know she’s better, but reflected glory and all that. You fucking sell-out.’ I was just lashing out now.
Pagan looked like I’d slapped him.
‘That’s not fair, man,’ Mudge said.
‘Who exactly do you expect to save you?’ Sharcroft’s modulated electronic voice asked.
‘I never expected to be saved,’ I told the living spider-corpse. It sounded hollow even to me.
‘That’s a cop-out,’ Morag said quietly.
‘So what should I do – turn myself over for dissection or just fuck off and die under an alien sun? Any battle’s going to be fleet and electronic anyway, probably followed by surface insurgency. You forget, I’ve done all this. Besides, aren’t you and Pagan just telling us that it doesn’t matter; there’s always going to be some prick in charge?’ I nodded towards Sharcroft.
‘Didn’t you say it was all about personal responsibility? We helped make this situation; we have to help fix it,’ she said.
‘How? By defecting?’
‘You know we haven’t done that.’
‘The sad fact is, Mr Douglas,’ Sharcroft began again, ‘that I’m very good at this sort of thing. I am the kind of cunt -’ he seemed to savour the word ‘- that you need. As for my previous associations, I don’t care whether you judge me. I don’t have to justify myself to you. You will never understand my motivations because you have never had any power and so cannot understand that once you’ve had it, it becomes very important to maintain it. You’ll do anything.’
‘That sounds like a justification to me,’ Mudge said. ‘Though not a very good one.’
‘No. I’m simply explaining that we are so different we’re never going to see each other’s perspective, so arguing about it is utterly pointless. If it’s any consolation, from your perspective I would now seem to be on the side of the angels.’
‘Oh, that’s exactly what it seems like to me,’ I said sarcastically.
‘Did you really think that with the threat of Rolleston and Cronin looming that the military, industrial and intelligence complex would just dismantle itself? Did you not think that they would adapt to the new circumstances, as difficult as you all, rather foolishly, made it? Can you not see the requirement for us?’
‘There are ways and means…’ I said falteringly. ‘Look, you guys started the whole thing.’
‘Irrelevant except perhaps as testimony at my war crimes trial. We still have a situation to deal with. The question is, are you going to help or are you going to abrogate responsibility?’
‘To work with the likes of you?’
‘Do you think I’m happy about that? I think you’re meddlesome cretins in way over your heads, lashing out because you don’t understand what’s happening around you and too frightened to make the hard decisions. But we all have to play the hand we’re dealt, Mr Douglas.’
‘Things have to change,’ I told him. On the one hand I completely believed this; on the other I realised how empty it sounded.
‘So change them,’ Morag said. ‘Don’t run away.’ Maybe she was right. No, she was right but I just didn’t think I had any more to give. I don’t think any of us did, her and Pagan included. I also didn’t think they had any practical solutions, just death sentences.
‘If only it was that easy,’ I said to her, and then to Sharcroft: ‘Thanks for the job offer but go and fuck yourself, parasite.’
‘And the rest of you?’ Sharcroft asked. Divide and conquer.
‘I’m with the overwrought one,’ Mudge said. Rannu didn’t say anything.
‘We’re done. How do we get out of here?’ I asked.
‘We’re not done. We’ve got something to do, and you guys are coming with us,’ Mudge told Pagan and Morag. Pagan nodded, getting it before I did.
‘They have-’ Sharcroft began.
‘Be quiet,’ Rannu said. He’d been looking thoughtful throughout the conversation but the menace in his tone was unmistakable. Morag looked as confused as I did. I should have known better.
I think we were in Old Mexico. Either that or we were in part of New Mexico that looked like Old Mexico. Anyway it looked like I’d imagined Mexico looked. That could have just been for the tourists, though tourists in this part of town would have to be quite intrepid and well armed.
We were in the upstairs private room of a bar, sorry, cantina. It had a small wrought-iron balcony that looked out over a crowded street of revellers, which is a fancy word for drunk people, the service industries that survive them and the predators that prey on them. It was a pleasantly warm night.
‘To Vicar, Balor, Gibby and Buck!’ Mudge shouted. He was halfway to standing on the table. ‘Better men than us by dint of having the common courtesy to die doing stupid things!’ He knocked back his shot of tequila and then chased it with a long draw from a bottle of the same.
‘To Vicar, Balor, Buck and Gibby!’ we all shouted and knocked back our shots. I grimaced. I struggled with tequila, conceptually. As far as I knew it was rotting whisky. Why would you purposefully let whisky rot? It didn’t make sense. Also I didn’t like the way the worm in the bottle glowed. In fact I didn’t like that there was a worm at all.
Mudge fell off the table. We laughed at his pain. He tried to get up but Rannu knocked his leg out from under him.
‘Don’t do that,’ Mudge slurred. ‘Spensive.’ I think he meant his prosthetic legs. When you’re a front-line, or in our case behind-lines, soldier you don’t think in terms of the grand scheme. You think about small objectives – kill someone/something, disrupt a supply line, extract another squad in trouble. You assume that you’re part of a bigger picture and that what you’re doing will help, despite the doubts. Sitting there and thinking that you successfully saved an entire alien race from being assimilated by bad guys was just too big to get your mind around.
Getting back in-system and not ending up in prison, or in my case being dissected, had taken up everyone’s attention, and then we’d each had things that we’d felt had to be taken care of. In doing so we’d forgotten that the four people mostly responsible for our success, the four people who were responsible for us being alive, needed a send-off. They needed remembrance.
Don’t get me wrong, if Pagan hadn’t figured out Crom’s betrayal then we would’ve been dead, and if Morag hadn’t successfully established contact with Them we’d definitely have been dead. Vicar had sacrificed himself to try and give Morag and I enough time to escape from Rolleston. Buck gave his life fighting the Cabal, killed by the Grey Lady. Balor had kept Crom – I wouldn’t think of that abomination as my friend Gregor – busy long enough for Gibby to fly the ship into it.
Rannu and I had largely been spectators. Admittedly spectators fighting for our lives against Them. Mudge had been recording it all for posterity. He’d made them heroes. A difficult word to take seriously, particularly in the military, but it applied here.
So here we were to send them off, their wake. I suspect they deserved a global celebration. What they got was the five of us drunk out of our minds telling the funniest stories about them we could remember. Mudge told us about the time he’d been hiding in New York. Balor had a meeting with someone from the American government. To make the government man nervous he’d taken the meeting naked, sporting a huge erection in a room completely covered in thinscreens showing footage from wildlife vizzes of fish spawning. Mudge and I told the story about Vicar on the Santa Maria giving me the lock burner he’d hidden in his arse. I told a story I’d heard second-hand about Buck and Gibby accidentally bombing a Them surface-to-air emplacement with live chickens meant for a dinner being held by some hopelessly optimistic officers.
Everyone had a story of some kind, mainly about Balor, who was better known. Many of them were probably pure myth. Mudge and I knew a reasonable amount about Buck and Gibby, and we all had something to say about our time with them. We got more drunk.
I hoped that the Hard Luck Commancheros had done the same for Buck and Gibby back in Crawling Town. I also hoped that the pirate nation of New York had done the same for Balor. Though reports out of New York pointed to widespread conflict between factions that had previously been held together by Balor’s sheer force of personality.
It was Vicar I felt sorry for. He’d never seemed to have any people around him. I’d only known him on the Santa Maria, the trial and then in Dundee. It had mainly been a business relationship. He had provided me with tech I needed when I could afford it. I didn’t think his desperate congregation was going to miss him. Maybe the food
