head was a blackened grinning skull in the white flames and still he kept coming.
I just about made it back to Morag and the others. They were standing over Pagan’s body. It may as well have happened in slow motion. I watched him turn his combination weapon on me. The plasma barrel fired. He couldn’t miss.
It hit me in the right side. I screamed as I burned. The plasma fire ate into me, through me, an unstoppable force, my own flesh now the fuel. What was left of my conscious mind prayed for death, for an end to the burning and the pain.
Somehow I was still conscious. Morag appeared by my side. There was a moment of peace through the pain, the chaos, the firefight. Then a piece of flesh was torn off her chin. She was still up. I was still screaming, burning. I felt a jack slide into one of my plugs. I didn’t understand. Then I was screaming through the pain at the terror. My flesh violated, made alien to me. It changed, meat sloughing off me, tendrils emerging through the skin of my face, somehow grown from my own flesh. The tendrils flailed, writhing in front of me, and sought out the strange flesh of the Citadel.
Then I was falling, burning. We were all falling. No, swallowed, being forced down and crushed again and again. Burned flesh all around me, gullet muscles constricting as we were pushed down at frightening speed, all the while my new alien flesh mating with the flesh of the Citadel’s roots.
Half a man reduced to charred screaming meat was deposited on cold hard rock. I was only vaguely aware of others there with me in the darkness. I tried to cringe from the heat but there wasn’t enough of me to move. The roots glowed orange and I heard it scream like Them as it carried lava up, from the depths of Lalande 2 to the Citadel. I could feel it. I was still joined with it. I screamed – inside only now, as every nerve ending burned again. The plasma fire all over again. Why couldn’t I die? Miles above us a city of ice became a volcano as the root system became enormous, destructive, flailing tentacles spewing lava.
‘I didn’t know I could do that,’ Morag said. There was wonder in her voice.
22
I stand in the centre of the great hall at Dinas Emrys on fire. Around me the stone starts to burn. I’m screaming. Some of the screaming is words. Those words are, ‘Where is she?!’
Pagan looks to be at his wits’ end. ‘You’re doing this to yourself!’ he shouts at me.
There just isn’t a way to manage this amount of pain. I can feel it through the morphine, through a chemically induced coma. Plasma is a one-shot kill unless you’re Balor or Rolleston. I get all the effects of the hit but none of the fun of dying. I think I’m aware of other pain beyond the burning. The human mind isn’t set up for this. This constant burning is the biblical hell the Christians talk about. Maybe I am dead. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life but surely nothing to deserve this.
I am put into a suit of warm meat. It breathes. It has its own pulse. New pain and more drugs. I am a lot lighter, easier for them to move, now that I only have half a body and should be dead.
I stand in the centre of the great hall at Dinas Emrys. I am still on fire.
‘You have to listen to me, Jakob. You are doing this. This is a manifestation of biofeedback. Your body burned and your mind is making it real, here, in the net as well.’
I know this. I’m not setting fire to stone now. I am not destroying code with the thought of pain. Even here I can still feel it though. Even here I still burn.
‘Where is she?’ I ask. Pagan does not have an answer for me. How can he tell me that she is hiding from me?
Dinas Emrys again. It’s the only place I have a semblance of life now.
‘I don’t want to die in space,’ I tell Mudge. Mudge’s icon that looks like Mudge. I’d need a mouth to tell him in the real world and all I have is charred mess.
‘I won’t let you die in space, man. If it looks like we’re not going to get picked up, I’ll use your own laser on you.’
‘That would still be dying in space,’ I point out.
‘Oh yeah, but you know at least you won’t run out of air and slowly suffocate or anything.’
‘I want you to know you’re a huge comfort to me. You could always save time and trouble and do it now. There’s nothing left of me anyway. Do it now.’
Normally Mudge would meet such a request with utter scorn but now he just looks uncomfortable.
‘You’re regrowing what you’ve lost, what the plasma took.’ Normally Mudge has no problem looking me in the eye and in here our eyes aren’t lenses.
‘I’m not comfortable with that.’
Now he looks at me. ‘Metal and plastic, alien nanites – what difference does it make? You’ve got to stop looking for the easy way out.’
Where’s Balor when you need him? He would have killed me in a second.
‘Where is she?’
‘Look, I can explain. Pagan can explain. You’re overreacting to-’
‘I don’t want to hear an explanation. Where is she?’ I want to discuss betrayal.
‘She’s too frightened to see you. Look, Salem’s out is sound.’
‘It’s for ore, the high G’s from the acceleration would powder bone.’
‘Not if we use their exo-armour suits. Their life-support systems are keeping you alive while you-’
‘Regenerate? Like an earthworm? What if I don’t want to go?’
‘Listen to yourself, man. Soloso and Strange survived. I just thought you should know. According to the information, the fleet is due to set sail in a couple of days’ time. We need to get back. This is our best hope.’
‘You don’t need me.’
‘You don’t want to die here, man. The air smells of greasy farts.’
He had a point.
Mudge showed me the footage. I was heavily sedated throughout the whole thing. He showed me Soloso and Strange saying goodbye. Soloso suggested that it would be unwise for us to ever return to Moa City. I couldn’t imagine why we’d want to.
It was surprisingly simple. Salem had a good eye for security weaknesses. We joined a cargo consignment. Pagan, Morag, Merle, Mudge, Rannu, Cronin and I were all wearing the stolen Themtech exo-armour. They were called Hellions. We were put in a crate and the crate was filled with counter-acceleration gel, the same stuff that we’d used in the OILO drop and that air and space fighter pilots filled their cockpits with. We were then smuggled into the cargo yard. No hacking involved, just a forged barcode and a switchover out of sight of Demiurge. Then we waited.
Even unconscious I felt our upward spiral ride on the catapult, a giant mass driver designed to fire cargo into orbit. Burned and new-growth flesh battered at impossible Gs. It felt like every blood cell burst. Despite the gel, we were all moved from the front of the container to the back. Even the flesh components of the Hellions became one huge bruise.
In orbit we’d cut through the container and pushed out some of the gel, hoping that nobody was scanning us too hard. Then Pagan sent the tight beam signal. We waited. Then he did it again. We waited some more. Well I say we. I was unconscious and yet still failing in pain management. I didn’t care. This could end in the flash of a particle beam weapon and all it would have meant to me was sweet release.
If I’d been a little less self-involved then maybe I would have thought of Tailgunner, Mother, Big Henry and Cat. Not to mention the seventy or so of Mother’s people, the resistance and belligerent street gangs who’d died in the diversionary attacks. People whose names we’d never even know, and mobilisation or not, Rolleston’s people would still be trying to track them down. No wonder Soloso and Strange didn’t want us back.
Oh yes, Cronin. Seems he’d defected. Seems that he was as scared of Rolleston as everyone else, maybe more so. He’d almost got himself killed by providing some initial information and then refusing to say anything else unless we got him off world and away from Rolleston.
