Veteran

30

It was pity. That was the conclusion I came to as another fit of coughing racked my body and I coughed and spat up blood, nausea rolling over me in waves. Morag lay next me on the bunk, holding me and trying to avoid getting blood on her. I didn’t have very much longer to go. I felt like all my flesh had rotted off and I only existed as drugs and a machine now. They hadn’t wanted me going with them, but I knew I’d last that long and Mudge, the alchemist, had assured me he had just the right cocktail of chemicals to see me through. On the way back I was going into an automed. They intended to place me in chemical stasis to slow the progression of the radiation sickness. It wasn’t so I could see the Earth again. I had little false sentimentality for that shit hole. I just wanted to make sure that Messer and the Wait didn’t live too much longer than I did. In fact, if they didn’t live as long as me that would be better.

Morag was looking after me on the trip out. Like I said, pity. I think revulsion at the pathetic nature of my current physical state, along with memories of me being an arsehole in the ruins of Trenton, had washed away any attraction she may have felt for me. Mudge would come in every so often, take the piss out of me and give me drink, fags and drugs that my system didn’t cope with very well. I couldn’t deal with the others. They weren’t as good at keeping the pity out of their eyes as Mudge and Morag. Not that I saw Gregor though; he was in a fucking cocoon.

The thing was, I’d take pity. I needed her. Pretty selfish thing to do, I guess, especially after what I’d said to her, but I couldn’t handle it on my own. If I’d been on my own and hadn’t had this thing to do I would’ve put the Tyler to my head long ago. Besides, I couldn’t really see Mudge doing such a good job of looking after me.

The butcher bill wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. I’d seen Balor’s wound: the plasma had eaten through his armour plate and cooked a lot of his systems. He’d actually blacked out, which he was furious with himself about. As far as I knew he was one of a very select few who’d ever survived multiple direct hits from a plasma weapon. It should’ve burnt straight through him. I guess he was very well engineered. Still, he’d seemed a bit more subdued since Rolleston had put him down and he’d been sucked out of the Spoke. It was good for peace and quiet but bad for morale. Not that we really had any. I don’t think Balor liked it now he wasn’t top of the food chain.

Rannu had had most of his face blown off. The Spectre had cracked the armour on his skull, killed a lot of brain cells, but he’d recover. The medpak that covered most of his face was slowly rebuilding it. He was lucky. We all were. Well, except Buck.

Gregor had healed himself. Just after the fight on Atlantis I’d seen him. There was still an angry wound in his head made by Rolleston’s skull fucker that the Themtech was trying to heal. He was fine once that had happened.

Pagan had only taken a few rounds from Rolleston’s Spectre and was pretty much fine but terrified, like the rest of us. Except Gregor, I think Gregor was just angry.

Gibby had only been saved because he had upgraded the armour implanted on his skull to provide better protection against impact from crashing. Josephine’s kick had split his armoured skull but he’d live. Other than that, he was missing lumps of flesh from the laser wounds on his chest. He’d heal, physically anyway. We were all used to losing people in combat, but Buck and Gibby had been together since they were kids growing up in Austin. Gibby told me that they’d done everything together. Raced the same cars and bikes, got in the same fights, worked together, lost their virginity together, which I had to admit was a little odd, and signed up together. Gibby said he felt like half of him was dead. Although I hadn’t grown up with Gregor, I had felt similarly when his loss finally sank in after Dog 4. We’d managed to get him back though, but after what I’d seen him do in the Spoke he just scared me.

Like Gibby, Mudge had lost some weight courtesy of it being superheated and blown off by the Grey Lady. He’d also needed a new leg, but other than that he’d got off lightly. Mudge was tough and his enhancements were pretty good. He came close to holding his own but at the end of the day he wasn’t built like us. That and his stupid decision not to wear armour over his string vest had led to him going down so quickly.

Morag was a mess. She had been blind, deaf and suffering from hypoxia. They treated the hypoxia. They replaced her eyes and ears. Tried to make them look as natural as possible, not like our black lenses. Augmented them so her eyes and ears had capabilities similar to ours. Better than the real ones, but every time I looked at the angry scars I thought how another bit of her humanity had been cut away, how with each surgery she became a little bit more like me. What the fuck were we thinking letting her come along?

They rebuilt my internal organs, put me back together, sewed flesh and replaced broken components. They couldn’t see the point and neither could I, as I was still dying of radiation poisoning. They tried to keep me from going. There was talk of making my final days as comfortable as possible in the medical facilities of Atlantis. And miss committing suicide in the Sirius system? Not a chance.

Our little stunt had worked to a degree. The referendum results came back heavily in favour of ending the war and removing the Cabal. Which wasn’t much of a surprise. Of course, there had been riots, lynchings and various other examples of vigilante justice, but humanity did all right. Governments didn’t topple, though they got stripped down very quickly, as did militaries, intelligence agencies and many corporations. Some very junior people ended up in positions of power. There was a degree of chaos. People were promoted one minute and gone the next as something new was uncovered about them. I guessed it was going to take some adjustment on the part of those who would be our leaders to realise the degree of integrity that was now expected of them. Or perhaps had always been expected of them but was now being enforced. Human society didn’t collapse, it abided. The governments and the corporations saw the tide and decided to go with it, to use it to their best advantage, which normally meant they had to play nicely.

Many of the Cabal had been put under house arrest. Some of them had their funds confiscated and as a result their medical care could not continue. They didn’t so much die as get turned off. Others had the security at their facilities overwhelmed and were killed by vigilante mobs. I suspect some of those mobs contained well-trained, ex-military personnel.

Of course, Cronin escaped. His escape is going to be talked about by space pilots for the next thousand years. Already it’s considered one of the most audacious bits of flying ever done. Just a shame it was done for such a poor reason. One of the Black Squadron’s new generation of frigates, USS Hatteras, managed to dock with the elevator that Cronin was on while it was still in transit, before it had reached High Brazilia. Once the elevator cleared the atmosphere, the frigate matched its speed and trajectory, then they cut their way into the elevator’s emergency airlock and evacuated Cronin and his people.

Only about a quarter of the elevator’s crew and passengers were killed as a result of explosive decompression before they managed to trigger the inner airlocks. The frigate took a lot of damage from High Brazilia’s orbital weapons and space force, but again another one of their angelic hackers wreaked havoc and the Hatteras and Cronin escaped to set sail for another system.

Some of those who had been involved with the Cabal or were otherwise doing very naughty things managed to survive. Other new leaders came from total obscurity, often straight off the streets. Everyone from community leaders to gang bosses found themselves in positions of power. Things stayed the same and things changed a lot. I think they were going to improve. I think humanity did good purely by not pulling itself apart in the face of massive change.

The transition could’ve been a lot worse. Whenever anyone tried to take advantage others would see them coming and step up. How this didn’t end up in total chaos I don’t know. Maybe humanity was just sick of fighting. Maybe we were growing up, though that seemed less likely. In retrospect what we had done was stupid on such a scale that the word irresponsible didn’t really cover it. We had not thought it through and we had got very, very lucky. Not just the seven of us but everyone in the system; it could’ve been so much worse. Well, Buck hadn’t been very lucky. I didn’t feel too lucky either.

Mudge had played a dangerous game. His media manipulation had been as canny as anything the Cabal could offer, though a lot more reckless. If anyone thought to check, and I reckoned someone would one day, he’d screened the footage that God showed of people watching our little revolution show. He’d made sure that God showed none of the places where it was bad – child molesters being lynched, Fortunate Sons opening up into crowds, government and corporate buildings being torched. He’d gambled that most people would be too overwhelmed by the news and too relieved by the apparent end of the war to misbehave too badly. Then when people got the idea that this was a celebration and not a riot they would act as their own good example. It worked, but like I said, risky. Our world could just as easily have burned.

So why wasn’t I holed up somewhere waiting for death? Going out surrounded by hookers, drugs and good whisky? Why was I on this fucking ship going back to Sirius, a place I’d sworn I’d never return to? We just seemed to be pushing our luck further and further; eventually something had to kill us all. You can’t buck the odds for this long and you don’t continue to take risks like this and expect to live.

I felt like we’d done our bit. Now it was time for the government and the military to step in and deal with Demiurge, Crom and the Black Squadrons, but this wasn’t enough for Gregor. In fact, he pointed out that surely that was the whole point of what we had done: that we ourselves had to start taking responsibility rather than hoping someone else would handle it. Gregor said that we had to deal with Crom. By the time the governments reacted it could be too late. More to the point, he knew how and where Crom was going to be released. He was going no matter what. I was going to argue – it just seemed such a waste after all we’d been through – but I was dying anyway and I owed him. I hadn’t looked very hard for him when I’d got back. Mudge had but I hadn’t.

The various governments of Earth were coming to a consensus surprisingly quickly, aided by the newfound transparency, that the Cabal, Rolleston, Cronin and the Black Squadrons were all bad. They were putting plans into place to deal with the threat posed by Crom and Demiurge. There were just a couple of things that were slowing them down.

They had lost contact with the colonial fleets. Any ship they sent they didn’t hear back from, presumably because they were being sequestered by Demiurge despite the ships going out with God in their systems. The colonial fleets’ equipment was the most up to date. Although Earth’s defences were supposed to be top notch, the ships they had in-system tended to be two or three generations old. They were serviceable craft that had made it through the war but no match for the modern ships on the front line. Not surprisingly, the various Earth governments were not in an incredible hurry to send their protection out of system to deal with Demiurge or Crom.

All this, as well as how disorganised inter-governmental cooperation was at the best of times, had pretty much ground possible responses to Demiurge and Crom to a halt.

That was when Air Marshal Kaaria of the Kenyan Orbital Command came to visit us. He was almost as pissed off with us as he was with Rolleston. We had, after all, pretty much compromised all military operational security. He had a point. However, we hadn’t fried most of his C amp;C staff. He wanted Rolleston dead nearly as much as we did. The fearsome African officer pulled some strings and found us a ship and suggested that we do the rest of our healing en route to somewhere we could help undo some of the damage we’d done. I felt he was being a little unfair, and regardless of how much he wanted Rolleston’s head and despite how much I hated the bastard I had no interest in fighting the Major again.

Mudge had listened to Gregor’s plan to go to Sirius and then said no. He said he had too much to do on Earth and besides, he wanted to capitalise on his fame. One of the transmissions that caught up with us just before we set sail had a news story in it about certain youths who were starting to dress like Mudge. I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or worried by that, maybe a bit of both. Pagan also decided against coming. He didn’t see what he had to offer and he felt he’d done enough. Besides, he thought that he should concentrate his efforts on finding a way to deal with Demiurge.

Balor was in. I wasn’t sure why, maybe for the thrill of it. Maybe he just needed a bit of life affirmation after getting his arse kicked, and nothing affirms life like near-certain death.

Gibby was in, which was good because we needed someone to pilot the ship. He was quiet and withdrawn. I just hoped that he didn’t want to follow Buck immediately. On the other hand, this was a good place to do that.

I had assumed that Morag wasn’t going to go. There was no need for her to. She had a distant look in her eyes, her new eyes, when we were discussing it. Finally she announced that she was coming with us. I started to object. I wanted to tell her that she’d done it, finally made something that could be better for her. That she could live and hopefully live well. That she would be needed to help deal with Demiurge. Anything to make her stay on Earth so she didn’t throw away her life on this suicide mission, but one look from her told me I’d forgone the right to have such opinions.

Pagan said what I’d been thinking but she was intent on going. She told us that she had to go. Pagan asked her if it was her or Ambassador that wanted to go. Morag silenced him with a look too.

Twenty minutes later Pagan, looking like a beaten man, changed his mind and agreed to come with us. I asked him if he was sure; he said he was. With Morag going Rannu was in, which I was thankful for – the quiet Nepalese was a solid trooper.

The air marshal got us the ship and the other gear we needed. They even delivered it to High Atlantis for us. The Atlantean authorities laid on a shuttle to take us up. Probably because they couldn’t think of anything better to do with us after Cat bullied their security services into not arresting everyone.

The shuttle’s airlock had been about to close when Mudge reappeared.

‘I figured this is going to be a pretty good story as well. Besides, clearly we’re invincible,’ he’d said.

‘Publicity whore,’ I replied.

‘Not just publicity, mate,’ he’d said, but the banter sounded hollow, forced.

‘Invincible?’ Pagan asked. I’d been thinking the same thing: which fight had Mudge been at?

‘Only Buck died,’ Mudge said, grinning. There was an appalled silence but Mudge didn’t stop grinning. Then Gibby started to laugh.

So everyone was in – strange how I couldn’t get happy about that. I’d spent much of the shuttle’s ascent trying not to get caught by Morag staring at her. She was right: her decision was nothing to do with me. It just seemed such a waste.

We couldn’t pronounce the name of the ship but roughly translated it came out as Spear of Understanding, so we just called it Spear. It was a long-range strike craft, the spaceship equivalent of a long-distance bomber. Stealth capable, it was designed to penetrate Themspace and deliver its payload at asteroid habitats or command ships. The funny thing was, long-range strike craft had been developed from deep-space, system-survey craft. I wondered how long we would have to wait before we could decommission our weapons of war and use them for more peaceful purposes.

Like some of the lighter frigates, many LRSCs were often refitted to use as special forces delivery platforms for jobs that required slightly more finesse than you could achieve with a guided missile. Well, that’s what they’d told us in the Regiment anyway. The elite Kenyan Reconnaissance Commandos had refitted the Spear for just such a use.

We’d inherited most of the commandos’ gear. Most importantly the refitted bomb bay had contained six Mamluk light mechs. In the same class as the Wraiths, the Mamluks were a more up-to-date light mech/exo-armour with improved stealth and sensor capabilities. Lying prone in their modified missile racks, their matt-black, sensor-absorbing, featureless, almost organic outlines were beautiful to look at. It didn’t matter how much you hated the military, if you had served then you still got a thrill from the hardware. The Mamluks were superb pieces of kit, only the best for equatorial special forces, I guessed. They were outfitted for vacuum operations and already had their propulsion/manoeuvring fins attached. Not quite as strong as the Wraiths, the Mamluks’ interfaces and responses from the servos were a lot faster, meaning they would react quicker than the older exo-armour model.

There was also a slightly older American-made Dog Soldier mech. The Dog Soldier was the only special forces mech ever designed to fulfil a fire-support role. It was not as stealthy or as fast as Mamluks or Wraiths, but was more heavily armed and armoured. Balor had arranged to have the Dog Soldier delivered to the Spear while we’d been en route on the shuttle. Now that we were under sail he was busy modifying it with Pagan’s help so that he could fit into it.

I was worried about the Dog Soldier’s lesser stealth capabilities but I was pretty sure we’d need its firepower. The Mamluks were armed with the most modern derivative of the chain-fed, 20-millimetre Retributor railgun and back-mounted, vertically launched, smartlink-targeted, anti-armour missiles. The Dog Soldier carried the heavier Vengeance 30-millimetre chain-fed railgun with an over-slung, magazine-fed, 105-millimetre mass driver. Basically the mass driver was a semi-automatic, much larger-calibre railgun. It also had an anti-missile/anti-personnel, ball-mounted, laser-defence system and two shoulder-mounted, smartlink-targeted missile batteries. I just hoped that Balor got it ready on time. I also wondered how he’d managed to find it and get it delivered to the Spear that quickly. The Mamluks came in at just over ten feet tall, the Dog Soldier was closer to fifteen feet.

Rannu, his face still covered in a medpak, was running Morag through extra-vehicular-activity combat simulations for the Mamluks. I didn’t like the idea, but if she was coming she should at least be as ready as we could get her.

As soon as we’d set sail Gibby had begun tinkering with the LRSC’s controls. I didn’t like space travel at the best of times, so Gibby mucking around with the Spear’s controls while we were moving faster than the speed of light did not go down well – especially when he accidentally managed to shut down life support for two hours – but he seemed to have everything working now. He rarely slept as he was speeding most of the time, and you could usually hear his strangely subdued and melancholy music drifting through the ship.

I’m not sure what Mudge was doing, probably masturbating and recording it with his eye lenses again, and I was busy dying. So we all kind of had something to do, but what we couldn’t do was plan. Gregor had been very insistent but vague about what the plan was. All we knew was that it would be EVA, my least favourite things to do. But we couldn’t work on the plan while we were under sail, while we had eight days to do so, because Gregor was in a fucking cocoon. This pissed me off and not just because it was deeply not normal.

Mudge had discovered it on our first day under sail. It had taken him quite some time to convince us it was real, as he’d been taking recreational psychotropics at the time. Eventually he showed us footage he’d shot in the engine room. It was a huge, resinous-looking pod held upright in the corner by the power-containment equipment. Some power lines had been spliced into the cocoon. Gibby checked the systems and confirmed a significant power bleed. I was too sick to go and look myself, or rather I was saving all the best drugs for the job, but from the footage the pod looked to be about eighteen feet tall.

Gibby reviewed the security-lens recordings from the engine room. The grainy low-quality picture showed Gregor entering the engine room. He was naked, his huge off-kilter physiology making it seem all the more obscene. He was carrying a tool kit. People like Gregor and I knew our way around an engine room because we had been trained to sabotage them. He uncoupled a very heavy gauge power cable. All of us then winced and were thankful for the low quality of the image when he pushed the cable into his flesh where the base of a human spine would be. It looked like he’d dislocated his arm several times to get the cable in place. Then he’d just leant against the wall. That got boring so we fast-forwarded it.

‘He’s got a big cock,’ Mudge said. We all turned to stare at him. ‘I’m just saying,’ he said defensively. We turned our attention back to the image. Gregor was shaking. His flesh beneath the skin seemed to be writhing, flowing and bulging of its own accord as his shaking began to look like a serious seizure.

‘What’s that?’ Morag asked, and then made a disgusted noise. Gregor was producing a substance that looked like viscous black bile. Before long he was vomiting it all over himself. We were all disgusted, but of course we all kept watching. The black substance adhered to him and solidified into the hard resinous substance of the cocoon. Soon he was covered in the cocoon, only his head, a fountain for this black vomit, showing. Eventually that was covered as well. We were quiet for a bit, just looking at the image of the solidifying cocoon.

‘What’s the chance of him becoming a butterfly?’ I asked. Mudge started giggling, seemingly uncontrollably.

‘What the fuck’s he doing?’ Gibby had asked. He was strumming one of Buck’s guitars. We were all in the quarters that Morag and I shared. I was propped up and coughing blood into a bucket every now and then. The interface that Gibby had set up meant that he could pretty much control the ship from anywhere on-board.

‘Maybe he’s just sleeping?’ I suggested. ‘Conserving energy?’ I realised how weak this sounded.

‘He’s drawing a lot of energy,’ Gibby pointed out.

‘Which he has to use for something,’ Pagan said thoughtfully.

‘This is quite interesting,’ he finished and lapsed back into silence. Morag, Rannu, Gibby and I all looked at him expectantly. Mudge was examining his own stomach.

‘And?’ I managed before coughing racked my body again.

Pagan looked up, his thoughts disturbed. ‘Basically, They are, as far as we can tell, autonomous colonies of what we consider to be naturally occurring nanites, right?’

We all nodded as if we knew what he was talking about. Mudge nodded very enthusiastically.

‘Well, presumably he’s using the energy to manufacture more of… well, himself, I guess,’ Pagan said. ‘But I am guessing.’

‘So it’s a transformation?’ Morag asked. Once again, although Gregor sounded and to a degree thought like my friend, I was having it driven home just how alien this thing actually was.

‘I would imagine so,’ Pagan said.

‘Butterfly!’ Mudge added.

‘Into what?’ Gibby asked, running his fingers up the fretboard of his guitar.

‘Butterfly!’ Mudge interjected again. Morag tried to kick him.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Pagan answered.

‘A warrior,’ Rannu said. He sounded pretty sure of himself.

Pagan shrugged. ‘Perhaps. It would certainly be a form that will be of use to him, and hopefully us, for whatever this mission will involve. Perhaps he’s disguising himself as one of Them, I don’t know.’

‘What if he wakes up and decides he wants to eat us all?’ Gibby asked. ‘Or insem… insem…’

‘Inseminate us?’ Morag asked.

‘Yep,’ Gibby said.

‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

‘Or eat us then inseminate us?’ Gibby suggested. We just looked at him.

‘There’s very little on this ship worth inseminating,’ I pointed out.

‘Hey!’ Morag objected.

‘I’d inseminate you,’ Gibby said. He was largely going through the motions of banter. He knew what was expected of him but his heart wasn’t really in it. Morag smiled and I glared at him.

‘Thanks, Gibby. That’s sweet,’ Morag said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, letting out an exaggerated sigh. ‘There’s very little worth inseminating on this ship bar Morag, as I’m too sick. Basically, I think you’re safe except from maybe Mudge.’

‘Yeeha!’ Mudge shouted.

Gibby glared at him. ‘I want you to know I’m heavily armed.’

‘It is a serious point…’ Pagan said.

‘What, Mudge inseminating Gibby?’ I asked, unable to help myself. Pagan tried to ignore me.

‘I mean what comes out of the cocoon and whether or not it’s going to be hostile to us.’

‘Why wait until now?’ Morag asked. ‘Seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to take us out.’

I wondered if her life had become so strange that things like someone cocooning himself were becoming commonplace to her.

‘Besides, we’re well armed,’ I pointed out. Even as I said this I knew what a stupid thing it was to say.

‘Did you see him on the Spoke?’ Rannu asked. Everyone went quiet. I didn’t really have an answer, or rather I did, but I didn’t think they wanted to hear that we’d all just get killed.

‘So what do we do?’ Gibby asked after an uncomfortable silence.

‘We wait,’ Morag said. She sounded a lot less troubled by this than I was.

‘But we don’t know what Gregor has planned. We don’t know where Crom is going to be or how he intends to deal with it or even get to it. We don’t know if the Black Squadrons will be there or anything,’ I said. I was pissed off about this. If Gregor wanted to turn into a beautiful butterfly he should’ve done it on his own time.

‘Where are we going to arrive?’ Rannu asked Gibby.

‘Far side of Sirius, way beyond fleet-controlled space and deep in Them space. Gregor gave me the coordinates. He also said we had to be very quiet when we got there.’

‘We’re going to the Teeth?’ Pagan asked. Gibby nodded. There was an uneasy silence in the cabin that I decided to break.

‘Well, we know it’s going to be a stealth operation,’ I said, and that was about it. That was about all we knew. I was doing my second least favourite thing, space travel, on my way to do my least favourite thing, EVA, to my least favourite place, Sirius, deep inside territory controlled by a whole alien race that was still hostile towards us.

I was listening to the spacecraft. That’s kind of a contradiction. It was very quiet, though you could feel the hum of the power plant throughout the vessel, but it was something you were more aware of than could actually hear. Every movement made a kind of booming echo through the skeletal black metal of the ship’s interior.

I was just lying there, listening and dying. It was a bad day. I’d had two heart attacks despite the augmentations to my heart. Any time I’d tried to speak I just coughed up blood, and during one particularly bad fit of coughing I’d actually managed to bring up a component of my artificial lung. Rannu had kept me alive – it turned out that he was a pretty accomplished medic. I was alive because of Rannu, the automed and Mudge’s ad hoc narcotic pharmacy.

We were four days in and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to Sirius, let alone back to Earth. I hadn’t been expecting Balor when the door opened. I’d seen very little of him on the journey. He’d mostly been working on the Dog Soldier and I reckoned his warrior credo didn’t cope well with weakness like mine. I think he thought I should have walked out into the wilderness to die so I could stop using up the tribe’s valuable resources. I also think the kicking he’d got at Rolleston’s hands had given him a fright. I looked at his chest. They had rebuilt his chest armour on the Atlantis Spoke, recreated it as well as they could. I wasn’t entirely sure it matched the rest of his skin. Still, he’d brought a bottle of good whisky and I was determined to have some of that regardless of how bad I felt and how much damage it did.

He lit a cigarette for me. Again I was determined to smoke it even though I knew it meant coughing up blood. How stupid am I? I managed to hold it between my lips and inhale a bit before Balor had to take it away. I must’ve looked awful. I was pretty much a hollow sack of skin full of disintegrating internal organs and machinery. The strange thing was, it wasn’t pity or sympathy or disgust I saw on Balor’s face, it was resolve and something else, maybe fear. I took a sip from the whisky; it didn’t even taste nice any more. It just hurt. What a waste.

‘What’s this, my wake?’ I asked. He didn’t smile. That worried me.

‘You’re going to die,’ he said.

‘No shit,’ I replied, wondering where this was going and getting ready to call for help.

‘You shouldn’t have to die like this,’ he said. I said nothing; I just stared at him. He drew his dive knife from its ankle sheath and placed it on the table next to the automed. Next he drew the shotgun pistol and placed that on the table. Finally he took an antique, stainless-steel pill box from the pocket of his cut-off combat trousers and placed that on the table as well. I looked at the three items and then back up at Balor.

‘Everyone feels sorry for you but nobody is prepared to do anything about it,’ he said. I struggled to sit up. If Mudge was going to get me up for the job it had better be one hell of a drug cocktail. I looked him straight in his one good reptile-styled lens.

‘I’m going to die on the job just like everyone else,’ I said. ‘If I wanted to be killed I’d do it myself. Understand?’ Balor said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. He was gauging me, sizing me up, trying to come to a decision.

‘What…’ he began, and then stopped.

‘What if I’m too weak to do my job?’ I finished for him. He nodded. ‘I’m dead anyway, so you don’t have to worry about looking out for me, but if I can pull a trigger I’ll help where we’re going. But that’s not what’s bothering you, is it?’

Balor shook his head, his sensor dreads whipping round as his head moved. ‘I don’t like seeing a warr-’

‘Soldier,’ I interrupted. He looked at me quizzically. ‘I am, or I was, a soldier, and a reluctant one at that. Don’t give me any of this warrior bullshit; you save it for Rannu.’

‘I don’t like seeing a soldier this way,’ he said. I managed another sip from the whisky and then refilled the glass with some of my blood. I looked back up at Balor, sitting huge and impassive next to my bed.

‘You’re really scared of me, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I mean this.’ I gestured down at my sore-covered wreck of a body. ‘This is pretty much your worst fear, isn’t it?’

He didn’t say anything. It hit me then that like all the other soldiers who dressed themselves up like monsters, Balor was overcompensating, running from something, hiding from something. He was just better at it than the rest.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked. ‘Out of all of us you’ve got to have the most to lose – maybe Mudge now, but he’s too fucked to care.’

‘Loyalty,’ he said.

‘Oh bullshit. You want to do a dying man a favour then, don’t fucking lie to me.’

He glared at me. I think I’d made him angry, and not the mock anger he play-acted with his cronies; I’d genuinely hit a raw nerve.

‘Because I think we’ve changed something,’ he finally said through gritted rows of shark-like teeth.

‘You don’t sound pleased about it,’ I replied.

‘I am. It’s why we’re warriors after all,’ he said. I didn’t follow him but I was sick of hearing all this warrior self-justification bollocks.

‘Don’t fucking start with that warr-’ I began.

‘No, you be quiet,’ Balor said. ‘I don’t care what you think of my beliefs, but is that not what all the fighting and killing was for? Isn’t that why all those marines on Atlantis had to die? Aren’t we trying to make things better? Isn’t that our job as the strong? Isn’t that what you told Cronin?’ he snarled. ‘The world without war, the world you’re trying to build, has no place for someone like me,’ he said finally. That stopped me.

‘What about Rolleston and the Black Squadrons?’ I asked weakly.

‘Believe it or not,’ he said evenly, ‘despite what you’ve seen me do, I don’t really have much of an appetite for killing humans.’

‘You’ve come here to die?’ I asked.

‘No. I’ve come here to die in a way that people will talk about for ever.’

‘You want to go out in a blaze of glory,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘That is why, more than anyone else, Mudge must live.’

‘So he can tell your story.’ Balor nodded. ‘And you don’t want me around because despite what you’ve done to your body and your head, you don’t want to be reminded that you are still human and human flesh is weak,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t need to.’

‘I’m worried that you will risk the mission-’

‘You’re on a fucking suicide run, pal. You don’t give a shit about the others – you’ve just fucking said that. You know the score. You know how we do business. What’s your motto, by guile not strength? We’re going in quiet and you want to make a fucking spectacle of your death!’

‘I’m trying to offer you a way out,’ he growled.

‘What’s going on?’ Morag asked from the open doorway. I hadn’t even heard her, though Balor must have. Neither of us said anything. For no good reason I suddenly felt guilty. I think I saw a trace of guilt on Balor’s face too, but who can tell? Morag took in the gun, the knife and the pill box.

‘What were you doing?’ she demanded, asking us both.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

Morag turned to glare at Balor. Balor stood up, his enormous scaled bulk seeming to fill the cramped cabin. Morag moved into the room, Balor towering over her.

‘Were you going to kill him?’

‘I offered him a way out,’ he growled again. Morag looked angrier than I’d ever seen her.

‘A way out? A fucking way out!’ she screamed at him. ‘Why can’t you say kill, or even better, murder?’

‘Morag…’ I started, but she’d grabbed Balor’s shotgun pistol and held the heavy pistol in an unsteady two-handed grip. Balor reached out to take the pistol. The report was deafening in the confined space. Or at least it would have been if we didn’t all have audio dampeners now. The recoil sent Morag sprawling back into the bulkhead, the gun clattering to the deck. Buckshot was suddenly ricocheting all around me, flattening against my subcutaneous armour. There was a black scorch mark on Balor’s chest from the pistol’s fierce muzzle flash. He barely took a step back. She’d shot him in exactly the same place that Rolleston had. Scorched his nice new rebuilt armour.

‘I’m sorry,’ Morag said, much more out of shock at what she’d done than fear of Balor. Balor bent down and retrieved the shotgun pistol and grabbed his dive knife and pill box from the table. I don’t think this had played out the way he’d envisaged. It was difficult to tell with his inhuman face but I think he was embarrassed. Mudge and Rannu were at the door. Rannu had removed the medpak; half of his face was angry red new-growth skin. He had a gun in each hand and Pagan was behind him. Balor made to push past them.

‘Balor,’ I said quietly.

He stopped and turned to look at me.

‘Balor, if I live long enough I’ll go down with you.’ He gave this some thought and then nodded before turning. Mudge and Pagan moved out of the way. Rannu just stared at him.

‘Don’t say that,’ Morag said through gritted teeth. I suspected there would be tears in her eyes if she’d still had real ones.

‘Is everything okay?’ Rannu asked, almost tonelessly.

‘Yeah, we’re fine,’ I said, but Rannu did not move.

‘Get out of the way,’ Balor said dangerously. Rannu still didn’t move.

‘Everything’s fine,’ Morag said.

Rannu moved aside for Balor, who glared at him one last time and then stormed off.

‘Thank you,’ Morag said to Rannu and the others. Mudge started to say something but she closed the door. She threw herself onto the bed next to me, causing me some pain, and then burst into tears. Or rather she started sobbing, no tears any more. I held her as best as my decaying flesh could manage.

‘That bastard,’ she managed later through the sobs.

‘I think he honestly thought he was doing me a favour. He’s scared, he’s just not scared of the same things the rest of us are.’ She looked up at me, her brown eyes no longer up to the job of conveying emotion. I struggled to look at them.

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said, and I think I believed her.

‘No?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘Why not?’ In comparison I was shitting myself.

‘I know you’ll protect me,’ she replied with utter conviction.

‘I thought you didn’t need my protection,’ I said, my mouth working faster than my brain.

‘We both need protection,’ she said. Despite the pain I held her to me, my eyes hurting where my machinery prohibited tears.

A day out from Sirius and Gregor was still in a cocoon. All we’d been able to do was speculate. We’d not been able to come up with a solid plan, let alone run simulations. Though in this case I suspected the simulations would have been quite depressing, in a you’re-all-going-to-die kind of way.

The door to the dying room, as I’d come to think of my cabin, opened. Morag and Pagan walked in. Pagan leant heavily on his staff; both of them looked thoughtful. They looked at each other, both seemingly waiting for the other to start. They seemed to be in a state of mild nerd excitement.

‘We need to speak to Gregor,’ Pagan said.

‘Or turn back,’ I said. An option which was beginning to look pretty good even to me, and I had nothing to lose, or rather I did but I’d already lost it.

‘Morag has had an idea,’ Pagan said. I turned to her expectantly.

‘We had an idea,’ Morag said.

‘Well it was more of-’ Pagan began.

‘Move on,’ I suggested.

‘Gregor still has his interface plugs,’ Morag pointed out. ‘We drill through the cocoon and insert a port into him and talk to him in the net.’

‘Can’t you do it wirelessly?’ I asked.

Pagan shook his head. ‘We’ve been trying. Whatever internal ware he uses as a receiver is not accepting incoming transmissions.’

‘And you can’t override it?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Possibly, but I don’t know how much is normal ware and how much is Themtech, and I’m assuming you know what happens to people who try to hack Themtech?’

‘They end up like Vicar?’ I said.

‘At best, and I don’t want to end up like him.’

I looked over at Morag. ‘Wouldn’t you be more compatible?’

Morag opened her mouth to answer but Pagan got there first.

‘Possibly, but if we drill into the cocoon then there’s no risk.’

‘To you perhaps, but it might trigger off some kind of defence system. If that thing is transforming then what’s to say you’ll even be able to find the port?’

‘We’re sending it through on a modified snake,’ Morag answered. Snakes were remotely controlled delivery devices for monofilament fish-eye cameras, old technology. Most people used mites or crawlers these days, but most special forces types still had them around in case they came in useful.

‘Okay, but what’s to say you won’t harm Gregor?’ I asked. ‘The cocoon is after all a protective casing, I’m guessing.’

Both of them weren’t sure what to say. ‘We need to know,’ Morag finally asserted. ‘He shouldn’t have cocooned himself without telling us what the plan was.’

‘Agreed, but if we kill him, we’ll never know,’ I said.

‘So we turn around, which we’re already considering anyway,’ Pagan replied. I fixed him with a glare from my lenses.

‘He’s still a friend of mine,’ I reminded him, though I’m guessing my near corpse-like appearance made me less scary than I used to be.

‘Understood, but he seemed pretty robust. He is after all part alien killing machine. When we get to Sirius we’re not going to be able to hang around for too long, stealth or no stealth. If They don’t find us, the Cabal will.’ He was overstating the point; finding a ship in something as big as space was actually quite difficult.

‘What are you looking for, my permission?’ I asked. Both of them looked a little guilty. ‘You’ve already decided to do this.’ Pagan nodded. I sighed. ‘Fine,’ I said, a little pissed off. ‘Can you at least make sure I’m there when you talk to him?’

‘That’s kind of why we’re here,’ Morag said. She moved over to the bed and, as gently as she could, rolled me over. I found myself staring at the bulkhead. This saved me from having to see the grimace on Morag’s face when she saw my bedsore-covered back, the bleeding sores from the radiation sickness, and smelled the rank smell of someone dying. I felt her plug in the wireless net interface.

‘We’ll call when we’re ready,’ she said and the pair of them left.

The net was tiny on the Spear. Strictly speaking, it could have been any size, but it only existed in the Spear’s own systems. The net representation of the ship was odd. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a skeletal spearhead or the long skull of some kind of mythical beast. Symbols, not unlike the veves Papa Neon used, were inscribed in the bone, though they would change, morphing into other symbols as you looked at them. This was encrypted information from the ship’s operating systems. A huge and largely featureless desert surrounded the net representation of the Spear – presumably this was to symbolise space. The sky was a beautiful rendering of a desert sunset. Different virtual areas of the ship were represented as smooth caves of bone. In one of these caves Morag and Pagan had set up the pub environment that they’d built from Gregor’s subconscious. It looked a little weird among all the polished bone.

The icon I had was actually a pretty good rendering of me, if I’d had no cybernetics or radiation poisoning. This time I thought to check in the mirror behind the bar what colour Morag had made my eyes. She’d made them green; it didn’t look right.

Gregor’s icon was similar to mine, a good rendition of him back when he was human, sans cybernetics. I was relieved to see he wasn’t a Smiler any more. I guess irrational tribal allegiances die hard. Morag was there. She was Black Annis again. I think I’d preferred the Maiden of Flowers or whoever the prettier one had been. Pagan was there in his Druidic icon. All of them were sitting at a table in the centre of the otherwise deserted bar. I walked over and joined them. There was already a glass of virtual whisky on the table. I took a sip; it was well programmed but ultimately pointless.

‘I thought you’d pop like a balloon when they drilled into you? How’d it feel to be violated?’ I asked. Gregor just stared at me. I sighed, or rather the animated virtual representation of me sighed. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I asked.

‘What’s necessary,’ he said.

‘Don’t give me that cryptic shit; you know as well as I do we can’t afford it,’ I said. He should know better.

‘I apologise. It was necessary for me to begin the transformation-’

‘Into what?’ I asked.

‘A form more useful for the job.’

‘How’re you going to look?’

‘Different,’ he said.

Morag and Pagan were just watching.

‘You needed to tell us about the job before you did that,’ I said.

‘I apologise. I realised I was cutting things pretty fine as regards the transformation, but you’re right. I knew that you’d eventually find a way to contact me,’ he said.

I just looked at him. I felt like really having a go at him but there wasn’t a great deal of point. That didn’t change the fact that I was pissed off with him.

‘So what’s the job?’ Pagan finally asked, breaking the tension.

Gregor looked over at him. ‘EVA into the heart of the Teeth.’

‘Penetrations like this have never worked before. I don’t see any reason why they should start working now,’ Pagan said.

‘Because I will be broadcasting a Them biometric signature. They will literally have to identify you by sight to compromise you,’ Gregor told him.

‘Part of your transformation?’ Morag asked. Gregor nodded.

‘You’re turning into one of Them.’ I said. I needed to remember that regardless of how much Gregor looked like Gregor in the net, not only was his body changed but the way he thought was as well. He wasn’t us or Them but something in-between.

‘Not exactly,’ he said. I was getting sick of this.

‘If you can disguise yourself then why not go alone?’ I asked.

‘I cannot disguise myself as one of Them. It’s not as simple as shifting form. I will be broadcasting a biometric field which will disguise us from Their sensors, but They’ll still be able to ID us visually.’

‘So be sneaky,’ I suggested. I was trying to remember how we’d been talked into this. Gregor was beginning to look somewhat exasperated.

‘We will get caught. Remember, They’re effectively a hive mind. I am not part of that. We will eventually be compromised and I will need your firepower. Also, Crom could affect me and I cannot risk infection. You will need to dispose of it.’

‘If Crom infects you?’ I said.

‘You need to ask?’

‘What exactly is Crom and how is it being delivered?’ Pagan said.

‘About twelve years ago the Cabal seeded the entire belt with unmanned probes manufactured from Themtech. They were organic and broadcast a Them biometric pattern. They were very small but even then Their defences caught and destroyed a lot of the probes but enough got through. They secured themselves as close to major concentrations of Them as they could get. Very basically they were nanite factories producing Crom and sophisticated receivers. When the Cabal is ready they will send a transmission which will release what are effectively smart spores.’

‘How many are there?’ Morag asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Gregor said.

‘Then how are we supposed to find them?’ Pagan asked.

‘We just need to find one, and I know where a few of them are. Then we hack the receiver and send a self-destruct code, which will in turn be transmitted to all the other devices.’ He pulled an envelope out of the pocket of his combat trousers. It was very old-fashioned looking, pre-FHC, with a wax seal and everything. Gregor pushed it across the table to Pagan. Pagan just looked at it. Something occurred to me.

‘I thought only Rolleston had Crom.’

‘The seeds are an older version of Crom – they’d just infect and kill the aliens. Rolleston has the information required to reprogramme the seeds for the sequestration strain of Crom.’

‘He must have done it by now,’ I said sceptically.

‘No,’ Gregor answered. ‘His priority will have to be releasing Demiurge and consolidating his power base with the Sirius fleet but he will get round to releasing Crom.’

‘But he could have already done it?’ Pagan said.

Gregor looked exasperated. ‘Possibly.’

Pagan’s icon shook its head. I knew how he felt. This was getting thinner and thinner.

‘You know Balor and Mudge would just have you release the killer strain of Crom to neutralise the threat,’ Pagan said.

‘Neutralise,’ Black Annis spat, her voice like broken glass being ground.

‘Militarily speaking-’ Pagan began.

‘Not going to happen, and that’s my call,’ Gregor interrupted.

‘They are a people not a weapon,’ Annis said.

‘They are a weapon if Rolleston gets his hands on them,’ Pagan pointed out.

Morag’s Black Annis icon looked like she was about to argue.

‘Okay, this is getting us nowhere,’ I said. ‘Change the subject.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Pagan asked.

‘How do you think?’ Gregor replied. ‘I was locked up in there for over a year.’

‘And they shared all this with you?’ Pagan asked sceptically.

‘No. They programmed my bioware for some pretty sophisticated applications and the rest is my training. I’ve no doubt you would’ve done the same, probably more with your information warfare training.’

Pagan didn’t answer, he just studied Gregor thoughtfully. Lights played across the letter as both Pagan and Morag interrogated the code represented by the letter with their own diagnostic programs. ‘That’s pretty well encrypted,’ Pagan finally said.

‘It’s a one-shot deal. Screw it up, corrupt it, trip any of its booby traps and it’s just junk. You’ve no idea what I went through to get this.’

‘For these spores to work they must be close to a very high concentration of Them?’ Pagan said.

‘They are,’ Gregor replied.

‘We start a firefight in an area concentrated enough for Them to visually ID us in space, then it’s over for us. We’re not going to be able to get out and it’ll be just a matter of time before They overwhelm us,’ I pointed out.

‘Just as long as you hold them off long enough to deactivate Crom,’

Gregor said. So there it was. Instinctively I took a large mouthful of the pointless virtual whisky.

‘So this is a one-way trip?’ Pagan said redundantly. Nobody else said anything. ‘I don’t want to be a hero.’

‘Either we stop it or the Cabal and Rolleston win,’ Gregor said.

‘What about the Earth governments?’ Pagan replied. ‘They have to respond.’

‘Maybe, but in time? We’re here. Now,’ Gregor said. Pagan shook his head violently. ‘What did you think was going to happen when you agreed to come?’ Gregor asked, anger sneaking into his tone.

‘I thought you’d have a better plan,’ Pagan spat back. ‘I’m out.’

‘How long do you think you can run from a Crom-infected Them and the Cabal when Rolleston’s in control?’ Gregor yelled.

‘Longer than flying into Them-central. I’d be better off putting a gun in my mouth!’ Pagan shouted back. Gregor opened his mouth to retort but thought better of it.

‘Then Morag will have to do the hacking, you fucking coward,’ he finally said and turned to look at her.

‘Morag’s out as well,’ I said.

Black Annis swung round to face me. ‘That’s not your decision,’ she said, her voice like ice.

‘Do you honestly think I’m going to send you out there to die after we’ve been through all this?’ I asked.

‘You’re not sending me anywhere; I’m going where the fuck I want!’ she shouted at me, her voice now modulated to sound like breaking glass.

‘This doesn’t help,’ Gregor said.

‘Shut up.’ I turned back to Black Annis. ‘Look, Morag, you’re right. I have no right to tell you what you can and can’t do but what I will do is sabotage any attempt you make to leave this ship.’ Her hag icon looked like it was about to throw itself across the pub table and tear out my throat. I ignored her and looked at Gregor. ‘You, me and probably Balor can go. If that’s not enough, tough.’

‘We need a signals person and it’s not enough guns,’ Gregor said.

‘Then we don’t do it,’ I told him firmly.

‘I’m going,’ Black Annis said. I lost it.

‘Why do you want to die?!’ I screamed at her. ‘For the first fucking time I can remember there’s hope – why do you want to throw that away? If I wasn’t already dead there is no way I would be going on this,’ I said more quietly. ‘If there is any possible way I could live then I would take it.’

‘I’m going to live through it,’ Black Annis said firmly.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, exasperated.

‘Ambassador wanted to make peace. I’m going to talk to Them,’ she said.

All three of us just sat there staring at her.

Then Pagan started laughing. ‘It’s as good an idea as just walking in there and letting Them kill us,’ he said sarcastically.

‘Morag, I understand where you’re coming from, and I believe there will be a time for that, and you’ll probably play an important part in it-’ Gregor began.

‘Not if she’s dead,’ I interrupted, earning myself another poisonous glare from the hag.

‘But we can’t take the risk initially. What if you can’t convince Them before the spores go off? What if while we’re talking the Cabal uses the Sirius fleet to attack? What if They just kill us out of hand before we can do anything for reasons we don’t even understand? Remember, the vast majority of Them are effectively programmed to kill us on sight until They are told different. Let’s save Them first and then approach Them peacefully afterwards,’ Gregor continued as the hag listened carefully.

‘Look. You lot go and do your commando thing. I’ll go and speak to Them. I can’t see any reason not to do both.’

‘How about everyone dies?’ Pagan suggested.

Morag turned to face him. ‘That doesn’t help,’ she said.

‘Neither will us getting futilely killed,’ Pagan said. It was a good point.

‘We won’t get killed,’ Black Annis insisted. ‘I’m the Whore of Babylon, remember.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Pagan shouted at her. ‘You may be the infant prodigal as far as hacking goes but you know shit about war – which, by the way, this is – and we’re going to need a bit more than youthful optimism to see us through here.’

The hag opened her mouth. It looked like she was getting ready to really have a go at Pagan.

‘He’s right,’ I said quietly. The look of hurt and betrayal on the demonic icon’s features was almost comic. ‘I’m sorry, Morag, but you’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Your only communication with Them has been Ambassador. Now it doesn’t matter who started the war, but we know what They are capable of and you don’t.’

‘So I don’t get a say?’

‘So you don’t listen to those who have experience?’ I asked back.

‘Why is it you don’t believe in me?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Rannu believes in me, he trusts my abilities. Why can’t you?’ This last was aimed directly at me.

‘Rannu has faith in you,’ Pagan answered quietly. ‘That is different to belief, and in this case you still lack experience.’

‘I handled myself in Atlantis,’ she said.

‘You had to have your eyes and ears replaced!’ I exploded.

‘In the lab, not in the media node!’

‘You were horrified by what you saw and did,’ I said.

‘Shouldn’t I be?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted.

‘This was what Ambassador was made for, this is all it was made for -to create peace between us and Them. You said you’d do everything you could to stop me from going?’ I nodded. ‘Well, I’ve just locked you in your room.’

‘That’s fucking childish, Morag,’ I groaned.

‘I could lock this ship down. I’m going to try and talk to Them.’

‘We still need someone to run comms,’ Gregor said.

‘I’ll go,’ Pagan said. There was a tone of resignation in his voice.

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ I said.

‘I was just sitting here thinking how unfair it all was that we have to die here and now and thinking that this can’t be our responsibility. Where is the government to clean up this mess? Then I remembered that abdication of responsibility is what got us here in the first place.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not really following Pagan’s train of thought.

‘Besides,’ he said, glancing at the hag, ‘maybe I’m beginning to find faith.’

Mudge sat me up on the bed in my cabin. He laid out his wares on a collapsible table. There were derms, pads, inhalers, pills all the colours of the rainbow, an old-fashioned syringe and even eye drops. On top of that I still had a little of Papa Neon’s medication left. This was what I would need to see me through the next few hours. Well, at least I hoped it would. I couldn’t be too sure because instead of a pharmacist I had a junkie.

‘So you’re going?’ I said, trying to get my mind off dying.

‘Yeah, man. I’ve got a good feeling about this. I think we’re going to be all right.’

‘You’re high, aren’t you?’ I said, grinning.

"Course I am. If I wasn’t I’d be shitting myself about my impending death. Seriously though, I think it might work. Morag’s plan, I mean.’

‘Got religion?’ I asked. ‘Pagan thinks that she’s the Whore of Babylon.’

The hacker myth? Wishful thinking on his part.’

‘What if we’re doing it, though? What if we’re betraying the whole human race?’ I asked.

‘I suspect we’ll be dead before we see the effects, so really you should only worry if you believe in hell. An afterlife hell, I mean, not, you know, Dog 4 hell or Coventry hell.’

‘Sometimes I don’t think you take anything seriously.’

‘Did you not see me save the world?’ he asked, getting exasperated now.

‘Well, the jury’s still out on that. Besides, didn’t you have some help?’

‘Did I? Oh, you’re just pissed off because your girlfriend is the new messiah.’

‘She’s neither. Anyway, whether the plan works or not, I’m not going to be all right.’

‘No, you’re pretty well fucked.’

‘But this’ll see me through it?’ I asked, trying to hide my worry.

‘This?’ he said, pointing at the drugs. ‘No, this will kill you. I thought that was the point.’

‘Why do all my friends want to kill me?’ I asked.

‘They know you best. At least you’ll be involved. We’re probably going to die as well.’

‘I thought you had a good feeling?’

‘I do, but I’m high and I’ve been wrong before.’ The smile disappeared. ‘Look…’I could see what was coming, something embarrassing that would make me feel closer to death than ever. I needed to stop it.

‘We’re good, Mudge,’ I said.

‘It’s been…’ he began.

‘I know,’ I said. We lapsed into an uncomfortable, self-conscious yet manly silence like the pair of emotional cripples we were.

‘Oh, if I live I’ll go and do the Wait for you,’ he said, almost as an afterthought.

‘You’d better fucking live. I don’t like the idea of those arseholes outliving me. Seriously though, look after Morag for me,’ I said.

Mudge thought about this. ‘No,’ he said finally.

‘What?’ I managed after I’d recovered the ability to speak.

‘Not a chance, man.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Mudge was grinning again.

‘What? I’m fucking dying, man. The least you can do is respect my last wish.’

‘Not if it inconveniences me in any way. I’m not a fucking babysitter.’

‘The word cunt springs to mind. Look after her, you bastard.’

‘No way,’ he said again. I could see he was serious. ‘First off, she’ll be fine; second, I think she can look after herself; and third, she’ll have Rannu following her around, and I suspect he might be slightly harder than me.’ I had to admit they were good points, but still.

‘Slightly – he kicked my arse,’ I had to concede.

‘I could kick your arse,’ Mudge said.

‘I noticed you waited until I’m dying of radiation poisoning to tell me that. Besides, Rannu probably just wants to fuck her,’ I said, not really believing that.

‘Rannu has a wife and kids.’ This I didn’t know.

‘That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to fuck Morag,’ I pointed out.

‘You’ve seen how faithful he is,’ Mudge pointed out, and he was right.

‘But Rolleston’s people would’ve gone after them,’ I said.

‘They did, but she’s an ex-Ghurkha as well. She was straight off into the mountains and she’s got a community full of ex-Ghurkhas looking out for her and the kids. File under more bother than it’s worth for the Cabal.’

‘But what the fuck’s he doing here?’ I said.

‘Believe it or not, mate, every one of us has something to live for, even if we don’t have a wife and kids. Even a sad fucker like you.’

‘I know that. What we don’t have is the responsibilities.’

‘He thinks he’s going to get through this,’ Mudge said.

‘Really?’ I knew Mudge had said the same thing but I didn’t think anyone other than Morag actually believed it.

‘He believes that this is the only chance his kids have for a future and that if we don’t do this all we’ll be doing is delaying the inevitable. As for just hanging around Morag to fuck her, that’s you you’re thinking of. Assuming it hasn’t fallen off, that is.’

‘You’ll know when that happens: I’ll have a railgun in my mouth,’ I said jokingly.

Mudge looked confused. ‘As a cock substitute?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to take some drugs now,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘What first?’

Mudge looked at the table, an expression of confusion on his face.

‘Mudge?’ I said uncertainly. Grinning again, he pointed at the pink pills.

‘I’m looking forward to the EVA. The right drugs, spending some quality time with just yourself and the void. Centring yourself. Remembering just how inconsequential you and your whole fucking race is.’

‘I admire your optimism,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I’m dreading it. I hate EVA. I nearly went mental on the Atlantis dive.’

‘Wrong drug, man,’ Mudge said.

‘That’s your answer to everything. What next?’

‘The two patches either side of the neck.’

‘That’s just to make me look stupid, right? They don’t actually do anything?’ I said, sticking the two patches where he’d suggested.

‘I mean Slaughter and then sensory deprivation. What did you think was going to happen?’ he asked.

‘You sold it to me.’

‘What people do with their own frontal lobes is their business. You’re an adult, man.’

‘How’d the others handle the dive?’ I asked as Mudge directed me to take some more pharmaceuticals.

‘Pagan was reading Moby Dick, Morag was listening to music and Rannu was meditating, like me,’ he said.

‘You weren’t meditating, you were high,’ I pointed out. He just shrugged. I gave everyone’s activities on the dive some thought.

‘How come everyone’s smarter than me?’ I finally asked Mudge.

‘You are pretty dumb,’ he agreed.

We took a lot of drugs, enough to almost feel alive. Well enough for me to walk anyway.

I had so much I wanted to say to Morag before we left. Before I died. But I knew when I was face to face with her I would lose the ability to put what I was thinking into words. And then for one reason or another we were never alone. Slowly I realised she was avoiding me. I thought she was still angry with me for trying to stop her from going, but when I finally managed to speak to her the look in her eyes told me otherwise. When I tried to speak she held her hand over my mouth.

‘We’ll talk when we get back,’ she said fiercely. I almost believed her.