War in Heaven

6

I’d taken worse beatings but it was pretty extensive. When they got tired of bruising fists and feet on subcutaneous armour they started to use sticks. My internal systems make me resistant to shock but they can be overloaded, like the Wait did in Crawling Town. They had a go at overloading my systems. Pretty much my only ray of light was when a few of them managed to electrocute each other. My biggest complaint was the poor quality of the threats. They had a limited repertoire mainly based around anal rape.

I tried not to rise to any of it. Regiment training was to try and remain as passive as possible. I pretty much had to use all my self-control to not take the piss. I suppose I should’ve been angry with them, but if somebody had done to a Wild Boy what I had done to those four police just outside Pitlochry we would have made sure they wound up dead.

Bruised and broken, I hit the floor of the cell with sufficient force to cause me to blow blood out of my mouth and nose. All in all I think I’d come off lightly, or maybe I was just getting used to barely being able to move because of the pain. I noticed I’d spat blood over a pair of expensive-looking shoes.

‘I’ve killed people for less,’ a broad cockney voice said. I looked up at the owner of the voice with the one eye I could still open. Even that hurt.

‘Isn’t that just the kind of thing that people say?’ I asked. Or at least I tried to, but it came out a slurred dribbling mess.

She was quite a small Asian woman, wearing a very smart-looking skirt suit. About half of her body was obviously cybernetic reconstruction. Something pretty bad had happened to her in the past. She also looked very familiar.

A solid white guy wearing a suit and carrying one of the new gauss PDWs and a wiry Chinese woman dressed and armed similarly stood either side of her. They were obviously bodyguards but unlike most bodyguards weren’t just a status symbol. I knew they knew what they were doing.

‘Do you know who I am?’ the Asian woman asked.

‘You look familiar.’ I was drooling blood as I spoke. ‘Are you in the vizzes? Immersion porn?’ The bodyguards were trying not to smile. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be a smart-arse; I was just confused. Though why I thought a porn star would visit me I don’t know. ‘I know who they are though. Lien, Mike,’ I said by way of greeting to the bodyguards. They were both ex-SBS. I’d known them briefly on Dog 4 but I think they’d spent most of their time on Proxima. Mike nodded to me.

‘All right, Jake,’ Lien said, her Scouse accent still strong. ‘You look like shit.’ I managed to give her the finger but only because I used my cybernetic arm.

‘My name is Komali Akhtar. I’m the prime minister,’ she said as if that should mean something to me. It did at least explain where I knew her from.

‘So you don’t work in porn then?’

‘No, Sergeant Douglas, I do not.’ Her voice was becoming more brittle.

‘In my defence I am at a funny angle,’ I slurred.

‘Get him on his feet,’ she told Mike and Lien. They ignored her. Good for you, I thought. When working close protection your job is to keep the principal safe, not to fetch and carry. When it comes to the principal’s safety they do what the bodyguards say, not the other way round.

Akhtar sighed, but to her credit she leaned down and helped me to a bench despite the fact I was covered in blood. Lien watched me very carefully and made sure she always had a clear shot.

‘What happened to you then?’ I said, approximately.

‘Pressure crushed my sub like an eggshell on Proxima,’ Akhtar answered matter-of-factly.

‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She looked me in the eyes. ‘Sorry? I’m one of the luckiest people alive today. At that depth in those oceans I should be dead. I thank Allah every day for my continuing existence.’ I guess that made sense. Everything I’d heard about Proxima suggested it was a nasty place to do business.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been following your career. Your terrorist act-’

‘Bollocks,’ I interrupted her. I’d spoken with enough feeling to spit blood all down my chest.

‘Excuse me?’ She did not sound happy. If she had been a Royal Navy sub captain and, if I remembered correctly, a scion of one of the more powerful Hackney families, then she almost certainly did not like being interrupted like that.

‘We weren’t using fear to make a political point; we were trying to use truth to make a point, and we’d largely been backed into a corner.’

‘Semantics.’

‘Either that or it’s spin to call us terrorists.’

She regarded me for a moment, very much the officer about to bawl out an uppity NCO or whatever they called them in the navy. She decided to let it pass and continue.

‘Regardless of the nature of your acts, your accomplishments are quite impressive bearing in mind the odds you were up against.’

‘Didn’t we pave the way for your career?’

‘Your brawling with the police is less so,’ she said, ignoring my comment.

‘They deserved it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘There’s no fucking maybe about it.’

‘Did you vote?’ Her question took me by surprise.

‘What the fuck has that got to do with it?’

‘We all watched your broadcast. We all heard what was said — Mr Mudgie’s speech about democracy. If you truly do want to change things, then you have to take an interest. Otherwise Mr Cronin was right: you are purveyors of chaos just trying to tear things down.’

I looked at her for a long time. She was like the few good officers I’d met in my time. You trusted her. Admittedly you trusted her because you knew where you stood, not because you thought she had your best interests at heart.

‘You let them beat me, didn’t you?’ I asked, smiling.

‘Of course. You may not like the police but we will need them. Your beating was their price for you not being killed resisting arrest.’

‘Did you pull the MI5 team out of the warehouse?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Vicar was more likely to talk to you.’

‘Going to torture me for information too?’

‘That was a decision made by the Cabal, not me.’

Which was fair. She hadn’t even been in office at that point.

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘I want you to go and help your friends. Cause problems for the Cabal again.’

‘Why me? Don’t you have a country’s armed forces under your command?’

‘Yes, and everyone will be doing what they can, but you’re rather good at annoying the Cabal.’

I smiled at this. It hurt.

‘You speaking to all of us?’

‘As many as I can.’

‘One-on-one briefings?’

‘You and your friends have been the most effective thorn in the side of the Cabal.’

This wasn’t making sense. My career as a so-called terrorist celebrity aside, she was too high up and I was too low down.

‘You have other people with our skill sets. You’re not telling me something, and unless you level with me you can go and tell the police that we’re not finished and I think they’re a bunch of pussies.’

I noticed Mike smile. Akhtar gave this some thought. The silence seemed to stretch out. This gave me time to consider just how much pain I was in. It was a lot, and this was despite the near-constant drain on my internal drug reservoirs.

‘We’re desperate,’ she finally said. This I believed. ‘What I tell you now cannot be repeated.’

‘If I go back to work with Pagan, Morag and the others, it will be discussed with the team.’

She gave this some more thought. I think she was warring with years of experience and training that emphasised the importance of secrecy. At the same time I was warring with years of being sent out on jobs with not nearly enough information.

‘You understand how this battle will be fought, don’t you?’ she finally said.

‘Fleet and net,’ I said. ‘They have the fleet, but if I understand the God versus Demiurge equation properly then we have the processing power to make God more powerful than Demiurge, which will have to rely on the processing power in the four colonial fleets.’

‘Yes and no,’ She said. This was new. ‘In theory we have the processing power but since God was released most governments have been isolating their systems and taking their resources off the net.’

Then it hit me.

‘And they won’t want to share because it means that they have to let God in again.’ I groaned.

‘Which means that Demiurge may well have the processing power to win the conflict. Basic divide and conquer.’

The short-sightedness of it beggared belief.

‘What do they think is going to happen?!’ I demanded angrily.

‘You have to remember it’s still an unseen threat.’

‘They’ve lost contact with all four fucking colonies!’

‘Obviously you are preaching to the converted here. There’s more,’ she said. I waited. I had the feeling I was going to be told more stuff which would make me feel angry and powerless at other people’s stupidity. ‘Earth’s defences are not as impregnable as people have been led to believe.’

I felt my heart sink. I had known that the Earth’s home system fleet was made up of earlier-generation ships that had survived service in the colonies. I knew the ships were neither as sophisticated nor as many as the ships of the colonial fleets. We had, however, been brought up to believe in an impregnable fortress Earth with its surrounding cordon of orbital weapons platforms.

‘You mean it’s a lie?’ I demanded.

‘Not exactly. It’s the same problem. It’s hard enough to get everyone to co-operate out in the colonies fighting Them, but when it’s on our doorstep, when the stakes are so much higher…’

‘Because people think they’ve got more to lose, never mind the squaddie in the fucking colonies!’

‘They want to look out for themselves, and understandably so.’

‘So the problem is there will be no cohesive defence?’

Akhtar nodded. ‘And some may wish to come to terms with the Cabal.’

‘That means total control!’ I couldn’t believe this.

‘They may prefer that to what they see as total destruction.’

‘Brilliant. So what do you want me to do? Go and die under an alien sun for governments too stupid to work together?’

‘Yes.’ And again she seemed deadly serious.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Not a lot in it for me.’

‘True,’ she agreed. This was weird.

‘You should work on your motivational speaking.’

‘Do you want me to lie to you?’ She had a point.

‘Maybe soften the blow a bit.’

‘You’re fucked.’

‘Yeah, now you’re getting it.’

‘I want you to sell your lives dearly. I want you to cause them as much trouble as you can. If you think you can provide us with intelligence safely then do so because we need any we can get, but most importantly I want you to raid, sabotage, assassinate and do anything you can to damage their resources and delay them. And when they catch you, and they will, I want you to make sure you kill yourself and destroy your internal memory before you fall into their hands.’

‘You realise that the people we’re talking about are just like you and me but have been misled by Rolleston and Cronin?’

She looked me straight in the eyes when she answered. ‘Yes. It’s something I have given a great deal of thought to. If you can think of another way…’

I was wondering how much I still owed this world.

‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I don’t want to die.’

‘Tough shit.’

‘Why am I being singled out for this?’

‘I can’t make up my mind whether that’s solipsistic or just plain arrogance.’

‘I only know what one of those words means.’

‘You’re not. We’re keeping half of our special forces, including reserves, back here for stay-at-home parties, if it goes badly.’ Stay-at-home parties was the preferred euphemism for suicide missions. ‘The rest we’re putting on the ground in the colonies in conjunction with the special forces of other countries who are co-operating with us.’

‘Such as Sharcroft in America?’

The look of distaste that she struggled to control endeared her to me further.

‘Yes. I know you don’t like him, but I am forced to admit that he is the best man for the job. For your information, I am speaking to every man and woman I am sending to die.’

‘Why are they going?’

‘Because each of them thinks that they will live. Somehow. I am sorry to be the one to break this to you, Sergeant, but you are nothing special. Though I have to admit that you do have a few things working in your favour.’

‘That I’m a hybrid?’

‘Yes, and we will be having samples from you. You can either co-operate or I’ll have them taken by force.’

I gave this some thought. ‘Fair enough.’

‘You also have two of the architects of God, both exceptionally skilled individuals, one of whom is also Them-augmented.’

‘And we have Rannu — he’s a skilled operator.’ She said nothing. ‘We have Rannu, right?’

‘You have one other edge.’

‘Mudge?’

She ignored me.

‘My Koran tells me that I should not let my hatred of some people cause me to transgress, that to seek revenge is a human weakness, not a strength. My mother says otherwise, but then such is the nature of her business interests, but I think you truly do hate Rolleston.’

‘Any reason I shouldn’t?’

‘Maybe you should let that carry you for a while.’ She was manipulating me and I knew it. She was also right. ‘Well?’

‘We have to know that things will change. You can’t keep on throwing us into the grinder and then forgetting about us.’

‘Do you see a fucking Fortunate Son sitting here next to you?’ she demanded angrily.

‘I mean it.’

‘You were right in Atlantis when you said there was nothing wrong with just wanting to do a job and look after your family; we don’t all have to be rich, powerful or even ambitious. You were wrong when you said we were eating each other. You’ve been feeding a trickle-down economy. I have no problem with people who become wealthy from their own hard work, but there has to be a level playing field. Everyone gets a fair chance.’

‘Pretty words.’

‘All I’ve got is that and hard work at the moment.’

‘You’re a politician.’

‘I’m a manager. I have no interest in ideology, just in solving problems. Being elected is a means to an end. I’m here because I can do it better, not because I’m sucking cock.’

I smiled at this. ‘I like you. You’re funny.’ I looked past her to Mike and Lien. ‘Is she on the level?’

‘Fucked if I know, mate. Pays well though,’ Mike said.

Akhtar was shaking her head in exasperation.

Lien was giving it more thought. ‘I think so,’ she finally said.

‘Either of you want to come to the colonies?’ I asked.

‘Fuck that!’

‘No.’

‘If we go out there to die and nothing changes, will you kill her for me?’ I asked Lien. Mike was smiling.

‘Sure, Jake,’ Lien said.

Akhtar was looking more exasperated.

‘You realise that admitting to being a potential assassin is not a sound career move for a bodyguard?’ Akhtar said coldly to Lien as she got up to leave. When she reached the door she looked back at me. ‘Go back to Limbo, Sergeant Douglas.’

‘You know that using my rank a lot doesn’t mean I’m any more your soldier?’

She turned to the door but hesitated again.

‘I knew Balor — he was a good man. No, what am I talking about? He was a card-carrying psychopath who had sex with sea life, but a capable one.’ She paused as she tried to find the right thing to say. I didn’t help; I just watched her, trying to keep my face impassive. ‘I think he died well.’

‘Maybe I’ll get the chance to do the same. In your service.’

‘It’s as much your service as mine. Eventually people will realise that.’ She left and I heard her heels clicking down the corridor.

The police released me, though they weren’t happy about it. I got my stuff back and reclaimed my bike. I opened up my comms again and found loads of messages from Mudge demanding to know what the fuck I was doing. There was nothing from Morag though.

Akhtar left quietly in an understated corporate-looking copter after some of her people had taken blood and DNA samples from me. I didn’t feel comfortable about that. I just hoped that they could come up with a way to deal with Rolleston and his Themtech-augmented soldiers.

I had been held in the police compound in the Coventry camp. Mudge was waiting for me when they finally let me go.

He looked me up and down. ‘Admit it. You enjoy getting the shit kicked out of you, don’t you? You’re like a masochist. Look, I know some clubs in London. We could go there, get you spanked, maybe some whipping, maybe a shock stick up your arse?’

‘Shut up, Mudge.’

He didn’t. ‘So are we going back?’

‘I am.’

‘Are we doing something stupid?’

‘Even the big boss thinks it’s suicidal.’

Mudge shrugged. ‘Sure.’

I shook my head. ‘Seriously, Mudge, what are you doing here?’

A pained expression crossed his face. ‘Jakob, you have no idea how fucking bored I am.’

‘That’s not a good reason.’

‘Besides, I got made unemployed.’

‘I’m not really surprised. What were you doing?’

‘Hosting a topical news quiz.’

‘What? Really, on the viz?’

I was kind of surprised despite myself. You never really expect to meet someone you see on the viz. Well, other than the PM. Not that I watched the viz of course. You particularly don’t expect it to be a mate. On the other hand, I suppose that all of us were viz stars.

‘I told you, mate — I’m a multimedia sensation.’

‘So how’d you get fired?’

‘I spat in some micro-celebrity’s face.’

‘Yeah, that’ll do it. Why?’

‘She annoyed me.’

Obvious really, I suppose.

‘Mudge, have you considered that with your people skills working in the media may not be the best job for you?’

‘I like the attention.’

I nodded. ‘Have you heard from Morag?’

‘I will fucking slap you if you don’t stop whining about her.’

Two minutes and Mudge was already irritating me. I checked with God. Morag had checked up on me. I smiled, until the scabs that were my lips cracked open and started bleeding again and it quickly became a pained grimace.

‘Have you got any drugs?’ I asked. He just looked at me as if I was stupid.

I screamed with the pain. Rannu, Morag and Pagan came running. They must have thought that They’d turned on us. I’d tried to keep my self-harming experiment as quiet as possible but it hurt when you rammed four knuckle blades through your arm. It had taken some force to get through my subcutaneous armour.

Mudge didn’t come to see what the noise was about. Withdrawal had given him chronic diarrhoea so he spent most of his time sitting on the toilet alien being cleaned out. One of his few current pleasures in life seemed to be holding court from atop the toilet creature. This was a nightmare because we were all sharing the space and because sometimes we had to undergo the unpleasant experience of using the same toilet creature.

I was sitting on the mossy floor in one of the little nooks of the communal cavern at the back of the cave, far away from the membrane overlooking Maw City. The three of them came to a halt over me. I cried out again as I tore the blades free of my hand. Blood was pissing out of the wounds. Even Rannu looked surprised.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Morag demanded. It was a reasonable question in the circumstances. I was starting to feel a little bit foolish.

‘Well, you know how Rolleston could walk through railgun fire…’ I didn’t finish. I could hear Mudge start to laugh from his toilet alien throne. I had hoped I’d be a bit more stoical. Apparently not.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Pagan said exasperatedly, before turning and walking off.

‘You idiot!’ Morag said and knelt down and started fussing. Rannu knelt and started to tend to the cuts in a more practical matter.

‘I don’t think you should walk into railgun fire,’ he suggested. I nodded. I was feeling really stupid now.

‘Perhaps you could have started with a minor cut,’ Morag suggested. Another valid point. Rannu bound my hand with what material he could find. I certainly didn’t seem to have any of Rolleston’s recuperative powers. My arm really hurt, and like Mudge I wished we had something to kill the pain even just whisky.

‘That was a really dumb thing to do,’ Morag said as she lay against me once Rannu had gone. She felt hot and was covered in sweat from another training session.

‘Yeah, I got that. How are the plans for getting us home coming along?’

‘Fine. It’ll definitely work, assuming we don’t just get shot by our own people.’ Then she went quiet. I could see her struggling to decide how to tell me something.

‘You’re going to do it?’ I asked. She nodded and then looked up at me.

‘I want you to come with me.’

She seemed so earnest. It was times like this when she lost the hard edge that I remembered how young she was supposed to be. How young she should’ve been allowed to be.

‘Morag, I…’ I started. We’d been through this. I had no frame of reference and we were talking about the mind of a species that had been trying to kill me for most of my adult life. Regardless of how misunderstood They may have been, I just couldn’t get away from the years of hatred and war.

‘I’ll look after you. I’ll keep you safe,’ she told me, and I believed her.

This alien place was the warmest, most comfortable and safest I could remember being since a child. The sad fact was that these previously genocidal aliens had looked after me better than any human ever had since my parents died. If things were going to change maybe I needed to stop being so frightened of things I didn’t understand. If only it was that easy.

‘Okay,’ I finally answered. She smiled. Also I liked to see her happy.

‘And no more stabbing yourself.’

I did heal faster, it seemed. It made sense. After all, the stuff They’d put into me was designed to find unhealthy flesh, eat and replace it. I tried not to think about that too much. It was nowhere near as effective as Rolleston’s healing but with a few hours’ rest the cuts on my arm were starting to look a lot better. The healing process really hurt however.

Morag took me by the hand to our grotto, as I’d started to think of it. We sat down by the pool and she held both my hands. I felt faintly foolish for reasons I couldn’t really explain. I let go of her and was on my feet, blades extended, when they rose out of the pool.

‘Jakob, it’s okay,’ Morag tried to reassure me. They were organic tendrils, white in colour instead of the black I was more used to. They looked like smaller versions of the massive tendrils I’d seen in Maw City. They swayed in the pool like the snakes I’d seen on documentary vizzes. The movement was in no way comforting. My heart was beating quickly.

‘Morag, I’m not sure I can do this.’

‘Its okay, Jakob. It’ll be fine, I promise.’ Her tone was reassuring but I think I sat back down opposite her and let her take my hands because her fearlessness was shaming me. I closed my eyes.

It wasn’t the normal, disconcerting hard click of connection you felt hard-wiring yourself into something. It felt more like liquid flowing into the four plugs in the back of my neck. This didn’t make sense. Plastic and metal had no nerve endings.

Then I was somewhere else. Then I heard the music again. Music sung through space. I felt tears on my cheeks. I opened my eyes to find myself in a waterfall of liquid sparks of light. Each spark seemed to cascade over me in a feeling of pleasant, slightly ticklish, electric warmth.

I was hovering in mid-air. The best way I could describe my surroundings was as a giant organic cave-tunnel like a vein, but this didn’t do justice to what I was seeing. A warm wind blew through the tunnel/vein. It was a conduit for light and sound. Were the light and sound Their thoughts? Bioluminescent lighting sparked all around us, travelling down through the tunnel/vein. Perhaps that was Their thoughts. This was Their mind, after all, not their biology. A purely mental space. I could see junctures where other organic tunnels/veins intersected. I was hovering over what looked like a bottomless drop. This gave me a moment of vertigo but I mastered it.

Morag was right to bring me here. I reached up to touch the tears on my face. I was whole; there was no plastic or metal in me now. I was naked. So was Morag. She looked like Morag, not one of her icons. Her eyes were back. This just made me want to weep more. I was kind of glad none of the others were around to see me like this.

‘The icon?’ I managed.

‘They’re not icons, it’s us,’ she told me.

I wanted to hold her. I moved across to her, floating through the curtain of warm sparks. Everything about her felt real as we hugged each other fiercely. Was this my reward? Was this what it had all been for? I could hear the music. It was the abstract, angelic choral music that I heard echo through space in my dreams, the music that I’d thought the Cabal had silenced and replaced with the screaming of war. It was more real here than what Ambassador had shown me as I slept in Morag’s arms in the ruins of Trenton.

‘Thank you,’ I said to her as I held her tight. Then I looked up. ‘Thank you!’ I shouted. Any inhibitions seemed foolish now. ‘Can we communicate with Them?’ I asked. I wasn’t used to the sound of awe in my voice.

She pushed gently away from me. ‘C’mon.’

Then she dived through the air and through the cascade of liquid light. I went after her, my dive clumsier. I heard a noise. I couldn’t quite work out what it was. It took me a while to realise it was the sound of my laughter. Not a cynical laugh or the laughter that comes with sharing a joke with a friend, or the laughter of trying to make light of a bad situation. This laughter felt like release. As I dived through the alien mind I was freeing myself from my worries and fears. I wondered if the stunted minds and petty ambitions of the Cabal could even understand this. I think this was what I’d been searching for all those years in the sense booth. Not dislocation, like I’d thought, but connection, exploration — a feeling of there being something more.

We dived, fell, flew for what simultaneously felt like a very long time and not nearly long enough. The inner mental landscape of Them was constantly changing. I understood none of it, but none of it was ugly and everywhere was light in different hues and the ever-changing music.

Ahead of me Morag pointed towards a small tunnel-like mental vein .

‘There’s one,’ she called and swooped gracefully towards it. I followed her and tried not to hit the wall. One what?

It was dark in the tunnel. It looked much more like rock than anything else I’d seen. The singing seemed further away.

‘Morag…?’

‘Ssh, it’s okay.’ I could just make out her shape ahead of me. The only light was the warm white glow from the main vein behind us. ‘I told you we weren’t the first to come here.’

I could just about make out markings on the rock wall. It looked like scrollwork, like the designs that Pagan had decorated himself and his surroundings with. I realised that I was wading through a shallow stream of very cold water. It reminded me of fording a burn in the Highlands. The scrollwork seemed to be moving, making disconcerting patterns. It was playing tricks with my head. The patterns suggested strange, fantastical and sometimes horrific shapes.

‘If you come in peace, you can live with them, even sculpt your surroundings,’ she said.

‘You mean there are other people?’

‘I am not a person,’ a voice said. The accent sounded vaguely familiar but I could not place it. The voice sounded utterly inhuman. It seemed to resonate differently from human language. I felt it rather than heard it. Perhaps it was because of my surroundings and my recent experiences, but I found myself overcome with a feeling that I couldn’t quite understand or fully explain.

The light was blue, but not Their warm blue; it was colder like steel and neon. It came from a large and ancient-looking, two-handed claymore with a very sharp silvery blade. The man or icon holding it towered over us. He was powerfully built. His muscles looked like corded steel and seemed almost too large. Steam rose from his flesh and he burned with an inner light. I could feel the heat coming from him. It was not the warmth that blew through the asteroid caverns. Instead it was like standing too close to a furnace. The light beneath his skin picked out the network of scars that covered his torso and arms. They formed symbols and patterns that shifted with the movement of his flesh as he moved towards us. As if they were mimicking or somehow connected to the moving symbols and scrollwork on the stone wall.

I was struggling to think of this as something human. His eyes glowed with the same steel-blue light of the sword. The light could be seen through the translucent pale skin of his face. His ears were long and tapered to points. For all his size there was something graceful and otherworldly about him. He wore plaid trousers of spun wool and a thick belt, with various designs inscribed into the leather, around his waist. His hair was long, shaved at the sides and organised into complicated braids. He had a short beard but a long moustache that was again braided.

Silver and gold bracelets wrapped around his left arm. I dimly remembered that they were called torcs. His other arm was made from the same silvery metal as the sword and covered in a complex engraved pattern. It looked like some kind of ancient but perfectly functional prosthetic. It had the same glow as the sword and his eyes.

Though my iconic form in here made me look fully human, my right arm had started to ache. I held it and took a step away from the heat, the sense of raw physical power and the radiating sense of barely controlled rage I felt from this thing. I think the emotion I was feeling was awe. It was clear to me that whatever he was, he had his roots back somewhere in humanity’s collective unconscious. At the same time I felt I was in the presence of something both ancient and utterly different to me. In some ways this thing, despite familiar trappings, seemed more alien than Them.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Now do you believe?’ Morag asked.

Shit, I thought. Was I having a religious experience? Had I been tricked into this? I pushed that thought back. I was determined not to let the normal cynical, fear-filled decisions of everyday life intrude on this place. Whatever was going on, I had to try and take this at face value as something strange but potentially wonderful. That said, I didn’t want to end up as mad as your average signalman. Though with the sheer feeling of power that was radiating from this thing I could see why so many were affected.

‘Oh,’ I said again, my mind like a steel trap.

‘I am Nuada Airgetlaa,’ he said.

‘All right?’ I managed. I looked at Morag. She was just smiling. ‘Did you know about this?’

‘Not really the way it works. They come and go as they please.’

‘And They let them?’

We may have been being rude and I didn’t doubt that this guy was some kind of mythic archetype from humanity’s past somehow given form, but all the while we were talking he was watching us. Actually it was more like he was studying me.

‘You are a warrior?’ he asked. I felt my heart sink. Here we go again.

‘No. I am or was a fucking soldier and I don’t want to be doing great deeds for abstract reasons.’

‘Jakob…’ Morag tried to warn me. She reached over and grabbed my arm.

‘You’d have more luck with Balor if he wasn’t-’ Which was as far as I got before I was lifted up by the neck and slammed against the wall. I found the tip of about six feet of steel pressed against my stomach. His fingers scorched my neck. I could smell my own burning flesh. The pale flesh on his face seemed to slew back down to the musculature as he hissed, revealing wickedly sharp canines and too many of them. His breath smelled of honey, heather and raw meat. I’m pretty sure I screamed. Up close he looked even larger. And I had been having such a nice time. I knew I was helpless here.

‘No!’ Morag said and grabbed the guy. She may as well have been wrestling a statue. She screamed and stumbled back, her flesh burned where she had touched him. He released me and backed off, his features reshaping into their original form. He looked down at Morag. She was cradling her burned hands, looking pained and unsure. He seemed appalled by the pain he’d inflicted on her.

‘I am sorry, Mother.’

Morag looked as mystified as I was.

‘That’s okay,’ she said slowly. I was rubbing my bruised and burned virtual neck.

‘It was just that he said the name of my enemy,’ he explained.

Balor’s ability to make friends and influence people seemed second only to Mudge’s. Unless of course he was referring to the mythological demon that Balor had named himself after. Of course he was. I groaned. Even though I was having some sort of religious experience I lacked the ability to process it properly. It all seemed like nonsense to me. Frightening and painful nonsense.

‘Different Balor and he’s dead anyway,’ I managed.

Nuada nodded. ‘So you are a warrior?’ he asked again.

‘Whatever. What are you?’

‘I am Nuada Airgetlaa, it means “Of the Silver Hand”. I am of the Tuatha De Danaan; I was once their king.’ He held up his silver arm. ‘But I am no longer whole.’

This I understood.

‘Tough war?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

I nodded. ‘I’ve got one just like it.’ Then I remembered where I’d heard the name before. ‘The arm. You made sure I got it? You’re one of those self-aware AIs that latches onto religious iconography in the net, aren’t you?’

‘I thought they were just the fevered imagination of hackers,’ Morag said. Nuada said nothing.

‘How did you get all the way out here?’ I asked him.

‘This is just another road from Tir Nan Og.’

This of course made no sense. I wondered if religion would have a more universal appeal if the gods could manage to be a bit less fucking cryptic. Then a strange thought occurred to me.

‘Wait a second. The arm. Are you trying to identify with me?’

I saw Morag roll her eyes. I think in the big electronic church of hacking you were supposed to be a little more respectful during your visitation.

‘The Adversary is coming-’ Nuada started.

‘No shit.’

‘Jakob!’ Morag hissed at me. She sounded genuinely pissed off.

‘The Adversary is going to drown us all. There will be only one god, and that god will be a god of fear.’

‘You mean Demiurge?’

‘And when he drowns us he will know us,’ Nuada continued.

‘So you can hide and keep secrets?’ I asked.

‘Now we hold our own mysteries, but not in the face of the Adversary.’

‘Okay, Demiurge is bad. We know this. So?’

‘He will have our power.’

This didn’t sound good.

‘Is that a lot of power?’ I asked. He just looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘If you’re frightened of Demiurge then fight. Don’t dress yourself up in old gods and expect others to do the work for you.’ Again he said nothing. ‘Have you got anything to bring to this?’

‘If we go near it, we will be taken, we will be corrupted, we will become an extension of it, and you do not want this as much as we do not want it.’

‘Okay, so come forward,’ I said.

‘And risk the burning times?’

‘So you’d rather be urban myths? Hackers’ tall tales? What are you anyway?’

‘I told you. I am Nuada Airgetlaa.’

I took another step back. Despite the odd way I seemed to be hearing him, he seemed to be trying to keep his tone as even and emotionless as possible. I just couldn’t shake the feeling of enormous rage being held back just below the surface.

‘Okay. With all due respect, what do you want from me?’

‘You must have them remake Pais Badarn Beisrydd.’

I looked over at Morag questioningly. She was crouching down and backing into the shadows. There was something odd and primal about her movements. What the fuck was going on?

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘If you are a warrior then we will share blood.’

With his silver hand he wrapped his fingers around the sword’s blade, barely touching it. His hand started to bleed what looked like smoking mercury. I looked at Morag again. The shadows in the tunnel seemed to be elongating to engulf her. They moved across her naked skin like they were alive. I began to feel dislocated like I was on a good but frightening psychotropic. It was as if it wasn’t happening to me but I was somehow witnessing it.

‘It’s only information,’ Morag whispered.

I could only see her as a shadow now, though the shadow’s teeth and eyes seemed to burn. I swallowed and reached out for the sword. I didn’t even realise I’d touched it until my hand came away wet with blood. Nuada grasped my hand. My blood and his mingled. It burned, it burned so much. It took me a moment to realise the discordant screaming that was so jarring, even in this part of this place, was me. My flesh glowed from the inside through translucent skin.

I awoke in the pool. My body felt like a rough-edged machine. It was awkward and painful to live in. Of course it would have been less painful if I hadn’t stabbed myself in the arm earlier. I felt feverish and was surprised that the water wasn’t bubbling. Morag was holding me, cradling me like I was a sick or frightened child.

Later in the grotto I was still shaken and didn’t feel right. I was too hot. A diagnostic check of all my internal systems found no trace of any information exchange.

‘Did you take me there?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer straight away. I think she was trying to work out if there was any accusation in my question. There wasn’t. I’d worked hard to make sure there wasn’t.

‘It wasn’t an ambush. I knew there were things there. I’ve spoken with some of them but I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘They’re AIs, aren’t they? Powerful self-aware ones masquerading as old gods. That’s why they’re so frightened.’

‘Maybe,’ she said.

‘You can’t believe they’re gods, can you?’ I said incredulously. Maybe I was just trying to convince myself. It had seemed pretty real at the time.

‘They’ve been here a while if they are.’

‘They must have come when we were colonising.’

‘Its difficult to understand Their way of measuring time but They encountered whatever that was before They encountered us.’

That shut me up until I eventually asked, ‘So what do you think they are?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they’re aliens searching for a way to communicate and then the way home, or maybe they’re the real deal — whatever that means. Pagan thinks that they are a reflection of us, our subconscious projected onto the net and somehow given form and independence. He calls them ghosts of our imagination.’

‘So?’ I finally asked.

‘So what?’

‘So what does it all mean?’

‘Fucked if I know.’

‘Brilliant. Just more religious bollocks.’ Morag opened her mouth to say something. ‘Don’t tell me to have faith.’

‘I was going to tell you to speak to Pagan — he knows more about this sort of thing.’

‘Oh he’ll fucking love that, me getting religion. Has he seen them?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

‘Back on Earth he has. He hasn’t been in Their mind yet. I’m going to take him in next.’

‘Yeah? Good, he’ll like that. Hold on. Does that mean he’ll see you naked?’ I demanded. She was laughing. I still didn’t like the idea. ‘Will you see him naked?!’ I demanded. She grimaced.

I awoke to the reassuringly distant scream of the sub-orbital military transport’s engines. Akhtar had laid on the aircraft and after some arguments with the crew I’d even managed to get my bike on board.

I hadn’t spoken to Pagan about my religious experience of course, meeting Nuada. I tried to ignore the whole thing. I didn’t understand it, therefore it was meaningless. I convinced myself that it really didn’t matter what they were. The whole pretending to be gods and spirits thing was just another snow job to try and get people to do what they wanted them to, probably for some inhuman reason. Maybe it was just entertainment for them. Besides, I had decided I was through, that I was going to retire.

We went home. I think I could have stayed or even gone on with Them if Morag had been with me, but Mudge really wanted to get back and get high. Besides, we needed to see how much damage we’d done.

The last we’d seen of Them was huge engines pushing cored asteroids out of their place in the Dog’s Teeth. Each asteroid was honeycombed with Their energy storage matrices. Energy harvested from the twin stars to sustain Them on their exodus. The massive convoy of ships surrounding the asteroids seemed to stretch out for thousands of miles as They prepared to flee the neighbours.

They got us home by using a variant of Their infiltration crafts. It was basically an engine with re-entry needles. Except this time when we came in-system we were broadcasting using the salvaged comms units from our Mamluk exo-armour suits. The good thing about the design of the needles was that we didn’t get to see how close we got to dying. We were intercepted by a Ugandan ship, and during the initial debrief we each had four Ugandan special forces pointing weapons at us at all times. It was quite tense.

We got passed from pillar to confused post as the authorities tried to decide whose problem we actually were. The debriefs got less combative and Mudge got in less fights with our interrogators. I had tried telling them that if they wanted his co-operation all they had to do was give him drugs, but nobody listened to me.

The Dog’s Teeth, Maw City — it all started to seem like a dream. Parts of it too pleasant and other parts too unreal to have any relation to the grind of being back in the real world and dealing with the imminence of a war that could split humanity in two. Assuming that it didn’t just destroy it.

Eventually Air Marshal Kaaria intervened on our behalf and everyone heaved a sigh of relief as we became someone else’s problem.

Mudge’s drugs had made me feel better and I was healing faster. I should still get someone to look at my spine.

As I looked out over the desert I had some time to think. Leaving aside the suicidal aspect of the job, it still did not feel right getting ready to kill innocent soldiers. I guessed this is what war had been about all through the ages. Was it any different from the streets? I’d mainly killed people who’d been trying to kill me. Or maybe that was just what I told myself to get to sleep at night. This was going to be more proactive. I guessed it wouldn’t be any different from what we’d done when we’d busted Gregor out, but then that was when I decided that I didn’t want to kill any more.

Except Rolleston. And Cronin. Rolleston had to die because he deserved it. Cronin I didn’t hate, but he had to go because he was so much part of the problem. Of course they’d be the most difficult to get to, assuming we could even find them.

Then there was Josephine, the Grey Lady. No real hate there. Just fear. To deal with Rolleston we’d first have to deal with her. Why the bond? I wondered. All our heavy hitters were gone as well. Balor might have been able to deal with Josephine, though even he’d implied that he was scared of her. Hybrid Gregor could have dealt with her if he hadn’t ended up on the other side. Though even then Rolleston and Josephine had all but walked through us in the media node. Rannu? He was a solid trooper, very skilled, but I didn’t think he was in the same league as the Grey Lady.

I watched Mudge dance by, singing along with some music he was listening to on his internal systems. He was naked and covered in body paint. That at least explained the unconscious airman on the bench opposite. It seemed I could sleep through anything.

‘Mudge?’

He turned to look at me. He seemed really jittery. He held out his hand as if he could take hold of me from the middle of the cargo hold, his hand grasping and relaxing.

‘We need more shooters,’ I told him. ‘Give it some thought.’ He nodded and then smiled.

I wasn’t sure if the escorts who took us from the airfield to Limbo were the same ones as before, as the entire security detail looked the same to me. They certainly didn’t seem happy to see us. Mudge being naked and blissed out hadn’t helped. Sometimes I felt that people didn’t take us seriously.

I was looking out of the window as we sank down into the silo. Mudge came over and put me in a playful headlock. He must have been coming down, as he was now able to communicate with us humans. Sadly.

‘Wow,’ he began. ‘You’re really going to have to eat some shit when we get there.’ Which is why I wasn’t looking forward to getting back to Limbo. ‘That’s going to be really humiliating.’

There was no point talking to him when he was like this.