Veteran

8

‘Why’d you have to give him that much?’ Morag asked. We were sat facing each other leaning against the ceramic hull of the stealth submersible. It was eerily quiet as the sleek craft, propelled by nearly silent hydro jets, slipped through the cold depths of the North Sea. I’d had to make do with the bottle of whisky because I’d been told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t smoke on the sub. I’d gotten about a quarter of the way down the bottle. I looked up at the tired, frightened, street-smart girl.

‘There’s a good chance McShit won’t make it,’ I said.

‘But he said he was going to grass us.’

‘Rolleston’ll probably still kill him and take out his operation,’ I told her. ‘Him grassing us is the only thing he can do. Even if he didn’t tell them straight off they’d find a way of making him talk. What he just did may have been the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for you.’ Morag lapsed back into silence.

The sub we were on was making a run to the drug factories in the Secessionist Amsterdam Territories. McShit had arranged with the captain that she would drop us where we asked. McShit would tell Rolleston all this and he would waste some time looking in Amsterdam, and find the captain, who would then tell Rolleston that we were in Hull. We would have a day in Hull at the most before they caught up with us. I hoped that whatever Pagan had for us was worth it.

I looked back up at Morag; she was going through the bag that Vicar had given her. Dressed casually and without the heavy makeup, she looked like any other kid. Though Christ knows what that meant today, just more grist for the mill. She was pretty, probably too pretty for her own good, and although there was wariness there it hadn’t quite become hardness yet. She looked back at me, suddenly self-conscious at my scrutiny despite the fact that when I first found her she’d been wearing very little.

‘What?’

‘How old are you?’

‘Why? Is it important?’ she demanded, sounding more like a teenager than a rig hooker now.

‘Yeah, it is,’ I said.

‘Seventeen,’ she said. I really didn’t want to know when she’d started working.

‘Old enough to be drafted,’ I said. She nodded.

‘MacFarlane fixed it for us. Bribed the Drumheads to hold off as long as possible so… so…’ she struggled.

‘So he got his pound of flesh.’ She shrugged. To her there was nothing strange or horrible about this. She thought of herself, at least at some level, as a commodity.

‘I want… wanted to be a signalman,’ she said. ‘When I got drafted I mean.’

Everyone wants to be a hacker, I thought.

‘You got religion?’

‘Not yet. I’ll get it in the net, when I begin to see,’ she said with a gleam in her eye. There was something about the interface: somehow or other it triggered the same response in people that religion did. They saw things, hallucinated religious iconography out there in the net.

‘You would’ve been posted to R amp; R,’ I said. Meaning she would’ve been doing the same thing in the military as she did on the Rigs, entertaining the troops. I didn’t stop to think just how cruel a thing it was to say. She stopped rummaging in the bag and looked up at me, her eyes meeting my lenses. I could plainly see her resolve.

‘Not if I scarred myself. Not with a knife but with acid, something like that,’ she said, and then went back to rummaging through the bag. I wasn’t quite sure what to say next.

‘You any good?’ I asked, lighting another cigarette.

‘At being a whore? Yeah, brilliant. You any good at whatever you do?’

‘Signals, hacking,’ I said, somewhat exasperated.

‘I broke into MacFarlane’s accounts once, had him donate some money.’

‘That’s pretty good for a surface hack with no implants.’

She shrugged. ‘My sister taught me how – she was signals.’

‘You’ve got a sister?’

‘Had. Brain fried over some planet out there. Don’t even know where. They didn’t think it was important enough to tell us, burial in space. Had she been here, Mum never would’ve sold me on.’

‘MacFarlane ever find out?’ I asked. She smiled to herself and shrugged.

"Course. He hired a hacker to trace it and then scared some of the others into grassing on me. He had this guy, some wired-up kung fu type.’ I nodded thinking of the fashionable bodyguard I’d beaten to death on the Forbidden Pleasure. ‘Well he also had some other skills wired in, like how to hurt people without leaving a mark so you could still work. I got to spend a couple of hours with him.’ I thought about this for a while.

‘Probably won’t make much difference now, but that guy’s dead.’

‘Yeah, I got that,’ she scoffed. ‘The boat blowing up was kind of hard to miss.’

‘No, I mean I beat him to death.’ She was quiet for a bit.

‘Good,’ she said quietly. Then we sat in silence for a while. I was desperately trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t remind her of something horrible.

‘Why do you smoke?’ she suddenly asked. ‘I mean you’ve got lung filters and stuff, right?’

I nodded. ‘I like yellow fingers, brown teeth and the smell.’

‘Oh.’

‘We’re not very fucking stealthy if you two keep on talking!’ The Russian sub captain hissed at us through the door to the bridge. ‘And I told you no smoking!’ I put the cigarette out and the pair of us lapsed into silence again. I was kind of thankful for it.

I thought about what Morag had said, the way she’d said it. The human race could fly to the stars and this young woman felt she had to mutilate herself so she didn’t have to service the troops. That wasn’t right. I’d always known that things were fucked up but more than anything else this drove home to me that there had to be another way. After sixty years of war we needed hope, we needed the war to end. If what Ambassador had said was some psy-op head fuck then it would be the cruellest thing of all.

Duty was something they drilled into us in basic, something I got in 5 Para: duty to our leaders, duty to our fellow soldiers, duty as protectors of the human race. By the time I got to the Regiment we knew it was a joke, or maybe it wasn’t but we were pretty cynical about it anyway. If, on the other hand, there was the slightest chance that we could do anything to help this war end, give us a chance to recover as a race so we weren’t eating our young, then that was our duty.

See that was the thing that got me: what if the cure for cancer was lying dead in a trench? What if the child of Vicar’s god was born on the Rigs? What if the man or woman who could bring peace to the universe was too attractive so they had to go to a service brothel? Nobody would ever know.

I had seen, done and experienced a lot of very fucked-up things but somehow what Morag said was the worst. I’d been going through the motions, just putting things off until Rolleston caught up with me. We had no chance, we were dead, but I had been trained to operate with these kinds of odds. Unfortunately so had everyone we were up against. I couldn’t put the cork back in the bottle; it’d been thrown away. I was in this now.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I whispered. Morag looked up and shrugged.

‘I didn’t have much on,’ she said. We both smiled. ‘Besides,’ she said more seriously, ‘I think it was gentle.’ I guessed she meant Ambassador. ‘Doing what I do you very quickly get a sense of who’s gentle and who wants to cause you harm. I don’t think it wants to cause us harm,’ she finished.

I laughed.

‘What?’

‘We’re going to try and stop this war based on hookers’ intuition.’

‘I guess,’ she said, laughing.

‘You realise this could all just be a psy-op on Their part? Just another tactic in Their attempt to wipe us out.’

‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘But I don’t believe it.’ The resolve was there again. She looked me straight in the lenses. ‘We have to try,’ she said, echoing my thoughts. I nodded.

‘You two can swim if you want!’ the captain hissed again.

I was looking forward to a downer-induced speed crash and then sedation in orbit. Natural sleep was a thing of the past, too many drugs, too much shit in the subconscious. Ahead of us we could see assault shuttles taking off, making their way to the fleet in orbit. In the pale Sirius B sky we could just make out the flashes of light. The 6th Fleet was catching hell in high orbit from Their fleet. As we approached the evac point we could see lines of soldiers waiting for transports. Waiting as the more valuable personnel and equipment was evacced first. I’d long ago stopped feeling angry about this. After all we were special forces so we were quite valuable.

‘Douglas?’ Amar Shaz, our signalman and hacker, said over our encrypted tactical comms link. He came from somewhere in the Midlands from a Sikh family. He‘d not been particularly religious before he‘d become a signalman, but now of course he’d found religion in the net. His faith renewed, he’d started attending virtual temple regularly, grown a beard and even started wearing a turban and carrying a vicious-looking, sword-length kirpan on patrol. The turban was made of ballistic mesh. In true squaddie style he’d come to us with the nickname of Sharon already firmly in place.

‘Yeah?’ I asked, not even bothering with comms discipline.

‘Orders to report to SOC,’ Sharon told me. He hadn’t done this over the communal band. He wanted me to be the bearer of bad news. There was no way we could go out again. The firebase we were using as an evac point was an hour or two away from being completely overrun. What did they want from us? I relayed the good news to the rest of the squad.

‘Fuck this,’ Mudge said, in front of me on the hover scout. ‘I’m not in this fucking army. I’m a journalist. I’m out on the first shuttle.’ I knew he’d be there with the rest of us.

We pulled the vehicles up just in front of the Special Operations Command bunker. I recognised the two figures stood there. Major George Rolleston was SBS, the Royal Marines equivalent of the SAS. They were a good regiment, the equal of our own, not that we’d ever admit it, but Rolleston was an arsehole. A black ops svengali who’d killed a lot of operators. His insignia-less uniform was rumpled but not dirty, so he hadn’t left the bunker, though he had the trademark Spectre subsonic, suppressed gauss carbine slung across his chest. He was our immediate superior at SOC and responsible for the deaths of a lot of Wild Boys, as far as I was concerned.

Stood behind him and to one side was a legend in the special operations community, Private Josephine Bran, the Grey Lady, a sniper and assassin who’d come up through the Marine Commandos and the SBS. Everyone knew her reputation and she made me very nervous. It was probably her presence that had stopped Rolleston from getting fragged years ago. Nobody could figure out why she protected Rolleston – the normal conclusion was that they were lovers – but I think there was more to it than that. Her fatigues were a mess and the marks of camo paint and the huge bags under her grey artificial eyes told me she‘d been working.

I climbed off the hover scout and stretched my legs. I felt like a zombie. I was so tired that much of what was going on didn’t seem to be making sense to me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked Rolleston. The relationship between officers and enlisted was very casual in the special forces community but my insolence was pushing it. Rolleston let it go.

‘I have a job for your Wild Boys,’ he said, pronouncing our troop’s, now our patrol’s, nickname with contempt. Every troop earned a nickname. Whatever our troop had done to earn the name Wild Boys had happened so long ago that by the time I’d joined nobody was left alive that could remember. Now Gregor and I were the two oldest surviving members and we didn’t know, but it stuck with us. Still, I’d heard worse names.

Someone had once told us that the name came from a pre-Final Human Conflict story about a group of homosexual assassins. Spinks had beaten the shit out of him – I could never work out why, must’ve been an Essex thing. Maybe he didn’t like being called an assassin, though we were, sometimes. Oh yeah, Spinks was dead, I suddenly remembered. Rolleston was looking at me expectantly.

‘What?’ I demanded.

Rolleston cleared his throat and looked at Mudge, who was bobbing up and down gently on the hover scout.

‘George, do you mind if I call you George?’ I asked. He said nothing. ‘We’ve been out raiding for eight days straight, trying and failing to do anything we could to slow this fucking push of Theirs. I am so tired that I can’t think fucking straight, so anything even remotely subtle is going to fly right fucking past.’

‘Get rid of the journalist,’ Rolleston ordered.

‘Go and fuck yourself, he’s one of us,’ I told him. I’d heard this before but couldn’t be bothered with it right now. Rolleston and I glared at each other for a while. I could hear the squad shifting behind me, just in case things turned nasty.

‘Fuck it,’ Mudge said. ‘Tell me later.’ He gunned the hover scout and headed off.

‘You will insert by stealthed gunship-’ he began.

‘Wait. Insert where? What are you talking about?’ I began. Something was beginning to nag at the back of my skull. I’d assumed that we were going to provide a security element for the evacuation. Instead of answering, Rolleston gave me a grid reference. It was more than twenty miles behind enemy lines.

‘This is a fucking joke, right?’ Ashley Broadin, the bullet-headed driver of the other Land Rover asked in her harsh Birmingham accent. Rolleston pushed on with his mission brief.

‘You will patrol that area attempting to avoid contact with Their forces…’

‘And how will we do that if we fucking land in the middle of them?’ Ashley demanded.

‘Ash,’ I said, and the tough Afro-Caribbean Brummie lapsed into silence.

‘We have reason to believe that one of Their elite assassin caste bioborgs is operating in the area, hunting the remnants of a Foreign Legion behind-lines raiding party.’

‘Bait,’ Bibby Sterlinin, the other railgunner in the squad, muttered to herself.

‘You are to capture the assassin bioborg and call for evac,’ Rolleston finished. SOC had been making up shit on the spot throughout the war and we’d gone out on some pretty hazy mission briefs. This was the vaguest and the dumbest.

‘We’ve saved you some ammunition, food and water. Resupply and I want you ready to move in twenty minutes – that is assuming you still want to catch a shuttle off when you‘ve finished.’ None of us moved, none of us said anything. Rolleston waited, looking expectantly at us.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘You expect us to take you seriously? Leaving aside the fact that Dog 4 is lost. Leaving aside that we’re about to be overrun. Leaving aside that we ‘re dead the moment we hit the landing zone. Leaving aside that we are all so tired and wired we don’t know what we ‘re fucking doing any more, and leaving aside that more than half the troop is dead. Going after a Ninja? We haven’t captured a Berserk alive yet, what chance do you think we’ve got with one of those things?’

‘You have your orders, Jake,’ Rolleston said.

‘Those aren’t orders; it’s a death sentence,’ Gregor said in his soft Highland burr. ‘Personally I don’t think we’ll get near the Ninja even if there is one out there. We’re dead the moment we touch down. Besides, even if we were at full strength, well rested and on top form, we’d struggle to take one down.’ We’d all heard about the Ninjas. They were Their answer to special forces, except one of them was worth a patrol of ours. Ninjas were known to have chewed up two SEAL squads, one SBS patrol and one of Germany’s Kommando Spezial Kraefte squads.

‘I’m used to hearing troopers whining but there is a war on. Could you please get on with it now?’ Rolleston asked, smiling.

‘Fuck you!’ Ash was off the hood of her Land Rover heading towards the Major. I felt rather than saw Bran shift slightly. ‘I ain’t going out there!’ There was murmured assent from Bibs, Sharon and even David Brownsword, our taciturn Scouse medic. Rolleston sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. He looked at Ash.

‘I’m not giving you a choice. You either take your chances out there as befits a soldier in the SAS or you get shot for mutiny right here and now.’ Ash was incredulous. I didn’t like the way this was going down. I felt the Wild Boys move from where they’d been sitting on the remaining Land Rover.

‘Don’t threaten my people,’ I told Rolleston evenly. He ignored me. Ash took a few more steps forward. ‘Ash,’ I said warningly.

‘Have a look around you, Rupert. I see a lot more of us than there are of you,’ the Brummie said. I closed my eyes momentarily. Rolleston smiled. Bran lazily brought her Bofors laser carbine up to bear on Ash. I heard the rest of the squad bringing weapons to bear on Rolleston and Bran.

‘Now why don ‘tyou just calm down?’ I heard Gregor say from behind me. Rolleston was just smiling. He looked perfectly calm.

‘You can’t win this.’ I told the Major.

‘Yes, Douglas, I can and will,’ Rolleston said. His voice was cold but the smile hadn’t left his face. ‘This will soon become a farce,’ he added.

‘She can’t get all of us,’ I said.

‘She can with my help, though that won’t concern you as I’ll take you out first.’ Again there was no trace of doubt in his voice; he just sounded bored.

‘Why don’t you be reasonable about this?’ I asked him. I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as the Major was.

‘I am. I’m not going to court-martial and shoot Ms Broadin.’

‘Fuck you!’ Ash said unhelpfully. Rolleston was still staring at me, his cold blue eyes looking into my matt-black lenses. He seemed to be telling me that this was a no-win situation. I seemed to believe him. That’s when I sold the squad out.

‘We’re going,’ I said to the sounds of incredulity behind me. ‘Put your weapons up.’

There was something wrong with Buck and Gibby, other than them still being here. Attached to Royal Air and Space Force 7 Squadron, British special forces bus drivers, they were on loan from 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the ‘Night Stalkers’ as they preferred to be called.

The two Americans barely looked like pilots. They were both jacked into the heavily modified, stealth-outfitted Lynx VTOL gunship. Gibby piloted the bus and Buck was co-pilot and gunner. The pair of them were all hair, leather, ratty dreadlocks, cybernetics, tattoos and old-fashioned, wide-brimmed cavalry hats that had no place in the cramped interior of a gunship. They looked more like a pair of cyberbilly degenerates, both their artificial eyes covered with cheap plastic sunglasses. The pair of them were much higher than the nap-of-the-Earth flying their bus was throwing us through.

Gibby had tricked out the cockpit with a keyboard. What plugs of his weren‘t wired into the gunship were wired into the instrument. Buck had slaved the gunship’s weapons into his guitar and the pair of them accompanied our trip with the pounding, rhythmic, harsh strain of ancient country and metal riffs.

Had I not been so tired I would’ve questioned the stealth benefit of playing retro at high volume. On the tail of the irregularly shaped craft one of them had written, ‘Jesus Built My Gunship’. Buck and Gibby were the kind that loved the war. To them it was just one long drug-induced guitar solo of miniguns and chaos surfing.

We’d taken more speed, more Slaughter, more ammunition and then out again. In the gunship nobody said anything, we were all too tired despite the amphetamines and Slaughter. The drugs woke up the body but our consciousness and the meat and metal of our bodies were two very different things. None of this was real. It was just bad news, drugs and dislocation.

Nobody would meet my eyes. I couldn’t blame them. I’d sold them out. We’d talked about it in the past. At what point do we say no? At what point do the orders become so psychotic that we can’t follow them? If ever there’d been a time we, I, should’ve said no that was it. The reason I hadn’t said no was simple: fear. I tried to tell myself it was for the squad, that I really believed that Rolleston and Bran would’ve killed us all and I did believe that.

Rolleston did not strike me as the sort of person who bluffed or took risks beyond what his profession asked of him. He was too controlled for that and Bran may as well have been a force of nature. Besides, even if we had managed to take out Rolleston and Bran, what then? We were still more than eight light years from home on a planet that was about to be overrun, and sadly our only hope of getting off the world was the same military organisation that had put us in harm’s way in the first place. At the back of my mind, however, was the nagging doubt that I’d done it because I didn’t want to die. I’d bottled it.

In the short Sirius night we were aware of rather than saw the huge organic armoured advance on either side of us. None of us really wanted to look too hard.

‘Listen up,’ I said. The six remaining grudging faces of the Wild Boys turned to face me. Grudging except for Gregor; there was no judgement there. He was there for everyone in the squad, even when they fucked up. I looked at them and despite my fatigue I managed to feel something, regret for putting them back on the line and the need to try and make amends.

‘We’re going in hot. We will find the best place we can to hole up. Wait the least amount of time possible to make a bad impression and then call for extraction. We are not fucking around out there and we are certainly not hunting a Ninja. You see, hear, feel anything that strikes you as Ninja-like, or even if you just get a little bit scared, we are out of there, okay?’ There were nods of agreement and even a few muttered affirmatives. Normally we’d hold a Chinese Parliament and refine the plan but nobody cared.

Across my internal comms link Buck sang some garbled slang and American military terminology at me that led me to believe we were approaching the LZ. I felt the four vectored thrust engines power back and saw the miniguns begin to rotate in their ball turrets.

‘Jake?’ I arched an eyelid open and saw Morag looking down at me, concern on her face. I felt somewhat in awe that she could still be bothered to care about anything.

‘Don’t call me that,’ I said. I opened the other eye and searched around for a cigarette. Then I remembered I couldn’t smoke and wondered if the captain would actually throw me out of the sub if I sparked up again.

‘What?’ she asked, sounding slightly confused.

‘Jake, my name’s Jakob.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘One I like, the other I don’t. It makes me sound American.’ She stood up and smiled.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just not,’ I said. I was never great when I was woken up. Something that even twelve years in the service never quite overcame.

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah? Why?’ I asked, knowing why.

‘You looked like you were having a dream,’ she said.

‘Know any vets who don’t have problems sleeping?’ I asked. Suddenly her eyes looked haunted.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The bad ones.’ This war just reaches out and touches everyone. She shrugged it off quickly. ‘We’re here.’