War in Heaven (79 page)

‘Think about where you are!’ she warned. Merle looked like he was going to say something but thought better of it.

‘For someone who didn’t want to kill, you’re getting good at this,’ I said.

‘I’m getting used to it,’ she snapped.

‘You certainly are. How many thousands do you think you killed in the Citadel?’ It was less of a question and more of a stabbing. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything for a while.

‘I’m sorry I used you, Jakob, but don’t push it,’ she growled, and she meant it.

‘He could have been more use,’ I said, nodding towards Cronin’s smoking body.

‘He’d told us everything,’ Morag said.

‘We don’t know that for sure,’ Merle spat.

‘Whose side are you on, I wonder?’ I asked her.

She just glared at me. I thought maybe I’d gone too far and then realised I really didn’t care.

‘Oh yeah, we need more paranoia and distrust on this ship,’ Mudge said.

Annis disappeared in a pillar of black fire. I looked at the space where she’d been.

‘That was a message from Rolleston,’ Mudge said. I looked over at him. ‘Think about it. If he wanted Cronin, all he had to do was possess him. Instead he put Cronin in our way and let us go. He knew that Cronin would spill his guts. It’s narcissism. He wanted us to take Cronin back to Earth.’ Pagan was nodding. ‘Cronin was his prophet, his harbinger, to dress his whole insane plan up in religious terror.’

‘Looks like Morag fucked that plan up,’ I pointed out.

‘We still have to pass the info on,’ Merle said.

‘I want to see the info you got from the Citadel,’ I said.

‘Are you in this?’ Pagan asked.

I just looked at him for a while. ‘Who the fuck are you to question me?’ I finally asked.

Pagan looked pissed off. ‘I’m sorry things went down the way they did, Jakob, I really am, but you need to remember whose house you’re in.’

‘I do. She just left.’ That’s it. Twist the knife in the old man.

‘We’ll show you, but surely we’re out now,’ Mudge said. ‘We’ve done our bit. This is going to be settled with a fleet action and a cat fight in the net, not by a few violent, sneaky bastards.’

He had a point. This had gone way beyond us now, but that didn’t mean there was an end in sight for us. They ran me through the highlights of Rolleston’s plan.

‘Oh,’ I said. The grim expressions around the room matched my own. ‘That couldn’t work, could it?’

‘Unless Earth can work together, it will work,’ Mudge the strategist said.

‘Well fuck it. It’s their problem now,’ I said without much feeling.

The pain was just about manageable now. Old burned flesh sloughed off to be replaced with new pink and tender flesh in a distinctly inhuman way. I lived in the meat suit that was the Hellion, in the care of its life-support systems. I took a lot of painkillers and spent all my time in the sanctum that Morag had designed for me. I stayed away from the others. I didn’t speak to God. We were still keeping what we knew about Rolleston’s plans away from God. Dissemination of that information would cause panic. It made me wonder why we’d bothered in the first place.

Still, it had given me a lot of time to practise with the trumpet. I think I was getting pretty good, particularly with the more bluesy numbers.

In consultation with Mudge we’d worked out how to fill the liquid bladder of the Hellion with whisky, and then hooked it into the isolated net so it synchronised with me taking a sip of virtual whisky. This and the fact that the air scrubbers on the
Tetsuo Chou
had finally got rid of the rotten eggs smell were the best things that had happened to me so far on the voyage.

I was sitting on a chair on the stage playing a number I’d just learned, watching the motes of dust in the light, when Merle walked in. He’d pretty much been the last person I’d expected to see.

‘How the fuck did you get in here?’ I demanded by way of a welcome.

‘Pagan,’ he told me.

‘Figures. You two have got a lot in common. You may want to tell him that I won’t be trapped in here for ever and he’s already on my shit list. I value my privacy.’

‘You mean you value your sulking time?’ I turned and fixed him with a hard glare. ‘What? You can’t do me in here, and all I have to do is let you slither out of the armour and stomp on you for a while in the real world. Even if you were up to speed, I’ve already kicked your arse once.’

I didn’t answer and wondered if he’d just come to make me feel a little bit more helpless. I reached down for the glass of whisky on the boards of the stage next to the chair leg.

‘You just come here to tell me that?’

‘No, I came to listen to your shitty trumpet playing. Look, I don’t need to justify myself to you, but people get consciously sacrificed every day in this war. It’s nothing new or personal and, guess what? With that stunt you and your friends pulled in Atlantis you stuck your heads above the ramparts. They knew that Rolleston would go for you if offered the bait. Is it shitty? Yes, but get the fuck over yourself because there are a lot bigger things at stake here.’

‘That an apology?’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

‘For what? Doing my job? Making the hard decisions?’

I looked him straight in his intense brown eyes. I wondered how much of the intensity was madness.

‘Funny how arseholes use making the hard decisions as an excuse. Rolleston and Cronin both said the same thing.’

‘You would have done the same to me if the positions were reversed.’

‘I would now.’

‘Before. Actually think about it. Someone you don’t know and don’t like versus a significant strategic advantage in the fight of your life? You might wring your hands and whine about it but I’d be gone.’

‘Bullshit. You were on my crew.’ But I knew he was right. He knew I knew it as well, judging by the sneer.

‘Listen to me, you selfish shit.’ He said it in the same casual tone he’d been using since he entered. I felt my eyes narrow. ‘You destroyed my sister’s career and then dragged her halfway across hell’s creation to get her killed. She doesn’t get the chance to sit in the Cotton Club destroying Miles Davis’s music, feeling sorry for herself. She’s just cold and still and we don’t even have a body to bury back home in Philly.’

‘I’m sorry about Cat.’

‘Don’t be. She was a soldier. She knew what she was getting into. You may have had a rough ride – I’m not in the best place to judge – but you can either use that as an excuse to push everyone away and go back to whatever miserable, lonely existence of half-measures and excuses you lived before, or you can just get on with it.’

‘You finished?’ I asked.

Merle stared at me for a while. It was the sort of look you often saw before someone got pissed off enough at you to throw a punch.

‘No. I get that you’re pissed off about being the sacrifice, but Pagan made the right decision. I also get that you think you can push him around in a way that wouldn’t work with me. Well, you can’t. Leave him the fuck alone or I’ll fucking deal with you, okay?’ With a final look of contempt he turned and headed for the door. As he reached it he looked over his shoulder. ‘After you said what you said to Morag about killing all those people, when she got out of the net she threw up. Just thought you should know that you succeeded in hurting her.’ Then he walked out of the door and out of the sanctum.

She didn’t pick her time well. I was good and drunk. I’d decided on that course of action rather than thinking about what Merle had said. Except I was thinking about it. Being drunk, it was much easier to come up with ways to justify my behaviour. Let’s be honest here: Merle and Pagan had betrayed me, and Morag had used me.

Physically I was starting to feel much better. I’d regrown, or rather the alien nanites had regrown, just under half of my body. Sooner or later I was going to have to leave the Hellion and face the others in the flesh.

Drinking was making me maudlin, or maybe I just should’ve thought about this stuff before rather than my own anger and pain. I suspected that the Puppet Show had been their own flavour of bastards, but who wasn’t these days? We – I – still fucked them over. Merle was right: I was no better. I couldn’t whine about betrayal. We’d accomplished so much but for some reason it didn’t feel like a victory. I thought about the losses. The
whanau
had known that with the resources they had, an attack on the Citadel had been certain death, yet they still did it. They did it fighting for themselves but also fighting for a home world they’d never known. They ended hard, violent lives hard and violently, and they’d deserved better. Dog Face had certainly deserved better than me putting a grenade into him. So did those other poor Kiwi bastards I’d killed.

I balled up my fist and pounded it against my head. There was something wrong here. Something that all the self-pity was covering up. When the drunk arsehole in the street spits in your face you know you have to walk away because it’s not worth it, but you don’t. You don’t because pride gets a hold on you.

Cat. A burst of laser fire in the head. Just under the rim of her helmet. No more Cat. My one-night stand with the killing weapon at her shoulder. Did you forget about your betrayals? Is that why you’re hiding in here or is it just because you know you can’t run from this? You know you’ve already tried to run and that didn’t work.

‘Jakob?’ she asked.

I looked up and her icon was just her. No pre-FHC flapper, no Maiden of Flowers and no Black Annis. She looked scared and vulnerable. I was just about enough of an arsehole to think I liked her that way. I shut down. I was still hiding behind anger and pride.

‘What am I?’ I demanded.

‘We’ve been through this. You have alien nanites running through your body. If you experimented with them you’d have more control. It’s no different from the rest of your cybernetics.’

I started shaking my head before she’d finished.

‘No. What happened wasn’t human.’

‘I have to admit I didn’t think that was going to happen. It was pretty extreme. I thought you’d be able to communicate through just touch or something but you were pretty messed up.’ Even she sounded a little worried.

‘Yeah, but that’s okay because it’s all growing back,’ I said bitterly.

‘Jakob, can’t you be as happy to be alive as the rest of us are?’ She was almost pleading.

‘I don’t think there’s much of Jakob left. Between you and fucking Pagan, I appear to be just a test bed for alien technology.’

‘For fuck’s sake! You’re alive! Why are you the only one who’s not happy about that?! Cat, Mother, Tailgunner, Big Henry, Dog Face, Buck, Gibby and Balor are all dead!’

‘You should have told me!’ I shouted at her. She took a step back, a conditioned reaction from her upbringing, but her face hardened quickly and she stepped forward again pointing a finger at me.

‘Because you would have let me – right? You saved us. What you can do kept us all alive. Are you angry about that as well? I get it. I understand that you’re frightened of becoming Rolleston or Gregor—’

‘I did …’ I said, meaning the possession. I’d become something worse than Gregor.

‘I know – I was there. But what saved you, the reason you’re here, is that alien, or whatever it is, tech in your head. Come to fucking terms.’ She straightened up and crossed her arms. I just stared at her. ‘You know what I think? I think that you’re just scared that you’re going to have to get a proper life if we live through this. I think that if you’d died it would have been easier than taking responsibility for yourself. That’s why you’re skulking in here. I think if you get out it’ll be straight back into the sense booths for you.’

It hurt. It hurt because it was on target.

‘Well, thanks for dropping by. I feel so much better now.’ There was a nasty sense of satisfaction when I saw how upset she looked at her dismissal. I turned away from her.

‘Jakob, we can’t keep doing this,’ she said.

‘I think you’re right.’

‘Talk to me.’ I didn’t answer her. ‘Pagan thinks we can fight Demiurge but …’ I ignored her. I could hear tears in her voice. ‘I’m trying to say goodbye to you.’

It was Earth. I was looking down on Earth. Even in the night it was so blue. The cities weren’t scars; they were ribbons and clusters of light. I was looking at the Pacific Rim from twenty-two thousand miles up. I’d never even set foot on that area of the world. It still looked beautiful and like home.

We were in the first-class departure lounge and the other passengers were giving the scruffy, rough-looking, half-drunk squaddies a lot of room. Much of the lounge was glass. We could see the elevator’s huge cable beneath us. We watched massive passenger and freight cars climbing towards us. Above us we watched the ballet of tugs, transfer shuttles and smaller craft docking with the entrepôt. Curving away into the distance were other larger ships in various orbits, as well as satellites, stations, habitats and weapons platform. A lot of the ships we could see were military. It looked like a blockade. All the traffic made space seem a lot smaller and busier than it should be.

Prime Minister Komali Akhtar had been waiting for us when we returned, as had Sharcroft. The welcome hadn’t been much better than the one I’d got when I’d returned after the mutiny on the
Santa Maria
. They were less than pleased that Morag had killed Cronin.