War in Heaven

25

A lot of our plan was based around Rolleston’s arrogance. On the surface this might seem risky but you’ve got to think that if a guy wants to be a god then there’s going to be a degree of arrogance involved.

It looked less like an airlock and more like a blister as it grew out of the hull and enveloped the Hellions, blocking out the dangerous light show below us.

On the other side they were waiting. The Black Squadron troopers weren’t soldiers any more; they were just weapons. They were bent over, covered in thick, overlapping chitinous plates. Reinforced bone pierced their armoured skins; one of their arms was a long sharp curved blade of blackened bone and the other was some kind of ranged weapon. It was their mouths that got me though. They were locked open in a fixed silent scream. You could see the pain etched across their still-human faces. You could read the desperation in their eyes. They were all linked to Rolleston through Demiurge. I think he liked to feel their pain. I think he fed on it. Among the transformed soldiers were twisted and deformed versions of the Berserks, like we’d seen in the Citadel, and with them similarly twisted versions of Their Walkers.

A missile flew from the back tubes of each of the Hellions. Unlike Them, these constructs and mutations screamed when plasma burned flesh and bone. The plasma fire formed a rough circle, a bit of breathing room.

Marching forward firing railguns and plasma cannons at anything that moved, just another target-rich environment. The railguns turned whatever they hit into moist fragments. The plasma cannons left little in their wake but burning puddles of flesh and bone. Rannu’s Hellion and mine took the lead. A corridor was chosen at random. Any movement was met with overwhelming fire. They tried growing through the roof, through the walls, through the floor, but that took them too long. The whole ship was flesh now, writhing all around us.

When their numbers became too much, when they were about to overwhelm us, then missiles were used just to clear a little space. Plasma flame cauterised the flesh of the ship. Each time we could feel the ship react a little beneath us. It was in pain from the fire. The Hellion’s armour started to run as they marched through liquid fire. We couldn’t afford to hang around until the plasma flames burned themselves out.

Targets everywhere. The whole ship seething but the Hellions held their own. Anything that got close was ripped apart by their back tentacles. The armoured suits were soon covered in gore.

Overwhelming firepower or not, there was a limit to our ammunition, and the whole ship was trying to kill us.

Then he came. He didn’t look like the calm and contained professional bastard I’d known from Sirius. He looked like fury. The madness in his mind hadn’t so much leaked as flooded out. He was naked and had transformed himself to look like an ancient Greek statue, like the type Mudge had shown me in a museum in London. As railguns and plasma cannons were pointed towards him, the whole front of his body blackened into what looked like living metal. Surely he couldn’t withstand concentrated plasma cannon fire?

Repeated plasma fire wreathed him in a corona of white flames. The railgun fire hammered into him, blowing chunks out of his flesh, which regrew almost immediately.

It was over quickly. He reached Rannu’s Hellion first and just reached out a burning hand, snapped his plasma cannon and threw the exo-armour into the wall. Root-like tendrils of biomechanical flesh grew around Rannu’s Hellion holding it still. Rolleston turned to my Hellion all but ignoring the constant fire from the railguns. He reached up and his hands grew into claws. He dug into the front of the armour and tore it open.

It was empty. There was a limit to our stupidity — I hoped. Rolleston started to sink into the floor. We triggered the charges in the armour. The feed from the Hellions went down.

It would be nice to think that the charges had taken care of Rolleston, but I just knew we weren’t that lucky. Besides, by that point we were inside. We heard his screams of rage echo through the vein-like corridors.

A few minutes ago

‘Shit,’ I said. There was a conspiracy to force me to relive two of my most unpleasant experiences simultaneously. The technology-transformed-into-flesh of the Bush was forcing us to rethink our entry strategy. Maybe strategy’s a strong word. We had some contingencies but once again we were making this up as we went along.

Only by reconfiguring the flesh insides of the Hellions had we managed to fit the spacesuits inside the exo-armour. Even then it had severely hindered movement and we’d had to use very lightweight suits. They had no armour and I was freezing. God was controlling the Hellions. We had successfully made the first fully functioning robots. God-driven robot devils. They were the diversion but we still had to get in ourselves.

All around us the battle still raged but we were so small compared to it all. We were less than bacteria in the big scheme of things.

I felt Pagan push a jack into one of the plugs in the back of my spacesuit, which in turn fed into one of my plugs.

‘You ready?’ he asked brusquely.

‘No,’ I said. I was shit-scared and hated this plan.

I barely had time to close my eyes and exhale all the air out of my lungs. The tendrils grew through the flesh of my face and cracked the thin plastic visor of the shit spacesuit. Cold. Then burning inside as my blood boiled. I felt my skin stretch and distend as my body swelled. It was agony. The tendrils reached down and touched the skin of the Bush and connected me to something awful. I opened my mouth to scream, except now I had no mouth. We were swallowed.

Flesh, awful and surrounding me. My mind touching it, assaulted, bombarded with information and images either too complex or horrific to process. It passes in a moment. It feels longer.

We fall through the ceiling. I hit the floor with blood running out of my ears. My joints are agony. Frost coats my nostrils. My skin is red from burst blood vessels and despite my internal air supply I’m panting for breath as the tendrils recede back into my flesh and I have a mouth again.

When something approaching conscious thought returns, when the theatre of atrocity that is the images downloaded into my skull stops dancing in front of my eyes, when the pain becomes manageable with the help of a lot of painkillers dumped into my blood, I use what Demiurge taught me when he possessed me. I get the bio-nanites that swarm through my body to heal the damage caused by hypoxia and ebullism. It can’t stop me shaking from the cold. Maybe it’s not just the cold.

Pagan unplugs himself from me and looks down at me with contempt. I resist the urge to shoot him. Then I catch a glimpse of Morag. She’s not quite quick enough to mask the look of concern. The others are down on one knee, weapons at the ready watching all around us.

Warm air runs through the corridor of biomechanical flesh we find ourselves in. It’s like something huge breathing on you. We take turns stripping off the shitty spacesuits while the others guard. We’ve got on inertial armour suits, the only armour we could fit under the spacesuits.

‘Well?’ I asked Pagan as we change.

‘I ran the spoof program, snuck it in using the cloak so it would be undetected. It’s adapted from one I’d use on normal tech but I’m unsure of the interface with the biotech,’ he said coldly.

‘Very clever, Pagan. What does that mean?’ I demanded.

He stopped and looked at me.

‘Either we’ll be hidden from whatever detection systems they’re using or we won’t. Shame we couldn’t get Morag to do it.’ In other words, either we’d be hidden from Demiurge and therefore Rolleston or he’d have us torn apart. We needed Rolleston to turn up, just not yet .

‘Drop the attitude,’ Merle said quietly to Pagan.

Pagan glared at him for a moment and then nodded. He was just frightened. Well that and he hated me, which was reasonable. I did after all kill him.

We pulled the reactive camouflage gillie suits on over our inertial armour and moved out.

We’d downloaded the plans for most of the flag-capable ships in the colonial fleet. We’d been pretty sure that Rolleston would choose the Bush because it was the best but it paid to have contingencies. The plans we had for the Bush were very different to the ship/organism we were now presented with, but Pagan quickly adapted an intelligent navigation program he’d used as a combat air controller. It was mapping the terrain and trying to reconcile it with the plans we had.

We were moving quickly through the corridors, hiding if we saw movement and watching the last moments of the Hellions on our IVDs. We could hear the firefight in the distance. We watched Rolleston walk through some of the best firepower that modern weaponry could provide. The footage was not doing much for morale.

Like the boardroom in the Citadel, the ship was diseased human technology, except in the case of the Bush it was total. We didn’t see much in the way of movement initially and quickly found out why. The humans needed to run the ship had become components, stripped of unnecessary parts, formed into more practical, useful shapes — if you were a psycho — and melded into the biomechanics of the craft. Morag had to stop to throw up. I couldn’t blame her. I wished I still had that reaction to atrocity. That said, it was still seriously fucking with my head.

The feed from the Hellions went down. Then we heard the screaming. It seemed to echo through all the corridors. It was rage. It was unmistakably Rolleston. As much as I wanted to think otherwise, there was no way we could have killed him. The floor didn’t so much shake as quiver beneath us.

We were heading deeper into the ship. We needed to find the isolated Demiurge system. We had hoped for a more normal layout but C amp;C was still our best hope. However, Rolleston must know that we were inside and Demiurge was compromised. Now he would start to hunt us. The moment we were found we would be back to fighting the whole ship, except this time without the help of sophisticated exo-armour.

Outside, Rolleston’s fleet had consolidated. Whoever was commanding the colonial fleets knew what they were doing. With most of Earth’s orbital defences down, its fleet stood little chance. Rolleston’s fleet was advancing, concentrating fire on one big ship until it was cracked open and then moving to another. Their fighters and incredibly fast and manoeuvrable frigates were mopping up the smaller vessels. Already Earth ships were fleeing. The Thunderchilde was still there, however. It didn’t look so clean and new; it was a scarred and burned behemoth taking fire all over its armoured hull. All of the Thunderchilde ’s own weapon systems were constantly lit up. A lot of its fire was aimed at the Bush. We weren’t even feeling the impacts.

On the net the battle was going a little better. Through sheer force of numbers the vagabond army of Earth hackers armed with godsware had taken out most of the enemy’s rank and file hackers and some of the angels. However, the four black suns of Demiurge were forcing them back with columns of black fire that turned anything they hit into ribbons of simulated black skin floating in the virtual air.

More than three quarters of the red sun was black now as the viral eclipse continued trying to eat God. I didn’t even notice God screaming any more. It was ambient noise.

We ducked into side corridors and hid behind rib-like supports when we detected movement ahead. We had motion sensors and tiny rotor remotes, also with motion sensors, feeding information to our IVDs, but in an environment like this their range was severely limited. The reactive camouflage helped, as did the heat- and EM-masking properties of the inertial armour suits.

That he couldn’t find us must have been making Rolleston furious. I wondered if he was worried now that he knew Demiurge was compromised. Though he must have had an idea when he saw us waiting for him when he turned up in-system.

We were deep inside the huge ship now. The absence of doors had made this possible. I don’t suppose they mattered so much when you controlled everything on board and you could grow a new wall if you needed to shut areas off. I still sweated. A lot. It was reassuringly human after I’d had the alien part of my flesh driven home again.

I leaned against a corridor wall hoping the reactive camouflage was sufficient cover as a patrol passed. I was desperate for a fag and wished that I’d made Mudge give me one back on the Thunderchilde. The patrol consisted of one of the weaponised Black Squadron members, four mutated Berserk-like bioborgs and something that looked like a cross between one of the Berserks and a praying mantis. It had downward-pointing, sword-like bones for forearms. I’d slowed down my breathing, supplementing it with air from my internal tanks.

The Black Squadron guy stopped. He sniffed the air. You have to be kidding. He turned to look at the wall. Rannu was little more than a pixelated ghost as his reactive camouflage tried to keep up. He looped his new monofilament garrotte around the guy’s neck and pulled it tight. His head popped off.

I was behind one of the Berserks. I pulled its head back with the metal of my right hand. Four blades extended from just behind my knuckles on my left hand and I punched them repeatedly and quickly into the back of its skull. It nearly knocked me over as it fell to the ground.

Another ghost and the praying mantis thing had a long blade sticking out of its skull. Merle had jumped up and stabbed it through the top of its head. The crack of armoured chitin breaking under the bowie knife-like point of the machete was fiercely audible. The thing shook for a moment and then dropped to the ground.

The others were having less luck. They were all carrying knives that weren’t really up to dealing with things like this in hand-to-hand. Of the three of them only Pagan really had the training for this sort of fight. That left them with their handguns and the 10mm rounds were no match for the chitinous armour.

Superheated air exploded as one of the remaining mutated Berserks fired its black light projector from its spiked and twisted weapons gauntlet. I heard Morag cry out and felt a moment of panic. I kicked out at the Berserk’s knee joint. I heard a satisfying crack and the thing lurched down on one knee and I drove the four knuckle blades on my right hand into its face, warping its horrible facial features further. I twisted the blades and then pulled them out. Letting it slump to the ground.

There was a burst of laser fire and one of the two remaining Berserks hit the ground, its head transformed into dirty black steam. A longer burst of gauss-boosted fire from Mudge’s converted AK-47. The final Berserk shook with every hit as it staggered back and then hit the ground.

We were now well and truly compromised.

Red steam floated into the air through Morag’s reactive camouflage.

‘You okay?’ I sub-vocalised over the tac net.

‘Fine. We need to move,’ she snapped.

We ran forward, stealth abandoned in favour of speed. Weapons sweeping left, right, up and down as we went. Anything moving got shot. We didn’t stay to see whether or not our fire was successful.

Where C amp;C should have been we found a solid wall of what we thought was new growth. We were taking shard and black beam hits on our backs. My shoulder laser was out searching for targets. Occasionally its red beam would stab out but mostly they were staying hidden.

We took cover behind the rib supports in the corridor and laid down suppressing fire. It was a waiting game now. Waiting for Rolleston to turn up and kill us, or more likely turn up, hurt us, torture us for a long time and then possess us so we could become part of his brave new world. I was firing the SAW and the shoulder laser. The corridor shuddered as white plasma fire ate away part of it. Morag caught the Black Squadron guy who’d fired with a three-beam burst from her laser carbine. Part of his superheated flesh was blown off but he ducked back around a corner leaving black steam hanging in the air behind him.

‘Jakob!’ Pagan snapped at me. He was a series of fractal images as his malfunctioning reactive camouflage tried to make him blend. Angrily he pulled the gillie suit off. He was hunkered down over by the new-growth wall gesturing at me to join him. I knew what he wanted.

‘I’m not a fucking jack!’ I snapped. It was just fear and selfishness.

‘Do it!’ Morag demanded.

Mudge glanced over at me and then returned to firing.

I fired a long burst up the corridor as I moved sideways towards Pagan. The return fire intensified and a beam and two shards tagged me. Part of my inertial armour was a blackened and smoking mess and the shards spun me around. I landed by Pagan’s feet. He just pushed a jack into one of my plugs. I felt the flesh on my face become something else. A foreign body moved inside me. The flailing tendrils of transformed flesh grew out of my face. I would never get use to this. It still horrified me. I had to fight against the panic. I wanted to throw myself away from them but of course they were part of me.

I touched the flesh of the new-growth wall. I felt the tendrils burrow into the warm moist membrane, like maggots through dead flesh. I felt something monstrous notice me and breathe my name. I heard it inside my skull.

The jack came out of the plug in my neck and I pushed myself back from the wall as the tendrils started to grow back into my flesh. The membrane covering the entrance started to dissipate like it was being eaten by invisible parasites. I was vaguely aware of our return fire intensifying as I crawled into the room.

Two grenades exploded behind me as the others bought themselves time and backed into the room. I was trying to get up, trying to deal with the body shock, when Pagan grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me towards a biomechanical, honeycomb-like growth. I’d seen it before. It was the Themtech-derived memory structure.

‘Move!’ Pagan snapped again. He was not being gentle. I was too disoriented to fight him off. I noticed that one of the walls in the room was transparent and supported by a biomechanical skeletal structure. Children floated in liquid behind the wall.

‘What…?’ I managed.

‘They’re children,’ I heard Morag say in horror.

The jack slid into my plug and again my flesh was transformed. It grew out to mate with the honeycomb.

‘Just for a moment,’ Pagan said. I touched the honeycomb. It was like the skin of a blister. Beneath it I felt Demiurge raging, trying to break through and touch me, consume me again. There was black fire and hatred beneath the skin. Then free again.

‘I will fucking kill you if you do that again!’ I screamed at Pagan when my face had the rudiments of a mouth again.

Pagan was standing over me looking cold and angry. Mudge, Merle and Rannu were at the new door I’d made, firing into the corridor.

‘You see that, what you felt? That’s where we’re going,’ Pagan told me. I stared at him. Knowing what they had to do and catching a glimpse of it were two different things.

‘You’ll both die,’ I said. I wasn’t thinking straight — we were all going to die — but they were going to be consumed by hate. They didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t understand that I knew what it was like to drown in the filth of Demiurge, of Rolleston’s mind. What had we been thinking? We should have run. Given him the planet.

I looked over at Morag, who was staring up at the wall-sized fish tank of children. They had no eyes, mouths or nostrils. They were hooked up to IVs and catheters and had wires coming from the plugs in the backs of their necks. Some of them were obviously dead. I guessed from biofeedback.

I tried to take in the room around me. It was an enormous space, like a cathedral made of biomechanical flesh. The domed roof was transparent and looked out into space. It was illuminated by the constant strobing flashes of the ongoing battle outside.

‘That’s the angels,’ Pagan said distractedly. He was studying the two ports he’d had me make in the skin of the honeycombed biological memory structure. He didn’t look happy. I could understand why. They looked more like an orifice than any ports I’d ever seen.

‘Jakob!’ The voice echoed down the corridor. I was only able to pick it up over the gunfire because of the quality of my audio filters. I went cold. Even after all this she still frightened me.

Morag gave me a look I couldn’t read. She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. Pagan was staring at me, grinning. The grin was cold and completely humourless; it looked like a rictus. I realised how gaunt he had become. He was just taut skin stretched across a skeleton. Both of them sat down and then slumped forward as they tranced into hell. They had to. We had no choice. They had to go after Demiurge in here, protected from God in an isolated system. For any of this to work, Rolleston had to be completely shut off from Demiurge.

The gunfire had stopped. I glanced over at the doorway. Rannu and Mudge were on either side of it. Merle had his plasma rifle at his shoulder and was checking all around the cathedral-sized room.

‘Jakob!’ the Grey Lady shouted again.

‘What?’ I found myself asking almost involuntarily.

‘We need you to surrender,’ she said.

Mudge and Rannu took turns to look over at me. Rannu had a raised eyebrow and Mudge was actually smiling.

‘Have you got a fag?’ I demanded.

‘Fucking get your own,’ Mudge told me. Merle was just shaking his head.

‘Oh yeah. I’ll just pop down to McShit’s and get a pack,’ I said. I was a long way from Dundee now.

‘You know it was the smell of cigarettes that gave us away, don’t you?’ Merle told his lover. Mudge just shrugged.

‘Jakob?’ No impatience there. She was calm, just waiting for an answer.

‘Okay, we surrender. You can come in and get us now!’ Mudge shouted. Even Merle laughed.

The motion sensor strapped to my webbing just behind my left shoulder picked up movement above me. I raised the SAW and saw Merle doing the same. I immediately zoomed in on it, not quite sure what I was seeing. It had a long, chitinous armoured body and six legs ending in sharp sword-like bone blades. The torso of a human woman stuck out of it. Her arms also ended in bone blades. Growing from the back of the thing was a gristly, multi-barrelled, rapid-firing shard gun.

She was descending towards us like a spider dropping down its web. Except the thread was made of flesh and looked something like a long intestine. As it lowered towards us the walls seethed, as all around us things began to grow out of it.

On the guncam feeds from Mudge and Rannu I saw weaponised Black Squadron things sprint at them firing. Their gun arms were either gauss or plasma weapons. Rannu fired his gauss carbine and Mudge his AK-47. They had to hose them down, keep firing at them, let the bullets chip away at their flesh. The mutated Black Squadron guys were still running as they died.

I dived to the side and rolled onto my back as shards impacted all around me. It was suppressing fire. I couldn’t work it out — this thing could have easily killed me. There was no cover. I returned fire, the comforting kick of the SAW against my shoulder. Every third round in the cassette was a tracer. I could tell I wasn’t having any effect on this sword-legged thing because I could see the tracers ricocheting off its carapace and bouncing into the wall.

I switched targets to fire at the things growing out of the wall. Anything that looked well formed got hit. The tracers and the armour-piercing, explosive-tipped, long, nine-millimetre rounds tore them apart. I was finding my targets because they were hitting me with shards or black beams. Pain, track the source and fire till it came apart.

‘Merle, take that spider thing out!’ I said over the tac net. I couldn’t work out why he hadn’t done it. He was taking hits as well. ‘Merle!’ he was ignoring me. Fuck it! I aimed my grenade launcher.

‘Don’t fucking fire!’ Merle shouted at me like he meant it. There was something new in his voice — emotion. On my IVD I could see from the window for Merle’s guncam that it was aimed at me.

‘What are you doing?!’ I shouted at him and staggered forward from more shard fire hitting my back.

‘It’s Cat!’ I looked again. I magnified in on her face. Some of it was new-growth biomechanical flesh over where the Grey Lady had blown Cat’s own flesh off. It was her as a reanimated corpse. Her pallor reminded me of Sharcroft. She didn’t even have the expression of agony on her face that the Black Squadron guys did.

I swung round to fire at more of the things crawling out of the walls as more shard fire hit me. I felt the integrity of my inertial armour start to give. I was knocked back but my subcutaneous armour held.

I caught a glimpse of the net feed. The viral eclipse that was eating the sun was almost done. Then the sun disappeared. God disappeared. Flames surged across heaven. Even though they were just icons, I could see the panic in the vagabond army.

Lying on the honeycombed memory structure, Pagan’s body began to buck and spasm. Smoke was pouring out of his plugs now.

Mudge was spun round as gauss fire from one of the mutated Black Squadron troopers caught him in the side. He hit the ground still firing but the trooper made for Morag and Pagan’s tranced-in bodies. I aimed and kept the SAW on him, pouring fire into him; at the same time my shoulder laser was blowing steaming chunks of superheated meat off him. He hit the ground. Mudge was back up by the door firing into the corridor. More doors were beginning to open in the walls. It was hopeless.

In the net Morag’s icon looked like her. It wasn’t Annis or the Maiden of Flowers, just Morag. She was standing in a circle of skull-topped poles, the ghost fence protection program. All around her Demiurge was like a black storm. Her hair and clothes were whipped around by the fury of it.

In front of the poles ghostly figures appeared: Buck, Gibby, Balor, Vicar, Dog Face, Big Henry, Tailgunner, Mother and Cat. Not vanquished foes, but a manifestation of the program written in by Morag, her tribute to the fallen. They were virtual spirits of the dead to protect her. Even if the body of one of them was here trying to kill us. The ghost fence protected her ritualistic summoning program. Except it wasn’t a summoning program; they came and went as they pleased. It was a series of complex protocols for contact. It had been set up to drive home the mysterious and superior nature of the gods in the net. Morag didn’t want to play that game.

I would have like to have shot and killed Cat’s transformed body, but the new doors appearing in the wall were keeping me a little busy.

‘Mudge, get to one of the other entrances! Rannu, stay were you are. The Grey Lady’s going to be coming through that door any moment!’ I shouted over the tac net.

Mudge ran towards one of the other holes appearing in the biomechanical flesh, firing at anything that moved. Nearly everything moved. I ran towards Morag and Pagan’s prone bodies. They’d both been hit multiple times. Parts of their inertial armour suits were blackened and smoking. But they were still alive, and that was all they needed to do their job.

‘Merle, if you’re not going to fucking shoot her, can you shoot everything else, please!’ I shouted. Brilliant. The ultimate killing machine chooses now to become sentimental and shut down.

As Mudge sprinted towards the other door Cat fired from her position above us. I saw shards tear through Mudge’s back and blow one of his metal legs off from the knee down. He went sprawling across the floor.

‘Listen, you bastards! Listen to me, all you fake-scary frightened cowards who feed us cryptic bollocks in return for worship! Listen to me, gods of the net!’ I heard Morag scream into the storm of Demiurge. She was angry. ‘Join us here! Now! Or we will show Demiurge where you live!’ The resolve in her voice made real the threat.

If they were as powerful as we thought, then they would also know about the experimental array linked to a physics lab on a science ship in orbit on the other side of the planet. She would feed that information to Demiurge if she had to. That would take the fight to them. It had been Salem along with a friend of his, a physics professor at Moa City University, who had worked it out. Salem had been a man of faith. He had never believed in the gods in the net. If I hadn’t been busy I would have been proud. Even in that icon she looked like the high priestess of an ancient and terrible religion. Gods were just another weapon to her.

‘Reloading!’ I shouted. As if anyone had time to care. I ejected the cassette from the SAW. My shoulder laser spun on its servos firing rapidly, but it wasn’t enough. I got shot. A lot. My armour gave up the ghost, and I watched black beams appear through my side and shards impact into my chest and legs. One of them dented my metal right arm as it bounced off. I collapsed to my knees. Red warning icons sang their familiar boring song in my IVD. I closed them down — all they did was tell me the fucking obvious.

I managed to ram the cassette home as weaponised Black Squadron troopers came sprinting into the room through the new doors. I fired, taking them down one after another. Each one was getting a little closer to me. I tried to place my body between them and Pagan and Morag. Absorbing more hits. Concentrating on the ones with the plasma weapons for arms. I couldn’t let one of them hit me.

I didn’t understand their tactics. These guys had been recruited from special forces of every nationality but they were acting like Them.

Cat landed in front of Merle.

In the net there was light in the darkness of Demiurge. I saw Pagan wearing his Druidical icon. Head bowed, stooped gait as he tried to walk against the howling windstorm of Demiurge. The glow was coming from him. Inside him. White and steel blue. It seemed to be engulfing his insides. Then he stood up straight, his clothes and hair torn at by the black wind. Pagan became something else: a holy terror. His eyes became lightning, his mouth became lightning, his internal organs became lightning, shining though his skin and clothes.

‘Cat?’ Merle asked. He sounded like a little boy. Oh for fuck’s sake.

I tried to resist the urge to think, I told you so, when Cat put both her sword-like arms and her two front legs through Merle’s torso and legs. She reared up on her back four legs. The blades piercing the screaming Merle manipulated him like a puppet.

I heard the flat thump of a grenade being launched and then another. Two large holes appeared in Cat’s torso, or possibly thorax, and then exploded. The front part of the Cat hybrid lurched forward. Her skull exploded as a long burst tore through it. I’m pretty sure that a couple of rounds hit Merle as well. What was left of Cat collapsed to the floor, dead. Again. Unfortunately Merle was still impaled on the ground.

‘I got you, lover,’ Mudge said over the tac net as he crawled towards Merle taking hits every inch of the way, the barrel of his AK-47 still smoking.

On the net the glow around Pagan became bright. It whited out the window momentarily, like the flash from a nuclear weapon I’d seen in vizzes about the FHC. Then it came back. White light and lightning was pouring into Pagan and then back out of him, striking out all around him. The ship shuddered beneath my feet. I could see something rise from Pagan like a ghost of blue energy. I could just about make out the shape of Ambassador as I’d first seen him so long ago on board the Forbidden Pleasure being protected by a terrified Morag. Now it was Demiurge’s turn to scream as white fire and steel-blue lightning purged him out of his own isolated system.

The ship bucked and shook. All the things trying to grow through the walls and the ceiling thrashed about and screamed inhumanly. The honeycombed bulge in the floor cracked and glowed beneath it. Pagan’s body spasmed so hard it actually left the ground and then burst into flames. This was what had been planned for Morag.

The inhuman screaming stopped and all the things that had been growing out of the wall fell. It was quiet. This was respite, but it still left us with the Black Squadron things, the Grey Lady and Rolleston, who must be pretty angry now. Who must be through toying with us.

Morag came to and sat up. She looked at Pagan’s charred corpse. Then she looked at my blood-covered and scorched form.

Merle was trying to crawl out from underneath the corpse of his transformed sister.

‘I’m not being funny, Merle, but if you’re capable of holding a gun do you think you could help?’ I asked him.

He just muttered something and then screamed as he pulled the blades out of his flesh. He retrieved his plasma rifle and got ready. He was bleeding badly. We all were.

The fleet battle was almost over. Just the badly damaged Thunderchilde and a few others held out. There was debris everywhere.

In the net the fight was going a little better as the vagabond army surrounded the few remaining angels. They didn’t know they were killing children. Above them the sky looked like a rough sea of fire and the four black suns still burned in the sky, columns of black fire still raining down on the plain of black glass.

‘Do you like my Seraphim? They are born into the net and think it is the real world. They truly do believe they are my terrible angels.’

I had no idea where he had come from. He just appeared in the room. I think he might have wanted to spout some snappy villainous monologue. Fuck that. We knew it was pointless but we shot him. A lot. It was cathartic.

Rannu was thrown back from the doorway he was guarding. He shouted. The side of his head steamed red as he staggered and fired a long and surprisingly undisciplined burst down the corridor one-handed. He was still staggering back as he fired his grenade launcher. There was an explosion in the corridor. Then a grenade hit the ground by Rannu and exploded. A concussion grenade, it still had enough force to blow him into the air. The Grey Lady jumped through the explosion.

Mudge, Morag, Merle and I concentrated fire on Rolleston. I ran out of ammo and ditched the SAW. I was aware of something happening in the net but I wasn’t sure what. I grabbed my Mastodon and TO-7 from their smartgrip holsters and with my shoulder laser continued firing uselessly at Rolleston.

He walked through the fire and made for Merle, who fired round after round into him from his plasma rifle, surrounding him in flames. Merle dropped the plasma weapon because he didn’t want Rolleston surrounded in burning plasma when he reached him, then drew his Void Eagle. In very rapid succession he fired all the rounds in its magazine pointlessly into Rolleston. His flesh was reforming and healing the inflicted wounds. Rolleston closed with Merle and we had to stop shooting at him. I holstered both my pistols and sprinted towards Rolleston.

I only saw it because I was looking for it. Both of the obsidian-bladed punch daggers appeared in Merle’s hands. The daggers were filled with Crom Dhu, the derivate of Crom designed to seek out and kill the other bio-nanites. It had been designed to exterminate Them if the war had ever got beyond the Cabal’s control.

Without the co-operation and resources of the Cabal, Crom Dhu had proved costly and difficult to replicate. Most of what the Earth forces had manufactured was stored in bunkers on Earth ready to fight the terraforming attempts of Crom Cruach. Rannu, Merle and I each had some. Merle’s was in his punch daggers; Rannu’s and mine were both in skull fuckers, daggers designed for piercing the hard bone of skulls. The virus was in the pommels, designed to be released when the blades felt flesh. Not unlike the dagger that Rolleston had used to infect Gregor. I drew mine from the small of my back as I ran towards Rolleston.

Unable to get a clear shot, Morag charged the Grey Lady, who was fighting Rannu. He had his skull fucker in his hand as he tried to dodge and block the Grey Lady’s incredibly fast flurry of kicks and hand strikes. She was beating the shit out of him.

Morag launched herself into the air in a perfect flying kick aimed at the Grey Lady, who side-kicked her in mid-air. I heard the crack of bone powdering as foot contacted face. It was a sickening sound. Morag’s head whipped back and she flew past the pair of them and landed in a heap.

The Grey Lady spun round on one leg and kneed Rannu in the side of the head with the upraised leg. It was so fast even Rannu hadn’t been able to do anything about it. She kneed him so hard that his knees gave out and he stumbled to the ground.

Merle stabbed out at Rolleston with speed I could only envy. Rolleston reached forward and grabbed one arm, but that had been a feint for the blade in Merle’s other hand, which was heading straight at Rolleston’s face. He caught that arm as well. I saw a look of panic on Merle’s face, and then Rolleston just broke both his arms, snapping the bones with such force that they broke through flesh and subcutaneous armour. I saw the bulges under Merle’s inertial armour as it turned dark and wet with blood. Merle started screaming. Understandably.

Rolleston turned to me as I reached him and swung at him with the blade. He grabbed my arm and then used my own momentum to help propel me into the wall. I bounced off the dead mutated Berserks that had been growing there and hit the ground disoriented.

I shook my head. I was vaguely aware of things happening on the net. No time. The knife, the knife? Rolleston was holding it. He knew. Hell, it had been his idea.

Morag and Rannu had both staggered to their feet and were attacking Josephine Bran. She was having no problem blocking or dodging both their attacks. When one of them gave her an opening she would close and hit them with low kicks, elbows and strikes at joint or nerves. Almost every touch made them cry out in pain. When she attacked she would manoeuvre so her intended victim got in the way of the other one’s attack. More than once Morag punched or kicked Rannu.

Rolleston tossed away the knife. Mudge started shooting him pointlessly in the back. Staring at Rolleston, everything he’d done, everything he’d caused to happen, came flooding back to me. From Sirius onwards, I could see the faces of all the members of the Wild Boys, SAS, SBS, other special forces, military intelligence and conventional soldiers whose deaths he’d been responsible for. All my friends that I’d watched die. I saw all of the pain he’d caused. In a moment of clarity, a moment of perfect cold anger, I knew that I was going to kill him.

Now I saw what was happening on the net. The plain of glass was obscured in mist. The beatific and horrific walked in the mist as shadows. They were like giants among the vagabond army, seeking out those who had been loyal, those who had worshipped them, and gifting them with the godsware. They were the history of humanity as religious iconography given form on the net. Like their namesakes they did not fight alongside humanity; they played their own games, but today they rewarded their followers with technology, uplifting them. Morag’s threat/summons had been heard.

I smiled. All eight blades extended from my knuckles. Rolleston slowly turned to Mudge. He could take his time as Mudge was no threat. One of Rolleston’s arms was transforming into a plasma weapon as he readied himself to kill another one of my friends. Mudge was still lying where he had fallen, firing burst after burst.

I ran at Rolleston’s back and jumped on it, swinging at him like a wild thing with the claws. With a strength I did not know I had, I pushed the blades through his hardening flesh again and again, just hacking at him. Black ichor, like Them, an entire alien race of his victims, spurted out over me. It was a religious experience. A very base one, as I became a vessel of rage moving faster and hitting harder than I ever had before. I was a wild animal enhanced by cybernetics and alien creatures in my blood and pure fucking rage. Rolleston was surprised by the ferocity of my attack. I would’ve been surprised by the ferocity of the attack if my total hatred for this man had not just coalesced into a perfect rage that left no room for thought in my head.

His head came away in my hand. His body dropped to the ground. I was covered from head to foot in blood and ichor. Winded, almost unable to breathe. I had become something else. I wondered about the Themtech in my body. Had I just been a vessel for revenge or self-defence, sent by another race?

The decapitation of Rolleston must have distracted the Grey Lady for a moment as Morag caught her squarely on the side of the head with a punch. She kicked out at Morag hard enough to break ribs. Rannu feinted with his left. Bran easily blocked it. Rannu’s right hand was a blur, then he stepped back. The dagger with Crom Dhu in it was sticking out of Bran’s shoulder. She turned slowly to look at it. The dagger would be pumping Crom Dhu into her system, killing all the Themtech bio-nanites that had given her the edge over all us mere humans for all those years.

In the net the vagabond army had taken to the air, trailing their silver cords behind them. They were among the net representations of the ships of the enemy fleet.

The head in my hand started laughing. I looked down at it in horror.

‘What were you hoping to accomplish?’ Rolleston’s severed head asked me.

I dropped it and backed away. His body stood up and reached for its head. Already black veins were growing from the stump of his neck and the bottom of his head. They met as he placed his head back on his neck and I watched as they knitted together.

The Grey Lady picked the knife out of her shoulder and threw it away. It was empty and useless now. Morag was clutching her chest and shaking her head despondently. Black scalpel-like blades shot out of Bran’s fingers, and she moved too quickly for Rannu. She raked the blades down his face, tearing them through his subcutaneous armour and making four deep bloody rents in his face. He stumbled back, sitting down hard.

‘Are we finished now?’ Rolleston asked. He was starting to sound angry. ‘Have we done our little dance?’

I glanced over at the knife he’d taken from me and tossed aside.

‘Probably not,’ I ventured, but if the knife hadn’t worked on Bran then this one wouldn’t work on Rolleston. He followed my eyes to where it lay.

‘Do you not understand what you’re fighting against?’ he asked.

‘Well, I’ve always known you were a wanker.’

I heard Mudge laugh. A lit fag had appeared in his mouth.

‘You know this fight would’ve been over a long time ago if you two hadn’t poisoned your flesh,’ Rannu said bitterly. I could tell by his body language that he was ready to start fighting again. Mudge was about to back-shoot Bran, and Morag was preparing to attack Bran as well.

I spent a long time looking at Morag. She looked back at me. She didn’t smile. She nodded. It was enough. I turned back to Rolleston. I briefly wondered why he was naked. Maybe there were just no clothes fine enough for a new god.

‘Shall we get this over and done with?’ I asked.

‘It is,’ he said. Black Squadron mutants came running into the vast biomechanical chamber to point their weapons limbs at us.

‘Bollocks,’ was the best I managed to come up with.

‘This was a game, a diversion for us, nothing more. You were controlled at every step of the way,’ Rolleston told me.

‘Bollocks,’ I said again, with some feeling. ‘I think we gave you a bit of a fright.’

He gave this some thought.

‘A few surprises but what have you accomplished? You’ve removed Demiurge from the Bush ’s isolated system at the cost of one of your own. I’ll just open it up to Demiurge out there. You made the little gods come. Good. They’re in one place — makes it easier for us to deal with them — and thanks to you we now have an idea of where they come from. Your god is gone. I rule the net. Your fleet is almost destroyed and Earth will finally grow to its manifest and true form.’

‘If I ask really nicely will you kill us now?’ Mudge said. Rolleston glanced over at him. The Grey Lady was coming to his side.

‘I’m not going to kill you, Howard. We didn’t go to all this trouble for that.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said quietly.

‘Don’t worry. We’re not even going to possess you. Well perhaps Mr Nagarkoti just long enough for him to rape his family.’

Rannu flinched. He looked terrified.

‘No, you’re such throwbacks that you will be the only witnesses to the world transcendent. Of course you will be in different forms. We are going to experiment with nerve endings and agony in entertaining new shapes. You’ll become musical instruments, curiosities.’

‘You know, all the other Wild Boys used to hate you because they thought you were a ruthless bastard. Then you get into all this and everyone’s scared of you because you’re such a thoroughgoing loon. I never hated you. I just don’t like you because you’re so fucking boring,’ Mudge told him and ground out his cigarette. Then he started crawling towards Merle, who was lying on the floor, his face a mask of agony as he tried to cope with the pain. Mudge ignored the Black Squadron things. What was the worst they could do to him?

I saw the anger on Rolleston’s face. He really couldn’t understand why such lowly beings as us — scum really, squaddies, petty criminals, failed not-so-petty criminals, journalists and ex-hookers — wouldn’t bow and scrape to his divine majesty. He really had bought into this god thing. The amount of power he wielded aside, it really was pathetic. He had us. We were dead or worse. We would end up as playthings for his twisted fantasies, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling we’d won, or rather that he couldn’t touch us. On the other hand I suspected that wouldn’t be much comfort to me in my future of torture, but the human mind could only take so much. I’d end up mad, insensate and probably comatose. So something to look forward to then.

‘If you’re doing the supervillain bit, have I got time for a drink?’ Mudge asked.

‘Look, you’re going to do really bad things to us — we get it. All things considered, we’re a bit fatigued by looking at the all the squirrel shit in your head that you’ve forced out into the real world,’ I said. ‘Really, we’ve got nothing to talk about, us and you.’

He nodded as if he understood. Then his fingers became claws and he rammed them into my chest cavity. I dribbled blood. It really fucking hurt but I didn’t scream. Rannu flinched. Mudge actually gave a shout of surprise. Morag cried out, her hand shooting to her mouth. Merle had his own stuff to worry about.

I could feel his fingers inside me. That’s okay. Internal organs don’t have nerve endings. I spat out some more blood. My love/hate relationship with the medical diagnostic warning icons on my IVD continued as they told me I’d be dead soon.

‘Major,’ Josephine said, putting a hand on Rolleston’s arm. He looked down at her. She was staring at me.

Something itched at the back of my head, some instinct telling me to concentrate on the net. Odd time I know, but I checked the net feed. Silver fire flowed from weapons, limbs, mouths and other things into the net representations of the ships in Rolleston’s fleet. The silver fire, given to the vagabond army of hackers by the gods in the net, sought out the possessed. It was the same godsware program that had freed Rannu. Many of the possessed would die. They weren’t in as good a physical condition and didn’t have Rannu’s strength of mind. I looked at Rolleston and smiled. He was getting angrier and angrier. He would feel the mass exorcisms — as pain, I hoped.

His feelings at what was happening boiled out onto his malleable flesh, his features warping, flowing and changing, I suspected beyond his control. As I watched his face become part demon and part insect, I realised. This wasn’t just hatred aimed at us, this was fear and self-loathing given fantasy and then form. He hadn’t considered himself human, ever, and hated himself. If he hadn’t had his fingers in my chest I would have pitied him.

I saw Pagan walking across the plain of black glass under a sea of fire towards four black suns. Lightning played all around him as his staff tapped against the glass.

I turned to look at Morag. She was horrified by what was happening to me. I wanted to tell her it would be okay. Maybe I did. I turned back to Rolleston and laughed at him.

‘Father?’ Josephine said with some urgency now, still holding on to his arm.

‘Look what you’ve done to yourself,’ I said to him and then closed my eyes. I didn’t want his face to be the last thing I saw. I thought of Morag. Rolleston clenched his fist.