War in Heaven

15

After darkness, hell. Slowly coming to. I could feel the pain through the fugue of painkillers, my IVD red with warnings. Hopelessness accompanied consciousness. Or in other words I knew I was fucked.

Opening my eyes was like tearing off a scab. Light was pain; focusing on my surroundings, making sense of them, wasn’t much better. Calum Laird may have been a cunt but I should have taken the job with him. He was an amateur compared to the other inhabitants of the cell I was in.

I was strapped into some sort of contoured vinyl couch, properly secured despite not having the use of my arms. I could feel a single jack in one of my plugs connecting me to some kind of medical suite. I was covered in medpak-driven medgels.

‘He seems to be healing quickly,’ Josephine said quietly. She was looking at the suite’s monitor.

It looked like your standard cell — stone walls, no windows, thick metal door. I reckoned it would have been quite roomy without the hulking, patchwork presence of Martin Kring. Even through the agony I still managed to find disgust for this murderous, so-called anti-insurgency specialist.

Kring was standing impassively next to an unhappy-looking Vincent Cronin, whose salon looks, smart suit that probably cost more than most made in a year and carefully cultivated corporate duelling scars all looked out of place in this dungeon.

And of course Rolleston. Still in uniform — crisp clean fatigues. Well built, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, every inch the suave officer. He had a patient, almost indulgent smile on his face beneath his pale-blue eyes. I’d seen matt-black plastic lenses with more feeling in them than those eyes. This was a moment of clarity. I wasn’t frightened; all I felt was an overwhelming hatred. It was all I could do not to scream my hatred and anger at him.

‘I don’t really feel that I need to be here for this,’ Cronin said to Rolleston, his annoyance obvious. ‘This is your department.’

‘I thought you might want to meet the man who caused us so much trouble. Besides, he will have information that will be of use to both of us. Don’t you, Jakob? Anyway, Jakob has an important lesson to learn.’

‘I’m not being funny, right, but either torture me or kill me because we’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ I said.

‘I find myself in agreement with him,’ Cronin said with a look of disgust in my direction.

Fuck you, suit. Things would be different if I wasn’t strapped down to this couch. With two broken arms. Surrounded by hard bastards.

‘I want to know why,’ Rolleston said.

Cronin turned to look at the Major. ‘This is a waste of our time.’

‘Leave if you want.’ Rolleston just kept staring at me.

‘Why what?’ I asked.

‘Why are you here? Why do you fight? Why did you try to pull down everything we tried to make?’ I stared at him like he was mad. I hoped he picked that up. ‘When you’re suffering I want you to remember that all you had to do was kill an alien and some whores and then go back to your miserable life a bit richer.’

‘Where do I start?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I mean, you get that you shouldn’t do the things you do, yeah?’

‘Get what you can out of him; we can break him now and get after the others,’ Cronin said. He sounded impatient but there was something else there. Nervousness? Fear?

Others? That meant some of them had got away. Rolleston glared at Cronin, obviously irritated by his indiscretion. Though I couldn’t see how it mattered.

‘You understand that you’re in no position to judge me?’ Rolleston asked.

I looked down at my broken, blackened and bloody body.

‘Well not at the moment, but give me a few days to get back on my feet and I’ll give you a square go.’ It was bravado I didn’t really feel.

Rolleston laughed as if we were two old army buddies sharing a joke. Then he reached down and placed his hand on my stomach wound. I gritted my teeth, rode out the pain, wished I had more drugs. His fingers elongated and burrowed through my flesh like razor-covered worms. I screamed and writhed on the couch. Rolleston tore his bloody fingers out of me. I saw them sway and writhe as they slowly returned to looking like fingers. The medical monitor was begging for attention, bleeping with urgency. I was gasping for breath. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers writhing through my guts. Control yourself.

‘Aaaah!’ Turn it into a laugh. ‘Yes! That’s the spirit! A little more torture, a little less fucking talk!’ Because false bravado was bound to see me through, though there was still no fear, only hatred and resignation.

‘Why?’ he asked again.

‘We’ve talked this to death!’ I shouted at him through a spray of blood and spittle. ‘Just fucking get on with it!’

‘Don’t give me orders, Jakob.’ Danger in his voice. He hadn’t liked that.

‘When did you get to like the sound of your own voice so much? You were always a cunt, but I just thought you were trying to get the job done no matter what. Now you’re a fucking psycho. The Cabal have gone. They’re over, dead. You’re just a broken machine following the programming of people who either don’t exist or have switched sides.’

The twitch on his face was instantly replaced by a calm smile. There was something there he hadn’t liked.

‘Humans are all biological machines. Everyone’s programmed. We call it growing up. All you are is malfunctioning pinkware,’ he said.

‘Fine, justify it how you want. It’s not difficult to work out why I’m here. This is just what people do when people like you try to make us live a certain way.’

It was a lie. I was here because of Morag and to a degree because I hated this guy. Want to rule humanity? Fine. But why did it seem that he was on a mission to make my life such a long bleeding streak of misery?

‘You’re angry you can finally see the strings?’ Josephine surprised me by asking. I don’t think I was the only one who was surprised.

‘As for what happened on Earth, you boxed us in. We were making it up as we went along. Just trying to survive. Can we get on with the torture now?’

Rolleston seemed to be giving what I’d said some consideration. ‘That’s what I thought — the spastic reaction of the frightened animal.’ So he hadn’t been giving what I’d said some thought. He just wanted to spin whatever I said until it suited what he wanted to hear.

‘While we’re having a nice little chat. What. The fuck. Are you doing?! You’re potentially going to kill millions of people. For what? Some abstract sense of accomplishment in the power game?’

I was finding impending death and torture quite liberating.

‘You know what you remind me of?’ Rolleston asked.

‘Someone tired of rhetorical questions?’

‘A Neanderthal. I don’t mean that as an epithet…’

‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘An insult,’ he supplied. ‘But this is an insight into what the Neanderthal must have felt in the face of Homo sapiens.’

I was speechless. I had no idea what he was going on about. Or why Cronin was looking so uncomfortable.

‘We have the opportunity to be strong as a species, to move forward as one, to make progress as one, to deal with the threats and opportunities that expansion provides from a position of strength, to actually build something instead of tearing things down and constant petty squabbling. This is an evolutionary point in human history. Do you understand that? Do you see what you’re opposing? What you’re trying to drag down, destroy?’

I tried to think through what he’d said.

‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him. ‘You fucking psycho,’ I added. Liberating.

‘George, that’s enough.’ Cronin did not sound happy at all.

Rolleston turned to him. ‘We have an opportunity here for an insight. Do you not see that? He is effectively an uplifted animal.’

‘What are you talking about?!’ I screamed at him.

Rolleston turned back to me. Again he looked angry.

‘I told you, we’re asking the questions,’ he said.

‘Or fucking what? Threats of pain are a little fucking redundant, don’t you think?’

‘I’m angry, Jakob.’

‘Good!’

‘Do you know why I’m angry, Jakob?’

‘Were you recently strapped into a chair and asked stupid fucking questions?!’

‘Because we’re more alike than not.’

‘Brilliant. Unstrap me and we’ll go for a beer!’

‘Because we’ve both been given a great gift.’

‘What?’ I asked, though I think I knew the answer.

‘Why are you healing so quickly?’ Rolleston asked.

‘Themtech,’ I said quietly.

He nodded. ‘Imagine my disappointment that it has been given to one so undeserving. You were a good if disobedient servant, Jakob, but let’s face facts. You’re little more than a brute beast whose only thought is its own selfish gratification.’

And the thing was, he wasn’t trying to anger me. He probably didn’t even think he was insulting me. He was just describing things as he saw them. He wouldn’t even have understood that I didn’t see myself the same way.

‘Not only so undeserving, but someone who’d never be able to understand what he was, let alone understand what we’re trying to do,’ he explained.

I met his eyes and tried not to flinch away from the cold analytical expression on his face. It was like he was studying an insect.

‘I’m an animal who’s caused you a lot of trouble. You know I’d never join you, right?’ I told him.

Cronin actually laughed. ‘We couldn’t use you.’ I heard Josephine sigh. Rolleston’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘You lack the vision. Though I think you know you’ll serve in the end.’

‘Nobody wants what you want except you,’ I said. Very fucking eloquent, I thought.

‘That’s because people only see the small picture. They fear what they don’t understand and like you think only of gratification. And the people whose power relies on them think only of the illusion of providing that gratification. Everyone’s miserable. Imagine if that could be changed.’

‘This is a waste of time. You’re crazy. Seriously. Move on. Brainwashing, torture, getting killed, whatever.’

‘Not quite yet.’

‘George, let’s just get what we need from him,’ Cronin said. He was looking more and more nervous.

‘As Mr Douglas has pointed out, he is an animal that has caused us a lot of trouble. He needs to be taught an object lesson in power. He needs to understand his place in the scheme of things.’

Suicide implants had always struck me as tools of the religious fanatic but right now I was thinking what a good idea they were. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this shit.

‘We want to know where the deserters are. We also want to know what you know about Earth’s defence plans.’ Rolleston was talking to me now.

I didn’t say anything but I went very cold. Mother and her people would move — it was standard operating procedure for them when people got captured — but I thought back to what the prime minister had told me about fortress Earth’s vulnerability. God was their only real hope against Demiurge, and fear and paranoia were diminishing that hope.

‘You’re going to have to get that the hard way,’ I told him.

‘It may interest you to know that you were betrayed by two of your own people,’ he said.

It made sense, but I tried not to react. I still felt angry. I hoped that whoever had got away would realise that we’d been betrayed and hunt down the traitors. It must have been two of Mother’s people. It was understandable. They had roots here. A lot of pressure could be brought to bear. Then something occurred to me.

‘Hold on a second. If we were betrayed, then why do you want to know where the resistance are?’ I asked.

Rolleston was too experienced an officer to give much away, but there was something there. Something he didn’t understand.

‘You know everyone breaks. You know that people can be broken in a very short amount of time using the variable time effects of a sense booth, and you have enough base cunning to understand that we can now break and slave people almost immediately.’

I thought back to Skirov tearing off gobbets of flesh on his pile of corpses, but he had known there was something wrong with him and wanted to die. It was pretty much the closest I had to hope. I wasn’t sure I was as strong as Skirov had been, however.

‘Then just fucking do it. Maybe you can make me like the sound of your voice as much as you seem to.’

‘Jakob, I can break you just as quickly without torture or other little tricks.’

I didn’t like this at all. Rolleston turned to Kring and nodded. Kring looked to Cronin. Cronin looked uncomfortable but finally nodded as well. Kring turned and left the room.

Moments later I could hear the sounds of a struggle. I watched Kring carry a gagged, bound, badly wounded but very angry Morag into the cell. He put her down and forced her to kneel. She stopped struggling when she saw me. Fear was written all over her face. I turned back to Rolleston.

‘Come on, not like this. Fucking brainwash me, torture me, but leave her out of this. We don’t deserve this. At the very least we’ve been worthy opponents.’ I was babbling nonsense — anything to delay the inevitable.

‘You are less than an insect to me. This is about understanding your place. This is about the fortune of your presence here before me. This is so you can understand something better. This is so you can admit your hypocrisy. You fight and struggle so hard to pull down what those above you have sought so hard to build, but you will betray it all for your own selfish wants and desires. Do you understand how pointless everything you have ever tried to do is?’ He turned to Kring. ‘Take her gag off.’

‘Go and fuck yourself, you cunts!’ Her anger made her Dundonian accent so broad it was almost impossible to understand. Fuck knows what the English and the Americans in the room thought she’d said.

‘I will have her gang-raped in front of your eyes. My understanding is that she is used to it.’

‘Don’t fucking listen to him, Jakob.’ I heard the resolve in her voice. I knew that she would be harder to break than me.

‘Please…’ I was begging now.

‘I will put you both into a sense machine and you will watch her being tortured for decades — do you understand me? You know me; you know I’ll do this.’

‘Fuck him! Jakob, listen to me. He can’t touch me. Don’t tell him anything.’

I couldn’t look at her. I was weeping. I knew Rolleston would do these things.

‘Not immediate enough for you?’ Rolleston asked. He drew his sidearm and held it at her head.

‘Fuck you!’ Morag screamed at him. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone so angry before. ‘Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it, Jakob!’

‘No… please… stop…’ I was sobbing as I begged. I wasn’t sure who I was begging to stop. Rolleston was starting to pull the trigger.

‘Jakob! Look at me! At least fucking look at me, you bastard!’ Morag screamed. I had to force my head round. She was scared now, but resigned, stronger than I could ever be as I tried to meet her fierce and earnest look. ‘Listen to me. It’s okay. If it was the other way around I would watch you die.’ I believed her. I broke.

If they were still alive, then I betrayed Mudge, Pagan, Cat, Merle, the whanau, all of the resistance and my entire fucking planet and everyone I’d ever known alive or dead. All the while Morag was crying, begging me to stop, not to say any more. It took me hours to sell out everything I knew. Rolleston listened to it all. I was numb with disgust at myself by the time I’d finished. I thought I was just a shell, that I couldn’t feel any more. Rolleston proved me wrong.

‘Do you understand now?’ he asked.

I nodded, neither understanding nor caring. It just seemed easier. Morag was a foetal ball on the stone floor, dry sobs racking her frame. Rolleston showed me that I could still feel. He shot Morag twice in the head.

I screamed. I screamed ‘No!’ over and over again. I screamed until my throat bled. I’m still screaming.

They left me in the room with her cooling corpse. It had been a large-calibre gun, though oddly quiet, suppressed. Her skull looked like a broken egg. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I could see where technology had violated her flesh. I had the obscene urge to try and put her head back together.

I don’t think that leaving me in there with the corpse was planned sadism; I just think they had other things to do. They wanted to get on running their psychotic totalitarian regime. Eventually they came and took her away. They tidied up her remains like the sum result of her eighteen years of life was to make a mess.

When she was gone I stared at where she’d been. They’d reduced her to a stain. All I could do was stare. I hoped someone would come and kill me soon. Even brainwash me, make me someone, something else. At least I’d be on the winning side. You can’t fight something like this. There was no thought of revenge. There was nobody left to take revenge. There was just a shell staring at a stain on the ground wishing he could be switched off like the machine he was.

It’s amazing how long you can think of nothing when the alternative is watching a replay of your lover being double-tapped in the skull. Any attempt to try and think of her in better times just ended with the same two whispered shots. My lover reduced to a spray of matter on the wall. Except sometimes I managed to think about all the shitty things I’d said and done to her in the brief time we’d been together. Even then it still always ended with those two gunshots.

It felt like days. I had a clock and calendar on my IVD but I didn’t understand them any more. I occasionally drifted off into fitful sleep. I dreamt of fire and plains of black glass haunted by black-cloaked figures.

It took a while for me to realise there was someone else in the cell with me, she was so quiet and unobtrusive.

‘How did you know it was us?’ I asked. My voice was a rasping croak torn out of a damaged throat. ‘The traitors?’

I couldn’t even bring myself to feel anger towards whoever had betrayed us.

‘They didn’t say who you were, but I recognised you when I saw you. I know how you move.’

It was funny how the Grey Lady wasn’t frightening any more. She was just a force of nature, something you couldn’t fight against. She was one of the bad things that happened to you when you tried to fight the likes of Rolleston. She moved into view. Now she was looking at me. Her eyes must have been implants but they looked real. They were grey.

‘How’d you get her?’ I asked.

What fucking difference did it make? I closed my eyes, watched the replay again and opened them to find the Grey Lady looking at me, her head cocked to one side almost quizzically.

‘I deployed with two other enhanced members of the Black Squadrons, both ex-special forces. They engaged the others. One of them was killed. The other was badly wounded but captured Miss McGrath. It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking.’ For some reason that seemed important to her.

We said nothing for a while. In other circumstances it would have been awkward.

‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, more out of something to say to break the silence than any real interest in anything. ‘Work for him, I mean.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Are you fucking him?’

She said nothing but there was the slight flicker of something there. Like I’d hurt her. I was good at hurting women, but this was the Grey Lady.

‘Do you just want to become some biotech god?’ She shook her head. ‘Then why? Why do this to people?’

‘You do terrible things to people who you disagree with,’ she said.

‘It always feels like they started it.’

‘You turned on him,’ she said.

‘Because he was trying to get me to do something terrible.’

I couldn’t even find the strength to be angry.

‘Only in relative terms. It depends on your foresight.’

‘You people like your justifications, don’t you. Like to feel good about what you do.’ Again I delivered this with a completely flat voice. I didn’t really care.

‘I do it because I’m good at it.’

‘You don’t fancy doing it for someone… nicer?’ Even in my hollowed-out state it sounded weak.

‘You’re not standing where I’m standing.’

‘So you are fucking him?’

Again there was just a flicker of something. Sadness? Anger? Go on, piss off the Grey Lady. Actually that wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe she’d kill me. I’d been thinking a lot about the afterlives all the signalmen I’d ever worked with had told me about. But they were just hopeful fantasies, dreams of seeing Morag again.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she told me.

I sighed. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Because you smell.’ It was delivered with monotone honesty but the childishness of the statement from the Grey Lady’s lips made me laugh. It was a bitter laugh. It sounded like somebody choking. I was sure she was right. It felt like I’d been lying here for days. The only concession to hygiene was some kind of suction/cleaning device strapped uncomfortably over my groin and arse.

‘So?’

Even through the numbness and pain, the Grey Lady carefully and thoroughly giving me a sponge bath rated as deeply surreal. She was thorough. She even shaved me and put some kind of small machine in my mouth that brushed my teeth, then washed and deodorised my mouth.

‘You’re healing quickly,’ she said, examining my many wounds.

That’s the Themtech, I thought. That’s what makes Rolleston and me so close. I’d not been paying any attention to my wounds but there was a lot less red on my IVD and the pain was subsiding. I think I would have preferred being able to concentrate on physical pain.

When she was finished I asked, ‘Why did you do that?’

She didn’t answer. She leaned forward and kissed me. I snapped my mouth shut like a trap. She straightened up. Again there was a flicker of something there. Hurt?

‘What the fuck!’ I shouted.

I was feeling again. I’ll give them credit, these people liked to push the boundaries. She undressed. Her naked body was wiry, hard but surprisingly petite for a frame that contained so much power. She stood in front of me, somehow vulnerable.

‘Don’t you understand?’ I asked. Desperate.

Steely fingers calloused from years of martial arts practice touched me. She knew how and where to touch me.

‘Don’t…’ I begged.

My body was already starting to betray me. A single dry sob painfully racked my frame. She gracefully swung a leg over the couch I was strapped to and straddled me.

‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, sounding vulnerable as she looked down on me. It was the one thing she could have said. She leaned forward to kiss me. This time I let her. This time I reciprocated. She was real. It was something. It was more than the constant feeling of numbness.

When she left I wept. Now part of the cell seemed haunted. I couldn’t make my eyes go there. I had betrayed everything else, why not her? And still nobody would kill me. Was leaving me here wretched like this part of Rolleston’s punishment? I knew exactly what I was. Rolleston was wrong: I wasn’t an animal. That was too noble. I was scum. When sleep came it was fitful. I wanted my dreams to punish me.

It was a plain of black glass over fire. In the distance the jagged knife points of mountains. Protruding from the plains were obelisks like the stone cairns of the Highlands writ large and made of the same black glass. Alien-looking glyphs of orange light played over the surface of the obelisks. The landscape was somehow familiar to me. A black sun burned in the sky. I didn’t want to look at it. I couldn’t look at it. There was something terrible about it.

There was movement next to me. I swung around, the sensation of fear an almost welcome return of feeling. I was staring at the hood of a black-robed figure floating above the ground. The figure was moving towards me but didn’t seem to notice me. I stepped to one side and it ignored me as it floated past.

I looked down at myself. I was naked and whole. But naked and whole as the machine I was. All components of the weapon were present and correct. The glyphs from the obelisk seemed to be playing over my pale skin like a projection.

In the distance I could just about make out two flying creatures of some sort, high in the air. It looked like they were circling. Somehow they felt like judgement. I started to walk towards them.

I woke up on the couch. My face distended, pulled forward. Black liquid tendrils, like one of Them. Instinctive hard-wired fear and loathing at this. The tendrils extrude from my flesh, my mouth, my face, piercing part of it, part of me.

I woke for real. Screaming. I was no longer strapped to the couch. I was free. The cell door was open. Rannu was standing over me. He looked awful, gaunt and wasted. Despite having black lenses for eyes there was something haunted about his expression. Something new. He looked afraid.

He was wearing combat trousers but was barefoot. He had on a filthy greying T-shirt and was carrying a gauss carbine in one hand, another slung across his back. In his other hand was a severed hand hooked up to some kind of miniaturised device that pumped warm blood through dead flesh.

‘Did you undo the straps?’ I asked inanely.

He shook his head. Did she do it?

‘Can you stand up?’ he whispered urgently.

If I could betray my dead lover and fuck the Grey Lady then I could stand up. I climbed off the couch and almost collapsed. Maybe I could have stood up in Earth gravity. Rannu helped me stand.

‘She’s dead,’ I told him, feeling my face crumple as if I was about to start sobbing again.

He looked into my lenses. ‘I know.’

Did he? How much? Did he know what I’d done? There’s always time for self-pity. I hugged him and started to sob. He hugged me back, unconcerned that I was naked.

‘We need to go. You’ll have to walk yourself.’ He sounded nervous. I don’t think I’d ever heard Rannu sound nervous before.

I let him go. I could just about stand. I noticed that he was missing the tip of his forefinger on his right hand. It made sense that they’d remove his weighted monofilament garrotte.

‘Can you hold a gun?’ Rannu asked. I nodded.

I wasn’t weak from my incarceration, just numb and not used to being on my feet again. Rannu handed me the gauss carbine and unslung the one across his back. We looked at each other for a while. I was so glad to see him, but maybe dying or even being brainwashed, if it meant forgetting, would have been better.

Selfishly, irrationally, I was suddenly angry at him. Where was he when Rolleston shot Morag? Why didn’t he rescue me before I disgraced myself with Josephine? Then I knew that he couldn’t have done anything about the first and the last was all on me, piece of shit that I am.

He turned and headed out the door, looking like a tired soldier. He moved more slowly and with less grace than before. I followed him out. He closed the cell door and pressed the still-warm severed hand on the biometric lock. The cell door locked behind us.

We played hide and seek in corridors lasered out of the huge stalactite decades ago. He took me up into the vents, also carved out of stone, to an automated machine room for the air-handling equipment. It was full of the detritus of his fugitive life.

He sat down with his head in his hands and shook. In a quivering voice he asked me to go on guard. Only then did I see how much coming to get me had cost him.

Then I noticed the corpse in the corner of the room. A squat, powerfully built man with the endomorphic body type I’d come to connect with Lalande 2 colonists. He had a screwdriver sticking out the back of his skull. One of his hands was missing. Still he had clothes. Getting the clothes off the corpse seemed to require a lot more effort than it should have. I got out of breath quickly and could feel the planet pushing down on me again. I hated this place.

‘I needed to get you out of the cell,’ he said, explaining the corpse.

‘Is he Black Squadron?’ I asked.

Rannu shook his head. His hair was a matted mess.

‘No. Kiwi SAS, I think.’

I was impressed that Rannu, in this state, could take out another special forces operative.

‘Poor bastard.’ There was genuine regret in his voice.

‘What happened?’ I asked. Wondering how bad it must have been to transform the Rannu I knew into this wreck. He shook his head again.

‘I got down fine, made it beneath the surface. I set up observation posts, did recces but I was learning nothing, doing nothing. The whole idea of me going ahead was so that when you guys got here I’d have some solid intel for you.’

‘Knew I was coming, did you?’ I asked.

He smiled and nodded, calmer now. The one good thing about his state was that I was pretty sure he hadn’t been brainwashed. He was in too much of a mess.

‘Morag was coming,’ he said by way of explanation.

‘You couldn’t get close enough to anything because Demiurge controls everything electronic?’ I asked.

Rannu nodded. ‘The priority was the Citadel, and I got close, but getting close is exactly like looking at an arcology made of ice. It didn’t tell me anything, though I got a more up-to-date idea of their external defences. It’s also bigger than we thought.’

‘They’ve added to it using conventional materials?’ I asked. It was better to think about other things.

‘No, it’s all ice.’

‘How’s that work? If it was cut out of a glacier, how could they make it bigger?’ Rannu shrugged. I don’t think it was of a great deal of interest to him.

‘So then I came up to Moa City, see if I could find out anything. Maybe even develop some humint sources…’

‘Stuck out like a sore thumb and got caught?’ Rannu nodded again. ‘I bet you gave them one hell of a fight.’

Rannu didn’t answer. I looked at him questioningly. Had the Grey Lady hopelessly outclassed him as well?

‘They sent some of the Black Squadron guys after me. They’re like Rolleston, maybe not as hard. I had my pistols on me…’ He looked ashamed of himself.

‘Rannu, don’t worry about it. Josephine got me. I didn’t even land a blow on her. She just walked all over me.’

‘I got one of them.’

‘That’s better than the rest of us.’

‘They took my kukri.’

To us it was just a big sharp knife. In my case, one I’d been attacked with. To Rannu it was an important part of his heritage, a connection to his family, his people and their past. It was also a symbol of the achievements of the Ghurkha regiment, one of the most, if not the most effective conventional regiment in the British army.

‘I’m sorry, man.’ Even if it seemed trivial next to Morag’s death. Don’t think about Morag; concentrate on Rannu.

‘I broke,’ Rannu said. Hearing his voice when he said it — the despair, the disgust with himself, the shame — was one of the most frightening things I think I’d ever heard. This was a different person. Those bastards had transformed Rannu, the rock, one of the most competent, reliable and professional soldiers I’d ever met, into this shell. What worried me was that Rannu had been captured before and hadn’t broken. While working undercover for the police in Leicester his cover had been blown. He’d been extensively tortured by the Thuggee crime syndicate he’d been infiltrating. He had held out, and the Thuggees were known to be vicious bastards. It wasn’t torture that had done this to Rannu; it was what he saw as failure. He thought he’d let us down. He thought he’d betrayed us.

‘Everyone breaks,’ I told him. Though most lasted longer than I had. I was the disgrace, for so many reasons. ‘They had the RV points covered, nothing more. Did they try to brainwash you?’

Rannu shook his head.

‘Rolleston was there. He was really angry. He wanted to torture me. Wanted to see me break the old-fashioned way, a mixture of psychology and pain. He said that once I was broken then he’d take ownership of my soul.’

It made sense. It was pretty much what they had planned for me with the added bonus of killing Morag in front of my eyes. Don’t think about Morag.

‘What happened?’

‘I escaped.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Two, maybe three weeks ago.’

After everything he’d been through he’d still been able to escape. I was pretty much in awe of him at that moment. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain this to him, make him feel better, because he set the bar way to high for himself.

‘And you’ve been hiding up here for all that time?’

‘Not just here, all over the place. They hunted pretty hard for the first few days, lots of close calls, but they must think I’ve either escaped or died. I’ve been quiet as a mouse.’

‘Why didn’t you get out?’

‘It’s not as easy as that. It’s locked down pretty tight, but I think I’ve got a way out. I stayed when they got you and Morag to see if I could do anything.’ He turned to look at me. It looked like he was about to cry. ‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t… I was too… Rolleston, the Grey Lady… too frightened.’

‘Rannu, there was nothing you could do, you know that, don’t you? They would have killed you.’

He looked away from me and shook his head despondently. There was nothing I could say to him that would help.

‘You said you have a way out?’ Rannu nodded. ‘I want to kill Rolleston first, I don’t care if I die doing it.’

He looked frightened. The expression looked alien on his face.

‘He’s not here. I was very quiet. I was lying over a grille listening to them. So quiet.’

‘The Citadel?’

‘He’s gone to hunt the resistance — him, the Grey Lady and Kring. They said they wanted to deal with them once and for all. They’re going to destroy them and then Cronin will use it for propaganda.’

‘What’s your out?’

‘Where’d you get the parachutes?’ I asked.

We were crouched in a tight air tunnel next to what looked to be a heavily armoured vent that led to the outside world. The facility we’d been held in was quite close to the point of the stalactite that was Moa City.

‘Apparently nearly everyone who lives here can base-jump, just like they can climb. It was popular as a sport before the war and has survival applications as well. They’ve just started doing it recreationally again. I stole them from some lockers.’ The talking was keeping his mind off other things. Mine too. I was struggling into a bulky parachute harness in the confined space.

‘What’s to stop their defences from burning us out of the sky?’ I asked.

He stopped strapping on his parachute and looked at me. He seemed to come to a decision and pulled a cobbled-together radio transmitter out of the pocket of his combat trousers. I stopped as well. I felt my heart drop.

‘It won’t work,’ I told him. ‘Demiurge will be able to control it.’

Rannu shook his head. ‘He will, but by then the signal’s gone.’

I gave this some thought. He could be right. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it but right now I didn’t give a shit.

‘The explosives?’ I asked.

‘That was the easy part. Made them out of cleaning supplies that I stole. The receivers for the radio detonators were the hardest thing. No big charges. They needed to be small so they wouldn’t get found. Just enough to take out a few vital components on the batteries in our flight path.’

Something about this wasn’t adding up. Rannu was clearing loose rock from round the edge of the vent. Someone had spent a long time chiselling out the rock the hard way. The explosives, the vent, the sabotage — I was suddenly overwhelmed with horror.

‘Rannu?’ He paused but didn’t look at me. ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘I told you, I’m not sure. Two to three weeks.’

He went back to removing the rock he’d replaced to disguise his work. He couldn’t deal with how long he’d been here but he must know. Even I’d started to make sense of the calendar and clock on my IVD.

Rannu ignored me as I stared at him. He finished removing the loose rock and kicked at the vent. It didn’t budge. Rannu lost it. He started screaming, kicking at it wildly. Finally the vent exploded out of the rock and I could see the ultraviolet light of the subterranean night.

There was a flash of red light and a loud bang. It was so unexpected that I jumped. Some hardened combat veteran. It was a point-defence laser taking out the falling vent.

Rannu held up the radio transmitter and pressed the transmit button. Nearby I heard a few pathetic-sounding explosions. Rannu threw the now-infected transmitter past me deeper into the air tunnel before he pulled himself over the ledge and out into the sulphurous night air.