Veteran

6

I broke into the car’s autopilot systems and gave it illegal instructions. I sent out a heavily coded text, cycling it through the cryptography sub-routines of my ECM block and screaming it to emphasise the urgency. The Rigs were no longer beneath us; we were over dry land now. Beneath us were the huddled makeshift stalls, rafts and junks of the harbour markets. Many of the people were making their way to the riverside to see the aftermath of the explosion. I suspected that many of them thought that They had come and were attacking Earth. After all. They would obviously start with Dundee, I thought, smiling to myself.

The bright commercial lights of Dundee’s Ginza were up ahead of us. Flashing neon hologramatic signs simultaneously offering us all the happiness that material goods could offer while warning us of the sacrifices that we all had to make because of the war. There was also news from the front, the duelling strobes of light from yet another space battle above Dog 1, cut with ground action, armoured vehicles, mechs and tired infantry wading through mud in one direction and air ambulances going in the other.

We were on the outskirts of the true Ginza. Scum like us were kept out by heavy police and store security presence. Outside the true Ginza were the knock-off shops and cheap food stalls that the rest of us could afford. All of it hidden beneath the raised toll roads that salary men and women used to get to work and to go shopping. The true Ginza looked like a bright fairy-tale world compared to what the salary men and women called Underside and the rest of us called Dundee.

I nosed the aircar down one of the off ramps into Commercial Street. People eyed the wealth of an aircar suspiciously as we landed. Most of them were just people trying to make a living in Dundee’s non-corporate grey economy, but I could see the usual spatter of ultra-violents and conscientious-objecting gangsters. Some of the more proactive ones made their way towards the car as the door slid open. I turned back to the rear seat.

‘Can you carry it?’ I asked Morag urgently. She nodded, her face a tear-stained mess of cheap make-up. ‘Find something to wrap it in. Nobody can see it, do you understand me?’ She didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Morag!’ I said. She looked up at me.

‘They’ll be tracking us?’ she asked.

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

The bonnet of the car slid back accordion-style at my command and I removed the car interface jack from my plug and began tampering with the aircar’s fuel cell. A little trick insurgency training had taught us.

‘You all right, pal?’ I heard a voice behind me ask. ‘Your leg sore?’ I turned around to find myself looking at an ugly young man with bad cybernetics and even worse skin. He was wearing this year’s iteration of what the street scum around town wore. He took one look at my burnt features and general poor mood and backed off, his hand coming out of his armoured tracksuit top. ‘No problem, pal,’ he said, having decided against robbing us.

I turned back to the car and finished what I was doing as Morag got out. She had wrapped it in the tartan car blanket that seems to come free with every car in Scotland. The blanket was dripping with its ichor. I gave the ECM block its last instruction then removed the jack and dropped it into the footwell of the aircar, praying that Vicar had done what I’d asked.

‘C’mon,’ I said, and we headed towards the corner of Commercial and High Street. There stood an ancient pre-Final Human Conflict stone church. Moving light from within the building backlit the stained-glass windows covered in hundreds of years of city grime. Behind us the aircar took off. Morag watched it head down the High Street beneath the raised roadways. It wouldn’t defeat satellite surveillance but hopefully it would slow Rolleston down enough to buy us some time. The only problem was I had lost my ECM block. I would need another or they would get my transponder.

‘Isn’t that really illegal?’ she asked.

‘Treason, associating with prostitutes.’ I turned to look at her. ‘I think you’re a bad influence on me.’ She managed a weak smile again but I think it may have been for my benefit. Hand inside my long coat, I approached the thick armoured double doors. The fact that they opened as I pushed gave me hope.

‘…the white light was not Them! No! It was not one of their infernal weapons! The white light was from the sky, from heaven, it was judgement! The spear of God, a warning to those who would indulge in unholy couplings!’ To give Vicar his credit he could adapt and improvise to make his sermons topical.

Inside was bare undressed stone. The stained-glass windows had holograms projected onto them. The stylised hellish vistas gave the inside of the church a reddish glow that seemed somehow warm, belying the horrific imagery. There were a number of plastic pews, where the truly wretched and miserable sat being lambasted by Vicar’s sermons. Behind the altar and off to one side I could see Vicar’s work area, various tools and banks of equipment, much of it jury-rigged or built from scratch by himself.

Vicar stood in the pulpit. Presumably it had once been made of wood but that had probably been traded, or burnt for fuel a long time ago. Now it was just a metal and plastic frame.

Vicar himself looked the same, maybe a little older, a little wilder around his already wild eyes. He wore a black vest and dog collar, his powerful frame just beginning to go to seed. He had a long unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, and still-human eyes if you ignored the look in them.

Half his head was covered in long, matted curly hair, the same salt and pepper as his beard. The other half was ugly military tech, a built-in, fast and powerful computer, but as with most military tech it made absolutely no concession to design aesthetics. I could see more elegant add-ons that had presumably been done by Vicar himself in order to keep up with technology and improve his shelf life as a hacker. In his day he’d been one of the best, and as such was drafted into the Signals Corps, and from there he became Green Slime, Military so-called Intelligence. Vicar was still no slouch today, though presumably he had been superseded, like all of us, by the younger, faster and hungrier.

‘Out!’ I barked at Vicar’s ragged congregation as I limped into the church, holding the wound in my leg together.

‘This is a house of God!’ Vicar screamed at me, drool dangling off his beard. The congregation tried to decide who they were most afraid of. My Mastodon being pulled free of its holster gave me the edge, and the desperate-looking congregation scrambled out the door past Morag and me.

‘Lock us down, Vicar,’ I said. ‘Now!’ Vicar ran an appraising glance over the state I was in. His eyes lingered on Morag, still in her worn basque, before finally looking at the car blanket dripping black ichor onto the floor.

‘What kind of party are we having, Jakob?’ he asked.

‘Lock it down,’ I said again, this time more forcefully. Behind me I heard numerous heavy-sounding locks clank into place on the armoured door, now that the last of the congregation had gone. Vicar smiled his mad, wild smile as concertinaed salvaged armour plate unfolded around the walls and roof of the old church.

‘There used to be a castle on this land as far back as AD 80,’ Vicar said.

‘Fascinating. Did you do it?’ I asked. Vicar was staring at Morag, undisguised lust in his eyes as they travelled up her body. He moved closer to her as I grimaced and tried to hold the wound in my leg closed. Morag flinched slightly but held her ground as Vicar reached out and touched her.

‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication,’ he said quietly, as he used his soft fleshy fingers to move her head from one side to the other, his voice low, breathy and excited.

Suddenly he yanked the travel blanket from her, and its contents fell to the ground with a wet thump. Vicar looked furious. I wasn’t sure if it was for show or not. His voice rose until he was shouting furiously into the frightened young girl’s face.

‘And there appeared another wonder in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his heads.’ I really didn’t have time for this. This was why I hated dealing with hackers.

‘This is important, Vicar,’ I said harshly. His head twitched round to look at me. ‘Did you do it?’

‘You owe me,’ he said, smiling and then casting another glance at Morag.

‘Did you do it?’ I asked again. I was beginning to feel angry despite the fact that ostensibly I was trying to get Vicar to do me a favour.

‘Do you know where we are now?’ he further irritated me by asking rhetorically. ‘I mean humans as a people?’

‘Did you do it!’ I was looking around, trying to think of a contingency. Had Vicar hacked into Dundee’s traffic control and sent misleading information about our landing? Was he using ECM to block my transponder?

‘We have opened the second seal; war is on the land,’ he said, quieter now, the glint of mania still present in his eyes. I opened my mouth to angrily demand an answer to my question again. ‘Of course I fucking did it!’ he snapped. ‘You owe me.’ His gaze went to Morag again and then to the alien bleeding black ichor onto the stone floor of the church.

They’re not aliens, you know,’ he said. I gritted my teeth as the painkillers I had taken for the burns were either beginning to wear off or just weren’t up to the task. I limped over to one of the pews.

‘Have you still got the med suite?’ I asked. My question seemed to shake him out of his thoughts. He looked up from the wounded alien and then down at my leg. He nodded.

‘You’re wounded,’ he said.

‘Not for me,’ I replied, and then pointed at the alien. ‘For that.’ Vicar looked down at it, seemed to give some consideration to the matter and then shrugged. He picked its light form up and walked down past the altar and into the nave. I stood up and followed at a limp, Morag with me.

There were various banks of electronic equipment here. Most of it was for net running or building and maintaining electronic equipment, but there was some ancient jury-rigged medical diagnostic and treatment equipment. I was being generous when I described it as a suite.

‘This is unlikely to do any good,’ Vicar said. ‘Doubtless Their physiology is as incompatible as their psychology.’ He began hooking up the alien to his equipment. I searched around on top of one of his other dirty workbenches until I managed to find some accelerant and a knitter and went to work on my leg. Moments later Morag handed me some salve to clean and soothe my burns.

‘This is weird,’ Vicar muttered as he began firing up the equipment.

‘Oh, you think?’ I asked sarcastically.

‘Your background notwithstanding,’ he said, meaning my time in the SAS. ‘I was seconded to Military Intelligence during my active service and we knew nothing about Them. We knew no more than the average squaddie and we could never get hold of one of Them or any of Their tech. It was always destroyed before it got to us. All we knew was They wanted to kill us, that They hated us.’ He frowned, presumably as he received some information on his internal visual display.

‘You said they weren’t aliens?’ Morag asked nervously. Vicar turned to look at her. Once he had had an eyeful he started talking again, though still staring at her.

‘There is no apparent purpose to Them. They appear to exist only to inflict suffering on humanity. They are here to test us.’ Morag seemed to be drinking in his words.

‘So what are They?’ she asked falteringly. I knew what was coming. I’d heard variations of this spiel before.

‘Demons,’ Vicar said, as dramatically as he could manage. Morag looked up at me and I shrugged.

‘He’s not a demon,’ she muttered quietly and then looked down at her hands. Vicar either didn’t hear her or chose not to respond. He got the Ninja settled into the cradle of the ad hoc medical suite and turned to look at me.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing with this?’ he asked, nodding at the creature. I realised I didn’t really have an answer, at least not one that made sense. What was I doing? I was taking the word of a group of rig hookers over my chain of command and committing treason against my entire species at the same time.

‘I want to talk to it,’ I said. Vicar’s head jerked around to look at me, his businesslike manner gone.

‘Who’re you running from?’ he demanded.

‘Rolleston,’ I said. Vicar nodded.

‘Understand this,’ he said, pointing at the creature. ‘Those are the servants of the adversary. If They speak They will only offer lies and we have no business communing with Them.’ He turned back to look at the creature.

‘That sounds like Rolleston,’ I said, though I didn’t really mean it. Vicar was busy examining his machines, a look of concentration on his face.

‘Repent,’ he said, though clearly his mind was on other things as he searched through an old filing cabinet. ‘Or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.’ He found what he was looking for, pulling out a solid-state memory cube, something that could hold an unimaginable amount of information. He placed a couple of jacks into two of the plugs in the back of his skull, plugging the other end of one into the medical suite and the other into the memory block. I stood up.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Vicar ignored me. His eyes rolled back up into their sockets, an affectation that signalled he was in the net. I took this opportunity to search around Vicar’s workspace until I found what I was looking for. There were a number of different ECM blocks. I picked what I thought was the best one and ran a diagnostic on it. It wasn’t working right so I chose another and another until I found one that was still functioning properly.

‘That’ll cost you,’ a disembodied voice said. Morag jumped, but it was Vicar, in the net but presumably still linked up to the internal surveillance systems of the church. The voice came from a speaker on the pulpit.

‘How are you intending on paying for all this, by the way?’ Vicar’s tinny disembodied voice asked.

‘I’m sure we can work something-’ I began, not really having a good answer. Fortunately the alien lost all cohesion at that moment, distracting us from the topic of money. One second it was solid, the next there was black liquid raining down on the stone floor of the church and soaking through the patched fabric cradle of the medical suite. I looked at it in astonishment, though I don’t know why. I’d seen this happen to the aliens all through the Sirius system, but for some reason here, in my hometown, it still seemed to come as a surprise. Morag let out a little whimpering noise.

‘Vicar, what’s going on?’ I demanded.

‘It’s all right,’ came the tinny voice from the pulpit’s speaker. ‘It was pretty much dead when it got here,’ said Vicar coming out of his net-running trance. ‘But I managed to save some of it.’ He looked thoughtful and surprisingly sane.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. I was beginning to think that I had risked my life for even less than usual.

‘It’s like I said, we never got our hands on one before. Their dissolution was always too perfect, all that was left was genetic junk.’ He then lapsed into apparent deep thought again.

‘So?’ I demanded. This seemed to break him from some kind of reverie.

‘Hmm? Oh, yes, well, according to the diagnostics I’ve run it appears They are some kind of bio-technological construct. Though it is just possible that They have occurred naturally, or rather They have much more control over how They evolve. That would explain the different castes, the Ninjas and the Berserks.’ This was old news, it had been posited for some time. I couldn’t really see how it would help. ‘The technology is almost like naturally-occurring nanites, only it’s liquid. It’s difficult to say what these aliens are. The race itself could be the individual cells and each bioform may be a colony or even an entire civilisation of Them.’

‘Well that’s very interesting, Vicar, but what does it mean?’ I asked. There was only so long we could stay in the church before Rolleston worked out where we were.

‘I’m not sure,’ he mused. ‘What it does mean is that our intelligence should have had this info years ago.’

‘Shoot to kill?’ I said, meaning the policy of utter eradication whenever we encountered them. Vicar shrugged. Then something occurred to me. ‘With technology like that, why not go viral? They could wipe us out in moments.’

‘I don’t know, perhaps some kind of societal taboo? Perhaps they see it as a form of suicide, but with this information we could certainly do it to them.’

‘If we hand this over then we can end the war?’ I asked.

‘If we hand this over then we provide our masters with the means to end the war,’ he said. He sounded doubtful. But this was a weapon; our masters liked weapons and they also liked victory. ‘And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, come and see. And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the Earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword,’ Vicar said as he straightened up to face me.

‘I don’t understand any of that,’ I said.

‘War is loosed upon the land, the second seal is open,’ he replied, talking to me as though I were a particularly dense child. ‘Perhaps the war is the important thing. It’s the taking part that matters after all.’

‘What are you talking about? You mean they wouldn’t use this information?’

Vicar just shrugged.

‘I don’t think we should give them the info,’ Morag burst out. Both of us turned to look at her. She looked frightened, as if she wished she hadn’t spoken. ‘I mean, would it be that easy? To reprogram their bionanites to attack them?’ She seemed to have a much better grasp of what was going on than I did.

‘It depends on how cooperative They’re being,’ said Vicar. ‘I hacked the creature, or rather it gave me entry, and with technology that sophisticated it should have taken me a lot longer. I should have needed to build a whole new set of equipment to translate the alien data and I should have had a tremendous fight on my hands against alien intrusion countermeasures.’ I still wasn’t following and it must have been obvious by the look on my face. There were rumours that certain technology would allow meat hacks through interface plugs, but if it existed then it was blacker than black. ‘All DNA is information, but before it died it made certain information compatible with my systems.’ This still wasn’t making any sense to me. I hated information technology.

‘You downloaded it,’ Morag said, surprising me again. Vicar nodded.

‘That was what the solid-state memory block was for,’ I said, pleased I could finally make a contribution to the conversation. Vicar nodded again.

‘It’s isolated in there. I’ve set up a routine that’s building it an environment.’

‘I want to speak with it,’ I said.

‘Then you talk with the adversary…’ Vicar began.

‘And hear only lies,’ I finished for him.

‘He’s not like that,’ Morag said.

‘You are just a whore, one of his already, and you have been seduced,’ Vicar said, getting back into character. I couldn’t understand why Morag looked so upset. Surely she’d heard crap like this before, and probably worse.

‘Why do you talk like that?’ she asked. Vicar ignored her.

‘Religious mania,’ I answered for him. ‘A lot of hackers get it. They say they see things in the net, the face of God, shit like that. It’s the dislocation of net running, I think. It’s like isolation and they start to hallucinate. Something about it triggers the parts of our brain to do with religion; they all end up like this or madder.’ I left out that Vicar had been on Operation Spiral, an attempt by the UK and US governments to hack Their communications infrastructure.

‘There are things in the net,’ Vicar said quietly and then looked me straight in the eyes, his madness reflected in my black lenses. ‘And I do not believe in God.’ Suddenly his madness looked really sane in a way I could not explain, and this wasn’t the first time either. I remembered the coldness of space and the blood of humans on my hands. Despite the fact that Vicar was just looking into inhuman black lenses I broke eye contact first.

‘So what are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘Preparation,’ he said. I decided it was a waste of time trying to get a straight answer from him.

‘I want to speak to it,’ I repeated. Vicar shrugged. He walked over to the workbench and held up a plug connected to the memory cube. I pulled a rusty folding chair over to the bench and sat down.

‘Take your time,’ Vicar said. ‘Your whore can work off some of your debt to me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, my voice sounding cold even to myself.

‘I don’t mind,’ Morag said timidly. I looked over at the frightened young girl and then back to Vicar’s leer.

‘I do. Vicar,’ I said. He ignored me. ‘Vicar,’ I said loudly and reached for his arm with my cybernetic right hand, exerting just a little too much pressure. His head snapped round to look at me. Why was I doing this? She was a hooker; what difference did it make to me if she went with Vicar? ‘I appreciate what you’ve done for us, I really do, but if you lay one finger on her I’ll take the laser to your groin. Do you understand me?’ I asked. He glared at me and then turned to Morag.

‘And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death.’ He spat at her. Morag looked like she was about to cry.

‘Pack it in!’ I told him. I looked at Morag stood in the chapel, wearing her working gear. Vicar was still staring at her, intimidating her. Presumably made easier by the fact that she was only wearing a basque, torn fishnets and panties.

‘Have you got any other clothes that Morag could wear?’ I asked him. He turned to look at me, an unpleasant grin on his face.

‘You want her for yourself, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Play the protective routine so you don’t have to pay? Is that it? Cheap bastard.’ I was tempted to hit him but we needed him. I leant in close to him, close enough to smell the gum disease.

‘Clothes,’ I said. Vicar directed Morag to some donated clothes he kept to hand out to his congregation and then plugged me in.

I felt the familiar sense of floating and dislocation, loss of the sense of a physical self. The software he was using was the same as they used for the sense booths, sending information to my brain via my interface plugs to make the virtual environment feel real. It wasn’t like running the net – normally it would be completely safe, there were feedback safeguards in place – but the alien was an unknown. If it was as sophisticated as Vicar said, then perhaps I was in actual danger.

The environment rushed up around me in a pixelated haze, the resolution slowly improving. It wasn’t the high-definition neon animation VR of the net but rather the more naturalistic realism of sense software. I felt familiar boots sink into familiar mud. I was on a plain surrounded by the sawn-off stumps of dead alien trees. I was wearing full battle gear, my Heckler amp; Koch Squad automatic weapon strapped horizontally across my chest.

What the fuck was Vicar playing at? I was back on Dog 4. In the distance the horizon lit up in an artillery duel. Above me the bright lances of light strobed across the azure night sky, as our fleet and Theirs went at it in high orbit. A figure was making its way towards me through the dead forest. I tried magnifying my optics, unsure if it would work under the rules of this environment. It did and I was less than pleased to see Gregor making his way towards me. He was also in full battle gear, the hardened ceramic breastplate with kinetic padding and a suit of reactive inertial armour beneath it. His railgun was slung up on his right side on its gyroscopic mount. The entire right side of his body was a smoking mess, all but gone; he was practically walking on bone. I reached up to touch my face, expecting to find it also burnt but instead found the smooth hard flesh of skin and sub-dermal armour. It was just like Dog 4, just like my dream.

I considered firing a burst into the visage of my old friend, just to see what would happen, but found that I couldn’t quite bring myself to shoot at something that looked so much like him. It approached me and stopped. Its eyes were black pools with stars in them. I waited. Nothing.

‘Do you have to look like that?’ I asked. It looked too much like a failure, a mistake, a betrayal of mine.

‘This is yours,’ it said. It even sounded like Gregor. It seemed like the alien had control of the environment and had chosen it from my subconscious. This was worrying enough. The question was had it been trying to make me feel comfortable and chosen the wrong thing or was it trying to put me off guard, fucking with me?

‘Is there something else we could be?’ it asked, Gregor’s voice flat, no feeling. I nodded and watched it turn. The low, sleek, black, off-centre humanoid shape of a Berserk. Its multiple limbs ending in long powerful claw-like fingers except the one that wore the bulky weapon glove with its splinter gun and other Swiss Army Knife-like weaponry accoutrements. The only difference was that Berserks were matt black; this one seemed to reflect the light, and like Gregor’s eyes its skin seemed to contain the stars. It looked like a portion of space. That reminded me of the Ninja that had taken out the rest of the Wild Boys and infected Gregor.

‘Yeah, that’s better,’ I said. ‘Let’s not forget what we both are.’ It didn’t say anything. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘We are Ambassador. Though you make us look like murder/slaughter.’

‘What do you want?’ I asked, trying to make sense of his words, perhaps it was having to deal with Vicar but I was wishing that I could just have a normal conversation with someone.

‘We need peace,’ it said.

‘Yeah?’ I said sarcastically, and then wondered if it understood sarcasm. ‘Stop attacking us.’

‘We cannot, until you do. You will not listen.’ Suddenly I was moving towards it rapidly. Without seeming to have taken a step, it grew to fill my vision, and I hit it. It felt like I had flown through a thin veil of water and I was screaming as I seemed to fall through space. Quickly I managed to control myself and look around, rolling in apparent free fall as I did. In the distance I could see the blue marble of Earth. I could dimly make out the various orbital stations that formed a defensive ring around it. As a grunt there was no need for my spatial geography to be up to much, but I guessed we were in high orbit.

I spun around but Ambassador, or whatever it was, was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw the burn; it was a pale-blue colour. It was one of Their ships. There was no doubt about that, though it was a configuration I’d never seen before. Roughly conical in shape, it looked like a series of separate, aerodynamic seed pods joined together, attached to a faster-than-light engine unit. It was difficult to make out, because it was set up for stealth, only the bum of the manoeuvring engines giving it away. Space seemed to pulse. I could not make out what was happening but I saw part of the craft seem to crumple, flame from within, briefly and silently blossoming, before being sucked out into the vacuum and disappearing. The craft seemed to fall apart but it was just the engine system being jettisoned explosively. Each of the pods was a separate stealth re-entry Needle. All of them were heading for Earth. Space pulsed again and again, the light from distant stars disappearing and then reappearing almost instantaneously as more and more of the re-entry pods crumpled and silently blew themselves apart.

I had always found the silence of space battles eerie, a view I seemed to share with most of humanity judging by the rousing music and special effects they were enhanced with on news broadcasts. I finally worked out what the pulsing was. I traced it back and made out a stealthed craft, this time of human design but more sophisticated than most I’d seen. It was firing some kind of black laser, presumably similar to Their black light weapons. One after another, the re-entry pods were destroyed.

Earth’s orbital defences probably would not even be able to detect this distant conflict. They did not seem to be fighting back. It looked like all of the pods were being destroyed but suddenly I found myself shooting through space. I did a bit more screaming before I managed to get a grip. I was in near orbit now. Just in time to see a damaged pod make it through the orbital defence cordon apparently undetected, which meant significant stealth tech, and flame flower briefly as it hit the atmosphere. I guessed it must have been read as a meteor or something. This was it; this was the craft I’d found in the park. The pilot was the creature that Vicar had downloaded. I felt disoriented to the point of nausea as I found myself looking at Gregor again on the plain of mud and dead trees.

‘Why won’t you let us talk to you?’ it asked. Did I imagine a tinge of desperation in its voice?

‘Aaagh!’ It took a moment to realise it was me screaming. I was in the church again, very sudden, real shock. I doubled over and retched, a little bit of bile dribbling out onto the floor. Someone had just yanked me out. Vicar was stood behind me, cable in one hand, a heavy-calibre automatic in the other.

‘What the fuck!’ I managed.

‘The red rider is here,’ he said, the mad glint back in his eyes.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘The people you’re hiding from,’ Morag said. She had changed and was wearing some kind of hard-wearing but threadbare baggy trousers with many utilitarian pockets, a pair of boots which looked a little too big for her and a hoody bearing the logo of a band or music collective or product that I was unfamiliar with. She’d cleaned her make-up off and tied her hair back in a ponytail. She looked more like a young girl and less like a sex crime now.

‘Rolleston?’ I asked. Vicar nodded. I stood up, still feeling somewhat disoriented.

‘Well?’ Vicar asked.

‘It said it wants peace,’ I told him.

‘Lies,’ Vicar said, but even he did not sound sure of himself.

‘No,’ Morag said. She did sound sure of herself.

‘Was that thing set up for infiltration and assassination?’ I asked him. Vicar considered this.

‘Infiltration obviously, assassination I don’t think so, but it could be a psy-op,’ he said, and I knew he was right.

‘How long have we got?’ I asked. Vicar smiled.

‘They are nearly at the door.’ He handed me the solid-state memory cube that contained Ambassador.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I am going to try and slow up Rolleston and the Grey Lady for as long as possible. Take this to Pagan, tell him this is the path to the one true God,’ he said, as if that should mean something. ‘In Hull,’ he continued.

‘Hull’s gone,’ I said.

‘The Avenues. He’ll find you.’

‘Vicar?’ Rolleston’s voice asked smoothly from a nearby communicator. Vicar looked at me, his eyes almost sane. I nodded, unable to understand why he was sacrificing himself like this. I turned and headed for the hole in the stone floor that led down to some ancient crypt. I noticed that Morag was carrying a grey canvas shoulder bag as I stepped into the hole.