humour in what he said. On the other hand, he had described us all right.

I inclined my head towards the black sun and the writing on the wall. ‘And that? Aren’t you on their side?’

‘You want to discuss this now? If we wrap you in sacramental bandages we can hide you better.’

‘This better not be an initiation. We’re not hackers and we’re not joining any fucking cult.’

I was aware of Rannu nodding as he continued scanning the other bandaged deserters.

‘No, I don’t think you’re ready to forswear violence yet.’

That was certainly true.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Rannu.

‘I don’t really like our choices,’ he said quietly.

‘Don’t look at it like a choice; look at it as another option. If it doesn’t work you’ll still have the option of fighting, running and hiding,’ the staff-bearing man told us. It was another good point.

‘I can see why they follow you,’ I told him.

‘Nobody follows anyone. That’s what we’re trying to get away from. We’ll pick our own deaths, not the powers that be. I don’t think you have much time.’

He was right. I could hear the gunships making low passes over the neighbourhood. I lowered the carbine. Rannu did the same.

‘We won’t take your weapons, but if you’re carrying them they will know that you’re not one of us,’ he said.

‘We’ll keep them nearby. Just so you know, we can easily kill with our bare hands and you’ll go first,’ I told him.

He just nodded.

More climbed through the windows, came in through the doors, advanced on us. It reminded me of some ancient zombie viz. Everywhere I looked they were crowding us. It was claustrophobic. The last time I’d been surrounded like this it had been by Them. I worked hard to suppress my augmented fight-or-flight reactions. However, they just wanted to get us swaddled in bandages as quickly as possible. The man with the staff watched.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. As much to try and control the urge to lash out or run as to find out.

‘We don’t have names here.’

‘What, do you number yourselves?’

‘That would be a form of identity. We get numbered when we serve. When we are slaves. Here we are all blank. We are nothing, nobody, ghosts who do not exist. Reflections.’

I took this in.

‘How do you get each other’s attention? Is there a lot of “Hey you”?’

I think he was smiling beneath the bandages.

They were regular troops. They handled the interaction with the End about as well as gunpoint interaction between civilians and the military ever goes. There was a bit of added brutality caused by the contempt and envy the serving man or woman has for the deserter. I could see that. I would have been the same when I was in the Paras, less so in the Regiment. By the time I’d got there I was a little less judgemental.

Lined up. Pushed down onto our knees. Questioned. The incentive to answer came from boots and rifle butts. We did nothing. Said nothing. There were too many people to question us all, which was fortunate. Neither Rannu nor I had the same accent as any of the nationalities that served on Lalande 2.

Of course the bandages were an issue, as the suspicious could see them being used as a disguise. There were over a hundred of the End down on their knees by the bonfire when the troops started cutting them off. A few of the faces revealed were either badly burned or horribly mutilated. I suspected some of the mutilation was self-inflicted. These people took the death of identity seriously. One woman whose bandages were cut off grabbed the sharpest rock she could find and started to carve up her own face. She had to be restrained. The staff-bearer went up to the NCO in charge of the squad and knelt down in front of her. He took the barrel of her rifle, pressed it to his head and asked that they shoot everyone there if they needed to be sure rather than cut their bandages off. It was a difficult moment for the NCO but they stopped removing them.

The soldiers searched the area but didn’t even find our gauss carbines, which we’d hidden close to us. They engaged in a little light looting – after all this was the wealthy part of town – and then foxtrot oscar’d.

I watched the gunship peel away from the mansion then turned back to look at the flames of the massive bonfire. The flash compensation on my IVD polarised the lenses slightly to allow for the glare. On the other side of the flames I could see the bestial horned statue. Now that I was closer I could see that it had been welded together out of all sorts. There were parts of vehicles, consumer electronics, furniture and even jewellery. The one thing the material had in common was that it all looked to have once been expensive high-quality gear. One part of me was appalled at the waste. The other half was amused. The fuel for the fire looked similarly expensive. I started to laugh.

‘It’s not vandalism; it’s liberation.’ The guy with the staff was standing over us now. ‘You both look ill-used. We do not have much but I think you should probably eat.’ And now that he’d mentioned it I suddenly realised how hungry I was.

Vat mulch and hot sauce. It was one of the best-tasting meals I’d ever had. They had to watch both Rannu and me to make sure we didn’t just wolf it down and make ourselves sick. We washed it down with odd-tasting water and, after some negotiation, some kind of moonshine. It tasted how I imagined fermented engine oil would taste. A small tin cup of the stuff left me feeling quite drunk.

The guy with the staff had stayed with us. He didn’t ask us anything. We did the asking. I even managed to remember to thank him. He and his people had taken a battering on our account and said nothing.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

He was monitoring how quickly I was spooning the mulch down.

‘I suspect you mean geographically and not philosophically? I grew up in the shadow of the Ugandan Spoke. Easy now, not so fast.’ He laid his bandaged hands over mine, stopping me from spooning another mouthful into my mouth.

‘You sound moneyed. How come you didn’t join the Fortunate Sons?’ I asked.

‘It was an option for me, initially anyway. I was a poet with a degree of recognition, if not popularity. While I was at university I net-published poetry which was considered to be anti-corporate.’

‘Was it?’

‘It wasn’t anti-anything. It was pro-person.’

I nodded as if I understood what he was saying. He probably needed to be speaking to someone like Mudge, though I noticed that Rannu was listening intently.

‘They arranged to have you drafted?’ Rannu asked.

‘Either them or my family. I’m not sure which.’

‘And you deserted?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Ten years was too long a slave.’ He tapped the black plastic of his lenses. ‘I think that’s why they take the eyes first. So they can try and get to our souls. I didn’t fully understand why I was fighting.’ He lapsed into silence for a moment and watched me eat. ‘Are you aware of the information purporting to be from Earth?’ he asked. I nodded. Rannu said nothing. ‘It seems in some ways we’ve been vindicated, but that is a retrospective justification. I just couldn’t do it any more. None of us could. I think perhaps we are all too weak but I will not fight again.’

My opinions on deserters notwithstanding, I was struggling to condemn these people. I wanted to ask him about the mates he’d left behind but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After all the only person left from my days in service was Mudge. Well, if you didn’t count Rolleston and the Grey Lady.

‘You know they’ll move you on from here? If they don’t kill you,’ Rannu said.

‘The scavenger teams already hate us. They shoot the moment we get in the way of something they want. They’ve killed a lot of our people. After all, nobody cares if deserters die. Right?’ He looked at us expectantly. Neither of us could meet his lenses. The bandages around his mouth seemed to crease as if he was smiling. ‘We know this is temporary. That death is imminent. Do you?’

It certainly always felt that way. We were always less than one step away from death. The feeling that my luck was going to run out if I didn’t stop doing things like this. Luck? Two gunshots. Meat that was once a person hitting a cold stone floor. For a moment I could see the appeal of the End. Then I remembered how important it was that Rolleston died.

‘Demiurge?’ I asked.

He turned his head. He seemed to be studying me.