Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.
‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.
‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.
‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.
‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.
‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.
‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.
‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.
‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.
Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.
2
We sat on the benches of the black copter opposite the three walking bruised egos that took the form of lower-echelon spooks. They’d optimistically asked for our weapons as we’d boarded the copter. We’d politely refused, Mudge had hit one, but I’d promised they could have their guns back at the end of the trip.
They’d also been more than a little annoyed when we’d loaded the four-wheel-drive muscle car and the dirt bike into the back of the copter. I mean cars and bikes don’t grow on trees. We’d taken the time and the effort to steal them so we wanted to hold on to them. So the gunmen had spent most of the trip staring at us resentfully.
It was my first trip to America. Or rather my first trip over the border into the America controlled by the American government. I didn’t get much of a chance to see it. Being in the back of some kind of military transport vehicle usually meant I was on my way somewhere to do something stupid, wasteful and dangerous. The journeys to and from said stupid, wasteful and dangerous things were often my only downtime. It had taken me a long time to learn the skill, but I could sleep anywhere, even in the back of these often noisy and always uncomfortable vehicles. I drifted off quite quickly. Careless perhaps, but I knew Rannu and Mudge had my back. They’d wake me when one of them wanted some rest.
Heaven appeared to glow a blue-white colour. It reminded me of something, something dangerous. I wasn’t sure about opening my eyes but I felt good. In fact I felt the best I had in a very, very long time, presumably because I was no longer dying but was in fact dead. On the other hand, I remembered that I’d done an awful lot of bad things in my life, from stealing money from my parents to buy cigarettes when I was ten to killing a lot of people. Some in cold blood and some after I’d tortured them – those were the ones I felt most bad about.
I didn’t feel quite so bad about killing Them. They may have been innocent dupes of the Cabal but they had been trying to kill me at the time, and it’s a lot easier to kill things that look that different from you. Still, it can’t look good on your application for heaven.
Then I decided that I’d been spending too much time around hackers and that I didn’t believe in all that religious shit anyway. So where the fuck was I?
The selfish part of me was happy to see Morag in heaven. Then I started to mourn her death, which I should have done first, piece of shit that I am. Then again, I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in any of that.
‘What?’ I managed. Morag smiled. She did look like an angel. Well, like a non-scary one with short spiky hair. She reached down to touch my face. Her hands felt warm. I felt warm and not at all like I was dying from vacuum exposure. Or being torn apart by Them. Or running out of air. Or just getting round to dying of radiation poisoning, which was something that I’d been meaning to do for the last couple of weeks. I also felt very naked and there were ‘things’ in me.
Mudge proved that I wasn’t in heaven, though hell was possible, by appearing over me, leering. He looked fucking dreadful.
‘The good news is you’re not fucking dead; the bad news is there’s no fucking drink to celebrate with,’ he told me. He sounded angry.
‘You look awful,’ I managed to sort of squeak. It felt like I hadn’t spoken for a very long time.
‘He’s run out of drugs,’ Morag told me.
‘They made this for us?’ I asked again. It was taking a lot of getting used to. ‘Are we prisoners?’
‘More like stuck,’ Morag answered.
I was in a cave in the side of an asteroid close to planetoid size. Across the front of the cave was a membrane made of… well, made of Them. Them being the individual bio-nanites that were the actual aliens rather than the Berserks or Ninjas that we had previously thought to be Them.
This membrane kept us safe from the rigours of vacuum, and other Them-growths were apparently providing air, heating and somewhat unpleasant sanitation facilities. There is nothing quite like having a previously hostile alien species climb up your arse to clean it because they have never had to develop toilet paper. Other growths also provided a kind of unpleasant gruel and a funny-tasting liquid which I think was supposed to be water. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were eating some inert form of Them, perhaps Their dead?
What They couldn’t produce, much to Mudge’s discomfort, was drugs, cigarettes or vodka. He was mostly a sweating, cramping, pale, feverish bundle of bile in the corner of the cave. I wouldn’t have minded a drink and a smoke myself.
The membrane was transparent, which allowed us to appreciate just how far out in space we were. I was looking out on what seemed to be a sort of crossroads. There were four very large asteroids including the one I was currently in. They were either tethered or just connected to one another by tubes like biomechanical Them-growths. There were more growths sticking out at all angles from the asteroids. These looked like a cross between organic high-rise buildings and stalagmites or stalactites, depending on your perspective. I recognised this place now. The crooked Them-structures had reminded me of teeth and I’d christened this area Maw City. We were not far from where we had fought Crom.
We used to think that these structures were Their habitats but now we knew it was just Them. Everything seemed to have a function in Their society. Their roots were deep in the asteroid. They somehow drew out the raw materials from them. With energy harnessed from the system’s twin stars They broke down the raw materials to provide the resources necessary to make Themselves into these awe-inspiring structures.
Massive tendrils snaked between the asteroids, the growths and the hundreds of Them-ships moving through this apparent nexus point. I watched as one moved in front of me, completely obscuring my view. The tendrils moved anything from Berserks up to frigate-sized ships around. It was one of these things I’d seen grab Morag.
The whole place was crawling with Them. There were Berserks, Walkers and other things that we had previously thought to be vehicles. I also recognised a lot of the ship configurations I saw from footage of fleet actions.
If I strained and used the magnification on my optics I could see beyond Maw City. There were fields of a coral-like substance, where everything from Berserks to dreadnoughts were being grown and born. Deeper still I could see the cored hollow remains of exploited asteroids.
All the Them-forms we were used to seeing were black – combat forms, I guessed. But many here were white and had a pale-blue bioluminescent glow that I had become used to seeing in the honeycombed energy matrices of Their engines. It was the same bioluminescence that lit our little cavern. I had always thought it beautiful. Not that I could have told anyone. Maybe Morag, though even she’d take the piss.
The growths handling the air made it feel like there was a warm wind constantly blowing through the cavern. Apparently getting the heating, water and temperature right had been touch and go, initially. When I had been
