Veteran

7

I reached up. Morag felt tiny between my metal and flesh hands; she seemed to weigh next to nothing as I lifted her down. The last of the light went as Vicar moved something very heavy over the hole. Darkness. Thermals did not help much as there was no heat down here. Then I made out the line of radioactive paint that pointed our way out. It was stale, cold and dry down here, the air thick with dust as I breathed in millennia-old dead people. I heard Morag whimper next to me.

‘Don’t worry, I can see,’ I said, not entirely meaning it. She jumped at the sound of my voice in the darkness, even though she was holding on to me. I could make her out silhouetted in the red, oranges, greens and blues of the thermographics. I felt a strangely voyeuristic thrill at the beauty of a person’s heat signature seen in the dark. I thought I could hear Vicar’s heavily muffled raised voice above me.

‘C’mon,’ I said and began pulling Morag down the radioactive line of paint, banging my head and bumping into things as I dragged her after me.

The exit was a tunnel of poured concrete that Vicar must have made himself. I could smell the unmistakeable odour of sewage and pollution that was the Tay at the end of the tunnel. I could see large rodent heat signatures in the tunnel and, beyond, black waters and the intermittent heat signatures of the Rigs.

‘Mind the rats,’ I told Morag, not so much a problem to my various layers but the diseases they carried would do the girl no good. I made enough noise going along to try and scare them. They ignored me. I was the trespasser in their world. The plastic and metal they weren’t interested in but they knew flesh. Eventually I ended up carrying Morag.

At the end of the tunnel I peered out, looking for Rolleston’s people. We were beneath one of the raised toll roads, the multiple-lane motorway that headed out over the Tay towards Fife and more parkland. The water either side of the bridge was clear. The Rigs used to reach this far up the river, but like the old road bridge they had long since been rendered down into waste by metal- and concrete-eating microbes to make way for the toll roads.

Out on the Tay, east of the new bridge, I could see a police riverine patrol boat making its way towards the far bank and the lights of Newport-on-Tay. On dry land behind us, beneath the toll road, were the various dregs of Dundee: junkies, the odd traditional drunk, trash burners and assorted homeless – people like us. They all looked authentic enough; that kind of resigned desperation is difficult to fake.

‘I’m going to have to put you down now,’ I told Morag. She nodded. There was a sucking noise as her boots sank into the soft, polluted, foul-smelling Tay mud.

‘Where to?’ she asked me. She was obviously afraid but coping well. It was a good question. I was dead. Rolleston would just hunt me until I was dead, and he had the resources to make sure it happened. I leant against the wall and lit up my penultimate cigarette, dragging down a lungful of the wasted sweet smoke, my internal filters already removing all the poisons. My life would be spent on the run. A series of near misses, each one getting closer and closer until the Major, or more likely the Grey Lady, got me. I looked down at the frightened young girl beside me. She looked back at me expectantly.

‘You got kin?’ I asked her. She nodded.

‘Where?’

‘Fintry.’ Christ, I thought, the Rigs must’ve seemed quite appealing to her. Even by Dundee’s standards Fintry was a shit hole.

‘They sold you into the life?’ I asked. She nodded.

‘They got quite a lot of crystal for me ‘cause I was pretty and young,’ she added by way of explanation. I didn’t ask her how old she’d been. Fucking wonderful, I thought. This girl may have even fewer options than I did. I took another drag of the cigarette; the glow lit up my burnt face and I saw Morag flinch.

‘You got people you can go to?’ I asked. She looked like she’d been slapped. I turned and made my way through the sucking mud towards the intermittent lights of the Rigs. I heard her struggle through the mud after me.

‘Hey,’ she said. I ignored her. ‘Hey!’ I kept going. ‘Fucking stop, you cunt!’ she yelled. I stopped and swung round on her.

‘I’m dead, do you understand me?’ I asked. ‘The people I’ve pissed off don’t stop and never fail. Sooner or later they will find me and kill me. Now I don’t know whether or not they know about you, but if they don’t the best thing you can do is run and hide as best you can.’ She looked up at me. I couldn’t quite read her expression; the fear was gone and something else was there. She looked like she was going to argue and then suddenly the life was sucked out of her.

‘So where are you going to die?’ she asked. I hadn’t really thought that through.

‘Dunno,’ I said. I hadn’t got enough cash for the booths, though that would’ve been nice. Drifting away, becoming disembodied in spirit. The Grey Lady quietly entering the booth and snipping my silver cord with a bullet, blade or toxin. That would be peaceful. ‘I guess I’ll get some cigarettes, go back to my cube, put on some Miles Davis and drink as much whisky as I can before they come for me.’ Morag nodded.

‘Sounds kind of nice,’ she said. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and flicked it into the mud. I turned and headed back towards the Rigs. Morag kept pace with me. I let this continue for a while, before stopping again.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, thinking that despite my earlier impressions she was just in fact another dumb rig girl.

‘Coming with you,’ she said. I stared at her for a while, knowing that all she would see would be her own reflection in the black polarised lenses that use to be my eyes, but she stared back at me defiantly.

‘I’m going to get killed. I don’t think you understand. This is no media. These guys don’t miss and have endless resources. To all intents and purposes it’s the government after me.’

‘What’ve I got?’ she asked. And then it struck me – Ambassador, what Vicar had said, the trip to Hull. False hope or not, this was probably the only hope she’d ever had. If she wasn’t already, then soon she would be old enough to get drafted and she’d end up a recreational worker, servicing the troops, officers first while her looks held up, then NCOs, then the squaddies. She would be used up by her early twenties. If she were lucky, sneaky, vicious and preyed on her fellow whores she would get NCO rank. Do unto others as she’d had done to herself. More likely she’d be discharged with no trade skills, not even the basic infantry skills of survival. If she dodged the draft it would be much the same, only in a more Darwinian environment. Coming back to my cube, drinking some whisky, listening to jazz and waiting to get shot in the head probably seemed like quite a good option for her.

‘What about Ambassador?’ she asked. It seemed to me she was trying desperately to keep the hope out of her voice.

‘Darling, it’s a pipe dream. The people it would need to speak to are the ones trying to kill it and us.’

‘But we could go to Hull?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, we could die in Hull instead, but all things being equal I think I’d rather die in Dundee.’

‘But if we could push this a little further, find out some more, maybe something’ll happen?’ she said, pathetic eagerness creeping into her voice. I was trying to decide what was worse. Destroying her hope outright or continuing down the road letting the hope build only to watch it crumble and die when they caught us.

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, I caught myself thinking as we resumed our trudge towards the Rigs. Maybe when the end was close enough and Morag had lived a little more than she should’ve with her assigned lot in life, a laser pistol to the back of her head would be kinder.

‘I’ll fuck you,’ she said, offering the only currency she thought she had. I closed my eyes.

‘Just… Look, don’t say that again,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t fucking apologise!’ I shouted, angry, not sure at whom, probably me. The offer to completely take advantage of her wasn’t as abhorrent to me as it should’ve been. ‘Just don’t… okay,’ I said, more quietly. She looked scared and confused but I was relieved that it didn’t look like she was going to burst into tears. ‘Look, we don’t have any money, no passes out of the city, no travel permission.’

‘We have these,’ Morag said, reaching into the canvas bag that Vicar had given her. She pulled out a bundle of paper cash. ‘And this,’ she said, holding up a pouch. I took it from her and looked inside. It contained rough, irregular-shaped yellow nuggets of metal. Probably Belt gold, not as valuable as the homegrown stuff but not something to turn your nose up at. ‘And this.’ She showed me a finance chip. I took the chip from her and plugged it into my chip reader. I let out a low whistle because it was an untraceable black chip, probably worth as much as the cash on it. More to the point it could be used with impunity even in corporate enclaves and Ginzas. In the big scheme of things we didn’t have a fortune but we certainly had enough to be going on with. I wondered why Vicar had done this and why he’d martyred himself. What was so important about all this?

Peripheral vision registered the light behind me. I turned around to see the aircar float out from the city over the river, twin searchlights playing over the area. It looked like a high-end Mercedes. Despite its civilian configuration I didn’t doubt for a minute that it was an armoured gun platform with an excellent sensor suite.

‘Come on,’ I said to Morag and dragged her under the rotting planks of what used to be the old commercial docks. We headed towards the riverside marketplace. They’d have thermographics and various motion sensors, both of which could be defeated if we were prepared to lie in the mud and crawl very slowly towards the Rigs. I was hoping to avoid that as the amount of toxic shit in the Tay would probably kill us in the long run, possibly the short run.

‘Is that them?’ Morag asked, out of breath.

I nodded.

‘Why don’t you just let them kill you?’ she asked. I glared at her.

‘Because I don’t want to die in this mud,’ I said. I’d had more than enough mud in my life. The Mercedes seemed to be searching further downstream. Perhaps they thought we were heading towards Perth on foot, or that Vicar had had the foresight to leave an escape craft of some kind, possibly even a submersible. In retrospect that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

We made it up into the bustling marketplace, hoping to lose ourselves among the other heat sources in the lines of stalls selling everything from tasteless vat protein mulch to dodgy black-market implants. The tarpaulin roofs of the stalls where blown about as the Mercedes took a low-altitude pass over the market.

A couple of times I saw people who stuck out, too clean, clothes too nice despite the effort to dress down. Occasionally they would seem to be listening to voices from elsewhere. Each time I was pretty sure we managed to avoid them. Morag was good, untrained but street smart and listened when I asked her to do something.

Eventually we made it through the market to the Rigs. We hurried onto a rickety catwalk of old pallets, the sludge of the river slopping around beneath us. We made our way up a scratch-built spiral staircase made of scrap metal. The staircase was about one quarter practical and three quarters dangerous self-expression on the part of its builder. We climbed up into the higher levels of the Rigs and headed deeper into the superstructure, both of us moving with the swiftness of long-term rig inhabitants.

I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It would be so easy to take the money from Morag, maybe leave the girl with enough for her to indulge her own tastes for once or maybe just enough for her to survive for a while. I could go to the sense booths and just wait; the Grey Lady wouldn’t make me suffer, she had no need to. It would be so easy I wouldn’t feel a thing. I mean, this wasn’t a media, I wasn’t some guardian angel; I was just another arsehole trying to get by as best I could and now I’d failed. I was out of time. So fuck Morag, she wasn’t my responsibility. But then she’d already offered that. I can’t remember how I found myself outside McShit’s and not the sense booths.

McShit’s was a series of split-open cubes held by high-tensile wires around the central support of Piper Dawn, one of the older Rigs. The wire-hung cubes arrangement made for an interesting environment during bad weather.

Inside was the usual array of scavenged bar furniture you would expect from a rig pub. The bar itself was an inverted bulletproof screen from an old bank with a wooden counter haphazardly glued to the top. A mixture of flickering electric bulbs, gas-burning lamps and various naked flames provided illumination. A still bubbled away behind the bar.

The place was filled with the various rig denizens who could afford a vice that night and had settled on booze. The place was subdued, probably because of the orbital strike on the Forbidden Pleasure. Nobody paid us much attention.

I knew the barman. He was a Twist, one of McShit’s kin. His name was Robby. Like all of McShit’s kin, a generation or two back his familial genes had been screwed by some viral weapon, pollutant or too much exposure to depleted uranium, and as a result he was born stunted. This didn’t stop them being used by humanity’s voracious war machine. If their nervous system wasn’t too screwed up then they would become chimeras – pilots for tanks, walkers, ground effects raiders and sleds, assault shuttles and even starships. A few of them were fast enough to become signalmen but most of them ended up like McShit himself: support and logistics. Robby looked up at me as I approached.

‘Evenin’ boss. Heard what happened?’ Then he gave Morag a long hard look. I think he knew her from the Forbidden Pleasure. Morag tried to smile at him. I nodded in answer to his question. He turned back to look at me more slowly.

‘Usual? The good stuff?’ he asked, his tone neutral, his expression guarded.

‘No. Er… yeah, gimme a bottle and have you got any fags?’ I asked. Robby’s eyebrows rose. I could see his mind go into overdrive.

‘You minted, like?’ he asked, but reached under the bar for a bottle of the park exported single malt. I could feel Morag glaring at me. This wasn’t what the money was supposed to be for.

I nodded uneasily at Robby’s question.

‘What fags do you want?’ I gave him my brand, the expensive brand I liked. The brand normally smoked by officers, senior NCOs and rebellious corporate enclave kids. The brand I could normally only afford straight after I’d won a race or a pit fight.

‘How many d’ya want?’

‘Two hundred.’ Robby stopped as he was reaching under the bar for the black-market cigarettes.

‘Yeah?’ he said, somewhat surprised. I nodded. He looked between the two of us.

‘You score big tonight?’ I almost started laughing hysterically at this but Robby brought out the cigarettes and named his price. I turned to Morag.

‘Pay him,’ I said. She looked like she was going to argue but pulled out some of the dirty notes and counted them off for Robby.

‘New meal ticket?’ Robby asked sceptically.

‘Like fuck,’ Morag muttered under her breath. I lit up another cigarette and resisted the urge to open the bottle of malt.

‘Is McShit in?’ I asked. I watched Robby’s expression harden. Others in the bar were beginning to take an interest as well and not just the Twists.

‘Now you know McShit’s always out,’ Robby said.

‘How much till he’s in?’ I asked. Robby looked at Morag again.

Tell me straight, boy, you in trouble?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘A lot?’ I nodded again. He watched me, seeming to size me up. ‘We’re closed!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Everyone out!’ There was surprisingly little argument as people shuffled out, the cubes shifting slightly on their cables due to the mass exodus. A few of the Twists remained, making no secret that they were packing.

Robby opened a small door in the bar and beckoned us through. We followed him past the steaming, huffing still. Robby guided us to the tubular steel central support for the rig. The hatch that had been cut into the steel had been very well concealed. Robby must have sent a signal from his neural ware because the hatch popped open for us. Behind it was a red-lit world of corroded tube steel. Robby reached over and grabbed a rusted rung welded into the old metal and began to climb down with a practised ease that belied his stunted appearance.

The tube world inhabited by the Twists was an open secret on the Rigs. Everyone knew about it – you could hear them from time to time inside the supports. Off the Rigs it was a true urban myth, a grotesque hidden fairy-tale kingdom made up of all the shit things people say about the Twists: cannibals, stealers of children, that sort of crap.

All the lighting was red safety lighting, which gave the place an eerie glow. The distant echoes of other people’s movements in the pipes further increased the eeriness, though many of the areas had cheap foam insulation to try and deaden noise. The Twists didn’t want to advertise their presence; this was their place. The other inhabitants of the Rigs pretty much left them to it as the Twists were useful and they had their own niche.

Robby led us down into the concrete block at the base of the rig. Originally ballast, it had been hollowed out with the same programmable concrete-eating microbes that they had used for the old Tay Road Bridge. More supports had been added externally, both driven deep into the riverbed and attached to the neighbouring rigs.

Piper Dawn was on the east end of the Rigs, close to where the Tay led out into the North Sea. On the east wall of this damp, submerged concrete block was a home-made airlock. Home-made was never a phrase I liked hearing in connection with things like airlocks. There were a few rigs between Piper Dawn and the North Sea but the Twists had gone out in diving gear with torches and remotes and cut a channel. Now this was all that was left of the Port of Dundee.

This was how you came and went if you didn’t have the influence and the means to use the motorways, the Mag-Lev, the sub-orbitals or own an aircar. McShit’s Port of Dundee was for those who needed to leave quietly. The Port had a few uncomfortable-looking chairs in it and bits and pieces of equipment I guessed were for regulating the atmosphere inside, some of it maybe sensor-based. There were a couple of monitors that showed external views of the polluted riverbed.

Various Twists were working on the machinery or just hanging around. Again there were guns on display, as well as less than subtle security systems. Throughout the hollowed-out concrete block ran steel bars. They weren’t supports but rather formed a kind of climbing frame that provided access to all areas of the Port. From part of this frame hung McShit.

McShit had been a chimera. Rumour had it that he could have had anything from a fighter to a starship but instead he’d chosen an armoured recovery vehicle and joined the Royal Engineers. Since being removed from the vehicle he had made himself a sort of small armoured cupola to hold him and his life-support requirements. The cupola was hanging from the frame by two powerful-looking waldos, making McShit look for all the world like a baby in some kind of machine-like cradle.

The top half of his tiny stunted body stuck out of the cupola, various wires extending from it to plugs in the base of his neck. His eyes were ugly, home-made but doubtless good-quality optics that stuck out from his skull like old-fashioned camera lenses.

The waldos swung the cupola along the metal frames in a kind of inverted loping gait until McShit came to rest in front of us both. He didn’t look pleased. Robby must’ve texted him via an internal cellular link that we were coming and that we were hot. I hoped it had been encrypted.

‘McShit,’ I said.

‘Don’t you McShit me. You’re fucking tracking mud everywhere, you radge cunt!’ he snarled. I looked down at the filthy concrete floor. The only way he could know that we had tracked in more mud was because it was covering our boots.

‘Sorry,’ I offered.

‘Robby says you’re in a lot of trouble.’ McShit glared in Robby’s direction.

‘I need to leave Dundee, get to-’ I began. McShit held up a hand.

‘That wasn’t what I asked. Same people after you who did the Pleasure?’

I nodded.

‘Lot of people dead, lot of people hurt. Too much. Nothing we can do about it in the community. There was a lot of steam, the water going meant some of the rigs got knocked about, people got crushed, lot of pain, and here’s us with no resources.’ He was shaking his head.

‘Wasn’t my doing,’ I said, thinking it was half true.

‘That’s government trouble that is, or a major couldn’t-give-a-shit corp,’ he said.

‘They’ve got special forces operators on the ground hunting for us. People I knew, bad types.’

‘You’re bringing me a lot of heat.’ I was worried I couldn’t read his expression. Suddenly the other Twists in the room all seemed to be paying attention.

‘I’m not denying that.’

‘Could be I’d do better handing you over to them – maybe a reward.’

‘Probably, though they might just kill you, plausible deniability and all that,’ I tried.

‘You’re from here, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘I live here.’

‘They’re not, are they?’

‘They all live in nice places.’

‘This is a nice place.’ I cracked a smile at this. Good old-fashioned them and us negotiation.

‘They be able to trace you here?’ McShit asked me.

‘They’d be able to trace us anywhere if they put their minds to it.’

‘We need to get you out of here then.’

‘We need to get to-’ I began.

‘Will you shut the fuck up?’ McShit snapped. ‘If what you say is right then some bad people are about to come and traipse more mud through my nice little world, and they’re going to come with anger in their hearts a poor general demeanour and the willingness to do me and mine harm. When that happens I am going to tell them exactly what I know about you. I am going to cooperate as much as is humanly possible for this twisted little body to do so. I will spill my guts.’

‘Come on, he can’t help us,’ Morag said angrily.

McShit turned to look at her, a smile splitting his grotesque face. Then he swung the cupola back to face me. ‘I don’t have much of a neck and I’m not sticking it out for some dumb grunt and a whore.’

‘Fuck you, dwarf!’ Morag spat in anger bom of fear.

‘Shut up,’ I told her quietly.

‘So you see how important it is that I don’t know where you want to go?’

‘They could still kill you.’

‘If they’re professional then I will have to impress on them that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth to take me and mine out.’ Once again his leering grin spread across his face. ‘Now this is a deeply beautiful moment – workers unite in the struggle and all that – but how much fucking money have you got?’