of the Final Human Conflict some two hundred and fifty plus years ago and unregulated industrial pollution in the wake of the country’s financial collapse.
Coming in a surprising third for cause of death in Crawling Town was the internecine feuding between the various nomad gangs, while we were here to see if we could increase the number of deaths caused by violence. I had an old and cold reason to do this. A score to settle.
I had been happily enjoying my retirement from getting shot at in the colonies fighting in the never-ending war against Them. No, that’s a lie. I was miserable, but I really didn’t know any better and so was everyone else. Also it was the sort of misery that was easy to cope with. Then my old CO, Major Rolleston, a thoroughgoing bastard of the highest order, had decided to complicate my life by sending me after a Them infiltrator. We had assumed it was a Ninja – squaddie parlance for one of Their stealth killing machines. One had killed most of the Wild Boys, my old SAS squad.
It wasn’t a Ninja. That would have been less complicated, though more fatal. It was an Ambassador. It was being sheltered by a group of prostitutes who worked in the Rigs, the shanty town made up of derelict oil rigs in the Tay River off the shore of Dundee. That was how I met Morag and really, really complicated my life by disobeying Rolleston. Fleeing with Morag to Hull (I only get to see the nicest places, a holdover tradition from my army days) with the downloaded essence of Ambassador, we agreed, sort of, to help Pagan, a computer hacker, create an electronic god out of humanity’s communications network.
Rolleston was of course delighted with my disobedience, betrayal and apparent treason against humanity and dispatched all sorts of interesting people to find and kill us. This included, but was not limited to, Rannu Nagarkoti, a Ghurkha ex-SAS man, who was currently riding through the sandstorm somewhere, and the Grey Lady, Ms Josephine Bran, the scariest operator in the scary world of black ops.
Hull got burned. Pagan, Morag and I fled to New York. I came a close second in my arse-kicking at the hands of Rannu. He then joined us. I’m sure there are easier ways. I met my old friend Howard Mudgie – Mudge to his mates. We also got the support of Balor, the insane pirate king of the ruins of New York, though this had taken some persuasion and, for reasons still unclear, me getting the aforementioned beating at the hands of Rannu. Balor was a heavily augmented cyborg who had had his body sculpted to look like a sea demon from some old mythology. Mudge put us on to two pilots I really wanted to speak to, Gibby and Buck. They’d both worked the same shady world of special ops that I had. They had been Rolleston and the Grey Lady’s taxi drivers, the taxi being a heavily armed and armoured vectored-thrust gunship. Gibby and Buck had been the last to see my best friend Gregor on Dog 4 after he’d been infected by one of Their Ninjas during its death throws. The two pilots were hiding out in Crawling Town. That’s why we’d come here the first time, and some bad shit had happened to me for no good reason I could think of.
Gibby and Buck had told us that they had taken Gregor to the Atlantis Spoke, one of the city-sized orbital elevators that ring the planet on the equator. We found Gregor in a lab deep below the surface of the ocean being experimented on by Rolleston’s employers, the Cabal. The dying Ninja had somehow joined with Gregor, transforming him into a hybrid form of humanity and Them. The Cabal were a shadowy group of upper-echelon corporate execs, military types and intelligence operatives. So we had some of the most powerful people in the world after us, and we were in the company of a human/Them hybrid and wanted for betraying the entire human race.
What we found out was that They had not started the war, as we had always been led to believe. It was us – or rather it was the Cabal. Not only had they started the war, but they had taught Them – who as far as I could make out were some kind of harmless vacuum-living space coral – to fight. They had done this through what Pagan called negative stimulus and what I call blowing the shit out of them.
So we’d been conned for sixty years into fighting a war that was manipulated so as not to end. I’m still a little hazy as to why. I’m guessing it had something to do with power, control, greed and all that good stuff. Mudge, however, claims it was to do with sexual inadequacy on the part of the members of the Cabal. Mudge puts a lot of the problems of people he doesn’t like down to that, though Morag did point out that the majority of the Cabal were male. The Cabal were also working on their own version of God called Demiurge. Only instead of guiding the net to sentience and electronic omniscience (a word I’m sure no self-respecting squaddie should be using as much as I have been) they just wanted to control it.
So as our situation got worse and worse we came up with more and more desperate plans. We decided to program God to always tell the truth but to be under nobody’s control. I know why we did this but often I feel it would be useful if we’d retained control of the electronic deity. We took over a media node in Atlantis at gunpoint and released God into the net. Now suddenly all information was available to everyone. Mudge then used the node to broadcast the evidence of the Cabal’s crimes against humanity and Them.
After a worldwide televised argument with Rolleston and Vincent Cronin, the Cabal’s corporate mouthpiece, the good Major and the Grey Lady made a concerted effort to kill us. In Buck’s case they succeeded. In what felt like a one-sided exchange of violence it also appeared that the Major was somehow augmented with Themtech. He was pretty much walking through railgun fire.
A lot of pissed-off people’s secrets had been revealed. There were also a lot of people baying for the Cabal’s blood. As most of the Cabal were fat old men being kept alive by machinery they weren’t too hard for the vigilante crowds to deal with.
Ambassador had told us that They wanted peace. We wanted peace. Hurray, the war’s over. Except Rolleston and Cronin got away. They escaped in next-generation frigates using Themtech, supported by frighteningly good hackers who we think were using technology derived from Project Demiurge. The frigates, which we’re now apparently calling the Black Squadrons, made for the four colonial systems of Sirius, Lalande, Barnard’s Star and Proxima. We believed they planned to take over the comms networks in each system with Demiurge, which would mean that they controlled the information in them, which would in turn help them take command of humanity’s colonial military. We also thought they were going to try and use a Themtech-derived biological agent developed by Project Crom to infect, subjugate and control Them in the Sirius system. And that is how I ended up going back there, my least favourite place but where my mind kept returning to.
We went to the Sirius system for other reasons. Maybe it was because I was dying of radiation poisoning at the time or maybe it was just because Morag really wanted to go. I was surprised by how it was actually worse this time than all my previous visits. Suited in Mamluk exo-armour we performed extravehicular activity – we exited a perfectly functional spacecraft and infiltrated the Dog’s Teeth. The Dog’s Teeth is an asteroid belt and was home base to the largest concentration of Them in the Sirius system. Our plan was to find the Crom virus/spores and stop them from infecting Them.
Morag had a different plan. With the remnants of Ambassador living in her neural cybernetics, she wanted to communicate with Them. She left us.
What we didn’t know was that when Rolleston attacked us in the Spoke he had infected Gregor with Crom. He had effectively turned Gregor into a slave plague-bearing weapon. We got compromised. The billions of Them there decided to kill us. That I understood. Gregor attempting to assimilate and warp the flesh of Them and infect Them with the Crom virus so they could be controlled by Rolleston and Cronin was more of a surprise.
Balor died. He finally opened his bad old eye. Whatever weapon he had behind the patch nearly succeeded in killing Gregor. Nearly wasn’t enough. Still, the old monster had given himself the warrior’s ending he’d always wanted. It was Gibby who killed Gregor. He was flying the Spear, our ship. He’d forsaken stealth and flown into the Dog’s Teeth taking fire every inch of the way but managed to make it to Gregor and detonate his payload and engines. Sanitising the area. I’d never seen anything like what Balor or Gibby had done. I thought the days of actions like that had long since gone, if they’d ever really been.
So instead of looking at peace we were looking at war between humanity. More than two hundred and fifty years after we swore we’d never do this to ourselves again. After we’d decided that the cost was too great we were looking at one half of humanity fighting the other. And it was our fault. Actually it wasn’t; it was the Cabal’s. It was Rolleston’s and Cronin’s. We were just the catalyst.
Gregor’s betrayal had hurt. A lot. But even though the monster had had his warped features, it had been Rolleston’s demon – he had been programmed. My friend hadn’t done this. My friend had died in the Spoke when Rolleston had stabbed him in the head and injected Crom into his hybrid physiology. Rolleston had tried to kill me so many times. He badly needed to die. It wasn’t so much revenge, though that would be good. It just really needed doing, though not by me.
We’d played long odds and won. Or some of us had. By ‘won’ I mean we were still alive. We were on the eve
