War in Heaven

21

The sonic decoy was subtle. A lot of noise may have got the guard fauna to investigate and also would have alerted Demiurge. We lay on the bottom of the icy underground river as dark shapes swam through the water above us, the reactive skin of the dive sheaths hopefully blending us into the stone. The dark shapes in the water were leopard seals fed on growth hormones, altered with neurosurgery to make them even more aggressive and fitted with cybernetic systems including an enlarged and power-assisted jaw. Most divers I knew hated diving anywhere near natural leopard seals, let alone these augmented versions. I wondered if Rolleston had got around to using Themtech on them. The idea of leopard seals with tentacles caused me to shiver.

I felt incredibly bulky with the smart-fabric dive sheath over my full combat gear. The sheath worked as one massive gill, pulling air in from the surrounding water, and was jacked into one of my plugs using technology originally developed for exo-armour. It also masked my heat and electromagnetic signatures. The seals would have had biological material from sharks implanted into them to help them pick up EM signatures.

I’d had rudimentary dive training in the Regiment, as had Rannu, Cat and Pagan, but we were using skillsofts and what little time we’d had in virtual sims. Merle was an accomplished diver. He’d been trained by the US Marines for their Force Recon outfit. We’d had a day to prepare for this, and that had included a run to get some specialist gear from one of Merle’s other Cemetery Wind caches.

The dark, fast-moving shapes swam over us and headed back towards the time-delayed sonar decoy. It would switch itself off before they got there so they wouldn’t actually find anything. If they located the decoy their handlers would know that something was wrong.

We gently pushed ourselves off the cold stone of the underground river floor and finned forward. Cave diving was one of the more dangerous types of diving and I could see why. Lots of tight spaces, particularly if you were as heavily encumbered as we were. The buoyancy controls on our sheaths were working hard to keep us neutrally buoyant. The hostile overhead environment meant that we had to be aware of snagging and couldn’t just surface if things went wrong.

The dangers aside, I liked it down here. Despite the fact that I was cold as the heat was bled off me in an effort to mask my signature. Despite the fact that I was drenched in sweat, there was something peaceful and tranquil about it. Seen underwater, the rock formations that we had become used to took on a whole new life, driving home how alien the environment was, but in a good way. Once again, everything we saw was in the green of lowlight vision. For a while I even forgot about the threat of the leopard seals. Fighting them would be a ball ache. We’d win, but discovery by the seals meant compromise, which meant scrubbing the mission.

Dinas Emrys, yesterday

The hologrammaitic rendering of the Citadel looked out of place among the rough, sparse, Dark Ages splendour of the great hall of Pagan’s sanctuary.

‘You’re going to have to trust me. I can hack it,’ Black Annis told us.

Mother, Tailgunner and Cat were looking sceptical. Mudge was looking bored. I couldn’t read Merle’s face and Rannu was always difficult to judge, but I think there was eagerness in his expression. Either he wanted a chance to prove himself again, which was fine, or he wanted revenge, which was less fine. I wanted revenge. I badly wanted to fuck Rolleston up and, if I got a chance, kill him.

‘Morag, if you could just tell us a little more about how you think you will do this,’ Pagan said.

‘Same principle as doing the data raid on Demiurge — I’ll stealth it. It’s Themtech, which means it has a mind or rather lots of different tiny minds.’

‘Like Essex,’ Mudge said. We ignored him.

‘Operation Spiral,’ Pagan pointed out.

‘I know how to do the interface and I will have Ambassador helping me.’

‘I’m sold,’ I said.

‘You’re just eager to fuck the Black Squadrons up,’ Merle said. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him.

‘Look, no offence,’ Cat said, ‘but I don’t want to base this op on optimism and overconfidence.’

‘Cat, we’ve had this conversation with Morag several times. I’ve been in your position and she’s always delivered,’ I said.

Annis looked over at me and smiled. It wasn’t very comforting. I felt like I was about to be eaten.

‘And I’ve hacked Themtech before,’ Annis added.

‘No, you’ve surfed it. There’s a difference,’ Pagan pointed out. My grasp of IT was pretty poor but he was right.

‘We adapt the Pais Badarn Beisrydd, and they’re not even going to know we’re there.’

‘Then why not use it as a way in?’ Merle asked.

‘Because it’s a trick we’re only going to get to play once,’ she told him.

We broke the surface of the water, weapons covering every angle, moving swiftly out of the natural rock pool and onto bloodied ice. This was where the leopard seals lived. Evidence of their handlers feeding them meat was smeared all over the ice. Much of the meat looked human in origin. I tried not to think about it. Human lives had always been tossed away casually, but food for guard fauna? That was taking the piss.

We advanced quickly. We didn’t have a great deal of time. The moment the seals returned, the mission was over. Rannu and Merle had already programmed their dive sheaths to peel off. We’d hide their sheaths with ours. They advanced past our cordon of guns in their reactive camouflage. I could just about make out the movement of them slinging their weapons and pulling ice axes from clips on their webbing. I peeled off my own sheath, moved forward and pointed my SAW up the ice wall, as did Pagan, covering the pair of them as they started to climb the shifting, fragile and unsteady ice. Merle made quick time. Rannu was slower. His capture and possession had taken their toll, just as they must have on me.

At the top I knew Rannu would take a covering position while Merle rigged and dropped three ropes for the rest of us. Cat, Pagan and Morag were the next up, using muffled motorised ascenders to pull them up with only a minimum of falling ice. Finally it was Mudge’s and my turn. With cover from above we attached our ascenders and started up the wall. We’d attached crampons to our boots and were practically walking up the ice trying not to knock any off. We gathered the excess rope with us as we climbed. We wanted to leave as little trace of our progress as possible.

Pagan and Morag were covering our ascent. At least I assumed they were. I could see nothing as they were wearing reactive camouflage and were presumably completely still against the ice. I heard one of the seals flop out of the water and onto the ice below us. I stopped my ascender; a moment later Mudge’s went quiet as well. I stayed very still, hoping that the reactive camouflage would hide us. Hoping that we’d hidden the dive sheaths well enough. I glanced down and I saw one of the huge, sleek, vicious-looking augmented seals flopping around among the blood and food remains. There was nothing to do but wait and hope.

I was getting nervous, almost shaky. Something was different. Everyone gets scared, unless they’re a psycho or have had too much meat replaced with metal, but this was different. I wasn’t handling this reasonably low-stress situation well. I did a mild sedative from my internal drugs reservoir to calm me down. This wasn’t good. How much damage had they done to me? I wished I’d asked Mudge to score me some Slaughter.

There was a splash below. I glanced down to see the pool rippling. The seal had cocked its head and was looking at the water. I think someone had thrown something from above. The seal waddled rapidly to the edge and then slid into the pool, disappearing below the surface. It didn’t seem very bright. Mudge and I quickly and quietly finished our ascent.

Dinas Emrys, yesterday

‘There’s only so far we can stealth. As soon as we’re compromised it’s all over,’ Merle said.

‘Not if they’re worried about other things and not if you’ve got fire support,’ Mother said. Tailgunner, resplendent in his feathered cloak, glanced over at her worriedly.

‘That’s a…’ Cat started. She didn’t say death sentence. The Citadel was basically a minor arcology, or to put it another way, a fortress of ice the size of a small city and very heavily defended. It was designed to withstand a prolonged siege from Them.

‘So don’t fuck it up,’ Mother said grimly. I wondered if this was what I’d seen the whanau talking about.

‘You’re a mech down,’ Merle said.

‘Soloso used to pilot mechs in the mines. We’ve been bringing him up to speed,’ Mother told us. Even on Annis’s horrible face I could see a look of worry. ‘What we’ll need is accurate info, which means good forward observation.’

‘We’ll be comms black,’ I said.

Tailgunner shook his head. ‘No, we’ve got an idea about that.’

‘Rannu and I can FO,’ Pagan said. It made sense, as an ex-RASF combat air controller he had the most experience.

Few things make you feel less like a hardened combat cyborg commando than wearing adult diapers. They may have been made from the latest smart fabric. They may lock all the moisture away from your skin. They may in fact be the very pinnacle of modern nappy technology, but despite the initial warm feeling there’s something deeply pathetic about a grown man pissing himself whatever the reason. It may be part of the discipline of running long-term OPs, sniper stalking or in this case a difficult infiltration. That didn’t make it any better. At least we’d taken something to constipate ourselves and eaten high-energy food sparingly the day before.

The Citadel was ahead of us. It was a flat-topped terraced pyramid. Large though it was, the cavern it was in dwarfed it. This meant a lot of open space all around the arcology, which provided clear fields of fire. There were also only a few ways into the large cavern, which would further bottleneck any attack. We knew that each of the terraces was basically a heavily defended trench made of super-hardened ice. Even from here I could see the various weapon systems — cannon, missile batteries, point-defence systems — bristling from the pyramid-shaped complex. Fully magnifying my lenses, I could make out combat drones circling the fortress as well as patrolling gunships and exo-armour squads.

What the fuck were we thinking? I started to shake again. I had to get this under control. We had a long way to go. I dropped the high magnification and the Citadel became a glow in an otherwise dark cavern.

There was no wild fauna on Lalande 2 with the exception of a few hardy rats that had adapted to the high G and were frankly terrifying. Rats shouldn’t have that much muscle. That meant that the Citadel’s defenders could surround it with motion detectors and motion-triggered anti-personnel mines, as well as much larger anti-armour mines. The anti-armour mines wouldn’t bother us but they would be a problem for the mechs.

They had EM, heat and sound sensors as well as security lenses, but if we triggered them we deserved to fail. The problem was always going to be the motion sensors. There was only one way to trick them and that was to move very, very slowly. This meant that a journey of just over a mile was going to take us the better part of twenty-eight hours of crawling over cold stone, hence the inevitability of wetting myself. This would take incredible co-ordination and discipline, as we wouldn’t even be able to see each other. We also needed to map the anti-armour mines for the mechs. Our initial movement was around the edges of the cavern so we could start from the whanau ’s entry point.

It was long, it was cold and it was boring. The highlights of the crawl were exo-armour or drone patrols passing overhead. They always made it easier to piss yourself. I was on downers to deal with the constant tension. As soon as we got close I’d have to counteract the downers with stims. I only hoped that nothing happened before then, as the downers would affect combat performance until I stimmed myself. All we had to look forward to on this miserable crawl were cold rations and the thrill of occasionally bumping into each other.

I had a lot of time to think about the insanity of what we were doing, thinking thoughts that would fuck me up. Not the sort of thoughts I would normally think while operational. I was worried I would set off the motion detectors if I got the shakes. The Citadel grew larger and larger in my vision as we inched closer. The closer I got, the more I could see the weapons, the men, the machines, and the more I realised the futility of what we were trying to do.

Rolleston had done a good job on me. I wondered how Rannu was holding up. I had betrayed these people once. I wasn’t going to do it again. It was my responsibility to them that kept me moving. That was how I dealt with it. Kept me crawling over the smooth stone between the mines and sensors. Concealment wasn’t required, as they had achieved near-total area denial. Or so they thought. Fortunately they hadn’t reckoned on anything as stupid as what we were planning.

I also knew that what the whanau were going to do had to count for something. I wondered how they could operate with the near total certainty of death.

Dinas Emrys, yesterday

‘They’ll know we hacked them,’ Cat said. This was good. This was her job — to come up with as many objections as possible so we could overcome them.

‘We need to make it look like something else and we need to knock out all visual surveillance in the lower boardroom,’ Annis said. As she did she expanded the part of the arcology that showed us the lower boardroom. It looked a long way from our point of entry.

‘Sabotage,’ I suggested.

‘Assassination attempt,’ Merle suggested.

‘We don’t even know if any of their command will be there,’ Cat pointed out.

‘Sabotage then. I think we should take any opportunity to fuck with their machine that we get,’ I said.

‘And take any opportunities for assassination that present themselves,’ Merle added. I had to agree.

‘Not at the expense of getting the data,’ Annis said, looking at Cat.

I glanced at Pagan. Even in his Druidic icon he looked subdued. I wondered who was running the Ungentlemanly side of the operation now.

Cat nodded. ‘Agreed. The info is our priority.’

‘Even though we’ve got no way to get it out?’ Merle asked.

‘Information always helps,’ Mudge pointed out.

‘And currently we know next to nothing,’ Annis added.

‘Okay, this is all pretty fucking slim,’ Cat said.

‘We’ve been out on hairier,’ I said. Rannu was nodding in agreement.

‘Okay. Let’s set up a full action plan and begin prep,’ Cat replied. There were smiles from all but the New Zealand contingent and Pagan.

‘There’s one other thing. We need to do this fast. We’ve got next to no solid intel but it can’t take them much longer to prep for the attack on Earth,’ Pagan told us.

Cat gave this some consideration.

‘All right. If we’re doing this then we are ready to go at 0500 tomorrow, understood? That means if we need more gear from Merle’s caches we get it today,’ she said.

Now we started to whinge. We were squaddies, that’s what we’re supposed to do. We whinged and then we went and got on with it.

We were close now after more than an Earth day of crawling. Our internal heating systems were running low to mask our heat signatures. I was cold and I ached. I’d had no sleep. Counteracting tiredness with amphetamines, which made me jittery, and then confusing my mind with downers to counteract the tension.

Twenty-five hours in, things had stopped making sense, which was good. This meant I could deal with the imminence of possible death. I could hear the soldiers talking now and smell their food. Soon we’d be trying to kill each other. Shame when we had so much in common. Pity we couldn’t just go after the leaders, on both sides.

At least Rannu and Pagan had had something to do. They had plotted a line of anti-armour mines from the mechs’ point of entry to the Citadel. The plan was for Rannu and Pagan to rendezvous just before the attack and use the palm interfaces on their smartlinks to swap information. Pagan would also be using his smartlink and internal targeting systems to passively plot firing solutions for the mechs. Most crucially they needed solutions plotted for the point-defence systems. Pagan was also looking at the main vehicle entrance on this side of the arcology and using his guncam to record details.

When he had all the information he required he sent it as a packet on a UV tight beam link to a transponder we’d set up at a prearranged location. That receiver was hard-wired via a cable run through a small hole drilled in solid rock to the whanau ’s position. Using tight beam communication meant that the Black Squadrons would have to have something interposed between the receiver and us. Also they had no reason to be scanning UV frequencies.

I checked the time displays on my IVD. One showed the actual time. The other was a countdown. I looked up at the large entrance to the vehicle bay. All that was between the entrance and us were three lines of trenches and then the terraced trenches above the door.

New Utu Pa, yesterday

‘I want two fireteams,’ Cat told us. We were in one of the smaller caves. Soloso and Big Henry were just inside the entrance discouraging people from paying attention to us. ‘Fireteam Alpha is me, Merle and Morag. Fireteam Bravo is Jakob running it, Mudge, Rannu and Pagan.’

I would have liked to turn over command to Rannu but I’d done that once and I couldn’t afford to be seen as a weak link again, as I suspected that Cat would actually drop me from the mission. I didn’t want to work with Pagan. I couldn’t trust him. Actually that wasn’t true. I knew he’d do his job, but I didn’t want to trust him.

‘Looks like we’ve got all the fuck-ups,’ Mudge said.

‘Shut up, Mudge,’ I told him.

‘Right, Rannu and I are going to start the killing before zero point. We’re going after officers, NCOs, heavy-weapon crews, but we’re going to be doing it quietly,’ Merle said. He seemed happier with Cat in command.

‘Then we move on my go and we are fucking quick or dead. Everyone understand?’ Cat told us.

We all nodded. I looked over at Mother and Tailgunner. They may as well have been carved out of mahogany. It was like looking at ghosts. After everything Mother had said I still couldn’t work out why. I’d spoken to Mudge about it. He’d said that sometimes you just had to draw a line against what the bad guys were allowed to get away with.

‘Is that my Void Eagle?’ Merle demanded. I looked down at the massive automatic holstered on my chest.

‘What, you want to argue about it now?’ I asked. We were just about to go operational.

‘I’ll be having that back,’ he snapped. Crucially Cat didn’t order me to give it back. In fact she was smiling.

‘There’s a reason the British army are called the Borrowers,’ Mudge told him. Rannu was laughing.

A new recruit had brought in a collection of antique weapons. Mudge had bartered with him for a pre-FHC assault shotgun for me. I’d added an external targeting system for the smartlink, which would be less than ideal, and I’d also had to make a few adjustments for the shotgun to fire caseless, but it would serve as a secondary weapon.

Watching the countdown I was shaking. When the klaxons and the red lights came on, for a moment I thought we were compromised but this was all part of the plan. I watched gunships laden with troops and exo-armour take to the air. The rest of Mother’s forces, along with whatever fighting elements of the resistance and Moa City gangs we’d managed to make contact with, had attacked targets in the city and its vicinity, hoping to draw elements of the Black Squadrons away from the Citadel.

I watched the gunships and flight-capable exo-armour head out of the big cavern. This helped but there was still a lot of men and hardware left. I knew we had to let them get to their targets. As soon as that happened our forces would pull back and hopefully melt into the background.

My breathing sounded impossibly loud in my ears but I didn’t dare risk a sedative now. I just wanted things to start — get it over with, break the tension. I was shaking quite badly now. Even under my camouflage I was sure I must have been visible as a quivering piece of rock, but nothing happened, though as a result of the alert the guards seemed more on the ball. The soldiers in the external defences were all New Zealand regulars.

I don’t think I noticed when the killing started. I knew that the others would be watching the synchronised countdown, getting ready to go. My heart was hammering at my ribcage. I didn’t hear the firing; I just saw an officer’s face cave in and he slumped to the ground. The man next to him had a moment to look surprised and then his face turned red just underneath his helmet. Rannu with a borrowed suppressed, long-barrel Steyr marksman’s rifle and Merle with his custom gauss rifle firing at subsonic speed. Every shot someone died. They were aiming and killing so quickly that none of the defenders had had time to raise the alarm yet.

The countdown reached zero. The explosion rolled across the cavern, echoing back and forth at the speed of sound. It was like standing in thunder. The ground shook as my audio dampeners managed the noise down to tolerable levels. This got their attention.

I knew that behind me a cliff face had just been turned to powder. One of the NCOs under Mother’s command was old enough to have worked mines in this area before the Citadel was built. He’d been able to guide us to mine shafts big enough for the mechs and close enough to the Citadel to blow a path through with a lot of stolen mining explosives.

They hadn’t even sounded the alarm when the Citadel started taking hits. My audio dampeners struggled with the hypersonic booms as 300mm rounds from the Apakura ’s mass driver cannon began impacting into the Citadel. The rapid hits penetrated deep into the hardened ice causing massive explosions of shards hard enough to cause shrapnel wounds. Water rained down on us from where the kinetic energy of the impacts had melted the dense ice. The ice burned where plasma rounds hit. The plasma had been fired by Kopuwai and Whakatau, the two Landsknecht-class bipedal mechs piloted by Soloso and Big Henry respectively. Every round from the plasma cannons sent up huge plumes of steam. All three mechs were targeting the Citadel’s point defence with their direct-fire weapons.

Rannu and Merle used the chaos to kill more and more as the defenders instinctively dived for cover in the face of the mech onslaught. My audio filters managed to pick up the rip of rotary railguns and the sound of rapidly staggered explosions. Apakura drew a wall of fire between her and the Citadel as she used the information provided by Pagan to detonate anti-armour mines with her rapid-firing belly railguns.

The Citadel’s point defences on our side were destroyed in moments. The Citadel had not even returned fire yet. The two Landsknechts and the Bismarck-class mech then fired half their missiles. Contrails filled the air in the huge cavern.

I opened my mouth and kept my head down. I’d been dangerously close to missile strikes before. Conventional and plasma warheads impacted. The ground jumped and tilted and I realised the impacts had blown me into the air and turned me on my side. None of the defenders had noticed; they’d had other things to worry about.

We were targeting the Citadel’s heavy-weapons systems and gunship landing areas. It looked like one whole side of the pyramid had thrown itself up into the air. Steam, water, shards and huge chunks of ice rained down on us. Several plasma warheads had detonated in the vehicle bay and it was burning with white fire. I could hear the secondary explosions of ammo cooking off. I was shaking like a leaf. I didn’t need a stim. I was wired. I needed something to take the edge off.

Each of us was a ghost, disrupting the steam and smoke as we stood up and ran towards the Citadel, killing as we went. The massive blast doors to the burning vehicle bay were starting to move, closing slowly. I sent a frag grenade from my launcher into the first trench. It exploded. I was oblivious to the screams. I glanced behind me. The Apakura, Kopuwai and Whakatau were emerging from the rolling cloud of dust, firing, seemingly unstoppable. Ahead of them Apakura ’s belly rotary railguns were hosing the ground down left and right, detonating the anti-armour mines closest to the Citadel. For a second I caught a glimpse of a small mech running towards us.

I reached the first trench. The defenders were still recovering from my initial frag. I sensed rather than heard Pagan, Mudge and Rannu run in behind me. I fired a flechette grenade. This was just slaughter. The soldiers in the trench were trying to work out what the fuck was happening to them when razor-sharp needles tore through cheap armour. The shaking had stopped. I fired at anything still moving with the SAW. Next to me Pagan and Mudge were subduing their own trenches.

‘Clear!’ I shouted. It was less fact and more a signal to move on. I turned to run into the vehicle bay. I heard the unmistakable hypersonic roar of a Bofors railgun and glanced over at the trench Cat was subduing. She’d painted the ice red. There were no bodies, only flying body parts.

There was movement behind me. I swung around to bring the SAW smoothly to my shoulder. Sprinting out of the mist came a Steel-Mantis-class scout mech. It was Strange in the Atua Kahukahu. She’d named it for the vengeful spirit of a dead child. She’d advanced ahead of the other three mechs. Shit! That meant that we could have made the attack with the stolen exo-armour and not have lain in our own piss for more than a day.

By the doors we tore the reactive camouflage gillie suits off. If we couldn’t see each other then we’d do more harm than good. The blast doors were still closing ponderously slowly. Inside the vehicle bay it was raining as plasma fires burned through ice. The walls and the ceiling were melting but I knew it was just superficial damage, even though most of the huge bay was burning. The missiles had veered to the left and the right at the last moment to give us a clear central path. Rannu was already sprinting across the bay towards another, much smaller blast door. We followed, moving rapidly, weapons at the ready. Any movement that wasn’t us got shot. We weren’t taking chances.

The scout mech’s twin rotary railguns destroyed any significant resistance. Strange swivelled the mech with economical grace, located points of enemy fire and tore them apart with short, disciplined bursts. She targeted the more heavily protected points. The short-range missile battery on her right shoulder fired its payload in one go. The missiles shot off in different directions and protected firing points and heavy-weapons emplacements exploded.

A burning light mech strode out of the plasma fire on our left. As one, Mudge, Pagan, Rannu and I triggered vertically launched Laa-Laas from one of the twin tubes attached to our packs. Four missiles hit the mech, exploding all over its already weakened body. The long-legged war machine toppled backwards and plasma flames consumed it.

Ahead of me Mudge was firing on the run, aiming his converted AK-47 at the catwalks that surrounded the vehicle bay. As Rannu reached the closed blast door he pulled the smart frame off his chest webbing. At a command sent through his palm link, the frame expanded. He attached the frame to the door and then turned, weapon at the ready. The rest of us reached the door and did the same.

This was the tricky part — the waiting while the microbes ate at the armour plate of the blast door, making us a man-sized hole to get through. When I looked behind me everything was fire. The main blast door entrance to the bay was about to shut. Through the crack I could just make out the Apakura. They had begun to counter-attack. It looked like every inch of the Apakura was either exploding or burning. It was wreathed in fire. Yet its belly guns were still firing; the huge impacts of its mass driver could still be felt. Chunks of ice fell from the ceiling with every hit. I watched it fire the rest of its missiles. Then the doors closed. Moments later we felt the missiles’ impacts. I glanced up at the scout mech next to me firing burst after burst. I’m not sure what response I expected from the composite and metal shell of the mech.

‘We’re through,’ Rannu shouted. As soon as the hole appeared we’d started taking fire from the corridor on the other side. Cat poked her railgun round the corner and fired but quickly had to take cover.

‘Strange!’ Cat shouted. The mech turned and knelt, putting one of its rotary railgun arms through the hole. I heard the rip as one hypersonic bang mixed with the next and I saw Strange move the arm about. When she’d withdrawn Rannu poked his head around the corner.

‘Clear!’ he shouted.

Strange was trapped in the vehicle bay. Atua Kahukahu was way too large to get through the hole and the external doors were shut.

‘Exit the mech! Come with us!’ Morag shouted. I could hear the desperation in her voice. The mech shook its head-shaped sensor array. I knew that the girl had had a short and tragic life. Now with the rest of her family almost certainly dead, it looked like it was going to come to a short and violent end. ‘Please!’ Morag begged. Strange’s sprint had been incredible. She’d made this part of the operation so much easier. She may have been a murderous disturbed mess, but she did not lack courage. Or maybe she wanted to die. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t leaving the mech.

‘We don’t have time for this. Move!’ Cat screamed at Morag.

We were through into the corridor. Advancing at a fast walk in two lines, Alpha team and then Bravo. Anyone who showed their face got shot. We passed the remains of the defenders that Strange had subdued. They were a sticky carpet and wallpaper. Humans reduced to their constituent parts at hypersonic speed. Pagan and Morag used their laser carbines to burn out any security lenses we saw.

We reached a second blast door. Merle used his smart frame with the microbes we’d taken from the Cemetery Wind caches. The rest of us covered our rear as the microbes did their job, exchanging shots with those defenders brave enough to poke their heads out of cover. Mudge’s leg was bleeding badly and he was moving with a limp. He’d taken a shard of ice in the initial bombardment. We covered Rannu while he rapidly applied an anti-coagulant/septic spray to the wound and affixed medgels and a pak.

As soon as the microbes had cut through, the defenders on the other side of the blast door and those behind us decided to mount a two-pronged attack.

Morag fired a frag grenade from the underslung grenade launcher on her laser carbine through the door and then ducked back into cover. Cat took hits as she stepped through the hole in the blast door, firing her railgun in a long burst. Merle followed her through and then Morag, firing three-beam bursts from her laser. Rannu fired a grenade at the defenders behind us and then Mudge and I laid down a withering hail of fire as Rannu and Pagan stepped through the hole. I snatched a frag off the front of my webbing, primed it by hand and threw it back down the corridor before stepping through the hole. Mudge backed through the hole firing.

In the next corridor Cat, Merle and Morag were already advancing in line, firing short bursts and single shots at anything that moved in front of them. Pagan, Rannu, Mudge and I followed, frequently checking behind us.

Two blast doors in, we were well and truly trapped in a huge building full of thousands of angry, frightened, well-armed people and probably members of the Black Squadrons too.

The isolated system had to be well defended, which meant going deep into the building. Which meant going through secure points like the blast doors. The microbes were the only things that could be trusted to go through them reliably but they took time. Presumably guided by Demiurge, the defenders soon caught on to this. They would be waiting for us every time we reached a door, and every time we got through. At each door we met more resistance as they became more organised.

We were starting to see individual members of the Black Squadrons now. We could recognise them by the way they carried themselves and their gear. Despite their reputed healing abilities they seemed as reluctant to get hit as any other soldier. Particularly when they had rail or plasma weapons fired at them.

All of us were wounded now. Cat, always first through to suppress the opposition, was bleeding badly from multiple wounds but still up and fighting. For once I hadn’t been hit too badly and adrenalin and drugs kept me soaring above the pain.

We found it when we got through the final blast door and into the central protected area of the Citadel. At first I thought the ice was black, but it was transparent. On the other side of the ice were what looked like veins, arteries and other body parts all connected to form some massive organism. It was unmistakably Themtech but transformed into what looked like a warped version of some kind of Earth biology. The warm wind blowing through the corridors made me feel like I was being breathed on. The organs behind the ice seemed to move and beat with some kind of inner pulse. Despite the fact that we were in a combat situation all of us slowed.

‘What the fuck?’ Cat wondered.

‘It’s processing machinery for the raw materials that the roots gather — air, heat, sewage, etcetera,’ Pagan told us.

‘We need to keep moving!’ Merle snapped.

‘Trippy,’ Mudge said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. He sounded subdued. I glanced over him. He did not look happy.

We were close to the conference room now. We moved through more corridors surrounded by the organic machinery. I wondered how people could even think of this mockery as life, let alone make it work on such a scale. But none of what I had seen prepared me for what was round the next corner.

We rounded the corridor and this time, sunk into the ice, we saw people. All of them looked like they had once been hackers. All of them had been shorn of their hair and were naked. All of them were inside the ice of the walls and ceiling and connected through their plugs, and more obvious violations of their flesh, via tendrils to the machinery.

Again we slowed. During the war They had committed atrocities because They did not understand the concept of a war with rules, but not even They had come up with anything this sick. I saw Morag stare at the frozen hackers, her recent tough-girl persona close to cracking.

This drove home something that I had suspected since I’d been captured, something I should have realised after Gregor. Rolleston was completely insane. Even Merle looked disturbed.

‘What is this?’ Rannu asked. I could hear his desperation to make sense of this, but there was no sense to be had.

‘There are few quicker ways to move and process information than the human brain. It’s always been the hardware that’s the problem,’ Pagan said quietly. For some reason I really hated Pagan for knowing this.

‘You mean this is part of Demiurge?’ Morag asked. Pagan swallowed and nodded. ‘But that means that if they do this on a large scale, then…’ Her voice just trailed off.

‘They’ll have access to a lot more processing power and memory than we could ever hope to marshal,’ Pagan said. Because no sane person or organisation would do this, he’d left unsaid.

‘Shut up!’ Merle hissed. Pagan’s head jerked round to look at the other man. ‘They have ears.’

Then there was laughter. It really fucked with my calm. I didn’t want to be here. Many eyes were opening and trying to move in sockets to look at us through the ice. Mouths moved where they weren’t frozen over. ‘You will all suffer. You will all watch each other suffer,’ they said. Multiple agonised voices speaking as one.

‘We need to move.’ I couldn’t remember hearing fear in Mudge’s voice before.

‘The best you can hope for is that this will be done to you,’ the voices said. Then they started naming people we knew and describing what was going to be done to them. They started with Mudge’s mum.

‘Move, now!’ Cat barked, but she sounded disturbed as well.

The next corridor was the same and then the next. After that we weren’t even walking on ice; it was like we were walking through the veins of the beanstalk root system we’d seen in the fissure.

The entrance to the conference room looked more like a sphincter than a door. We were down to our last smart frame of microbes. Mudge was carrying it but he wasn’t sure where to put it. All of us were surprised when the sphincter just opened. Cat and Merle, backed by Morag, advanced cautiously into the room. Pagan and I followed with Rannu and Mudge watching our backs.

‘Stay where you are!’ I heard Cat scream. I had a moment to register the large room. I had this odd thought of a cybernetic room in which high tech had been mixed with the living organism of heavily modified, organic Themtech. It was like modern corporate architecture had caught a disease. One of the Citadel’s roots grew through the room. In the centre was a long table made out of a single slab of thick granite.

Sitting at the table apparently as surprised to see us as we were to see him was Cronin. Standing behind him was Kring. They looked like they hadn’t even realised the base was being attacked. Both were covered in some kind of thick viscous fluid that they had been trying to wipe off themselves and both started moving as we entered, simultaneously seeking cover and reaching for weapons. They were fast.

As they moved I was surprised to see Cat and Merle shift aim to something at the other end of the room. I brought up my SAW to shoot at Kring, who I reckoned would be the bigger threat. He disappeared behind the granite table as I fired a burst. Sparks flew off granite.

Cat and Merle advanced quickly, Merle firing his plasma rifle and Cat her railgun, seemingly at the wall. Behind me I heard Rannu and Mudge firing rapid bursts and a grenade detonate. Morag and Pagan were firing at the walls, ceiling and table. I knew that they were taking out anything even remotely resembling a sensor or lens. Some of the things they were targeting looked like growths.

That left me with Kring and Cronin. I moved forward, firing diagonally across the table. Now I could see what Merle and Cat were firing at. There were things growing out of the walls. They looked like deformed Berserks. They had human-looking, screaming mouths in their bodies but the heads of animals. Some were covered in spikes and other less pleasant features and they were growing from the organic parts of the room with surprising speed.

Kring just stood up. I shot him. A lot. He staggered but the enormous cyborg was standing up to the gauss-boosted fire of a long and accurate burst from my SAW. He raised both massive fists, a PDW in each. That was fine. I was happy to take low-powered rounds on my armour and swap shots with him. Then my world became fire. Every round exploded fiercely, blowing off chunks of my armour and kicking me back into the soft organic tissue of the wall. I was vaguely aware of the granite table breaking in two from the force of his fusillade.

The lunatic was firing concentrated explosive rounds. They were expensive and dangerous to use, and he was using them in a fast-cycling automatic weapon. Red icons erupted all over my IVD. I slid to the ground. The table blocked his line of sight. Kring was firing indiscriminately. He stood and took any fire aimed at him, staggering as shot after shot hit him. I couldn’t figure out who else was firing. The room seemed to fill with rapid explosions. Then I realised he was firing at the twisted Berserks growing out of the wall.

I tried to roll onto my knees but hands burst out of the floor to grab me. I was screaming now as some kind of pincer-like claw tried to prise armour and flesh open. My blades extended from my knuckles and I stabbed them viciously into the floor, tearing at it. The partially formed Berserk mutant went limp, succumbing to the ferocity of my attack. There were more growing out of the wall all around us. Another grenade went off somewhere behind me. Now there were black beams and shards in the air just like back on Sirius. I saw Pagan go down as explosions rolled over him. Then I saw Rannu stagger in the doorway as he was back-shot. Mudge’s head whipped round. It looked like a black beam had taken half his face off.

I’d had enough. On one knee I fired a thirty-millimetre HEAP grenade at Kring. As I did, Cronin shot me with a gauss PDW. He got me in the arm. It penetrated hardening inertial armour and then my subcutaneous armour, tearing into actual flesh.

Kring dodged to the side, the HEAP hitting the wall just behind him. The explosion knocked me back to the ground. The table slid across the floor towards me. Kring was thrown forward over the wrecked table. I felt the organic floor moving beneath me.

Back up onto my feet. I fired a burst at Cronin. He dived for cover behind the table. He was fast for an exec. I pointed the SAW down and fired another burst into the ground because the floor just wouldn’t stop moving. Bringing the SAW back up, I was appalled to see Kring standing again. He dropped the two PDWs and drew two Benelli shotgun pistols. I risked a burst; he staggered slightly, and I hit the ground again. How much fucking damage could this monster take?

Morag was down! No, it was okay, she was tranced in. That was trust in this environment. Everyone else was fighting the Berserk mutants growing out of the floor, the ceiling, the walls.

Heavy-calibre hit after hit on my chest armour and helmet. Almost cracking the armour. There was more pain, more red icons on my IVD. Where the fuck was the fire coming from? Kring. His shotgun pistols were firing saboted gyrojet rounds with smart miniature warheads. Money truly was no object for these guys. The gyrojet rounds would track me regardless of my cover and I couldn’t take much more.

I staggered to my feet, taking more hits. I fired my last grenade at him. He dived out of the way and the blast knocked me off my feet again. Still at least I wasn’t getting shot. Then I did something really stupid. I charged.

I’d hoped to surprise him. I jumped onto the broken table and ran across its sloping surface, firing. The expression on his mismatched face with its bulbous fish eyes didn’t even change. He grabbed me as I closed. At least he had to drop the shotgun pistols. He lifted me off my feet and slammed me into the wall. He then threw me into the ground. He didn’t drop me. He threw me. The wind was knocked out of me.

My SAW was hanging loose on its sling and was just getting in the way. Fighting for breath, I dragged the Void Eagle out of its holster and fired it repeatedly at point-blank range into Kring. The shots staggered him and I managed to fire about half the magazine before he slapped the gun out of my hand. Something clawed through the floor, tearing through my inertial and subcutaneous armour and ripping flesh out of me.

Kring reached down and dragged me to my feet. I extended my claws. He hooked a punch into my chest. As he hit me, his now-spiked cybernetic fist was propelled forward into my chest by a jackhammer-like pneumatic action. My breastplate and subcutaneous armour cracked, the force of the blow causing internal damage. I spat blood onto his Hawaiian shirt.

I don’t know how I had the presence of mind to duck his other fist but I did. I heard buzzing. The organic wall behind me opened and I was showered with some kind of fluid. On his fist the fingers had slid back; it looked like the hand had split open to reveal a small chainsaw. I felt this was unreasonable.

I suspect it was more strength born of desperation rather than training and boosted muscle that allowed me to drive the four full-length blades on my left hand up through his chin and into his head. His features warped at the bladed violation of his face but he didn’t fall. Now I started to panic. The powerful fingers on his pneumatic fist wrapped around my neck and started to squeeze. I felt him push the chainsaw against my breastplate. I could feel it. With terrifying strength he began to cut through the already damaged plate. I screamed when it reached subcutaneous armour and then again as it touched flesh, blood spraying all over him.

I was clawing at the laser pistol on my right hip. The claws on my left hand were still stuck in his face. The gun came free. I put it against his head and squeezed the trigger again and again and again. I kept squeezing. The back of his head became red steam. By the time he toppled over dragging me with him, the entire back half of his head was missing.

I managed to free myself. I’d blown the tips of my own blades off with the laser. A clawed hand came out of the wall and ripped the side of my face off. I rolled to the side and scrabbled for my SAW. The deformed Berserk tore itself out of the wall and loomed over me. I pulled the trigger on the SAW. I walked a long burst all the way up its torso. It was coming apart as meat and not the usual liquid dissipation I’d come to expect from Them. It dropped to the ground. Killing Berserks was about the most normal thing I’d done in what felt like a long time.

Something stabbed through my armour from beneath. A cry of pain and I rolled to one side and up onto my knees. I fired another long burst into the Berserk rising from the organic floor. It disintegrated in a hail of bullets.

I was getting shot, a lot. I staggered forward. Pistol rounds. Just pissing me off. I spun round. A terrified and slimy Cronin was emptying a pistol in my general direction. I raised the SAW and fired. He was no longer there. He was fast.

Something fell through the ceiling and onto me, tearing at my armour. I stabbed into it with claws, fighting wildly. It was bleeding, not leaking all over me, or was that my blood? I managed to ram its head back against the table and fired the SAW one-handed until its only movement was the jerk of bullets tearing through dead flesh.

The floor was a bad place to be. I climbed to my feet. Rannu was slicing up a Berserk, a knife in each of his hands. Cat and Merle were fighting back to back. Mudge was firing rapidly, standing over an unconscious or dead Pagan and a tranced-in Morag. Need to get to Mudge.

Out of the chaos Cronin charged me with a katana. No time to shoot. I tried to parry with my SAW. The katana sliced right through it and buried itself in my helmet. I felt the blade bite into armoured skull and blood ran down my face.

I kicked forward, sending Cronin staggering back. Unfortunately he kept hold of the sword. I let the two halves of my SAW fall to the ground.

‘Come on then!’ I screamed at him like it was some feral pub fight back in Dundee as I extended what was left of my blades.

He was skilled, fast and desperate. He swung at me again and again with the blade. I parried what I could with the claws. The rest cut into me, going through my armour, painting me a deeper red. I ignored the warning signals on my IVD. I got cut so I could claw at him, not caring, pushing him back. Finally I got lucky and caught his sword between my knuckle blades. I headbutted him, and as he staggered back I jumped into the air and kneed him in the head. I felt part of his skull give way beneath the impact. I tore the katana out of his grip and stabbed him through the shoulder with my two remaining full-length blades. I pulled my other hand back, getting ready to ram the broken blades on my left fist through his face.

‘Bastard!’ I screamed at him, as inhuman as anything else in the room.

‘I surrender!’ Cronin screamed. He looked terrified but not of me. Why was he covered in slime?

‘Jakob!’ Morag. I heard the note of command in her voice. I wanted to kill Cronin so much I was shaking. Instead I grabbed him by his hair and pulled the antique assault shotgun out of its scabbard. I started making my way back towards Morag, firing the shotgun one-handed at anything that moved that wasn’t us, dragging Cronin with me.

On the other side of the table Merle and Cat were firing as they backed towards Morag, Rannu and Mudge. I saw Cat go down. Half her face was red steam and blackened bone. Laser fire. She hit the ground. I knew she was dead. I heard Merle scream. I saw Rannu, Mudge and Morag’s expressions change. They looked terrified. I turned round. Through the sphincter in the opposite end of the room I saw Rolleston and the Grey Lady enter. Marching at us, firing.

All of us poured fire at them. Merle’s repeated plasma blasts wreathed Rolleston’s head in white fire. His head was a blackened grinning skull in the white flames and still he kept coming.

I just about made it back to Morag and the others. They were standing over Pagan’s body. It may as well have happened in slow motion. I watched him turn his combination weapon on me. The plasma barrel fired. He couldn’t miss.

It hit me in the right side. I screamed as I burned. The plasma fire ate into me, through me, an unstoppable force, my own flesh now the fuel. What was left of my conscious mind prayed for death, for an end to the burning and the pain.

Somehow I was still conscious. Morag appeared by my side. There was a moment of peace through the pain, the chaos, the firefight. Then a piece of flesh was torn off her chin. She was still up. I was still screaming, burning. I felt a jack slide into one of my plugs. I didn’t understand. Then I was screaming through the pain at the terror. My flesh violated, made alien to me. It changed, meat sloughing off me, tendrils emerging through the skin of my face, somehow grown from my own flesh. The tendrils flailed, writhing in front of me, and sought out the strange flesh of the Citadel.

Then I was falling, burning. We were all falling. No, swallowed, being forced down and crushed again and again. Burned flesh all around me, gullet muscles constricting as we were pushed down at frightening speed, all the while my new alien flesh mating with the flesh of the Citadel’s roots.

Half a man reduced to charred screaming meat was deposited on cold hard rock. I was only vaguely aware of others there with me in the darkness. I tried to cringe from the heat but there wasn’t enough of me to move. The roots glowed orange and I heard it scream like Them as it carried lava up, from the depths of Lalande 2 to the Citadel. I could feel it. I was still joined with it. I screamed — inside only now, as every nerve ending burned again. The plasma fire all over again. Why couldn’t I die? Miles above us a city of ice became a volcano as the root system became enormous, destructive, flailing tentacles spewing lava.

‘I didn’t know I could do that,’ Morag said. There was wonder in her voice.