Veteran

23

The water was down to our knees now. Balor collapsed his trident down into a metal tube and clipped it to his belt. I noticed he had blood on his clawed hands that reached all the way up to his elbows. His maw was also covered in blood. I found myself slightly envious. I was jittery. I wanted the violence to start again. Pressure seemed to be building between my ears and the rushing/howling sound was back.

‘We got feed?’ Pagan’s voice asked over our comms net.

‘Nothing, completely isolated. I need a wire link,’ Morag answered. I could hear her trying to mask the fear in her voice.

‘This is going to be a shooting gallery,’ Balor said, grinning, giving words to what I wanted. I was twelve feet tall, covered in metal and the weapon I held was effectively an unstoppable force.

The Wraith’s lenses tinted as the water finished draining out and a bright line of light appeared in my vision as the doors started to open.

‘We provide covering fire and advance until we find Morag a link,’ I heard my voice say.

‘We’re going to take some punishment,’ Pagan said. So? I thought.

Mudge extended a thin camera boom from the head of his Wraith as we all shuffled away from the opening doorway. The camera boom peeked around the opening door to see what waited for us. The images from the camera appeared on our internal visual displays. There was a hastily assembled barrier that ran the breadth of the large loading dock. I could see the helmets of a lot of soldiers. I counted two tripod-mounted railguns and what I assumed was a rocket launcher. Also behind the barricade, hull down, was a small six-wheeled vehicle of some kind, a plasma gun mounted on its flatbed. Running down either side of the dock were catwalks. Mudge couldn’t get the angle on them but we assumed that they would be used as elevated firing positions. There were rails running along the condensation-covered concrete roof that reached back into the darkness, presumably to run a crane along. They may have been using the crane as another gun emplacement but it was so far back the little camera couldn’t make it out. The most worrying thing was the Walker standing behind the barricade.

As soon as the door was open a crack we started taking fire. They wanted to start doing damage with ricochets. I felt impacts against the Wraith’s armour, staggering me slightly.

‘Ready?’ I asked impatiently, wanting to be in this. There were four affirmatives. Balor didn’t say anything. We marked targets and Rannu fired a multi-spectrum ECM smoke grenade forward. As they saw the smoke their firing intensified. We stepped into the firestorm. I began firing the Retributor. As I disappeared into the smoke I saw Balor clambering up onto the left-hand catwalk.

I fired blind, my sensors giving me nothing, my target-acquisition software telling me where the six-wheeled vehicle with the plasma gun had been. My audio dampeners cut out the near-constant supersonic bang from our Retributors and the sound of their plasma gun firing, allowing me to hear the music of tearing metal and screams.

We emerged from the smoke in a line, Morag’s Wraith behind us. We must have looked like angry gods. The vehicle with the plasma gun mounted on it was in mid-air being torn apart by fire from my Retributor. I switched fire from that to the Walker, staggering back as rounds from its twin rapid-firing railguns impacted into me. Their targets destroyed, Rannu and Mudge were also concentrating their fire on the Walker while Pagan sprayed the barricade. The troops behind the barricade were picked up and thrown into the air by the force of the railgun rounds. Others just seemed to come apart. I felt only contempt for them.

Behind us, advancing down the left-hand catwalk, Balor was splitting his fire between troops on his walkway and on the opposite side. I wondered if the security detail had time to form an opinion on the blood-dripping demon approaching them. Grenades exploded in midair just above the catwalks, fired from Balor’s over-barrel grenade launcher and detonated by proximity fuses. I saw smoking bodies fall from the catwalks.

The force of a plasma blast sank me to one knee and I saw Mudge’s Wraith flung back. He landed on his arse, causing sparks to fly as he ground against the concrete floor. We were taking heavy fire. This wasn’t right. I couldn’t work out where it was coming from. Further down the loading bay I could make out the flickering flame of a muzzle flash. It was approaching us fast, illuminating the tunnel. I registered the plasma round glowing as it approached me in what seemed to be a lazy arc. I tried to get my Wraith out of the way but realised I couldn’t move quickly enough. The blast lit up my shoulder, the plasma flames burning through the titanium armour. I imagined I could feel the heat. I tried to return fire but was staggered by railgun fire from the badly damaged but still standing Walker.

There were two heavily armoured gun cupolas on the roof rails. Each one had a chain-fed 30-millimetre rotary cannon. The left also had a plasma cannon and the right a 20-millimetre railgun. My internal visual display was lit up with red warning icons regarding the integrity of my Wraith armour.

‘Port!’ Pagan shouted across our internal comms net. Morag’s Wraith moved towards a wall panel. Behind me I could see Balor jump off the catwalk as where he’d been standing ceased to exist in a hail of 30-millimetre rounds.

The net-feed window lit up again. I couldn’t make out what was going on but it seemed to be some kind of corridor made of black glass. Annis moved down the glass corridor so quickly it was like she was standing still and the virtual construct moved around her. I was switching between laying down largely pointless suppressing fire on the Walker and creating sparks off the heavily armed cupola.

Suddenly both the cupolas stopped firing. I watched as all four of their weapons turned on the Walker and then opened fire again. It was awesome and relentless and they took the Walker apart. I stopped firing and just watched this happening, oblivious to the small-arms fire bouncing off the pitted and scarred armour of my Wraith. It took a 30-millimetre, high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade to bring me back. I looked around for the source and saw one of the security detail sprinting away from the barricade, making for a door that presumably lead into the facility. The railgun rounds threw him to the ground and sent him scraping across it.

I saw Mudge’s Wraith reach up to the right-hand catwalk, small-arms fire sparking off its armour as he pulled part of it down, sending soldiers tumbling to the concrete floor. One of them in blind panic ran close enough for me to stamp on him.

We advanced, stepping over or kicking the barricade of crates and other junk out of the way. To the right there was a line of thick plastic windows that looked into some kind of storage area. Intermittent fire was coming from it. The windows shattered into thick plastic chunks as we subdued the area, pouring fire into it, destroying everything from food supplies to expensive scientific equipment. Part of the storage area exploded as we set fuel off, and ammunition began cooking off in another area. Whatever resistance there had been was either neutralised or had retreated further into the facility. At the back of my mind I hoped we were in the right place but I pushed that down. I didn’t care.

I sent Mudge and Rannu down the tunnel to check what was down there. Pagan and I did a final scan of our immediate area. I realised the ammo counter was blinking on my internal visual display. I wondered when I’d run out of rounds for the Retributor. Mudge and Rannu’s Wraiths came running back.

‘Nothing,’ Rannu said over the comms net. I nodded; the Wraith’s head mimicked my movement.

‘Dismount,’ I said as Balor trotted over to us and went down on one knee, his weapon aimed into the burning storage area. The heads on the battle-scarred Wraiths flipped back and their chest armour split and swung open. I slid both my feet out of the slippers, pulled my hands from the gloves and pushed myself up and out as the plugs snapped out of my neck ports. I almost fell as I rapidly adjusted to being only six feet tall again. It didn’t feel right. Like everyone else I was covered in sweat and panting for breath, but other than me only Balor was grinning.

I stepped into a puddle of blood. I looked at it momentarily, perhaps too long, and then sent the coded order to my Wraith to open both its storage compartments. Panels in either thigh slid open. I was struck by the lack of noise from the wounded. We’d been too thorough for wounded.

I removed the Benelli assault shotgun from the Wraith’s storage compartment and rapidly reassembled it. Then from the other storage compartment I took the carryall and bandoliers with spare ammo. The others were doing the same thing except for Balor, who was covering us, and Morag. She was looking around at the carnage, her face blank. She couldn’t make sense of it or her part in creating it. I’d seen this before. I’d felt this way before but no part of me could empathise with that right now. Who wouldn’t want this? This felt like the ultimate expression of immediate power.

‘Did you send out the biohazard warning?’ I asked her. She ignored me. If they thought there had been some sort of biohazard leak or accident the Spoke authorities would not immediately send forces in. Morag said nothing.

‘Morag?’ I said.

‘No,’ Pagan answered for her. ‘As soon as we breached they shut down all the internal exits and issued their own biohazard warning. I’m guessing that whatever they’ve got in here they don’t want anyone else knowing about.’

‘So all we have to worry about is a rapid reaction force from Rolleston or his masters,’ Mudge said. I nodded. Morag was still looking around at the carnage. She jumped as I reached over and touched her shoulder. Then she turned to look at me questioningly.

‘Get ready,’ I whispered. She nodded numbly and then threw up. I tried to ignore the contempt building in me.

We made our way out of the loading bay and into the facility proper, our weapons shouldered, our gun barrels leading the way, searching for targets, the crosshairs on our smartlink moving across our internal visual displays. We searched for even more people to kill.

Behind us out in the loading bay charges went off destroying the abandoned Wraiths. Their internal systems had already been junked by one of Pagan’s viruses. It was a shame to let them go but even if they were fit to go in the sea again they would never get past the blockade that was building outside. They were destroyed to provide a minimum of evidence.

We clear the facility. We kill everyone we find. We clear offices, sleeping quarters, shower and toilet facilities, kitchens and recreational areas. Balor decides to stop using guns. I see him drag one of the security detail off his feet and run him through with his trident in mid-air.

Suddenly there was nobody else left to kill. I was breathing heavily, standing among the debris of what must have been some very expensive machinery. I was sort of aware of walking past Balor in the corridor outside this lab. He was tearing into somebody with his teeth.

Nobody was shooting at me. I had time to take in my surroundings beyond identifying and neutralising threats. It was an open-plan work area. Against the walls were freezers, fridges and glass-fronted cupboards, many of them broken and smashed. There was what looked like an operating theatre set into a depression on the floor. The table was oversized and had some very sturdy-looking restraints. Looking around I realised that this had been a sealed clean room. One side of the wall was thick plastic glass to allow observation. Past the operating theatre I could see another strong plastic window.

The roaring in my head was beginning to subside now. I had been wrong about there being nobody left to kill. People were emerging from under tables and behind overturned workbenches and from the sunken operating area. Many of them wore lab coats, a few maintenance overalls, several of them just normal casual clothes and two of them wore the uniform of the security detail, which had no insignia.

Somebody wearing a lab coat was approaching me. He was the oldest person there: he looked in his early sixties to me but could have been older. He was speaking to me slowly and carefully until his face turned red and disappeared. I think there was screaming as he dropped to the ground. I heard someone shout ‘No’ from the doorway. As the smoke drifted lazily from the barrel of my shotgun, I turned towards the doorway to see Morag standing there, hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes. I stepped over the corpse I’d made and headed towards the observation window on the other side of the operating area. The staff gave me a wide berth.

It was actually some time later that I remembered the look of horror and fear on their faces. That was the thing: I considered myself largely an all-right guy. I did the same bad things that everyone else did to survive. Maybe I was a bit better at doing the bad things than other people but I was a relatively easy-going person. Someone you could go and enjoy a pint with. That was how I saw myself, but how could I do all this and think I was normal? How could I hurt and kill so many other people and still expect to form a relationship with someone? How could I objectify one person and empathise with another? I could hear Morag crying now, her body racked by sobs. Surely that was the only normal response to this? How had I got to this? When had this become normal? The young man, little more than a boy, who’d shit himself in his first serious firefight with the Paras was a distant memory, another person.

I ejected the empty magazine from my shotgun and put another one in before slinging the weapon. I suddenly felt very tired. I sat down on the operating table, dimly aware that Mudge and Rannu were securing the prisoners behind me. I lit up a cigarette and looked through the observation window into the secure room and considered how much Gregor had changed as he stared back out at me.

He was stalking from one side of the small room to the other like a caged animal. His eyes were black pools with no discernible iris. They looked like they were made of the same liquid that constituted the bodies of Them, like Morag’s had in my dream. He was taller, leaner, yet somehow much more powerful-looking, but his physiology was all wrong. He looked somehow lopsided, like he had too many bones in some places and not enough in others. His fingers were longer, with too many joints, and ending in long nails of what looked like black chitin. What I had initially thought was shoulder-length straight black hair I realised was tendrils of the black alien liquid. I tried to smother my disgust as some of his hair appeared to be moving independently. He kept his eyes on me as he stalked backwards and forwards. If he recognised me at all then he was pissed off.

‘Morag?’ I said. There was just the sound of crying. ‘Morag!’ I said more sharply.

‘Yes?’ she answered, taking heaving breaths.

‘I need you to get into their internal net and get me anything you can.’ Mudge drew up next to me looking through the glass at what had become of his friend. He was quiet for a while.

‘Shit,’ he finally said. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked as Balor, covered in blood, walked past us and up to the clear plastic window, staring at Gregor.

Finally I saw the net feed on my visual display flicker back to life. Black Annis standing in a landscape of blackened glass, obsidian, I think it’s called. Much of it was burning. The hag icon stuck out, her cold blue skin contrasting with the black and red background.

‘There’s not a great deal left,’ Annis’ modulated graveyard voice rasped over the comms net.

‘Pagan?’ I asked, still staring at Gregor, who was now staring back at Balor.

‘On it,’ Pagan said. Moments later I saw his idealised Druidic icon appear on the apocalyptic landscape of their internal net. I assumed the virtual flames were the aftermath of an attempted purge. I could see ghost-like shadows in ragged cowls drifting across the jagged obsidian terrain.

Balor turned to me, a bloodstained grin on his predatory maw.

‘I want to fight him,’ he said simply. I ignored him and turned to Rannu.

‘Bring one of the scientists over,’ I told him. All the scientists were kneeling down facing the wall, clutching their ankles. Rannu gestured at one of them with his gauss carbine and the young man staggered over to the operating table. I drew the Mastodon from its shoulder holster. I noticed he’d wet himself, another normal reaction to all of this. I was almost envious of his fear. Or would’ve been if it hadn’t been for the cold, clamminess and discomfort of wetting yourself. He was crying.

‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid you’re the hostage that has to die to make the others cooperate,’ I told him. It wasn’t that I wanted to shoot him; I just couldn’t see what difference one more would make.

‘No… no, please, please don’t…’ he managed to say before sinking to his knees. I needed him just this side of hysterical.

‘Then can you help me?’ I asked him. ‘We don’t have a lot of time, so the moment mine is wasted I have to kill you and start again, okay?’ My voice sounded even and reasonable. He nodded through the tears.

‘When you work on him out here,’ I said, tapping the operating table I was sat on, ‘how do you sedate him?’

‘We feed it with a special protein formula once a day. When we want to take it out we add programmed nanites to its food. They enter its system and send a signal triggering a kind of inert trance we’ve programmed into its bio ware.’

‘Call him it once more and I’ll fucking shoot you myself,’ Mudge snarled. I held up my hand. I looked at Gregor. He was standing still, just staring at Balor, his head moving slightly as he studied the heavy-conversion cyborg. I could no longer ignore the similarity between my old friend and one of Them. Was I looking at Gregor or just a facade the Ninja had made of its victim? I didn’t know.

‘We could try talking to him,’ Mudge suggested in a tone that implied even he didn’t believe that would work. I was also pretty sure that giving him his dinner wasn’t going to work either.

‘Let him out,’ Balor suggested. I ignored him and instead looked down at the terrified scientist kneeling in front of me.

‘What do you do if he breaks out?’ I asked.

‘He can’t; the containment chamber-’ he said, controlling his sobbing somewhat better.

‘Yeah, I get that,’ I said, interrupting him irritably. ‘But you’ll have contingency procedures should it ever happen.’ He thought about this. ‘I’m going to need to hurry you up,’ I said, waving the Mastodon at him.

‘We load the same nanite serum into hypodermics and shoot him with it.’

‘Outstanding. Mudge, help this guy find the serum and a dart gun please,’ I said.

‘You’re letting him out?’ Balor said. The excitement in his voice was nearly sexual.

‘Not to play with,’ I told him. He snorted in derision. ‘Rannu, move the rest of the prisoners to the opposite end of the room.’

‘You’re not keeping us in here if you open that room!’ An authoritarian female voice shouted. I turned to see a hard-faced, middle-aged woman, also wearing a lab coat, looking at me with only a trace of fear on her face.

‘Your choice is that or a bullet in the head,’ I said. She was right: I didn’t want them in the room, but I had no choice because I needed all my shooters in the same place.

‘Morag, Pagan?’ I said. On the net feed I could see them stalking through the burning obsidian ruins of a building that put me in mind of some kind of temple. They were collecting pieces of shattered obsidian that had moving arcane-looking symbols on them. Behind them I could see the smouldering remains of several of the cowl-wearing, ghost-like shadows.

‘We’re just about-’ Pagan began. The window went black and then it filled with static as the net feed was severed. I turned round to where Morag and Pagan were sitting on the floor against the wall. Morag was jerking and fitting, drooling blood from her eyes and ears. I swung off the table, bringing my Mastodon down to touch the head of the scientist in front of me.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know!’ he howled, obviously terrified and obviously telling the truth. I spun round, bringing the gun up to bear on the hard-faced woman who’d spoken up. She was looking my way as I walked towards her.

‘You! What the fuck happened to them?’

‘You wouldn’t shoo-’ The Mastodon went off, her head exploding all over a stainless-steel bench. The prisoners rather predictably started screaming.

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ I shouted uselessly. I was looking along the prisoners trying to see one who was obviously a signals person or a hacker.

Pagan came alive again and immediately turned to Morag. He connected a wire from one of his plugs to hers. It was the surge of anger at this repeat violation that reminded me of what had happened when Ambassador had tried to feed her all the information he’d taken.

‘Pagan, what’s happening?’ I asked, my revolver still extended. Rannu was trying to calm the prisoners, pushing the odd over-excitable one back down against the wall. Mudge was holding two dart guns in one hand and some very sturdy-looking hypodermic needles in the other. He was looking at Morag, his mouth hanging open in shock. Balor was still staring at Gregor. The net feed in my visual display was still just showing static.

Morag woke up screaming. Her eyes flickered open and they were full of blood. Pagan, his face gaunt and drawn, looked terrified.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked. Morag’s head twitched round to look at me. She said nothing but tried to clear the blood from her eyes. I turned to Pagan.

‘What happened?’ He just shook his head and looked over at Morag. Rannu was at Morag’s side, examining her eyes and ears. Pissed off, I holstered the revolver and unslung my shotgun to cover the increasingly nervous prisoners.

‘Jakob, if we’re going to do this then we need to do it now,’ Mudge said. Everything was unravelling: Morag was down, Rannu was distracted, Balor was doing his own thing and Pagan appeared to be in shock.

‘Pagan.’ He ignored me. ‘Pagan!’ I shouted. He looked up at me. ‘Get over here and cover them.’ He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. ‘Now!’ I shouted with the voice of a thousand parade grounds that all NCOs remembered. Pagan snapped out of it and took my place. I turned round and caught the dart gun Mudge had thrown to me. The hypodermic had less in common with a needle and more in common with a dart from a gauss weapon. I checked the guns. They were smartlinked and effectively gauss rifles. I guessed they needed the velocity to penetrate its – his, I corrected myself – thick skin or whatever passed for skin in his radically altered physiology.

‘Balor, get away from the glass,’ I told him but he ignored me. ‘Balor!’ It didn’t work this time. ‘Fuck it.’ I turned to the terrified scientist who’d given me the info. ‘You, open the door and then get to the back of the room with the others.’

He began to protest, as did some of the other prisoners.

‘Shut up!’ Pagan shouted. He still sounded scared. I didn’t have time to think about what had happened in the net.

‘Do it now!’ I shouted at the scientist and swung the dart gun around to point at him. He stood up and scurried over to a control panel. Some of his fellow prisoners were shouting at him not to do it. Pagan screamed at them again. Gregor had watched the scientist move over to the panel and had in turn stalked expectantly over to the door of his containment chamber. Balor turned and watched him go but thankfully stayed out of our field of fire.

‘Rannu, if you’re finished I could do with another shooter here,’ I said.

‘I’m taking Morag out of here,’ he told me. I wished I’d thought of that. There was the hiss of the door’s seal breaking and then it swung open. Gregor’s twisted silhouette stood in the doorway backlit by the harsh strip-lighting of his cell. He stepped over the lip of the door. I took an involuntary step back. He opened his mouth and screamed. It was like the sound of the spires in my dream, except he wasn’t singing, he was angry, and it was mixed with a very human scream of rage. Mudge and I fired. We both hit. Gregor didn’t seem to register the twin impacts. Both of us dropped the dart guns and moved back, bringing our own weapons to bear. The prisoners screamed and heedless of Pagan’s laser carbine began scrambling over each other to get to the door.

I think Balor thought it was Christmas. His trident extended, snapping into place as he moved purposefully towards Gregor. Gregor swung towards him. Even his movements were inhuman, his strange gait more like Them than us. Balor stabbed forward one-handed with his trident. The three-pronged weapon pierced Gregor’s chest though he gave no indication of noticing it. Balor forced him back into the corner by the open door. Roaring, Balor leapt into the air, his free hand swinging back as he prepared to claw the pinioned hybrid.

I saw Gregor’s black fingernails grow and solidify until each of them was an eight-inch-long black blade. With his right hand Gregor grasped the shaft of the trident and pushed it back, tearing it out of his flesh. His left reached up, moving with the sort of speed I’d only ever seen once before, on the night Gregor had been taken. He caught Balor’s wrist with his left and letting go of the Trident swung upwards with his clawed right hand. The blow tore into Balor’s heavily armoured stomach and chest, halting and then reversing his trajectory. Gregor clawed him with so much force that Balor went crashing back into the operating table.

Immediately Balor was up as Gregor closed on him. He swung with one clawed hand and then the other. He tore rents in Gregor’s skin, revealing black liquid below the surface that immediately started to knit the torn flesh back together. I think that was when I stopped believing that my friend was alive and that I was looking at anything other than an alien wearing the distorted and tortured flesh of Gregor’s body. I felt like he’d been hollowed out. I dropped the shotgun, letting it hang on its sling as I drew my Tyler, stretching it out in a two-handed shooter’s stance for maximum accuracy. I was going to kill this mockery and then kill every fucking person who worked here. I didn’t care if I was still here when reinforcements arrived; I’d kill as many of them as I could as well.

Balor was slammed against the stainless-steel wall. He howled as alien claws pierced his side, pinning him to the wall. I was about to fire when the pistol was forced up and Mudge was suddenly in front of him.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted.

‘It’s not him!’ I screamed in Mudge’s face, trying to break free.

Gregor staggered back for no good reason I could see. Balor used the opportunity to push him back further while repeatedly clawing him in the face. Each time Gregor’s distorted features were torn off, the black liquid began re-knitting the flesh and then Balor’s claws tore them open again. Gregor sank to the floor. I lowered my pistol, sure that Balor would do the job for me, but suddenly Gregor struck out. The blow sent Balor flying back into the air so high he broke through one of the hanging strip lights and slammed into the ceiling, before bouncing off the wall and landing on the ground.

Gregor stood up but swayed as his facial features reformed. Balor pushed himself to his feet and began striding towards Gregor. As Balor closed with him he swung out with his left with surprising speed. He caught Balor firmly on the face and picked him up off his feet again, sending him over a table and into the wall, hard enough to make a significant dent.

Balor threw the metal table aside and stood up. Gregor swayed again and then sat down hard. His eyes were still black pools but the expression on his face was one of confusion. Balor made for him again, presumably intent on finishing the job. Mudge let go of me.

‘No!’ he shouted at Balor. I wondered why Mudge had his AK-47 in his hands. Balor was ignoring Mudge. I watched in horror as Mudge shouldered the AK-47 and fired a three-round burst, staggering the pirate. Balor stopped and turned to Mudge. He looked furious. He looked inhuman. Gregor’s eyelids flickered and closed over the black liquid pools of his eyes as he slid to the ground. Mudge lowered his smoking AK-47. I saw him swallow before he turned and fled. Balor charged after him but I knew he had no chance of catching Mudge’s cybernetic legs.

I moved to stand over the inert body of the hybrid, the Tyler still in my hand. I pointed the laser pistol at him. Unconscious as the last of his wounds knit shut, he looked almost peaceful. More like my friend.

‘We’ve come a long way just so you can shoot him,’ Rannu said from the doorway. I lowered the pistol.

‘Morag?’ I asked.

‘She can move,’ he said.

‘Right, you go and calm Balor down, share some brotherly warrior shit with him or something. Get Mudge back here; I need a hand bagging Gregor.’ He nodded and left the room. I could hear him sub-vocalising over the net, trying to reach Balor. I turned to Pagan, who still did not look right.

‘Pagan, I want you to junk whatever’s left of their comms and security, okay?’ He nodded. We needed to leave here and we needed to do so quickly.

Exfiltration wasn’t exactly easy but it was less violent. Morag was up and moving, most of the blood cleared away, though her eyes were completely bloodshot. After making sure they had no way of communicating we pretty much left the surviving lab staff to it.

We put Gregor in a survival bag, gave him an air supply and a heat source – if indeed he needed either – and vacuum-packed the bag. Mudge and I slung it under a collapsible pole. We’d carry it between us.

We moved through the facility until we came to the place that Morag had predicted was the weakest part of the superstructure over a place least likely to be populated. Balor had the canister. The canister had been the real cost. Not the transport, the weapons, the intel or even the Wraiths. The canister he held in his hand was the really expensive thing and contained one of the most proscribed substances in human space. Unlicensed possession was normally enough for a substantial jail sentence; using it in a terrorist act like we were doing was worthy of the death sentence in most states and all Spokes.

Balor sprayed the programmable concrete-eating microbes on the concrete floor at the back of the loading bay. I watched as a sizeable circle of the concrete turned to liquid, becoming a deeper and deeper pool until it cascaded out of the hole it had eaten. Balor quickly sent the microbes their destruction code before he and Rannu jumped through.

We moved through the maintenance level below. Pagan tricked out the sensors and sent fake images to the cameras, sending ghost images of us in all the wrong places and making sure everything looked empty and normal where we actually were. Morag was supposed to be helping, but she did not want to enter into the net again and we didn’t have time to deal with that now.

There was activity from Spoke security and their emergency services but nobody was quite sure what was going on and they didn’t have the surrounding layers secure yet. They’d probably been warned off by Rolleston’s people and were waiting for their response. We slipped through.

Another three storeys down we found an abandoned maintenance shaft that Morag had discovered during her research. We used what was left of the microbes to eat their way into the abandoned shaft. We set up a winch mechanism. Rannu went first, then I followed and Mudge lowered the bagged form of Gregor down. We had no idea how long the sedative would last, though we had brought more of it with us. If he woke up en route we could all be fucked.

At the bottom of the shaft was a tunnel that led to one of the maintenance airlocks for the Mag Lev tunnels. In the tunnel we unrolled our lightweight vac suits and assembled the helmets. The Mag Lev tunnels were designed to be flexible as they were bored into tecton-ically unstable rock. They were also vacuums to limit the air resistance the high-speed train would have to push against.

Pagan hacked the airlock mechanism and sent false data to the Spoke’s systems to make it look like it hadn’t been opened. We entered the cavernous dark tunnels of the Mag Lev system. It was a twenty-mile tab via flashlight, Pagan again having to trick out cameras and sensors on his own, as Morag wouldn’t help. It was sometimes easy to forget how good Pagan was when you saw Morag’s capabilities. Spokes and the Mag Levs have some of the toughest security on Earth as they are seen as huge terrorist targets. What he did was an amazing bit of hacking, but I could see it was taking a toll on him.

In the tunnels Rannu had point. Balor was at the rear. Mudge and I were carrying Gregor; Morag and Pagan were flanking us. There were no Mag Levs. I reckoned Rolleston’s people must’ve shut them down.

I didn’t think twice about a twenty-mile tab, even post-combat. That’s why it came as something of a surprise when my helmet filled with bloody vomit, almost choking me, and I collapsed.

I found out what happened later on. They managed to evacuate the sick from my helmet into the rest of the suit. Apparently when they took it off me, back onboard the Mountain Princess, it was pretty disgusting. Embarrassingly I had to be carried the rest of the way by Balor.

When we reached an external airlock Pagan again hacked the lock and sent false information to the security systems. In the airlock our suits injected us with a stasis-inducing drug that lowered our heart and respiratory systems. Balor then attached us all by safety line and with Magantu acting as scout towed us in a line to the surface, avoiding the submersibles, cybrids and exo-armour patrols that were presumably looking for us. A heavily coded comms burst brought Buck and Gibby in the transport back to find us. Balor sent Magantu back to New York. It was going to be a long swim for the shark.

Buck and Gibby flew us back to the Mountain Princess, the ore transport ship we were using as our base of operations. Fortunately Gregor did not wake up from the sedative and they were able to secure him in the recently installed containment chamber on the ship.

The chamber was in one of the ship’s concealed smuggling holds. They were well hidden but would not stand the determined and well-equipped search of the ship that presumably Rolleston and his people would begin in the near future. How long we had depended on what resources they were prepared to throw at the problem. They also had to factor in the risk of exposure, as the people doing the searching had a chance of finding Gregor, who could be difficult to explain. They would also have to be capable of dealing with him.