and the clothes he gave out, but not all the hellfire and damnation. Did he have any family that would miss him? Did they know? Maybe it was something I should look into. I could tell them just what sort of person the mad old bastard really was. Make them proud. If they cared.
‘The sun’s coming up!’ Mudge announced, and the night did seem to be developing a red tinge to it.
‘You’re not thinking of quitting now,’ Pagan managed after a number of attempts. ‘Lightweight,’ he added.
‘Nope. This wake has moved into the next phase. The one I like to call whore phase!’ Mudge announced. ‘Though I have in the past called it sexually transmitted disease phase.’ Mudge tried standing up but failed. He turned to look at Morag. ‘Don’t worry. I didn’t mean you.’ We all stopped.
Morag glared at him but then cracked up laughing. She reached over and tugged at his cheek. ‘S’all right, love. I’m not your type, am I?’
‘Nope, not enough penises,’ Mudge agreed. Rannu, who was quiet when drunk – at least I hoped he was drunk, the amount he’d had – seemed to be puzzling this comment through.
‘How many penises does Morag have?’ he finally asked. We fell about laughing. Rannu just looked confused. We’d had a dangerous amount to drink.
‘The question is: how many penises does he want?’ Pagan suggested.
‘All of them! All the penises!’ Mudge shouted. There was cheering from the street. ‘Besides, Morag and Jakob have to go and have angry make-up sex!’
‘What! Now wait…’ I managed, but Morag just grabbed me.
‘C’mon.’
There was an urgency to it. A need, for both of us. It wasn’t angry but nor was it tender. She rode me as I held her up, her back against the wall of the aging, rotting room at the top of the cantina , the glass door to the balcony open to the dawn air. Maybe it was passion – difficult to remember. She led the way. She was in control. She had to be.
Because afterwards she sobbed and shook in my arms as I tried to fight off the hangover I so richly deserved. It was the frustrated sobbing of someone who can’t shed tears because their eyes are metal and plastic now. I held her. I said nothing. This wasn’t just the normal emotional retardation of a male not knowing what to do when his girl’s upset. I knew there was nothing I could say.
I knew what was wrong. We’d talked about it when we’d finally had the chance to in the Dog’s Teeth. When we’d finally had the chance to do the talking bit that normally comes first with people in a relationship. Talking was difficult when people are trying to kill you all the time.
I think she liked sex. I think she liked me enough to want to have sex with me, for whatever that was worth, but she’d spent so much of her life being used. She said at times that she’d felt little more than an appliance, the cheap alternative to sense booths. That made sex complicated for her. She wanted it; she liked it; but then doing it made her feel cheap. Doing it reminded her of so much bad stuff. What could you say to that? All I could do was hold her.
It didn’t help that when we had been really intimate, when we’d shared a sense link, felt what the other felt, I’d fucked it up by getting scared and acting like a prick. In my defence it was because the alien essence that lived in Morag’s headware had taken that moment to enter my head and change my dreams. That still didn’t help Morag or excuse my behaviour.
I held her until she stopped crying. I guess I was surprised that she was still able to be this vulnerable with me after all the bad things I’d said to her in the past. Then it occurred to me – if not me then who? Then we made love again. This time more tenderly. This time she didn’t cry. Afterwards she fell asleep. I resisted sleep for as long as I could. I wanted to watch her, and sometimes sleep wasn’t so good for me. Eventually I drifted off.
Morag had been training with Rannu. Mainly physical training but some hand-to-hand stuff, the kind the Regiment taught us as well as the Muay Thai that he excelled at. She was still hot and sweaty, my arms wrapped around her as we looked out over Maw City. It was like a bioluminescent termite mound but somehow beautiful at the same time. It was difficult to explain. Their industry was somehow hypnotic. The others were further back in the cave.
Pagan and Rannu were discreetly keeping their distance and Mudge was too ill to be obnoxious. Actually that wasn’t true. He was too ill to move; he was never too ill to be obnoxious. This was as close to privacy as we were going to get. I was frustrated because this was the first time in a long time we weren’t in immediate danger.
Morag took the metal of my right hand in her much smaller one. The tactile sensors in the hand sent messages to my brain, a simulation of touch. With my real hand, albeit a hand that had armour and enhanced muscle under the skin, I stroked her hair.
‘Why don’t you train me?’ she asked.
‘Laziness, and Rannu’s better than me,’ I told her.
‘Not because you don’t want me to know this stuff?’
‘You need to know this stuff, I guess, but I’m not keen for you to be in harm’s way, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You don’t have to be protective all the time,’ she said, but there was no sharpness in her tone.
Eventually I think I worked out what she was getting at.
‘I have faith in your abilities, if that’s what you mean,’ I told her.
She smiled. See? Given time I could think of things to say that weren’t just going to upset her.
We sat there for a while watching the industry of the alien habitat. All the zero-G manoeuvring looked so graceful, much more so than the clumsy machines we utilised. I guessed that’s what came of evolving in vacuum.
‘What are They like?’ I asked after we’d sat in silence for a while. Morag gave this some thought.
‘Very different. They think as one and They just haven’t developed certain things that we take for granted.’
‘Like what?’
‘They don’t understand that we don’t think as one like Them. They can’t see how some of us would act against others of us. The biggest problem I had was trying to explain what happened with Crom. Even the concept of the Cabal is beyond Them. They just don’t get duplicity at all.’
‘That would explain their tactics during the war.’
‘There’s something very soothing about communication with Them. Something warm. Like this place.’
‘Womb-like?’ I wasn’t sure where that had come from. Again she gave it some thought before answering.
‘I wouldn’t know.’ She sounded distant.
She was quiet for a while.
‘I can trance in, you know,’ she said. I looked down at her and found her looking back at me, searching for my response.
‘Yeah?’ I managed. I wasn’t sure what to say.
‘I mean, I haven’t but I know I can.’ She looked away from me.
‘Have you heard of Project Spiral?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘Vicar worked on it. It was the American and British governments’ attempt to hack what they thought was Their comms net,’ she said.
‘But it wasn’t, was it? It’s Them, Their minds.’
‘Yes, but it’s Their comms net as well. They have the equivalent of biotechnological telepathy.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You could argue we have that with integral comms links,’ I said.
‘I don’t think it’s the same. I’m going to trance in. With my own systems and Ambassador’s help I should be able to do it.’
‘You know what happened in Operation Spiral?’ I asked, sounding calmer than I felt.
‘No, do you? I’d be interested, but God’s so far away. I know the results of what happened. Everyone brain- burned or mad. Vicar-’
‘Was the best of them,’ I finished for her.
‘But they didn’t know that it was Their mind and they hadn’t been allowed in.’
I wanted to talk her out of it or at least tell her to be careful. I didn’t. I was sort of sure she knew what she was doing though this was uncharted territory for all of us. How did an ex-Rigs hooker end up on Earth’s first
