War in Heaven

9

Trace’s expression changed from shock to fury. He looked up. It was clear to him that whatever was happening was our fault. Morag fainted and hit the plush carpet as I started to move towards Trace. With the inhibitor jack in one of my plugs I felt like I was wading through mud to get to him. Inhibited though I was, the barrels on the lasers rotating up to speed still looked like slow motion to me. This just meant that I’d get to see my death more clearly.

My flash compensators saved me from going blind from the red light as it stabbed out. Then the room was full of red steam and we were covered from head to foot in very hot blood. The four security guards looked like they’d been cut in two and had then exploded. Their superheated flesh was still bubbling and steaming. The carpet was on fire. The multiple barrels of the rotary laser were still spinning but no longer firing. They stopped. The sprinklers came on.

Trace was on the other side of his desk looking devastated. I was a little surprised myself. I reached down to pick up one of the M-19s but it came apart in my hand. It had been cut in two.

Trace was drawing a pistol from inside his suit jacket. It looked very shiny and expensive. Mudge had one of the guards’ sidearms a long time before Trace completed the draw.

‘Mudge, no!’ Cat shouted pointlessly. Mudge fired a burst at point-blank range into Trace’s face, which caved in on itself. Mudge was grinning but he looked angry as well.

God was still screaming. It sounded like a thousand voices crying out in agony. The noise was messing with my normally calm demeanour.

‘What the fuck?!’ I demanded of Mudge. He looked like a full-on psycho, covered in blood and laughing in the flickering light.

‘Fuck him. He was an arsehole,’ Mudge said. I only heard him because my dampeners cut through the unnerving sound of God’s screams. Cat and Pagan were right — we were a mess and Mudge was out of control.

I was struggling to sort out what was happening. I was sure I could hear gunfire. Maybe human screams mingling with God’s own.

Cat was checking the guards’ weapons. Another M-19 had been bisected but two of them were fine.

The locks on my shoulder and knuckles sprang off. The inhibitor jack went offline and the world sped up. I picked the inhibitor jack out of my neck plug.

Morag came to and sat up. She was looking around appalled at the carnage.

‘Did you do this?’ I asked her. She looked like she was going to ask for forgiveness even though she’d saved us. Instead she just nodded. She looked sick at what she’d done. ‘Morag!’ I demanded. Her head whipped round to look at me. Then she remembered she hated me. Her remorse gone, the blood and the light made her look somehow evil.

‘It was a secure network but he was communicating with it wirelessly,’ she said. ‘As soon as I knew that, I knew I could hack it.’

Except that you weren’t supposed to be able to hack heavy-duty corporate secure networks and take over their security systems that quickly. Even I knew that.

Cat handed me an M-19 and I passed it to Mudge. I took two of the guards’ sidearms. I was the only ambidextrous shooter and I had a feeling we were going to need to maximise our firepower. Both pistols were shitty little ten mils. Morag had another of the ten mils and we took all the ammo and grenades for the M-19s’ grenade launchers we could carry. Mudge was disgusted to find that all the grenades were stun baton rounds. It made sense. Asteroid habitats were made to be rugged but nobody wanted high-velocity rounds puncturing a window. The bullets in the M-19s were probably low-impact frangible rounds that would shatter rather than penetrate. Frangible rounds were great for use on uppity Belt zombies; not so much fun against people wearing armour.

Morag grabbed a portable computer on the desk and started tapping rapidly on the screen.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Looking at the net,’ she snapped irritably. Because we had time for attitude.

‘Why?’ I demanded. I wanted to tell her that we didn’t have the time.

‘What do you think would make God scream?’ she asked and put the computer down on the desk so we could all see it through the humid blood mist. The screen was showing a net feed. Some comedian had made the asteroid station look like a dark, monstrous subterranean kingdom in the net. The whole thing was lit with a bright white light. I was pretty sure that was how the visual interface was translating God. Tendrils writhed through the station’s virtual reflection, digging deep into its walls, violating the net construct utterly. The tendrils had an organic black look to them. They reminded me of the proto-Them construct Ambassador had shown me in my dreams that had formed in response to the Cabal’s initial attack. Except that these tendrils were burning with black flame. This was something malevolent far beyond a simple attack program.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ Cat asked.

‘I don’t know and I’m not going in to find out,’ Morag told her.

‘What is it?’ I asked. I knew I just didn’t want to face up to what it meant. That this could be over before it started. Morag turned to look at me as if I was stupid. There was only one thing it could be.

‘It’s Demiurge,’ she said.

Whoever had done this had done it well. Power was down. Auxiliary power was down. The station was running on some tertiary, or worse, system. It was getting cold. This was making us steam because we were covered in blood. The lights were still flickering like strobes to the point where it was difficult for our optics to cope.

We didn’t have a plan; we were just trying to get out of there. We were moving down through the corporate administration levels. Whatever was happening hadn’t reached there. There were frightened people hiding in the offices but terse interrogations provided little information as to what was happening.

The sound of gunfire had become less constant but we could still make out distant screaming. It sounded like it was coming from the dorm/recreation areas, which of course we would have to go through to get back to the ship. Assuming that was still a good idea. I still thought it was because we had a better class of gun on board.

We didn’t know where Pagan was and we couldn’t risk any form of comms to find him. All we knew was that he had gone to negotiate something with the Yakuza. All the need-to-know bullshit was beginning to get in the way of this fucked-up op.

Cat was in the lead. She was moving quickly, legs bent to provide a steady platform for her M-19, checking up, down, left, right. Going wide around corners so nobody could grab the weapon. I was behind her, a pistol in each hand. I had my shoulder laser scanning behind me. Then Morag, and finally Mudge watching our backs. At least he wasn’t acting like a fuck-up at the moment. He was doing his job properly.

‘What are we doing?’ Cat asked as we entered a laser-cut rock stairway. She spoke quietly as we had no comms.

‘Getting Pagan and leaving,’ I told her.

‘What about Merle?’

‘He’s a bit of a fucking luxury at the moment.’

‘What if Demiurge has compromised the ship’s comms?’ Morag asked.

‘Is this a good time for a conversation?’ I replied as we rounded a corner on the stairs and almost shot a couple of terrified Belt zombies. Cat took up a covering position on the reinforced door that led into the dorm/rec area.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. They jumped at my voice and then spoke in a language I didn’t understand. It sounded faintly eastern European. They pointed towards the door.

‘Are we doing this?’ Cat asked through gritted teeth.

‘We could go and hide,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘You’re such a fucking pussy,’ Mudge said. I couldn’t see him but somehow I could hear the grin he’d have on his face.

‘Shut up, Mudge. Morag, open the door.’ I think she was about to argue but it made sense. She only had one pistol, which freed up one of her hands. Cat and I covered her while Mudge pointed his assault rifle back up the stairway.

It was the smell that got us first. People had died and died bad. The coppery tang of a lot of blood was almost overpowered by the burned-pork smell of cooked flesh from laser or black light fire. Then of course there was the smell of shit. People soil themselves when they are afraid or when they die, and bowels rupture when the lower abdomen is treated to sufficient trauma.

I followed Cat through. The red emergency lighting coupled with the flickering light made it look like hell. The carpet of dead people helped give that impression as well. How had this happened so quickly? This was like smoothly executed genocide.

‘Them?’ Cat asked as she scanned the area. We were all thinking it. Just for a moment I wondered if everything we’d done had just been a Them psy-op, a precursor for an attack on the home system. I knew better, or I hoped I did.

‘Look at the wounds,’ I said. ‘That’s not from shards or black beam.’ Cat glanced down momentarily.

‘Tight grouping as well — good shooting,’ she said. She was right. A short burst to the body and then double tap to the head. Except for the ones that had been mutilated. Morag turned to one side and threw up. She was heaving, leaning on the rock wall next to the door.

‘Pull yourself together!’ I snapped. She glared at me. I hated saying it but we needed everyone working here. She straightened up, pistol at the ready. Thing is, she’d had the correct reaction. I should want to throw up. I shouldn’t be so used to this shit. Most of the corpses had been shot or just torn up. It was easy to see why Cat had thought it was Them. Some had had their genitals gouged out and their faces sawn off. I didn’t like that, not at all, and I didn’t want that to happen to me or anyone else here.

‘It’s a psyche job,’ Mudge whispered. I wasn’t sure but I thought that something had moved at the furthest range of my magnified optics. It was difficult to tell, my flash compensators were struggling with the flickering light. It was confusing my lowlight capability as well. ‘Fear of castration and loss of identity, it’s a standard and quick way of causing fear.’ Even Mudge was sounding grim.

‘Its certainly fucking playing with my calm,’ Cat growled.

‘Okay, we head back to the ship, keeping an eye out for Pagan,’ I said.

We started moving, constantly scanning our surroundings. There were still people alive down here but they looked terrified and we didn’t stop to chat. We could hear whimpering and screaming from the wounded and nearly dead. This had been done in the time we’d spent in Trace’s office.

I whipped my head to the right. Old instincts were telling me that something was moving in the shadows. I switched to thermographics, painting the area in multi-hued heat-haze patterns. It was difficult to pick out what was going on in the mass of hot pipes. Space was cold. Any habitat in space needed a lot of heating. If my imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me, then whoever or whatever it was must be able to shield their heat signature to a degree.

We rounded a corner onto the main thoroughfare. Broken neon signs flickered and in one case provided an ongoing shower of sparks. More corpses.

‘Uh, Jake?’ Cat said. I looked over. Past her, against the station’s thick external rock wall, one of the security force’s light mechs lay in a heap on the ground. We moved over using it for cover.

The mech had been torn apart. There was little evidence of heavy weapon fire. It looked like something had ripped parts off until it had got to the pilot. Around the mech were several dead guards. Again most of their wounds looked like they’d been inflicted in hand-to-hand by something with claws and possibly teeth. All over the walls I could see where rounds from the mech’s autocannon had impacted into the rock.

I shoved both the pistols into my coat pockets and grabbed one of the guards’ M-19s. The palm link connected and ran a diagnostic of the weapon. It was fully functional but the magazine was empty, as was the grenade launcher. I started to reload. Morag was doing the same as Cat and Mudge covered.

‘There’s something there,’ Cat whispered as I felt my blood turn to iced water. We all looked up. I wanted to ask her if she was sure but that was a stupid question and wishful thinking. I put a fourth grenade, a stun baton, into the grenade launcher and chambered it by working the pump mechanism. Morag was moments behind me.

‘Mudge, watch our back,’ I told him as we knelt down behind the wreckage of the mech, looking to where Cat was pointing. I had my shoulder laser still scanning behind me.

It took me a moment, but then I saw it. It was strange, some kind of animal, moving on all fours, slinking carefully in the shadows about six hundred metres further down the main thoroughfare towards the docking area. Something made me glance to one side. I cycled through normal vision, lowlight and thermographic but could see nothing. I just couldn’t shake the feeling I was being stalked.

I glanced down at the wreckage of the mech.

‘Morag? Can you hack this mech’s systems?’ I asked.

‘It’s inoperative or I would’ve been able to pilot it,’ Cat hissed.

‘It might be compromised by Demiurge,’ Morag said. I didn’t like the idea of sending Morag anywhere near Demiurge but I was thinking that we were running out of options.

‘Hopefully not the operating system. I need you to hack in and release the smartlink safety on the autocannon,’ I told her tersely. Hoping there was enough of the old NCO left in me that she wouldn’t argue. She didn’t. Instead she slung her assault rifle and climbed into the mech cockpit. She ended up sitting on the torn-up corpse of the pilot while looking for a port.

‘He’s in the way,’ she complained.

‘It’s moving!’ Cat said. Her words were punctuated by a short burst of automatic fire.

‘Corpse hack!’ I told Morag, barely registering her look of horror.

Whatever it was came loping straight down the middle of the thoroughfare straight towards us. It was low and had the look of a predatory animal as it bounded in and out of pools of flickering light. I joined Cat in firing short controlled bursts at it. As it crested a pile of corpses less than four hundred metres away I saw how pointless the frangible rounds were. Nearly all were hitting it but they were just sparking off some heavy-duty armour.

Morag plugged herself into one of the dead pilot’s jacks. He was still connected to the mech. She went through his systems. It was like necrophilia but the mech twitched. I heard the hum from its auxiliary batteries and part of the cockpit lit up. Morag managed to move the pilot’s fingers to release the mech’s grip on the autocannon.

‘Cat!’ I scrambled over the wreckage of the mech and reached for the weapon. It was armed with an autocannon because a railgun, plasma weapon or heavy lasers would be more likely to breach something. Two hundred metres. It was going to be a bitch to aim. The autocannon looked like an oversized assault rifle. I grabbed the handgrip and tucked the butt under my arm. Most of my hand fitted into the trigger. One hundred metres. Cat grabbed the barrel and lifted it up trying to aim. Fifty metres. I pulled the trigger.

I screamed as I dislocated my right shoulder. The recoil shot the massive weapon back and out of my grip. Cat threw herself to the side, but the muzzle flash caught her and burned the right side of her body, setting the bodybuilder’s top she was wearing alight. We were going to die doing something stupid, something that had been my idea.

Still on fire, Cat grabbed the weapon again. It was on us. It leaped into the air as I rolled and grabbed the trigger with my left hand and pushed it down. I tried to keep it held down as the autocannon bucked all over the sand. The thing all but leaped into the weapon’s fire. Even the velocity of the twenty-millimetre rounds didn’t halt its pounce but it knocked it off kilter and into Cat, who in a feat of adrenalin-fuelled strength pushed it off. I had a moment to be appalled that this thing was still moving. It was a flailing mass of mechanical, armoured limbs, which were beating and clawing at the ground, kicking up a lot of bloody sand. I didn’t understand how it could still be moving. There was movement off to my right but I had no time to worry about that.

‘The cannon!’ Cat shouted. She grabbed the barrel of the weapon and practically held it against the creature. I managed to lift the butt off the ground and hold the violently kicking weapon as round after round flew into it until it stopped moving.

I didn’t have time to even look at what we’d killed as another one burst out of the wreckage of a bar to my right. It exploded though a neon sign in a shower of sparks. I heard Mudge firing his M-19 at it and saw the useless rounds spark off its heavy armour. My shoulder laser had time to stab out at it twice before it pounced and tore Morag out of the mech’s cockpit and slammed her into the wall. It landed on top of her and a bloody metal claw powered down into her torso. I was sure she was dead. Ignoring the agony of my dislocated arm I charged the monster, all eight of my nine-inch knuckle blades extended from my forearms. I shoulder-barged it, intent on knocking it off Morag and then dealing with it. It was like shoulder-barging a mech. It didn’t move. I stopped dead. It casually clawed me, tearing off half my face and sending me flying back through the air.

I landed in the sand and scrambled to my feet desperate to get it off Morag. I knew I was too late. I knew she was dead. With a scream Cat drove more than a foot of serrated pickaxe blade on the end of a miner’s multi-tool in through the creature’s cranium and down, deep into its brain. Cat twisted the handle and pulled it off Morag. It was only then she put her burning T-shirt out.

Morag was bloody, her right leg at an odd angle, but she was moving and moaning. Thank God she’d chosen to wear armour like me and unlike Cat.

I staggered to my feet looking around for more of them. My right shoulder was dislocated. That should be difficult when you’re an amputee. It was the join to the cybernetic arm, which was hanging off at an odd angle. The painkillers in my internal drug reservoirs were trying desperately to cope.

‘Er, Jakob?’ I heard Mudge say. I looked over to where he was kneeling by the twitching corpse of the thing that had attacked Morag. I was nauseated to see it wore a mask made of a flayed human face. Mudge was still covering us but he reached down and tore the mask off. I now knew what it was that had attacked us. Actually I knew who it was that had attacked us. They were friends of Mudge’s and mine.

‘Cat?’ I said weakly as I leaned heavily against the mech’s leg.

I was still scanning all around as was my shoulder laser, though the movements of its servos were sending little jolts of pain through my shoulder. Cat walked over to me, grabbed me and pulled the arm back into its socket. I screamed. My scream was answered. Wolf howls echoed through the rock passages.

I went over and knelt by Morag. Her leg was broken, her cheek was hanging off and her chest armour had taken a battering. There was some blood where the armour had been punctured but it looked superficial. She was out cold and there was nothing we could do for her now.

‘You know these guys?’ Cat asked.

‘Yeah,’ I answered.

‘You piss them off?’

‘They’re friends of ours, saved us from getting killed.’

‘So they with the Cabal?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Mudge said. He and Cat were covering as I checked their weapons. One had a laser rifle, which I threw to Cat. She collected the spare batteries and grenades while I covered her with the gauss carbine I took off the other one. ‘This isn’t their style. I mean it is and isn’t. I mean, did Vladimir seem the type to do civvies?’

I glanced over at Mudge and then went back to scanning the area. Vladimir was fun to be around if you were on his right side, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.

‘They call themselves the Vucari,’ I told Cat. ‘They’re Spetsnaz.’

‘Oh perfect,’ Cat said. The Spetsnaz may not have been the best special forces in the world but they were one of the most feared. They were rumoured to recruit out of lunatic asylums. ‘Were they in colonial space when the Black Squadrons got there?’

‘No,’ I said. This had been bothering me. ‘They were sent out there like us.’

‘They changed sides?’ Cat asked.

Now I could see Vladimir happily perpetrating this massacre, particularly if someone owed him money, but changing sides? More than anything the Organizatsiya encouraged loyalty.

I checked their sidearms — more fucking ten millimetres. It figured. These guys liked to close with their prey and get their claws wet. I took them anyway, dropping the ones we’d nicked from the guards. We were now slightly better armed.

‘How many?’ Cat asked.

‘Squads of eight. Depends on how many squads,’ I told her. ‘Mudge, carry Morag.’ He protested that he wanted to be a shooter. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me. When you’ve completed special forces selection and training then you can be a shooter.’ He grudgingly picked her up.

We moved quickly. I wanted to get back to the ship and our gear and then look for Pagan, though I didn’t fancy his chances. I wondered if Demiurge had taken over the systems yet. Had God beaten him? God should have had the advantage. He should have had a lot more resources in terms of processing power and memory.

Cat was on point, I was at the back, Mudge was carrying Morag between us. She was better off unconscious the way her leg was hanging down. The side of my face that was hanging off was blissfully numb. We were passing another street that branched off deeper into the asteroid on our right.

‘People in the bar,’ Cat whispered.

I glanced down the street and saw the bar she meant. It had a flickering neon sign of a scantily clad woman done up like a Japanese cartoon character. I guessed this was more a brothel than a bar. Metal shutters covered the windows though several of them had been torn off. I could see numerous heat signatures inside the place.

As we continued towards the dock there was the sound of lots of guns firing long ragged bursts in our general direction. The fire was grossly inaccurate but forced us to take cover as we tried to push corpses up and into the way of the bullets. How can people still miss in the age of the smartlink? I wondered. And long bursts are just lack of self-control. This wasn’t the Vucari. They would be eating us by now.

‘We’re on your side, you stupid bastards!’ I screamed during a relative lull in the hail of fire.

‘Fuck you!’ came the heavily accented reply.

‘We just want to get across to the dock!’ I shouted back.

I was surprised when a man in a suit wearing dark glasses and holding a gun appeared in one of the windows and gestured for us to approach. I shook my head vigorously, hoping his optics would pick it up from there, and then pointed towards the dock. He continued gesturing.

‘Fuck this, let’s just go,’ Cat hissed.

‘Pagan!’ the man shouted.

I glanced between Mudge and Cat. Both of them nodded. We made a run for the brothel. As I was scanning all around us I was sure I saw movement in the pipework that ran above the major thoroughfares.

We leaped the window ledge and came barrelling into the Yakuza brothel. It was a fairly comfortable-looking affair for Freetown but I suspect that was more for the Yakuza who hung out there than the clientele. It had a central stage with a pole so the customers could see which of the desperate-looking male or female prostitutes they wanted. There was a bar and a set of metal stairs that led upstairs to the work booths.

The lights weren’t flickering in here; someone had got pissed off with them and smashed all but the red emergency lighting. The candles didn’t so much provide more light as fuck with the imminent and painful death ambience.

Most of the working boys and girls were sensibly cowering behind a makeshift barricade of overturned tables. I felt like joining them. All the Yak guys were toting guns and looking macho in pre-FHC-style suits, hats and shades. The weird thing was they all looked the same, even the girls. They had all been cut to look the same — like their leader, I supposed. Only which one was their leader? I guessed it was the guy stripped to the waist, all his tattoos on show. It made a degree of sense. He was the fattest. He was carrying a big sub-machine gun. It had a drum magazine and looked like a pre-FHC copy. I hated fashion guns. He also had a short straight-edged sword shoved through a red sash wrapped around his waist.

Mudge lay Morag down behind the barricade and then unslung his near-useless M-19. I passed my slightly less useless gauss carbine to him and he covered us as I knelt down next to Morag.

The fat, half-naked guy with the tattoos was speaking to me in rapid Japanese. I didn’t speak Japanese regardless of the speed.

‘Medpak?’ I asked and then used the universal bridge between cultures of speaking slowly and loudly. ‘First. Aid. Kit,’ I said, pointing at Morag’s wounds. For all the poor guy knew, I was trying to sell him Morag. Fortunately one of the hookers understood and a rudimentary medpak was slid across the floor towards me.

I winced as I heard the crack when I pushed Morag’s leg back into place. Well, roughly into place. I applied medgels to the break and then to her face. I didn’t want to take her out of her armour and check her chest wound unless I had to. I hooked her up to the medpak so it could drive the gels. Her vitals didn’t look great but she wasn’t dying.

‘Jake.’ Even under the circumstances Mudge’s contraction of my name still irritated me. I ignored him as I worked on Morag as quickly as possible. ‘Jake!’

‘What?!’ I swung my head round to look at him. When we’d come in I’d been so focused on seeing to Morag’s wounds I must have walked straight past Pagan.

He was in one of the comfortable chairs. He made it look somehow throne-like. His staff lay diagonally across him. Both he and the chair showed signs of receiving small-arms fire. He was injured but it looked like his subcutaneous armour had taken the brunt of it. However, he was juddering in the chair like he was being beaten, and blood was bubbling from his mouth and nose. I’d only seen this once or twice before. This was damage from biofeedback. He was in the net getting a right kicking from someone.

The Yakuza boss pointed at a thinscreen slowly peeling off the rock above the bar. It took me a few moments to work out what was going on. At first I thought it was some sort of animated Japanese entertainment viz. Then I realised.

It was showing a huge six-armed man/wolf creature surrounded by a nimbus of white fire. I had seen that fire before, when the angelic hacker Ezekiel had burned the net construct of the Warchilde to let Rolleston escape. I guessed the hacker running the demon-wolf icon was Bataar, the Vucari’s signalman. I remembered thinking of him as the high priest of a cult.

The nimbus of white flame acted as a shield against Pagan’s attack programs, which had manifested as a near-constant stream of lightning from the tip of his staff. The nimbus flared where the lightning touched it. The demon-wolf opened its mouth and breathed white fire all over Pagan. A wall of water shot from the rock floor to meet the white flame. The defence program was turned to steam and the white flame licked over Pagan’s screaming icon.

‘Can we get him out?’ I demanded. I wasn’t really sure who I was asking. I wasn’t sure how bad it would be to pull him out of a situation like this. I wasn’t really sure how to do it externally to someone using an internal computer.

Both icons were in a bad way, covered in burns and rendered blood. Surrounding the wolf was a mass of black tendrils that burned with black fire as they reached for Pagan. White light shone from behind Pagan, off-screen. I presumed this was God. Pagan was simultaneously trying to defend himself from the demon-wolf, attack it with lightning and fend off the black tendrils with momentary walls of fire.

The ripping sound of one hypersonic bang running into the next triggered the noise dampeners on my ears and deafened anyone not similarly augmented. This was of less concern than the long burst of railgun fire that tore through the brothel at about chest height. It was like all the furniture in the room had taken flight and was then joined by spinning body parts.

Something wet hit me. The railgun fire stopped just as the flesh of a Yakuza gunman near me split into three and then exploded in superheated chunks as a burst of laser fire hit him.

One of the surviving armoured shutters burst inwards as a Vucari tore into the room. I just about had time to draw attention to myself by firing a short bust from each of my salvaged pistols into its face. My shoulder laser was more effective at charring head armour.

She grabbed me by punching her claws through the subcutaneous armour that protected my stomach, then picked me up, carried me across the bar and rammed me into the back wall. My shoulder laser kept firing point blank into her face, but her heavily armour-plated skull was resisting the beam. It did however burn the dead skin mask she was wearing off. That just showed me her blood-covered, rage-contorted features and her fucking big sharp teeth. She tore a chunk of flesh out of my left forearm. I knew I was going to die so I did something stupid. I grabbed the top of her maw with my left arm and tried to use all my boosted muscle to force her head back. She opened her maw to tear into me and I shoved my right arm into her mouth. She bit down on it, her teeth denting and starting to penetrate my cybernetic arm’s armour. I extended all four blades on that arm. All four of the razor-sharp, carbon-fibre blades extended into her brain. She shook, juddered and then slid to one side. Her claws tore out of my stomach and I screamed some more.

Mudge was riding another of the Vucari as it rampaged around the room killing nearly everything it reached out and touched with its claws. A gunman near me lifted his SMG to fire. He was going to hit Mudge. Somehow I had the energy to kick the gun out of his hand. Mudge was punching the Vucari wolf cyborg in the head with his bare hand. I wondered if the Vucari even knew he was there. Cat had the laser and was manoeuvring for a shot, but Mudge and the Yakuza were getting in the way.

I saw the gauss carbine I’d given Mudge lying on the ground. I dived towards it, grabbed the weapon and rolled up.

‘Mudge, get off!’ I screamed. Mudge slid off the Vucari and curled up in a defensive ball close to its feet. I fired the gauss carbine. Cat fired the laser. The armour-piercing, electromagnetically propelled darts tore into the monstrous cyborg but they weren’t doing enough damage. Cat was hitting the Vucari and superheating armour and flesh, blowing bits off it, but the thing was withstanding the fire, its animal-like howls of pain matching the screams coming from the net feed on the thinscreen.

The Vucari bolted, sprinting out into the street through the wreckage of the armoured shutters. Cat chased it. She was insane. I followed her. I think her actions shamed me into it. Cat was firing burst after burst at the thing as it climbed up a stack of street bunks. The metal frames of the bunks bent and buckled with the Vucari’s weight as it sprang up. I raised the gauss rifle to my shoulder. The smartlink showed me the grenades in the carbine’s underslung launcher. The Vucari weren’t screwing around with stun batons. Fortunately the smartlink translated from Russian to English.

I fired the first grenade. Its velocity took it through the bunks to the rock wall and the fragmentation grenade exploded. Wreckage rained down on Cat and I as the force of the explosion blew the wolf cyborg across the street and into the opposite wall. It bounced off the rock and landed in the street ahead of us.

It tried to get up. I was angry now. Why had they done this? Why were they forcing us to kill friends? This was exactly what I had never wanted to do. These were good people — I mean they were all borderline psychos, but they were good people. Actually there was nothing borderline about them. I fired a second grenade. The flechettes tore into it, most of the needles sparking off now severely compromised armour. It tumbled back into the sand. It was still moving. I fired the third grenade from the hip. The cross hairs on my smartlink told me where it was going to hit. The thirty-millimetre, high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade went through its chest cavity and exploded. I was too close. The force of the explosion knocked me on my arse, battered my teeth together and a bit of Vucari shrapnel tore the side of my head open and almost took my ear off.

Cat came to stand by where I was sitting on a Belt zombie’s corpse. She was looking all around.

‘You getting up?’ she asked.

Cat and I stepped back into the brothel. Mudge was leaning on the bar. He had the M-19 in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. It looked like something had hit him hard enough in the side of the head to stove in part of his subcutaneous armour and he had a ragged tear in his chest.

‘ Na zdorovye,’ he said bitterly.

He took a long swig from the bottle, winced and then spat out a tooth. I glanced over at the Vucari I’d killed. I remembered her name now. It was Andrea. When we’d taken them to get drunk after they’d saved our arses she’d swapped oral sex jokes with Bibs. These people had gone toe to toe with Them when nearly out of ammunition to save us and this was the thanks they got. Why the fuck had they done this?

I’d almost forgotten Pagan. I glanced up at the thinscreen. The wolf-demon was still. It seemed suspended from a tree of thorns that had grown through its flesh. I caught a momentary glimpse of Pagan’s icon on the screen, which looked ragged and half torn apart. I briefly wondered why they had to make the virtual damage look so gory in their fake world. Pagan’s icon disappeared. Tendrils covered in black fire swamped the place where he’d been. The white glow that I’d come to connect with God seemed to recede and disappear.

‘Jesus, that hurts. When’d I get shot?’ Pagan asked. Pain filled his voice. Real Pagan didn’t look much better than virtual Pagan. He was lying on the ground. Railgun fire had destroyed his chair. He was lucky it hadn’t torn him apart. There was blood all down his chin and beard from where it had drooled out his mouth and nose. Blood was also running out of his ears. I knew that you had to take a serious amount of biofeedback for that to happen. Then he had the bullet wounds on top of that.

‘Has Demiurge taken the station?’ I asked. My voice sounded dead even to me. As if I didn’t care. I glanced over at Morag. She was still unconscious.

Pagan shook his head. ‘Not yet, but it will,’ he said and then started speaking rapidly in Japanese to the Yakuza. The surgical clones looked to their boss. He hesitated as long as face dictated and then nodded. The gunmen went running from the brothel.

‘You speak Japanese?’ Pagan ignored my stupid question. Later he would tell me that he’d worked extensively with the Japanese Special Forces Group on Barney’s. ‘Where’s it getting all its processing power and memory from?’

Pagan turned to look up at me. He look tired and in pain.

‘Good question. They came on a long-range strike craft. There’s only so much Demiurge that could fit into the systems of a craft like that. God here in the camp should have easily outbid it in terms of power. As soon as it kicked in all the docked ships switched off their net links to the station. All the in-system ships will be carrying God. If they add their memory and processing power then we should be able to beat Demiurge.’

‘“Should”?’ He shrugged. ‘Won’t most of them have left as soon as they realised something was wrong?’

‘Several tried. One of the first things Demiurge went for was the camp’s external weaponry. Two tramp freighters and a factory ship were blown apart.’

I tried, I really tried, but this news did nothing except make me feel increasingly numb.

‘Those ships’ captains have got a lot to lose if they switch on their comms and Demiurge wins.’

‘That’s why Itaki’s people -’ he nodded towards the Yakuza boss, who was standing in the middle of the carnage trying to make sense of it ‘- will be doing the persuading, at gunpoint if necessary.’

‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked.

He started to shake his head but winced at the pain.

‘No. I can’t fight that thing and neither can Morag.’ Then there was a look of momentary panic. ‘Where’s Morag?’ I pointed at where she was lying on the ground among the metal kindling that had once been a makeshift barricade.

‘She all right?’ he asked.

Not really, but I nodded.

Cat joined us. She had succeeded in removing the railgun harness Andrea had been wearing. The railgun had folded up snug along her back when Andrea had fought like an animal. Cat had linked to it, run diagnostics and was now putting the harness on.

‘What now?’ Cat asked.

‘Back to the ship,’ I said.

‘I know where your brother is,’ Pagan told Cat.

Bollocks. Cat turned to look at me. I sighed and glanced down at Pagan.

‘It’s what we came here for,’ he said.

Mudge joined us, catching the gist of the conversation. ‘Look at all the free stuff we got,’ he said, grinning.

‘Be a shame to come all this way and not get him,’ Pagan said.

‘With their weapons we’re hunting them,’ Cat said.

Pain cut my bitter laugh short.

‘Dream on. These guys lived for fighting Them hand-to-hand. One at a time nearly killed us, and we only got away with it because they seem to have gone fucking mad.’

‘Four down though,’ Cat said.

‘Five,’ Pagan corrected her. ‘There was no way their hacker walked away from that.’

‘He could already be dead,’ I pointed out. Meaning Merle.

‘Scared?’ Mudge asked. He was goading me.

‘Mudge, will you just fuck off,’ I snapped. ‘The adrenalin combat junkie act is wearing a bit fucking thin.’

Mudge looked pissed off and for once didn’t say anything. Still it was a Chinese parliament and I’d been outvoted.

‘Okay, we go and get him,’ I agreed. ‘Mudge, stay here and look after Morag.’

‘What? I piss you off so you go off and play with your soldier mates-’

‘Yes-’ I started.

‘And I get saddled babysitting your ex?’

‘Mudge! Wind your fucking neck in!’ I shouted, finally losing my temper. I don’t think it was Mudge I was angry with. Well not just Mudge. ‘Stay here, look after Morag, and if anything happens to her don’t be around when I get back!’

We stared at each other for a while. The hookers and the Yakuza had turned to see what the commotion was about. Mudge somehow thought better of saying anything and stalked over to where Morag was lying on the ground. I think I’d managed to alienate everyone now.

‘I hope this guy’s worth it,’ I muttered to Cat.

‘He’d best be better than James Bond,’ Pagan said.

‘Who?’ Cat asked. I’d no idea what he was talking about either.

This was bullshit. I did not want to be doing this and we had better things to do, like making sure Morag was okay, if I was honest. Moving deep into the bowels of an asteroid mining camp looking for incredibly dangerous Russian special forces operators was not high on my list of priorities. I respected Cat wanting to help her brother, I really did, and if he was one of ours then it would be right to come and get him. We didn’t know this guy, however, so this wasn’t our problem. Besides, if BPIC took back control of the station we could be right back where we were to begin with. Except the next guy might not want to gloat and be so sloppy with his computer security.

BPIC didn’t have much use for long-term people containment. It was expensive and tied up resources. They had a lock-up for when Belt zombies, usually newcomers who hadn’t had the life sucked out of them, got out of hand. Anything deserving more long-term punishment got dealt with summarily. It normally involved an airlock. After all they were pretty much the law out here.

We found Merle’s cell. It was a laser-cut hole in the stone not much bigger than a man. It had a smaller hole in the bottom of it to drain waste and a very solid, thick titanium hatch at the top. Pagan once again proved how clever he was by calling it an oubliette. It looked like a hole in the ground to me. It was empty.

The lights were still flickering in this part of the station and we hadn’t seen corpses for some time now. We’d just found lots of blood, bits of torn flesh and drag marks. I think we were close to the various life-support systems. The only sound was the loud humming of a lot of machinery.

Cat, armed with Andrea’s railgun, and I covered while Pagan investigated the hole in the ground with the French-sounding name.

‘He’s dead,’ I told Cat. I couldn’t see any way he could get out of that. Someone had to have opened it. That someone was probably a very dangerous, heavily augmented Russian cyborg.

‘Not Merle,’ she said with some conviction.

‘Even if he got out, if he’s been in there for any amount of time then he’ll be in no physical state to help us,’ Pagan told her gently.

‘If he’s high value then BPIC could have moved him,’ Cat said, but I could hear the doubt in her voice.

‘I don’t think he would have been a priority for BPIC today. I don’t think they even have a frame of reference for what happened here,’ Pagan said.

‘This isn’t a good spot for a conversation,’ I hissed. This place was seriously messing with me. As that thought crossed my mind a howl echoed through the rock corridors. All of us froze.

I’d heard wolf calls before, real wolves, when I was growing up. The calls the Vucari had used earlier were most likely for intimidation value. After all, they could probably communicate between themselves via Demiurge’s control of the net. This was different. There was something mournful and desperately sad about the noise.

‘I think we should go,’ Pagan said.

‘He’s here and he’s alive-’ Cat started.

‘Is that just intuition?’ Pagan demanded. ‘There’s taking a risk and then there’s courting trouble.’

I knew they were waiting for me to make a decision. I couldn’t say why I decided to push on. I wanted to leave and wasn’t sure of the advantage of continuing to look for Merle. I don’t think Merle was the reason I decided to push on, however. There was just something about that howling.

‘We go on.’

Pagan didn’t argue; he knew better than to do that in a situation like this.

I don’t know what the stone chamber where we found Vladimir had been used for initially. I think there was some kind of machinery buried under the pile of corpses. We’d been passing when another mournful howl had alerted us to his presence. I’d entered first. I checked all around looking for more of them. There could be some hiding in the corpses but if so thermographics wasn’t picking them up. I pointed the gauss carbine up the mound to the figure sitting on top. Pagan and Cat were in after me. They were too professional to say anything but I could tell they were horrified by what they saw. Pagan still had the presence of mind to turn his back on the atrocity and cover the door. It took a degree of balls to turn your back on something you know to be that dangerous.

‘What are you doing, Vladimir?’ I asked quietly, trying to force down my rising gorge. He was crouched on top of the pile of bodies tearing gobbets of flesh from them and putting them in his mouth and chewing. His expression was pained, like a spoilt middle-class kid forced to eat something he didn’t like. A lot of what he was eating was just tumbling out of his mouth partially chewed. I think it was the noise, the tearing sound of skin and meat, which jarred my already frayed nerves the most.

He turned to look at me, wearing someone else’s face. He was covered from head to foot in other people’s blood. It should have been horrific, and it was, but there was something pathetic and pitiable about him as well. He’d got his wish to feast on human flesh but it didn’t look as if it was to his taste. This was a warewolf reduced to a ghoul, a mere carrion eater. He seemed tired as he took off the face.

‘My friend,’ he said sadly. He continued tearing off lumps of flesh. There was something compulsive about the behaviour. ‘I have betrayed everything.’ He tore off more flesh.

‘Why?’ was the best I could do. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had before Cat tried to waste him. He ripped off another lump of flesh.

‘If he does that one more time…’ Cat growled.

‘This isn’t you,’ I said.

He stopped chewing and looked at me.

‘We both know it is. We are always surprised by what we are capable of…’ Then he tapped his armoured skull with the tip of a bloodied claw. ‘When we serve something bigger than us.’

‘Has something made you do this?’ Pagan asked. He did not look at Vladimir; he was still covering the door.

‘I do not know you that you should address me with such familiarity,’ Vladimir replied, a predatory smile on his face. His mock haughtiness was like a ghost of his old self. ‘I always wanted to be a monster. It’s much easier than trying to be good.’

‘Are you slaved?’ I asked, though I’d seen nothing in any of the Vucari’s plugs.

He stared at me. It was all I could do to return his look.

‘Do you owe me a debt?’ he asked.

I didn’t want to answer that. I couldn’t see any form of repayment of my debt that was going to be good. I swallowed hard, trying to ignore the acid burn of rising bile in the back of my throat.

‘Yes,’ I finally managed.

‘I cannot do it myself,’ he said. He sounded almost solemn.

The glimpse of his face I caught as he pounced was of a mask of hatred and insane rage. We all fired. The railgun kicked up a storm of dead flesh. Despite the ordnance he took a long time dying.

I felt nothing as we probed deeper into the complex. Pagan was freaked but I didn’t care any more. All I could think of was that someone had done this to Vladimir. I wasn’t sure how but I was pretty sure who.

We were crossing a metal bridge over a deep pool of water that had been cut from the stone of the asteroid. The pool was part of the water supply. A thick carpet of algae covered the top of the pool to help with oxygen generation. The flickering lights in this section were ultraviolet to stimulate algae growth.

The UV made the blood-soaked Vucari that dropped from the ceiling wearing someone else’s face seem surreal. I think Mudge would have enjoyed the experience. It didn’t seem real to me. The Vucari landed between Cat and me. Cat’s blood looked black in the UV as he tore a claw up her back. The blow lifted her off her feet and sent her sprawling to the metal. As it turned to face me I threw myself back, trying to bring the gauss rifle to bear. I knew that behind me Pagan would be swinging around to fire but then the Vucari stiffened. Blood, his own, dribbled out of his mouth and he fell forward. There was a piece of jagged metal sticking out the back of his neck between the armour plate on his skull and the armour plate on his back. Even allowing for getting the metal between the two plates, it still would have to be pushed in with a lot of force to penetrate the subcutaneous armour. I had to admit I was impressed.

Standing behind the fallen Vucari was a naked man about my size. I had no idea where he’d come from. He was breathing hard and his right hand was bleeding badly. There was no body fat on him at all and he looked malnourished. I saw the high cheekbones that could make features like his look cruel but now they just added to his gaunt appearance. His hair was a dirty matted bird’s nest. His skin was as dark as Cat’s and there was more than a passing resemblance though he had a smaller build. The thing that got me the most however was his eyes. They must have been designed to look like the real things but I’d never seen implants like that. They had seemed intense in the pictures but now they managed to look simultaneously cold and somehow insane.

He spat on the corpse. Some feeling flickered inside me.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

He ignored me. He wrenched the metal shank out of the Vucari, turned him over and pushed the dead skin mask off his face. I recognised this one as well. His name was Vassily.

Cat climbed to her feet with some difficulty due to the railgun harness. She turned to face the man.

‘Merle?’ I couldn’t remember Cat ever sounding that unsure.

He looked back at her. His implants were certainly emotive. I wasn’t sure how that worked. I was sure I saw hate in his eyes.

‘A fucking cop!’ he spat.

‘Corporate secur-’ she managed to get out before he attacked her.

He attacked someone with a railgun with only a metal shank. I thought Cat was pretty good about it. After all the shit we’d been through I would have been tempted to just blow him away. I was quite tempted to do that anyway. He drove her to the ground and she was just managing to hold him off. It seemed that her obviously superior strength was not necessarily a match for insane conviction. The shank was getting closer and closer to her. I bet she wished she’d put armour on before going to Trace’s office now.

I shook my head. We really didn’t have time for this sibling rivalry bullshit. Pagan was covering our back. I put as much power as I could muster into the kick I delivered. It snapped Merle’s head around to one side and he spat blood all over Cat. His head was lolling around but he was still conscious, so I stamped on it. He collapsed onto her.

‘You’re not one of us yet,’ I told the unconscious body. Pagan backed up closer to me.

‘So we’ve collected another arsehole then?’ he asked.

Just once, I thought, it’d be nice if we could sort things out without violence.

‘Ungrateful bastard,’ I muttered, meaning Merle. We’d have to carry him now as well.

‘Could somebody get my naked brother off me?’ Cat asked.