War in Heaven

13

The cable car was heavily armoured with a number of weapon systems sticking out of it like spines. Most of them were for point defence. The cable was carbon nanotube in an armoured sheath. Even allowing for this, the cable looked very vulnerable. Tailgunner had confirmed that during the twenty-year-long, on-off siege of Moa City, the cable car normally didn’t last long when They came calling. The locals had only just got this one up and running again.

We were sharing the crowded car with grubby, drawn, exhausted-looking miners coming off shift. I hoped the crowd was enough to hide us from the ever-present surveillance but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we stuck out. We were wearing clean clothes and looked healthy. I could feel the security lens burning into me, scrutinising me. It was as if Demiurge was staring at us. Which it would be as it ran our features through various facial recognition programs.

The cavern that Moa City occupied was the largest yet. It was more like a large alpine valley with a roof of stone. The cavern walls close enough to see were cut into terraces where they’d been extensively mined. This made me uncomfortable. It was like chipping away at the walls of your own house and then wondering why the roof fell on you.

Enormous geothermally powered strip-lighting rigs hung from the cavern roof among the stalactites. It was supposed to be daytime but the harsh light was more institutional than daylight. It wasn’t total either. Many of the lights had been destroyed or damaged. Some hung down from the rock; others flickered on and off intermittently. At ‘night’ the lights would go UV, providing what little modified vegetation was left with the band of light it needed.

The floor of the cavern was supposed to be a lush carpet of vegetation broken up by plantation-style mansions cut out of the rock itself. Big Henry had told me that it had been fashionable to have a seam of precious metal run through the wall of your own house. The problem with the Garden District was that the New Zealand colonial forces hadn’t been able to defend it when They had swarmed in from Nightside.

‘I remember during one of the attacks — the first one I saw — I looked down from the city and it looked like the whole place was crawling. It was like a carpet of insects on a nature viz. You could barely see the ground,’ Tailgunner said as he saw me gazing down at the cavern floor.

We’d used some of the morphic compound to change his features. His tattoos — they were called ta moko apparently and told his story — had been covered with foundation. The whanau were nothing if not pragmatic. A bandanna covered the computer tech protruding from his skull.

‘There’s people down there,’ I said. In some places huge bonfires were burning and by magnifying my optics I could just about make out large groups around the fires. There were large, oddly shaped statuary near some of the people.

‘They call themselves the End,’ Tailgunner said. I could hear the contempt in his voice. ‘They’re deserters. Part of some suicide cult. They use their religious beliefs to justify their cowardice. They moved into the Garden when They moved out.’

I had always been somewhat impressed with conscientious objectors. I was less sure how I felt about deserters. It was too much like running out on your mates when they needed you.

‘Who are the guys in the civvy-looking APCs?’ Cat asked.

There were wheeled armoured vehicles moving around far below us.

‘Probably salvage teams and private bailiffs,’ Tailgunner told us. ‘When They came the first time the Garden was overrun. Those that had the chance evacuated. The thing is, They don’t loot — no interest in what we have, just in killing us. In some of the houses there are still valuables left. Not to mention that some of the ostentatious bastards had veins of precious metals running through their homes. So the old owners, if they still have money, send teams in to clear out the squatters and see what’s left. Others are private concerns, looters.’

Far below us I saw muzzle flashes and the strobe of a laser in the streets. Much of it was already rubble, the abused ghost of a wealthy neighbourhood. The same could be said for almost all of the rest of the cavern. Moa City had been under siege for almost half of the war since Lalande 2 had been invaded fifty-five years ago. The story of the siege was written in craters, scars, gouges, blackened and melted stone almost everywhere you looked. No part of the enormous cavern was more heavily damaged than the city itself.

One of the greatest engineering feats of the pre-war era, a great deal of survey work, modelling and experimentation had gone into the city’s planning. An enormous stalactite hung from the cavern roof. It was about three miles high and its tip hung about half a mile above the Garden District. Engineers had decided that the stalactite could support habitation, and the city had been cut out of the stone and existing caves with lasers and microbes. It was designed to be a dormitory city for the mineworkers, while those who could afford it lived in the Garden, among the lush vegetation below.

After They had attacked, the wealthy who survived moved up into the stalactite. Initially thought to be a weak point in the planet’s defences, the giant stalactite proved to be a veritable fortress and much of it was given over to the military. The rest of the people were pushed into already crowded parts of the city and left to fend for themselves, particularly when the mines were abandoned by the human forces.

The stalactite filled much of the view through the scarred and pockmarked armoured-glass windscreen of the cable car. It looked like there was not a single inch of it left undamaged. Some of the rock was covered in a patchwork of armour plate. The plates looked thick enough to have come from mechs, or cavern-sea battleships; much had rusted due to the environment. Wart-like artillery, anti-aircraft and point-defence batteries grew out of the stone in numerous places.

‘Was the siege as bad as they say?’ I asked.

Both Tailgunner and Merle laughed humourlessly.

‘Mother’s first memory was of her mother cooking meat from her father’s corpse for the children to eat. He’d killed himself to provide food,’ Tailgunner said and then turned to fix me with his lenses. ‘Yeah, it was bad.’

I swallowed and nodded. It sort of put into perspective what we’d been through. We’d grown up in an impoverished war economy on Earth but it was way worse on the sharp end. Just trying to live long enough to be an adult was a challenge and meant you had to do bad things just to survive. And this had been done to them on purpose. I was pleased that Mudge was back with Pagan at the whanau base. I wouldn’t have liked him to remind Tailgunner about the proud cannibal heritage they’d claimed. I was also wondering why my world had suddenly become all about cannibalism. Morag was staring at Tailgunner, appalled. She was still sporting cuts and bruises from the FAV chase. I wasn’t; I’d healed quickly.

The cable car took us high up towards the cavern roof, towards the thickest part of the stalactite. We passed a broken lighting rig hanging down from the cavern roof. The light was flickering on and off, sending sparks cascading down. Just past the lighting rig we docked with the fortified gatehouse that was the cable car station. We tried not to move too enthusiastically as the mass of exhausted miners plodded off the car. I ignored the sense of vertigo as I stepped from rocking cable car onto stone platform.

To my heightened senses it seemed like there were lenses everywhere and all of them were pointed at us. Regular soldiers with the bored disinterest that came from garrison duty checked the fake IDs we’d fabricated in Limbo and let us through.

What got me most about Moa City was how quiet it was for a place so crowded. They may not have been starving, but the inhabitants looked hungry, drawn and exhausted. Hard times were etched into the lines on their faces.

The streets were smooth tunnels that seemed to always spiral down. The houses were cut out of the stone itself, but everywhere I looked I saw lean-to huts and other shanty-style dwellings. Off the main thoroughfares this part of Moa City was a densely crowded, tangled warren of alleyways. Like the outside of the enormous stalactite, the inside showed extensive battle damage.

‘What’s that humming noise?’ Morag asked.

A pair of armed surveillance drones floated by over the crowds of people.

‘The catapult is just above us. This was the scene of some of the worst fighting in the last ten years,’ Tailgunner said once the drones had passed.

The enormous mass-driver catapult was used to throw heat-shielded ore cargoes into orbit for collection by tugs before being loaded into freighters for export.

I felt a stab of anger as I walked past a holographic projection of Cronin. I could see his enormous bodyguard Martin Kring just behind him. Kring looked more metal and plastic than man. The headline on the news piece was F REE E ARTH G OVERNMENT WARNS OF POSSIBLE FIFTH COLUMN TERRORIST CELLS. I wondered if they meant us specifically. I wondered how many more operators had made it to the ground and were still free.

A patrol went by in a six-wheeled light combat vehicle. They were more alert than the guards in the cable car station as they scanned the crowd. I felt their eyes on us but they showed no sign of suspicion or recognition as we moved away from the main thoroughfare and deeper into the warren of alleyways.

‘This is the Rookery,’ Tailgunner said. ‘I grew up here.’

I was worried that despite his disguise he’d be recognised, but he kept his head down and avoided eye contact. Cat, Merle, Morag and I got stared at a lot. We were obvious outsiders. The deeper we went into the Rookery, however, the less surveillance lenses and remotes we saw.

When I had to run the gauntlet of a line of begging vets who’d had their implants removed, I almost felt at home. Everything was so cramped. Sometimes it felt like I was walking through people’s homes. We got more hard stares from men and women carrying weapons and wearing gang colours. They were mostly older vets. Younger gang members would be serving in the military. I guessed something about the way we carried ourselves made them leave us alone.

‘Do you know anything about this Puppet Show?’ I asked Merle.

We’d reached the external wall of the stalactite and were working our way up on narrow paths cut out of the stone.

‘I’ve had a few dealings with them. They’re different. Seem to be reasonably trustworthy in a scary, don’t-fuck-with-us kind of way,’ he said.

I was trying to hide that I was gasping for breath. Merle could have been out for a stroll despite having spent the last six months in a hole.

Tailgunner disappeared into a gap in the rock just above us. Morag followed and then I reached it. I had to crawl through into a small cave. The cave mouth looked out over the cavern, giving us a view of the cable car run we’d come in on. We were above the lighting rigs now and I could see clusters of smaller stalactites, many of them with windows and entrances. Below us on the lighting rigs I could see tents and houses made of packing crates and other scavenged materials. Connecting them all was a web of strong-looking metal cable.

Tailgunner was kneeling down and pulling a modified climbing harness out of the bag he’d been carrying. Attached to the harness were two pieces of rope ending in a metal sleeve that contained runners. We got out the harnesses we were carrying and Tailgunner showed us how to clip the sleeve onto the web of cable. The runners gripped above and below the cable, as did the brake pads when you wanted to slow down.

‘When you get to a junction, you clip on the cable head you have free and unclip the one you were using. Clear?’ Tailgunner asked.

Oh yeah. Sounded simple, if you weren’t three and a half fucking miles up. Still, maybe I’d be lucky and land on one of the lighting rigs. That way I could die by electrocution.

It looked like Tailgunner had fallen out of the cave but he’d just kicked backwards and slid down the cable. Morag followed. She was grinning. It looked like she was going too fast to me. It felt too fast when I kicked off after her. I was using the brake a lot until I burned myself on the sleeve and noticed smoke rising from it. My legs felt too light as they dangled over the drop. My body felt too heavy. The high gravity made me think the ground wanted me back in a bad way.

I was too busy with my fear to notice the junction and I hit it hard. My heart jumped around in my chest cavity as I swung up past ninety degrees and got to look at the ground from an interesting new angle. I almost tangled myself up in the cables. I managed to control my swinging. It didn’t look very dignified.

‘Move!’ It was Cat coming up fast behind me. I managed to clip the second sleeve over the next line and unclip the first head and move off just before she collided with me. The second stretch of cable was uphill. I had engaged the motor in the sleeve and the rollers were pulling me up the cable, but it was slow. This gave me time to contemplate dangling on a jury-rigged web of cable from a home-made climbing machine miles above rocky death on a high-G planet.

If anything this area looked more badly damaged, as if it had been more fiercely fought over, and the people who lived out here in the smaller stalactite dwellings and on the lighting rigs looked harder, more dangerous. There were more gang colours on view, more weapons. Tailgunner told me later that they were collectively known as the Sky Gangs or the Light Tribes. Most of Them could climb across any surfaces and when They’d come swarming across the cavern ceiling, the gangs here had put up a hell of a fight but had been forced back into the main stalactite time and time again.

We slid into an opening on one of the stalactites. The outside was painted. I think it was supposed to look like a theatre, like the kind you see in old vizzes, only it was inverted. We were met in the rock opening by gun barrels. One day I’d find a place where people didn’t want to point guns at me.

The opening was the entrance to a dome-like cave with various worn, low sofa-like pieces of furniture in it and a stall selling sweets, snacks, alcohol and recreational pharmaceuticals. It was decorated with murals that replicated posters from an earlier age promoting some kind of live entertainment. I think they were from a time before vizzes. If you wanted to go and see actors you used to have to go to a big building where the actors actually were and watch them with hundreds of other people, as ridiculous as that sounds.

The men and women pointing guns at us looked serious, capable and like they’d seen action. Initially I thought they were Maori with only one or two white guys. Tailgunner told me later that a lot of them were descendants of colonists originally from other islands in the South Pacific back on Earth.

I was less sure of the look, though. They seemed to be wearing their best clothes, like you see glamorous types wearing on the tabloid viz stations, if those best clothes had been made from a patchwork of rags. Presumably the rags were the only material they had to make their finery out of. All of them had long thick dreadlocks. I was sure I saw the silver of metal, as if some of the dreadlocks were made of steel camouflaged by the rest of the hair. Occasionally something would move under it.

I didn’t put my hands up but I did keep them away from where my pistols were concealed beneath the borrowed combat jacket. Many vets wore their combat jackets after they left the service. They were warm, rugged and some, like this one, were armoured. The others were doing likewise. Again it was useful not to have Mudge with us. On the other hand he could have spent some money at the drug concession. I’d have to get him something.

‘Don’t point those guns at me. I want to see Puppet Show,’ Tailgunner said, a little brusquely I thought for someone on the edge of a three-and-a-half-mile drop with guns pointed at him. One of the raggedy types seemed to agree with me. He took a step forward and pushed a shotgun barrel into the skin on Tailgunner’s face.

‘I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, but you’re leaving now,’ the guy said. His voice was low, even and full of honest menace.

‘I know you,’ Tailgunner said. That was all he said. I turned to look at him. I had been hoping for a bit more.

‘Everyone fucking knows me, so what?’

‘It’s Tailgunner, you wanker.’

Again I felt that Tailgunner was pushing them a little harder than they needed pushing in our current position. I saw Morag turn to look at him. I was aware of Cat and Merle shifting slightly. I saw glances exchanged among the raggedy types. They definitely knew the name and it was a significant one.

‘You don’t look anything like him,’ the guy with the shotgun said. He was standing too close. He’d gone for the intimidation of physical contact with the gun and not the safety of distance. Tailgunner demonstrated this to him by ripping the shotgun out of his grip.

‘I’m fucking wanted.’ Tailgunner was all street snarl now. Show no weakness. ‘I’d be pretty fucking stupid to wander around without a disguise, yeah?’

Then he handed the shotgun back as if he couldn’t give a fuck. This was a different Tailgunner. This was his public face. He unclipped himself from the cable and started securing the rig about himself.

‘If you’re-’ the guy with the shotgun started.

Tailgunner fixed him with a glare. ‘It’s a call the Puppet Show makes, not you,’ he told him and then went back to what he’d been doing.

The raggedy types exchanged looks, mouthed questions and shrugged. It was clear they weren’t used to being dealt with like this. It was also clear that the big hacker’s name meant something here.

‘We’ll need your guns,’ another raggedy type said. Tailgunner finished packing away his cable gear and looked at her.

‘Go on then,’ he said.

I tensed. I hated giving up my guns, especially in the colonies, but there was no rush to disarm us. I noticed that one of them had left the group and disappeared through some thick red curtains into another part of the stalactite. Moments later he came back with one of the largest men I’d ever seen. He had the same dark but sallow complexion that many of the people of Lalande 2 had. He had the dreadlocks and a facial tattoo but it was much simpler than Tailgunner’s or the others’ in the whanau. He was pretty much the first fat person I’d seen since we’d got here, but judging by the patchwork of scars that covered his face he’d worked hard to get this fat. It was a muscular and solid kind of fat. His ragged finery strained to contain his build. I wondered how he could move his bulk in the high G.

‘Soloso,’ Tailgunner said, nodding a greeting. This time I heard caution and respect in Tailgunner’s voice.

‘He says he’s Tailgunner but he doesn’t look like him,’ the guy with the shotgun said.

‘Well, well, well hard Max Ruru,’ the big guy rumbled. At first I’d thought it was a heavy ground tank starting up.

‘We’ve come to see the Puppet Show,’ Tailgunner said.

Soloso was looking us over. I don’t think he liked what he was seeing.

‘Come to complicate our lives, more like it. Hear you’ve sold out, gone over to the other side. That true?’

Tailgunner met the other man’s look. ‘I think you’re the only person who’d get away with asking that question. Once.’

Soloso gave Tailgunner’s answer some thought. Then he smiled.

‘You get asked for your guns?’ he surprised me by finally asking. Tailgunner just nodded. Soloso turned to his own people. He looked angry. ‘Do you think we’re frightened of these people?’ The raggedy types shifted uncomfortably under the glare of his black plastic lenses. Then he turned back to us. He took his time shifting his bulk. ‘The Puppet Show will start soon. Please don’t make me waste my time by talking about the consequences of fucking around.’ Then he nodded his massive head towards the red curtains.

The rest of us unclipped ourselves from the cables and headed towards them. As Tailgunner passed Soloso, the big man stopped him with a massive hand on the hacker’s chest.

‘You went toe to toe with every hard man in the Rookery; I even heard that you got in a couple of fights with some SAS guys, but I always got the feeling you were avoiding me,’ he rumbled.

Tailgunner looked up at the bigger man.

‘I was never sure I could take you. Now get your fucking hands off me.’

At first I thought it was a tectonic event, then I realised the rumbling was Soloso laughing, but he took his hands off Tailgunner and we headed through the curtains.

The other side was different. A large room hewn out of the rock, it sloped down with irregularly spaced lines of chairs, all of which faced a stage. Suspended platforms hung from the ceiling supporting a complicated lighting rig and automated weaponry that was tracking us. Thick, red and extensively patched curtains blocked our view of most of the stage.

I felt rather than saw Soloso come through the curtains behind us.

‘I don’t like this,’ Morag whispered, leaning in close to me. ‘This place is run by a network. Unless it was completely isolated then Demiurge has got to be in here.’

She left unsaid that an isolated system before the coming of Demiurge would have been of little business use. The thing is, we were committed. We had to rely on Tailgunner’s judgement. Even now gunships and flight-capable exo-armour could be on the way to get us. The Puppet Show could collect what I guessed would be a not-insubstantial bounty.

Then the curtains opened and the spots came on. There were five of them. They were on Morag, Cat, Merle, Tailgunner and me. Would have been quite effective if we hadn’t had flash compensation. We could see fine. The stage was backlit in green. Crackly, poor-sound-quality music, which I think was supposed to be sinister and atmospheric, started playing, and the puppets dropped from the rafters over the stage like three hanged women.

They had the thinnest, frailest bodies I’d yet seen on Lalande. They made Strange look bulky. I think had they not been supported by complex-looking exo-frames, their bodies would have just snapped in the high gravity. They hung completely limp in their frames, held up by what looked like thick metal tendrils. Hanging there, they reminded me of Sharcroft in his spider chair, all but a corpse.

They wore dresses that looked like they had once been expensive and fashionable but had seen better days a long time ago. They were accessorised with tatty, once-elegant, elbow-length gloves. Crying facemasks of beaten steel covered their faces.

I didn’t get this. How could this mockery rule the Rookery’s criminal classes? By criminal classes, I meant everyone in the Rookery. They were poor; it wasn’t like they had a choice.

‘You’re bringing trouble to our door, Tailgunner,’ they said. Each word seemed to come from a different one of them. There was no hesitation. The accusation flowed like a proper sentence but somehow it sounded like a ripple of words. I didn’t like it. I kept wanting to turn around, but every time I did I found Soloso there. He was always watching one of us. Most often Tailgunner, but as soon as I looked behind me he would turn his huge dreadlock-shrouded, bullet-shaped head to look at me and smile.

‘Yeah, that’s probably true,’ Tailgunner said after some thought.

‘We have money,’ I said distractedly. I was still looking behind me at Soloso. I turned around to face the Puppet Show.

‘Which we could relieve you of,’ the Puppet Show said. It was very matter of fact, almost as if it wasn’t paying attention.

‘We need supplies,’ Tailgunner told it. He glanced at me. ‘We’ll make it worth your while.’

‘What sort of supplies and for how much?’ the three of them asked as one.

‘Food and medicine mainly, maybe some tools and later some ammunition and explosives. For a lot of people. We’ll take what you can give us.’

The working-class Scottish part of me thought he was being very cavalier with someone else’s money. On the other hand we were being pretty cavalier with Sharcroft’s money. The Puppet Show took some time looking between us.

‘This looks like black ops kind of trouble to us. Why would we want that?’ they asked in unison.

‘Again, money,’ I suggested.

They all turned to look at me. They moved in a kind of angry jerking way, exactly like puppets on a string.

‘We have lots of money. We don’t need trouble from the Freedom Squads. See, a very nice young lady came and explained it to us. Perhaps you know her?’

I manage to resist the urge to look around to see if she was standing in the shadows. Like I’d see her if she was. Morag glanced over at me, worried.

‘See, we can do what we want as long as we don’t interfere with them in any way. It seems like a good deal,’ the Puppet Show continued.

‘Before we talk any more, are we safe here?’ Merle asked, his tone neutral.

‘You are what we say you are here. Nothing more,’ the Puppet Show answered.

This was starting to freak me out. I wondered if they were just three corpses in a frame used as a front to mess with people. Was Soloso the real boss?

‘Which doesn’t answer my fucking question.’

‘Look, this is a nice set-up you have here. Sure it impresses the locals, but if you’re going to fuck us, let’s get to shooting. You go first. If not then I’m going to assume that you’re stalling, which means you’ve got people on the way, which means we’ll initiate the shooting,’ Cat surprised me by saying.

The four of us that weren’t Tailgunner shifted slightly, ready to go for guns. Soloso didn’t even flinch. I know because I glanced nervously behind me.

‘Tailgunner.’ It was a whisper, one syllable each, but they still made it sound like a complete word.

‘Okay, everyone just cool down,’ Tailgunner said, making placatory gestures with his hands.

‘We’re not the people for your street-level bullshit,’ Merle said, sounding genuinely angry.

‘That’s enough. We’re in their house,’ I said to Merle. He didn’t answer. I turned to the Puppet Show. ‘You’re very scary. Seriously, I don’t like this at all. It’s creepy.’ I ignored the look of contempt from Merle and the look of confusion from Morag. ‘We’re here to deal. If you don’t want to, then we’ll go our separate ways and you do what you have to do. Even if that means grassing us up. If you want to deal then let’s get all the gun-pointing, cock-waving, I’m-harder-than-thee bollocks out of the way so we can get on with business.’

‘We didn’t come here to fight you,’ Morag added. ‘But just so you know, we could be a lot of trouble for anyone who helps us.’ Now she didn’t have to emphasise that, but it was now most definitely all our cards on the table.

The Puppet Show stared at us. They stared at us for a very long time. They were very good at intimidation psychology for three inanimate bodies dangling from a roof. I could see Merle getting impatient. I was trying to decide whether or not to target Soloso or one of the automated weapon systems in the rafters. The rafters were winning but I reckoned I’d let the shoulder laser have a crack at Soloso. Though I couldn’t shake the feeling that it’d be like trying to kill a tank with a flashlight. Then I remembered that my combat jacket didn’t have a shoulder flap for the laser anyway.

‘You are safe here,’ came the rippling answer, finally. Tailgunner, Cat and I relaxed slightly.

‘I don’t wish to appear disrespectful but how does that work?’ Morag asked. As she did the Puppet Show jerked round to face her. Not so long ago she would have flinched. Not now though. ‘You’re networked, aren’t you? This whole place.’

‘It works by having to shut down our entire system and go on to a clean life support while every single component is stripped out and replaced and then shielded at some expense. It works through isolation from the net that was our world. It works through surgery to cut our infected systems to replace them with new clean ones. It works through constant and expensive vigilance to keep out attempts to invade our system or re-link it to the net.’

It was difficult to tell, but I reckoned two, if not all of them were pretty pissed off about Demiurge. Morag looked at me and shrugged. It wasn’t the definitive all-clear I was hoping for on the communications security side of things, but at least it wasn’t her screaming at us to run.

‘You’ll deal with us then?’ I asked.

‘Not at the expense of our own destruction,’ the three voices answered. ‘But we will listen and we have no interest in turning you in. How many people do you need supplies for?’

There was a pause. Years of training meant that we did not wish to give away any more info than we had to.

‘Just over two hundred,’ Morag said. She hadn’t had the training. She looked at me and shrugged. I guess we had to trust it or we’d never get anywhere. Merle didn’t look happy but then he never did. I found that I really didn’t care if he was happy or not.

The Puppet Show swayed from side to side in what I guessed was a negative gesture.

‘Too many,’ they said. ‘We have the supplies but we cannot get them to you without being noticed. We can get small bits and pieces; maybe we can provide you with a couple of protein mulch vats, but anything beyond that is too dangerous.’

‘Another waste of time,’ Merle said. ‘Shame. I’d heard good things about you.’

‘That’s enough,’ Tailgunner told him.

I wasn’t paying attention. I was having an idea.

‘This is the big supply nexus for the region, right?’ I asked. Tailgunner nodded. ‘Does that include the Citadel?’

‘Yeah,’ Tailgunner answered. ‘But it’s a no go. The supplies are delivered by Mag Lev. The tunnels are embedded in the rock and the stations are fortresses.’

‘If you had enough firepower or explosives could you take out one of their tunnels?’ I asked.

Fortunately Tailgunner picked up on what I was talking about. ‘I think we could probably find some place weak enough,’ he said.

‘So what?’ Cat asked. ‘Rolleston and his friends don’t get their supplies immediately but neither do we.’

‘What are their alternative methods for supply delivery?’ Merle asked, catching on. ‘Shuttle?’

‘Not between here and there. The Citadel was chosen because it was difficult to get to. If They were to attack They would have to bottleneck through tunnels. That meant They couldn’t bring in some of their really big guns like the Hydras,’ the Puppet Show told us. ‘They have a dedicated Mag Lev link. If they can’t do that then they will have to do it the old-fashioned way by ground convoy.’

I brought up a map of the area on my internal system. Along with the catapult, there was another atmosphere processor and a military shuttle port above us. It was the shuttle port that kept people alive during the various sieges, as it was the entrepot for supplies delivered from orbit and other parts of Lalande 2.

With Moa City being turned into what was effectively a fortress, they wanted to have their vital supplies like food and munitions as well protected as possible. The centre of the city had been converted into a supply depot and had grown and grown. Which meant that if the Mag Lev was down…

‘Any supply convoy would have to come by here,’ I mused.

‘Which still doesn’t help you,’ the Puppet Show said. ‘Because you’re still left with the same problem of having to get it out of the city without being spotted. It’s near-total surveillance.’

‘But you know how to do it,’ Morag said.

‘Not without getting noticed.’

‘So let them notice. Because they’ll think it’s us. Which it will be, just with a little bit of local help,’ Morag added.

The Puppet Show was quiet. We waited. We waited some more. I thought about listening to some Billie Holiday on my internal systems.

‘We want to see a full plan, including how you’re going to minimise our exposure, and we will want a ridiculous amount of money for as little aid as we can get away with providing. Half of it now.’

‘That seems unreasonable,’ I said equitably.

Soloso was by my side holding an old-fashioned black credit chip that still had a digital readout on it. The display showed a ludicrous sum.

‘That’s just half, isn’t it?’ I asked.

He nodded. Reluctantly I took one of the black credit chips we had with us out of the pocket of my combat jacket. I had to struggle with my nature to pay so much for so little, particularly having had no money for the majority of my life. Then I remembered it wasn’t my money; it was Sharcroft’s and he was a prick. I gave them a bonus.

Morag held up a memory chip. ‘This is the truth as best we can tell it. What happened on Earth, the war, who Rolleston and Cronin are and what they’ve done, and what we think is going on here and in the other colonies. Read and watch it. We’ve provided what corroborating evidence we could but that’ll be difficult to check under Demiurge. If you’re prepared to believe it then pass it on.’

Again the Puppet Show was quiet for a while before answering.

‘We will review it. If we believe it we will have it disseminated by people several steps removed from us. Perhaps we will do so even if we don’t believe it. We understand the value of propaganda,’ the Puppet Show finally replied.

Morag looked pained. ‘We worked long and hard to make sure it wasn’t propaganda. It’s always going to be subjective but we’ve tried to tell the truth as best we can.’

The Puppet Show disappeared up into the rafters as if they had been yanked up. The curtains closed. Bit rude, I thought. Soloso was standing by Morag. He towered over her. Again not so long ago she would have been intimidated, but not now. She just handed him the memory chip.

‘We’re done here? Let me see you to your cable,’ Soloso said with all the politeness of a posh hotel concierge, if the concierge was capable of pulling your legs off and eating your head.

The general rule in the army is never volunteer. I’d learned this the hard way after I’d joined 5 Para, or rather after I’d volunteered to join instead of waiting for the inevitable draft. It was so I could join the same regiment that hadn’t managed to kill my mum and dad. I’d had some odd ideas in my teens. I’d volunteered for this too. I wanted to see the show. I was quite surprised when Morag joined me.

That was why I was dangling from high-tensile rope over a six-hundred-foot drop in a vertical water-drill-cut shaft pretending to be a combat engineer and desperately trying to remember my demolitions training. I was also trying to teach Morag how to place demo. I had no idea where I stood with her so of course I chose this moment to talk to her about what I can only laughingly call our relationship. The status of which I had come to think of as good if I wasn’t being shot at. I was so bad at this sort of thing.

‘There’s no need to be gentle. It’s pretty safe until it’s got a detonator in it,’ I told her as we worked plastic concentrate explosive into what we hoped were likely fracture points. The whanau all had experience of mining but they were busy at the moment. Some of the others back at Utu Pa probably could have helped but we hadn’t thought to ask. Morag followed my lead and worked the charge into the crack with a look of concentration on her face.

‘You did well with the Puppet Show the other day,’ I said. She grunted a vague affirmative. ‘And in the FAV.’

She stopped and turned to look at me. I saw her in green, illuminated by my lowlight optics.

‘Yeah, I’m getting good at killing people,’ she said.

‘That’s not the way to think about it. Think about it as helping keep Mudge, Pagan, Cat and Merle alive. Well maybe not Merle. Besides, I’m pretty sure they were members of the Black Squadrons.’

‘And that makes it all right to kill them, does it?’

I gave this some thought.

‘Yeah. They knew exactly what they were doing when they chose to work with the really bad guys. They’re no better than Rolleston and Cronin.’

She just looked at me. I don’t think she liked what she was seeing.

‘Okay,’ she said carefully. ‘Maybe it’s not about them; maybe I just don’t want to be that person. Get that comfortable with it.’ She left the ‘like you’ unsaid.

‘Morag, you didn’t have to be here. You could have helped in other ways that didn’t put you at the sharp edge.’

‘Is there a difference? Directly or indirectly responsible for killing?’

That stumped me.

‘Fucked if I know. Less dangerous and I reckon the distance makes it easier to get to sleep at night.’

‘I meant morally?’ She sounded a little exasperated.

‘What are you talking about? Look, I don’t want to be doing these things either, but here we are doing them. You’ve got to put that stuff to one side until we’re done. Those are things to worry about when we’re not hiding from the Black Squadrons hoping we don’t get shot.’

‘I wish I had your moral relativism.’ I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not. Moral relativism?

‘You have to stop spending so much time with Pagan. I’m not used to killing, I don’t like doing it…’

‘You do it very well.’

I was starting to get angry.

‘Morag, we killed some bad guys. The fact that they were bad doesn’t matter because I can guarantee before we’ve finished we will have killed a lot of people who were just doing their job and got in our way. People that in other circumstances we would have been happy to have a drink and a laugh with. People not unlike all the guys back at the pa. People not that unlike us. You will have to kill them because they’ll be shooting at you. If you can’t deal with that then say so now because I will fucking drop you, because you put us all at risk if your hand-wringing causes the slightest hesitation. Do you understand me?’

Her expression was unreadable. For a moment I had the feeling that this was some kind of test. Then she turned away from me angrily.

‘Did it occur to you that I’d be fine and that I just needed someone to talk to about this?’ she demanded, but she didn’t sound as angry or as upset as I had expected. I, on the other hand, was. Our talk wasn’t going well. It seemed that all we could do now was tear at each other.

‘I’m serious, Morag. You need to put these thoughts out of your head. Find a way to deal with it, to forget about it until you’re in a safe place to process it, because even talking to the rest of us about it fucks us up. Starts us doubting.’

‘So we isolate ourselves?’ she asked emotionlessly.

Again I had to give this some thought.

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think that you’ll ever be closer to anyone than you are to the people you fight with. Maybe not even lovers, because how could they understand?’ She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at me. ‘I need to know. Can you do this?’

She swung round on the rope to face me. Defiance in green.

‘Why don’t you say what you mean? Can I kill? Can I be a killer?’

Okay, I hadn’t been thinking about it in those terms. Can you fight maybe? Can you be a soldier?

‘Can you?’

‘You’re an utter bastard.’

‘NCO,’ I said by way of explanation.

‘What’s that? A non-commissioned officer?’ I nodded. She looked me straight in the eyes. ‘I can do what’s necessary.’ She meant it. I’d heard that resolve before.

There was something in this conversation, something that I didn’t get. Mudge would call it subtext. Morag didn’t get as angry or as upset as I thought she would. Maybe she was getting harder but I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow the conversation had been for my benefit.

Below us I heard the sound of the massive mine elevator moving up towards us. It was designed to move the largest of mining mechs. I could see the glow of Apakura ’s lights on the elevator as the monstrous Bismarck-class mech rose up out of the darkness to meet us.

I placed the last of the detonators into the PEC and Morag and I kicked off the rock and rappelled down to meet the rising elevator platform. This close to the Bismarck I felt awe looking up at its armoured bulk. There was a lot of violent tonnage contained in its reinforced superstructure. Our battered FAV was parked under the giant mech’s four legs. It would never be hermetically sealed again and the armour had taken a profound beating, but some of the Kiwis had got the tough little vehicle working again.

The light above us was like a harsh artificial dawn as we rose out of the lift shaft and onto one of the terraces in the Moa City cavern wall. Time to play soldier again. I put the butt of my H amp;K SAW into my shoulder and moved forward and to one side. I knelt down by a pile of rubble. Morag was doing something similar on the other side of the mech, her laser carbine at the ready. Ostensibly we were providing a picket. We were looking for anything in the vicinity with hostile intent. Soon everyone in the cavern was going to know we were here.

Five hypersonic bangs shook the ground in rapid succession. Even with our dampeners they sounded impossibly loud. Anyone without dampeners would have been immediately deafened. The noise rolled back and forth across the enormous cavern. It was like being in close proximity to the source of thunder. Only the dead in Moa City could have failed to hear us, though I had my doubts about that.

This wasn’t the way I was used to fighting but it was an awesome display of firepower. The five 300-millimetre, tungsten-cored projectiles were designed for penetration. They arced high across the cavern and into the stone close to where wall became cave roof on the opposite side. I magnified my vision to see rock powdered to dust as they hit in almost exactly the same place. Each round drove into the rock, kinetic force creating friction and leaving a tunnel of smoking stone in its wake. Hopefully penetrating deep enough to break into the Mag Lev tunnel we knew was there behind a thick layer of rock.

Fire lit up the top of the Apakura as it launched a salvo of long-range missiles at the same place. The sound of the missiles was like a whisper compared to the impacts of the mass driver rounds. I split my time between scanning the nearby area and watching the fires of the rocket engines burn across the cavern. Flames blossomed as the conventional explosive, shape-charged warheads blew out more rock and hopefully added to the damage to the Mag Lev. Unfortunately, right now we had no way of telling if it had worked.

Or at least that was what I thought until I saw the Mag Lev train. It shot out of the hole the barrage had made and fell, and fell, and fell. It was long train but was dwarfed by the size of the cavern. I was running towards the elevator now. I didn’t want to see it complete its downward journey. I heard the impact. Even from the other side of the valley. I imagined the screams.

I reached the lift platform and triggered the mechanism just as the combat drone came into view, rising over the terraces. I raised the SAW to my shoulder to fire but Apakura beat me to it. I flinched involuntarily as the rapid-firing railgun closest to me fired a short burst from its rotating barrels. The drone disintegrated.

I could see the burn of missiles coming towards us, fired from a battery on the huge stalactite city, as the lift platform began descending into the shaft. They were too slow. That said, I still felt like getting into the FAV.

We were further down the shaft when the missiles hit. Our world went orange and the overpressure battered us to the ground. Apakura had protected us from the worst of the blast and the rain of debris. Try not to think about the train.

Morag staggered to her feet, blood pouring out of her nose. I felt blood running over my mouth as well. She climbed into the FAV. We’d left the engine running. The downward journey seemed to take for ever. There must be someone up there by now, a Black Squadron rapid response force of some kind, but nothing bad was happening to us yet. Maybe we deserved something bad. Try not to think about the train falling.

After an eternity of waiting for some kind of death to land on us from above, we reached the base of the elevator. I sat on the bonnet of the FAV as Morag drove me towards the control box for the explosives. This would have been a lot easier with wireless detonators but we couldn’t take the chance so we were doing it the old-fashioned way. I just hoped none of the wires had been damaged by the missile strike. Don’t think about the train.

Apakura shifted off the lift platform and away from the base of the shaft, moving more like a spider than any quadruped I’d ever seen. When it got to us it crouched down, providing more cover as I got down behind the FAV. I could hear the sound of vectored-thrust engines in the shaft now — poor timing on their part. Don’t think about the train. I opened my mouth and triggered the explosives.

It had taken three nights to wire. The shaft and every tunnel connecting the Moa City cavern to our vicinity blew. Overpressure rocked the mech and moved the FAV across the tunnel floor and knocked me over. Rubble avalanched into the mine from what used to be the elevator shaft. Then it went dark in a way that lowlight couldn’t help with as dust filled the air. I felt my way into the FAV and Morag drove us out of the mine, Apakura following.

I could see it in their faces when we finally made it back to the pa, having taken a circuitous route and checked and then double-checked we weren’t being followed. I climbed out of the FAV covered head to foot in rock dust.

The belly hatch on the Apakura opened, Mother and Tailgunner climbed out. They looked stricken. Horrified by what they’d done. It’s one thing to destroy part of the enemy’s infrastructure; it’s another to kill some poor sod who was just taking the Mag Lev back home, or just worked there. I was pretty sure there’d be more of this before we were through.

The thing was, after I’d managed to clean myself up, Morag found me and took me deeper into the caves. Where we could be alone. Where we could make love or have sex or fuck, I wasn’t sure which. I still wanted Morag, needed her, even loved her, but she was becoming more and more alien to me.