Veteran

22

I would’ve been gratified by how ill Morag looked if f hadn’t been the only one who’d thrown up so far. I put that down to dying as I was pretty used to turbulent transport flights. The magnetic storms caused in a binary system like Sirius were considerably worse than anything the Atlantic could throw at us. Still it was a rough crossing, I thought as I retched into the waste-paper bin that seemed already half filled with my vomit, as the wind and rain battered us around over the ocean. I was really pleased that Buck and Gibby had had the time to set up the transport so they could control it through their interfaces and musical instruments. My head seemed to throb with every beat of the country and metal they were playing.

The transport flyer Mountain Princess was effectively a small warehouse with enough vectored thrust engines to make it fly. Basically it was the same principle as the gunships that Buck and Gibby had flown with the 160th but with none of the elegance or performance. Which was one of the reasons we were being battered around so much. We were also pretty low, but not because we were trying to avoid detection as we were showing up on Atlantis air traffic control as a supply transport from a nearby ore ship. Someone Balor assured us was a good friend of his captained the ore ship, though to me the captain looked like she owed Balor and was shit scared of him.

‘Jake!’ Mudge shouted across the cargo hold. I looked over to him; he was beckoning me over. Despite my misery I managed to stagger to my feet and make my way across the hold with my bucket of sloshing vomit. ‘Do you want to see the Spoke?’ he shouted at me over the roar of the engines and the storm. I don’t know why he was shouting as my audio dampeners were breaking down the noise and filtering what he was trying to say clearly. I was about to tell him that I wasn’t bothered but decided why not and followed him into the cockpit.

Buck looked ridiculous staggering from side to side in the cockpit, trying to play his electric guitar and not pull the wires out of his neck port. Gibby looked less so as his fingers played across his keyboard, a look of concentration on his face. Outside windswept rain battered the cockpit’s windscreen so hard we could have already been underwater. Below us I saw the white heads of a fierce high sea.

The only other Spoke I’d ever seen had been the Kenyan Spoke, from where I’d shipped out and been brought back to in restraints as a mutineer. They always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Maybe it was the humbling nature of such a feat of engineering. I wasn’t use to seeing a structure that completely filled my horizontal field of vision, and that was just the base of the elevator.

Atlantis climbed out of the ocean along the equator roughly halfway between Africa and South America. The Spoke had been built on a similar principle to the pyramids that they’d had in Egypt before the FHC Crusades. Build a big enough base and you can make a building any size. The roots of the building went down deep into the Earth’s crust and were designed to be strong enough to resist seismic events much like the Pacifica Spoke and the Spokes in southern Asia and South America.

The spokes were basically city-sized buildings that sheathed the carbon nanotube cable that supported the up and down Mag Lev lines. The end of the carbon nanotube was tethered to an asteroid counterweight, but lying some way beneath that was High Atlantis, Atlantis’ orbital equivalent and one of the space entrepots for Earth.

The elevators were huge multi-storey affairs. They were capable of hauling bulk cargo such as the resources of the Belt that were delivered to high orbit by enormous industrial mass drivers. There was a channel in the solar system that was a nearly constant stream of huge lumps of ore. From high orbit a huge fleet of tugs manoeuvred them into place at High Atlantis and other High ports and sent them down to the surface to be delivered by freight mag lev trains, airship or, for the poorer countries in the northern hemisphere, old-fashioned surface ship.

Tonight Atlantis was receiving a thorough battering from an angry Atlantic Ocean. I watched as high waves broke themselves on the Spoke’s thick, reinforced, chemically treated concrete walls. It was covered in lights both for the huge landing decks that seemed to sprout from it and as navigation aids for aircraft. Despite the weather, we were far from the only aircraft in the sky around Atlantis tonight. Everything from aircars to shuttles, for people who didn’t want to travel at the comparatively leisurely rate of elevators, was in the air around the Spoke. Illumination was also provided by the huge viz screens attached to the walls, many of them obscured by the fierce sea, which beamed out near-constant adverts to the network of surface vessels docked at this deep-water port.

I could see Gibby’s throat moving as he sub-vocalised. Presumably he was in contact with Atlantis air traffic control. Buck leaned over to me.

‘Two minutes,’ he said quietly, my audio enhancements picking up what he said. I nodded and moved back into the cargo hold, pushing Mudge in front of me. We’d run the final diagnostics not ten minutes ago, made any final last-minute adjustments to the Wraiths and stowed our gear. None of us had had the slightest idea what was in the oversized metal coffin that Balor had brought on board, but as I came back in I noticed it was open and everyone else was standing around it. I staggered over to the others.

Looking in the coffin, suddenly my nausea was forgotten. I turned to Balor.

‘You brought a shark?’ The coffin was a cryogenic storage box that was going through a rapid defrost program. Inside the box, through the cold smoke of the liquid nitrogen, I made out the form of a heavily armoured, cybernetically augmented twelve-and-a-half-foot-long shark. Balor was breathing in a funny way, and it wasn’t just because he was using his gills.

‘Are you linked?’ I asked incredulously. Balor just smiled. I suspected he had a remote biofeedback device that connected him and the shark, similar though not as intense as the one that Morag and I had used. It wasn’t a threat to our comms discipline because nobody would have a reason to use it. What it did mean was that at some level Balor was thinking and behaving like a shark. My day just kept on getting better and better.

‘That thing’s not going to attack us is it?’ Mudge asked. If they were linked I was more worried about Balor attacking us.

‘Magantu,’ Balor said proudly.

Morag looked up at him sharply. ‘That’s your girlfriend!’

‘That’s just something you tell people for effect, right?’ I asked him. He ignored me and just kept breathing funny. Fuck it, time for a little cocktail. Some of the sickness pills, a stim or two, some amphetamines to help the stims along – don’t want to fall asleep – and then some of the old red. Trying to make sure that nobody else noticed I sent a blast from the inhaler up each nostril. Tasted something I haven’t tasted since I was naked, cold and covered in blood on the Santa Maria. The perfect complement to my boosted nerves. Street level, none of the military-grade stuff any more, a bit rough round the edges but I could still feel the blood roaring in my ears.

We’d been over the plans so many times I didn’t need to tell anyone what to do. We climbed into our Wraiths. Each of us was wearing inertial armour, as in the Wraith’s cramped confines there was no room for any heavier armour. I leant back and felt the four studs slide into the ports at the back of my neck. With a thought I started the armoured exoskeleton up. It didn’t make a sound but it fed information on its systems straight to my internal visual display. In the cargo bay of the transport, Mudge, Rannu, Pagan and Morag did the same thing.

I strapped myself into the machine, slipped both my feet into the control slippers in the lower thighs of both the slender, twelve-foot-tall mech’s legs. My hands slid into the control gloves at the bottom of the upper arms of the mech. The palm link for my smartgun linked to the Wraith’s primary weapon system, the modified Retributor rail-gun, the oversized pistol grip for which was in the mech’s right hand.

The Retributor was a 20-millimetre, chain-fed railgun that we’d turned into a steel gun. All that really meant was that we’d pressurised the barrel to keep water out, used barrel inserts to reduce the calibre to 12 millimetres and used longer, more hydrodynamic rounds, or harpoons as they were nicknamed.

I calibrated the smartgun. The interface software was turning the Wraith into an extension of my body, making allowances for differences in perception. Suddenly I was twelve feet tall. I missed this, or maybe that was the electrical fire of the Slaughter in my synapses.

I stood up, swaying slightly. It had been a while and we were in heavy air. The normally sleek and elegant lines of the Wraiths were made ridiculous by the EM and heat-retardant foam we’d strapped to them. I switched on the acoustic decoy designed to fool Their scanners into thinking we were some kind of fauna, maybe a small whale or something, I wasn’t sure.

Wind and rain howled into the cargo bay as Buck played a little riff to lower the rear cargo door. We all took hold of one of the support rails and made our way towards the cargo door. Except for Balor, who was pushing the coffin along the floor. He got it close enough to the lip and upended it, spilling a wriggling and angry cybernetically enhanced mako shark out onto the cargo bay floor. Magantu snapped at Rannu’s mech but he lifted his leg out of the way just in time and the mako slid out, falling the remaining twenty feet into the ocean. Balor dived gracefully out after his predatory girlfriend.

Rannu made a ready signal with his mech’s hand. We all replied with an affirmative signal, our comms procedure of silence until contact already in place. I wished I’d said something to Morag. Rannu made the go signal and stepped out into the stormy night, falling towards the ocean. Pagan followed him, then Morag, then Mudge and finally me.

I felt the jarring impact as the mech hit the surface, breaking through it and sinking like the heavy piece of Belt metal and super-hardened plastic it was. We had replaced the normal back-mounted flight system with a hydro-propulsion unit. We’d programmed in the point we wanted to sink to and planned to use the propulsion system as little as possible. It would only power up to make incremental changes in our course. We switched off all systems bar necessary life support and even that we down-powered as much as we dared. I was alone in this armoured suit accompanied only by the sound of my own breathing and the rushing of the Slaughter in my veins. As the first twitches began I was worried I was going to peak too soon.

Balor and his alleged girlfriend were our scouts, our shepherds. They were to make sure we didn’t stray too far. As we quickly lost any surface light I had the unnerving feeling of having to abandon myself to things largely beyond my control. Soon I couldn’t see anyone else and then I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even make out water through the optical interface with the Wraith, only blackness. I didn’t even know which way was up or down and then even that ceased to have any meaning. It got cold quickly. Shaking joined the occasional twitch of combat want. It was the sort of cold that you felt you would never be able to get away from. I became very aware of the blackness pushing against me. Every so often I would hear a creak from the Wraith’s superstructure but all the readouts remained in the green. Then the propulsion system would kick in briefly, causing vertigo and nausea. Once I panicked when I felt something touch and move the Wraith. I was about to turn on all systems when I realised it must have been Balor.

With all the darkness my mind began to play tricks on me. It wasn’t the drugs: none of them were psychotropic, though they didn’t help as the speed, stims and Slaughter made me jittery. It was just my mind wanting to fill in the blanks in the total darkness. There was nothing definite, just dark shapes, or rather slightly lighter shapes in the darkness. I twisted, accidentally turning the Wraith, then again at the next trick of the dark. I was startled again as I felt something grab and move the Wraith. I settled down when I realised it was Balor again and I was risking compromising the mission. I had to ignore my sensory input until it was time not to, going against all my instincts. The Slaughter was making me crave the action to start.

I wondered how Morag was and hoped she was okay. I was thinking this when I saw them. First came the glow and then came the most alien-looking things I’d ever seen. They were like pale, glowing, organic flying saucers trailing tendrils beneath them. They moved by flexing their mushroom-like bodies. They were beautiful in the deep silence. It seemed that I was in the centre of a field of biolumines-cence. It was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. It was like moving through a floating garden. Through the light they provided I could just about make out the humanoid forms of two of the other Wraiths as dark shapes falling through the water. More disturbing was the predatory shape of Magantu moving around us, awakening some instinctive fear in me.

When they had gone it was easy to dismiss the jellyfish as a hallucination brought on by sickness, drugs and sensory deprivation. There was nothing now. I was trapped in a prison not much bigger than I was. I didn’t understand direction any more. Was I moving, still, or was I inverted? The rushing in my ears was becoming louder, a neural static of loud and discordant music, with no frame of reference but my imagination. I thought of it as the howling of angry angels. I’m not sure if it was panic or just a Slaughter-fuelled requirement for action, where action involves hurting another living being. I wanted to hammer on the reinforced titanium skin and tear it open, but I knew that would make me less – after all, it was my body now. My body creaked, the sound of metal under incredible pressure.

I felt like all the veins on my skin were standing out, as if the pressure outside was inside trying to crush my head. I felt like I had outside the Santa Maria. I was about to blow the mission. I’d peaked too early and there was an abyss howling behind my plastic eyes. Then I saw the light. It seemed to bleed slowly into my periphery. At first I wasn’t sure it was real and I closed my eyes. Opening them again there was a sudden rush of vertigo. It filled my vision as far as I could see up or down, left or right. It was a wall of light. Suddenly directions seemed to make sense. I was looking at part, a small part, of the base of the elevator. It was covered in some kind of biolu-minescent algae that gave it a pale, ghostly glow and for a moment made it look biological in nature, almost like Their technology.

Not for the first time I was overwhelmed by the scale, the sheer arrogance of the engineering. Although Atlantis had been built after the FHC, it was structures like this that had caused the war. During the Neo-Crusades fundamentalists had described them as pillars to heaven. Despite being the cause of the war only one had ever been attacked. The destruction of the first Brazilian Spoke had been the beginning of the end of the war, and the building of the second Brazilian Spoke had been one of the main reasons for the economic downfall of America and north-western Europe. From this perspective it was easy to see where the old-time fundamentalists got their sense of religious awe.

The 360-degree vision provided by the three cameras in the Wraith’s head allowed me to see the other four Wraiths in the pale ambient light. Our systems were still running quiet. Underneath the algae we could see the Spoke’s own lighting providing areas of brightness in the dark, the line between light and darkness much more defined in water than it would be in the air.

Of course the mermaid was a hallucination.

It was a hallucination with a steel gun. I could see the wakes in the water from the steel gun firing. It looked like many small fish darting towards me. The hallucination wasn’t a mermaid, it was a merman. Now there was an explosion of bubbles from his weapon as a compressed-air charge launched a mini-torpedo from its under-barrel grenade launcher. I could hear what sounded like rain pattering off the skin of the Wraith. It was a very violent hallucination. My skull was about to burst – too much blood, too loud, too much internal pressure.

My internal visual display came alive. Tiny explosive charges blew the clasps that attached the foam we’d wrapped the Wraiths in. At a subconscious level I was aware that Pagan and Morag would now be jamming comms traffic from the cybrid and any other comms and scanners that were turned against us. Motion detectors, sonar and several other passive and active scanners formed a three-dimensional image in my head. There was the cybrid, and there were now drones in the water as well as independently targeted seeker torpedoes.

‘Did you see them? Did you see them!’ Mudge shouted over the comms line, his voice full of wonder. I think he was as high as I was but on something else. The Retributor started firing. As did other Retributors. The cybrid had realised he was outmatched and was trying to flee. I saw the harpoons impacting into his heavily converted cyborg frame. There was an explosion off to my left as one of the drones went up, a brief blossom of orange surrounded and quickly snuffed out by the water. The cybrid merman seemed to get churned up, turning in on himself as the integrity of his reinforced frame gave way. With the low-light amplified vision the blood in the water looked quite black.

The next explosion shook my Wraith, knocking it back. I ignored the creaking sound of distressed metal. One of the torpedoes had gone off nearby. I didn’t think to check if any of the Wraiths had been damaged. I just wanted to destroy. The Wraith’s propulsion system was on full, pushing me deeper into the ocean on the most direct route to where we assumed the facility was.

In my internal vision I had windows open showing me feeds from the cameras on each of the Wraiths. I also had a blank window up which would accept a feed from the net once Morag had entered it. I wasn’t paying any attention to that. I was ignoring the comms chatter as more and more drones and torpedoes were launched. Two of the steel gun emplacements on the Spoke came to life and we began taking heavier-calibre fire. Through the blood-fuelled fire in my head I was thinking that I was fighting one of the pillars of heaven. More cybrids appeared in the three-dimensional rendering of the battle. The gun was silent. There was no recoil as I began firing nearly constantly, stopping only to change target when I was rewarded with flame or blood.

After the sensory deprivation of the descent, suddenly the deep was very much alive. Everywhere I looked I could see the conical turbulence from the wake of multiple ordnance. I launched two torpedoes at a submersible gunboat. Somebody, I don’t know who, vented sensor-confusing ink from their Wraith. We fixed targets with our smartlinks, the Wraiths’ acquisition software plotting the targets’ most likely movements, and we fired blindly through the cloud.

I was laughing when we emerged from the ink cloud in a wake of our own turbulence, tendrils of ink grasping for us. There was a cybrid right on top of me, extending his steel gun at point-blank range. I didn’t care. He was snatched sideways in the water as Magantu appeared from nowhere, powerful, mechanically assisted jaws clamping down on the cybrid’s armoured body. The Wraith’s propulsion system pushed me through a cloud of blood and mechanical fluids.

My audio dampeners kicked in at the thunderous sound of a super-cavitation attack sub heading straight down towards us, falling through the bubble of air it surrounded itself with.

Ahead of me I saw that three Wraiths had stopped by the bioluminescent, algae-covered wall of the Spoke. Two were covering while the third seemed inert. I could make out the propulsion system on the inert Wraith making small adjustments to hold itself steady in the water by the wall.

The net feed window in my internal visual display came to life. I could see the horrible visage of Morag’s blue-skinned hag icon standing on a plane of glass. Ahead of her a waterfall fell from a pale sky, filling the screen from left to right. I saw Black Annis drawing symbols of smoky shadow in the air more rapidly than I could understand. They dissipated just as quickly.

I reached the wall and turned round to see a busy ocean filled with turbulence. Warning signs regarding the integrity of the Wraith began appearing in my internal visual display. I ignored them and provided covering fire for Morag’s run into what we hoped was the facility’s airlock. Either that or we were trying to enter a maintenance area really violently. The Retributor was always busy. I nearly dropped it when the submersible gunboat went up. The explosion was so close I was slammed back into the wall by the concussion wave.

In the net I saw figures like humanoid mirrors rise from the glass plane. I figured this was a manifestation of security attack programs. I watched as Annis traced more smoky symbols in the air with her other hand. The mirror figures were running towards her now, casting a distorted reflection all around them. I watched as one by one they started to burn with a pale-blue fire the colour of Annis’ skin. They continued running though they were melting, the reflections they cast becoming more and more distorted.

Balor swam out of the darkness above me. He was so close to my field of fire I paused and adjusted my aim. He looked at home. He looked exactly like what he wanted to be, an ancient sea demon. The extending spear he carried was in a trident configuration. I watched as he swam down on another cybrid and despite her armour and reinforced frame jabbed the trident down into her spine and twisted. He left the corpse hanging there, tendrils of blood escaping into the water, as he continued to swim towards us. Whoever was in the fifth and final Wraith joined us, back to the wall and firing at the security forces. As shots from a steel gun rained off my armour, chipping concrete from the Spoke, I realised how much I wanted this. If I went out now, it would be okay. Of course this is what you’re supposed to think on Slaughter, so it’s all right to die.

In the net I saw the waterfall part slightly like a curtain being twitched open. The audio sensors on the Wraith picked up the grinding noise of the external airlock door opening just enough to provide us with room to propel the Wraiths in. Morag’s Wraith came alive again and the net feed went dead. Balor was in first, a Wraith following him, I had no idea whose, but it turned and started providing covering fire for the rest of us.

One after the other the Wraiths moved into the airlock. The second to last was moving as I interfaced with the propulsion system and, still firing, manoeuvred myself into the dark interior, the doors already closing. I fired my last few bursts, watching them arc through the water just before the doors shut. Then I heard rather than saw the water begin to pump out of the chamber, as without a word we prepared ourselves to face whatever was coming when the internal door opened.