War in Heaven

16

Mudge calls it the vertiginous moment. Pulling yourself over the ledge. The ground distant and less fixed in your perception than you like ground to be. It should pretty much be a constant. I was too weak and the tunnel was too cramped to pull myself over properly. I lost some skin and left a bloody smear on the outside of the stalactite. It didn’t matter despite what the warning icons on my IVD said. Like the OILO drop, the ground seemed to want me much more than it ever had on Earth and Sirius.

There was a moment’s free fall and then I pulled the ripcord. The ground wasn’t moving towards me so suddenly. Looked up to see the large canopy they have to use on Lalande fully deployed. Looked down to see the ruins of mansions and huge bonfires casting flickering light over scratch-built bestial statuary. Was where we were going any better? Tailgunner had told me that the End was some apocalyptic religious cult of deserters.

The harsh beam of a spotlight cut through the UV light playing over our parachutes. They’d be scrambling gunships and coming looking for us. I made a decision on the way down: enough of the self-pitying bullshit. I had Rannu to look after. I owed him. I had to get back to the others and see if I could undo some of the damage I’d done. I also had a purpose. I didn’t give a fuck about Earth, the colonies or any of the politics. Mother was right: what difference did it make who was in charge? Rolleston, on the other hand, had to die as hard as possible. Then I could give suicide some serious thought.

The ground came up and hit me hard. I shrugged off the parachute harness and ran out from underneath the canopy. Still some stims left in the reservoir. They’d drained off the painkillers but that’s fine, the pain is fine. We ran in the opposite direction from the most direct route out. Escape and evasion training — go the way they don’t expect you to.

We were running over scarred Earth, through scrub foliage, what was left of landscaped gardens run wild for fifty years, past the rubble of cave-like mansions cut out of the stone, our gauss carbines at the ready. I could hear the gunships and copters in the air now. Just think about the job, nothing else. The Demiurge-controlled remotes would be the biggest threat.

Normally we’d stay away from people but the crowds milling near the huge bonfires were our best hope. I veered across rubble-strewn, battle-scarred ground towards a massive pyre in front of a large mansion of hard stone rising out of the ground. For some reason it reminded me of a burial mound. There was a huge effigy illuminated by the flames, made demonic by the red flickering light. I couldn’t make out what it was but it looked vaguely humanoid with horns. It appeared to be constructed from whatever expensive salvage they could find from the destroyed houses of the rich.

All around the fire I could see the silhouettes of people with their hands held high, swaying in the light to the hypnotic heavy rhythm of some kind of music too contemporary for me to know. The chanting came from them, not the speakers. Still running, I glanced across at Rannu, who shrugged. There were more spotlights now from the searching gunships. It was not the lights that worried me but the thermographics.

Rannu and I ran to the back of the mansion and vaulted in through a hole in the rock that still held the remains of a stained-glass window. No time to check inside — gunships too close. If they came for us then Rannu got a burst in the head before I turned the carbine on myself. It wouldn’t be suicide; it would be a sound tactical decision and a little self-preservation. What we had left of ourselves.

Lowlight illuminated the cavernous room. I’m sure the rich people who owned this place would have been horrified by what had happened to it. There was a noticeable seam of some kind of metal running through the wall. Bits of it had been chipped away over the years. The floor was covered with ground mats and military sleeping bags. There were the remains of food. I was tempted to eat some of it; Rannu was more than tempted. There were empty alcohol bottles and containers that once held narcotics. Slogans had been painted on the wall but a crude mural of a black sun dominated the room. I’d see the black sun before, in my dreams. Below the black sun, in what looked like blood, was scrawled T HE B LACK W AVE. It seemed a little contradictory to me.

Rannu was taking small but eager bites of some vat-grown confection.

‘Rannu?’ I said slowly. He looked up and then saw what I was looking at. Overhead I could hear a gunship. ‘I think these people worship Demiurge.’

‘They are here for you?’

Our carbines swung up to cover the figure in the doorway. Seeing I had him, Rannu swung around to check behind us. More figures appeared at the glassless windows and at the other doorways into the room.

‘We’ll kill a lot of them and then ourselves before they get us — understand me?’ I told Rannu and meant it.

I was suddenly overcome by revulsion and anger towards these people. They had run out on their mates and then voluntarily chosen to worship Demiurge, and they knew it was bad. They called it the Black Wave, not the Freedom Wave.

The man doing the talking was tall and had the solid build of an ex-soldier. He was wearing a long coat, combat trousers and boots, and the rest of him was completely swaddled in old-fashioned bandages. The bandages had symbols written all over them. I’d known enough signal-people to realise that the symbols were religious or occult. He held a staff that looked like it was made out of scrap metal. The head of the staff was beaten into the shape of a goat’s head.

I glanced around at the rest of the people slowly surrounding us, courting gunfire. All of them were swaddled in bandages. At the very least their faces were covered, but many were swaddled from head to feet. Some, but not all, had symbols painted on the bandages.

‘We are not going to harm you. All of us are unarmed,’ he told us.

It was disconcerting. The bandages made him faceless, made him look like an old-fashioned casualty, a ghost from a historical war. Maybe he was. He was right though. The closest thing any of them had to a weapon was the goat-headed staff he was carrying.

‘Fine. Well we’ll just hide here for a bit, you don’t grass us up, and then we’ll move on. Okay?’ I said.

I was still pointing the gauss carbine at his face. He hadn’t wavered. Deserter he may have been, but he wasn’t a coward. I couldn’t say the same for the rest of them. There was a lot of very nervous body language.

‘Why don’t you let us help you?’ he asked. His voice was cultured, educated, privileged. Equatorial Africa, I suspected. It sounded like he came from money.

‘Why would you do that?’ I asked.

‘We help everyone who comes here. We’re the last port of call for the desperate.’ I could hear a degree of self-deprecating humour in what he said. On the other hand, he had described us all right.

I inclined my head towards the black sun and the writing on the wall. ‘And that? Aren’t you on their side?’

‘You want to discuss this now? If we wrap you in sacramental bandages we can hide you better.’

‘This better not be an initiation. We’re not hackers and we’re not joining any fucking cult.’

I was aware of Rannu nodding as he continued scanning the other bandaged deserters.

‘No, I don’t think you’re ready to forswear violence yet.’

That was certainly true.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Rannu.

‘I don’t really like our choices,’ he said quietly.

‘Don’t look at it like a choice; look at it as another option. If it doesn’t work you’ll still have the option of fighting, running and hiding,’ the staff-bearing man told us. It was another good point.

‘I can see why they follow you,’ I told him.

‘Nobody follows anyone. That’s what we’re trying to get away from. We’ll pick our own deaths, not the powers that be. I don’t think you have much time.’

He was right. I could hear the gunships making low passes over the neighbourhood. I lowered the carbine. Rannu did the same.

‘We won’t take your weapons, but if you’re carrying them they will know that you’re not one of us,’ he said.

‘We’ll keep them nearby. Just so you know, we can easily kill with our bare hands and you’ll go first,’ I told him.

He just nodded.

More climbed through the windows, came in through the doors, advanced on us. It reminded me of some ancient zombie viz. Everywhere I looked they were crowding us. It was claustrophobic. The last time I’d been surrounded like this it had been by Them. I worked hard to suppress my augmented fight-or-flight reactions. However, they just wanted to get us swaddled in bandages as quickly as possible. The man with the staff watched.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. As much to try and control the urge to lash out or run as to find out.

‘We don’t have names here.’

‘What, do you number yourselves?’

‘That would be a form of identity. We get numbered when we serve. When we are slaves. Here we are all blank. We are nothing, nobody, ghosts who do not exist. Reflections.’

I took this in.

‘How do you get each other’s attention? Is there a lot of “Hey you”?’

I think he was smiling beneath the bandages.

They were regular troops. They handled the interaction with the End about as well as gunpoint interaction between civilians and the military ever goes. There was a bit of added brutality caused by the contempt and envy the serving man or woman has for the deserter. I could see that. I would have been the same when I was in the Paras, less so in the Regiment. By the time I’d got there I was a little less judgemental.

Lined up. Pushed down onto our knees. Questioned. The incentive to answer came from boots and rifle butts. We did nothing. Said nothing. There were too many people to question us all, which was fortunate. Neither Rannu nor I had the same accent as any of the nationalities that served on Lalande 2.

Of course the bandages were an issue, as the suspicious could see them being used as a disguise. There were over a hundred of the End down on their knees by the bonfire when the troops started cutting them off. A few of the faces revealed were either badly burned or horribly mutilated. I suspected some of the mutilation was self-inflicted. These people took the death of identity seriously. One woman whose bandages were cut off grabbed the sharpest rock she could find and started to carve up her own face. She had to be restrained. The staff-bearer went up to the NCO in charge of the squad and knelt down in front of her. He took the barrel of her rifle, pressed it to his head and asked that they shoot everyone there if they needed to be sure rather than cut their bandages off. It was a difficult moment for the NCO but they stopped removing them.

The soldiers searched the area but didn’t even find our gauss carbines, which we’d hidden close to us. They engaged in a little light looting — after all this was the wealthy part of town — and then foxtrot oscar’d.

I watched the gunship peel away from the mansion then turned back to look at the flames of the massive bonfire. The flash compensation on my IVD polarised the lenses slightly to allow for the glare. On the other side of the flames I could see the bestial horned statue. Now that I was closer I could see that it had been welded together out of all sorts. There were parts of vehicles, consumer electronics, furniture and even jewellery. The one thing the material had in common was that it all looked to have once been expensive high-quality gear. One part of me was appalled at the waste. The other half was amused. The fuel for the fire looked similarly expensive. I started to laugh.

‘It’s not vandalism; it’s liberation.’ The guy with the staff was standing over us now. ‘You both look ill-used. We do not have much but I think you should probably eat.’ And now that he’d mentioned it I suddenly realised how hungry I was.

Vat mulch and hot sauce. It was one of the best-tasting meals I’d ever had. They had to watch both Rannu and me to make sure we didn’t just wolf it down and make ourselves sick. We washed it down with odd-tasting water and, after some negotiation, some kind of moonshine. It tasted how I imagined fermented engine oil would taste. A small tin cup of the stuff left me feeling quite drunk.

The guy with the staff had stayed with us. He didn’t ask us anything. We did the asking. I even managed to remember to thank him. He and his people had taken a battering on our account and said nothing.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

He was monitoring how quickly I was spooning the mulch down.

‘I suspect you mean geographically and not philosophically? I grew up in the shadow of the Ugandan Spoke. Easy now, not so fast.’ He laid his bandaged hands over mine, stopping me from spooning another mouthful into my mouth.

‘You sound moneyed. How come you didn’t join the Fortunate Sons?’ I asked.

‘It was an option for me, initially anyway. I was a poet with a degree of recognition, if not popularity. While I was at university I net-published poetry which was considered to be anti-corporate.’

‘Was it?’

‘It wasn’t anti-anything. It was pro-person.’

I nodded as if I understood what he was saying. He probably needed to be speaking to someone like Mudge, though I noticed that Rannu was listening intently.

‘They arranged to have you drafted?’ Rannu asked.

‘Either them or my family. I’m not sure which.’

‘And you deserted?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Ten years was too long a slave.’ He tapped the black plastic of his lenses. ‘I think that’s why they take the eyes first. So they can try and get to our souls. I didn’t fully understand why I was fighting.’ He lapsed into silence for a moment and watched me eat. ‘Are you aware of the information purporting to be from Earth?’ he asked. I nodded. Rannu said nothing. ‘It seems in some ways we’ve been vindicated, but that is a retrospective justification. I just couldn’t do it any more. None of us could. I think perhaps we are all too weak but I will not fight again.’

My opinions on deserters notwithstanding, I was struggling to condemn these people. I wanted to ask him about the mates he’d left behind but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After all the only person left from my days in service was Mudge. Well, if you didn’t count Rolleston and the Grey Lady.

‘You know they’ll move you on from here? If they don’t kill you,’ Rannu said.

‘The scavenger teams already hate us. They shoot the moment we get in the way of something they want. They’ve killed a lot of our people. After all, nobody cares if deserters die. Right?’ He looked at us expectantly. Neither of us could meet his lenses. The bandages around his mouth seemed to crease as if he was smiling. ‘We know this is temporary. That death is imminent. Do you?’

It certainly always felt that way. We were always less than one step away from death. The feeling that my luck was going to run out if I didn’t stop doing things like this. Luck? Two gunshots. Meat that was once a person hitting a cold stone floor. For a moment I could see the appeal of the End. Then I remembered how important it was that Rolleston died.

‘Demiurge?’ I asked.

He turned his head. He seemed to be studying me.

‘The Black Wave?’ he asked.

I cursed my own indiscretion. On the other hand he’d know from my accent that I wasn’t from around here.

‘You worship it?’ I asked.

‘More venerate it as an inevitability. One war ends and another begins. This time we fight each other, and if the information the resistance is circulating is correct it seems that we did the last one to ourselves as well. There was a demon, a harbinger…’

‘In the net?’ Rannu asked.

The man nodded. This sent a shudder through me. Of all the religious experiences that people have in the net, the ones involving so-called demons are always the worst and most destructive — and not just for the hackers themselves. I remembered the boy lying on the soiled bed in Fintry, Vicar standing over him, cross and Bible in hand, trying to cast out the demonic virus in the kid’s ware.

‘He told me of the Black Wave’s coming. He told me that the Black Wave was hate.’ The man laughed. ‘Can you imagine? All these years of artifice and we finally make machines hate.’

‘So why venerate something so…’ I was searching for the right word.

‘Negative,’ Rannu supplied. It didn’t seem quite strong enough but it would do.

‘Because of its inevitability, its symbolism. Sixty years of warfare was not enough. At some level humanity wants to destroy itself. If not this war then other reasons will be found. The Black Wave is the perfect expression of this. We, as a race, have created a god and then we made it hate. How much harder do we have to work to destroy ourselves?’

‘It was a small group of people,’ I said. I couldn’t shake the feeling that history was the story of a small group of arseholes making the rest of us bloody miserable.

‘Do you oppose these people?’ he asked.

This was more difficult. Answering that had operational security ramifications. What was I talking about? I’d already sold us out. At least he didn’t seem malevolent. Rannu still gave me a sharp look when I nodded.

‘You still fight, hate, commit acts of violence and destroy other human life?’ he asked.

‘That’s…’ Now Rannu was searching for a word.

‘Sophistry?’ the man suggested. Rannu nodded. ‘Perhaps, or perhaps it’s taking responsibility, collectively, for our race’s actions.’

It seemed that nobody was going to tell me what sophistry was. Maybe it meant bullshit. Maybe that’s what Rannu had meant to say.

‘So you’re waiting for death?’ I asked.

‘In a way, but we won’t play its game. We’ll die on our own terms.’

I couldn’t make up my mind if this guy was a suicidal nut-job or one of the bravest persons I’d ever met. Not that they were mutually exclusive.

‘We still have to fight,’ Rannu said.

‘Even if it’s more futile, painful and destructive than putting one of their guns to your own head? Besides, there are ways and means of fighting. It doesn’t have to involve violence.’

His words were starting to make sense to me. He was very persuasive. Though I wasn’t sure he wasn’t twisting words out of shape to get us to think what he wanted.

‘Is this how you recruit people?’ I asked.

‘We don’t recruit people. They come to us when they’re ready. You will not join us. You are both still full of anger, hatred and fear. I can see the flames that burn around you. They surround you like a nimbus. I think you need to rage against the dark for a while longer yet.’

I had nothing to say to that. Was it insight or was it a sales pitch? I didn’t know. I did know that he’d saved our arses. I wondered if he was still fighting, like us, but used different methods. Better methods, if they worked. On the other hand, if they ever crossed Cronin, Rolleston or the others they’d be snuffed out. A more likely fate was death at the hands of bailiffs or scavengers. Their sin would be the old one of having what someone else wanted and not being mean enough to protect it. Or maybe it was all an elaborate justification for just giving up.

‘You’ll be going on your way.’ He said this with certainty. ‘You need rest before you do. When you go I would ask you to take only what you think you’ll need.’ He stood up to leave. ‘If you want anything just ask anyone. They’ll try to help as much as they can. Will you excuse me?’ He turned to walk away.

‘Thank you,’ I said. Rannu said the same. He didn’t look back at us but he nodded before he strode away.

I wasn’t drinking much. It didn’t take much. Rannu did drink but in moderation. Tonight he was matching me, tin cup for tin cup of the fermented engine oil. We were sitting under a pathetic canopy of what had once been ornamental foliage in a hole that was the dried-out remains of some kind of water feature.

The UV-lit false night was somehow managing to be cold and humid. Both of us were wrapped in borrowed coats and sleeping bags. It might have been warmer in the cave-like mansion but neither of us wanted to go inside. The cavern roof above us was enough of a prison for me.

Many of the End were dancing around the big fire listening to some kind of bass- and beat-heavy music that I suspected I would disapprove of under normal circumstances. They were just shadows where the UV light contrasted with the red and orange of the flames. They seemed unreal. Everyone was drinking heavily and taking rec drugs, and we were trying to ignore quite a large group having sex not too far away from where we were sitting. There was a sense of desperation to it all. The Ugandan poet with the staff walked among them, constantly being stopped. He took time to speak to any who accosted him. There was something comforting about him, even if he did trade on the darker side of the net. Perhaps his personable and comforting nature was the real danger, a type of seduction. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to mistrust him.

‘After Leicester, after Rolleston burned me, Ashmi asked me to stop,’ Rannu said out of nowhere. It took me a while to work out who Ashmi was. I felt a little guilty that I’d never asked Rannu about his family.

It had been Rolleston who’d betrayed Rannu to Berham, the head of the Thuggees, after Rannu had refused to break off the deep-cover operation to work for the Major. Rolleston once again teaching a lesson on why he must be obeyed.

‘I’m not surprised. Nobody wants that to happen to someone they care about.’ Of course I’d managed to avoid the whole physical torture thing by just spilling my guts. Not that it’d done any good. Two shots.

‘This is it. In the unlikely event that I live through this, I’m out. This is the last mission for me. Yangani and Sangar should have their father with them and Ash deserves her husband by her side. Though whether I deserve her is another question. I want to see my children grow up. Teach them what I can.’

‘I was surprised when Mudge told me you had a family. Surely you’ve got too much to lose to be doing all this stupid shit with us.’

‘I never had a choice.’ I turned to look at him. I didn’t understand. ‘I didn’t like working for Rolleston, but when I knew, after I found out in New York, what choice did I have? Your children judge you, is what I think. They don’t mean to — they don’t even know they’re doing it — but how could I go back to them and look them in the eyes if I hadn’t done everything I could to make a future where they are not just more meat to be ground up or just another weapon of polluted flesh? Because after we pollute our flesh with machinery we then pollute our minds with what we have to do. I know Rolleston. He would make my children slaves; he would make us all slaves. He does not tolerate dissent. It would have been like I’d done it to them myself. But this is enough.’

It was almost as if he was looking for permission. As if he wanted to be told that what he’d done was sufficient.

‘I think you’ve done your bit,’ I told him. Though I still needed him to help me kill Rolleston.

We lapsed into silence again. I feared sleep. I feared the Black Sun. I feared the replay of Morag’s death that I knew was waiting for me just beyond consciousness.

I took another sip of the fermented engine oil. Let it burn. I was hoping it would destroy some of my taste buds. Get rid of the constant taste of battery acid and rotten eggs. I wondered how long my lung filter had to go before it needed replacing. I wondered how long Rannu’s had — surely much less time if it hadn’t already expired. Were his lungs being burned with every breath as we spoke? I was sure there would be more symptoms if this were the case. If nothing else, then coughing and rasping when he breathed.

Eventually Rannu tried to sleep. It looked fitful. I just watched him, wishing I couldn’t think.