Through the thick plastic of the portholes I watch as the fleet continues to assemble. Manoeuvring engines flicker off and on. Outside I can see one of the mechs crawl across the hull of the Thunderchilde like a skin parasite. A flight of interceptors shoots past on heavy burn. So much activity but all I hear is the omnipresent hum of the ship’s engines reverberating through the craft.
She’s lying on the bench. Plugged in, presumably to the isolated systems and not the net at large, but not tranced in. She’s wearing an olive-drab sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of combat trousers. Her hair’s growing back now, much to my relief. She looks beautiful. She doesn’t look happy to see me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘For everything.’
She just looks at me. I can’t read her look.
‘I believe you. You always are,’ she finally says. ‘But no more.’
This really, really hurts. I knew it would.
‘I just want to hold you one more time,’ I tell her, my voice wet with emotion.
She looks pissed off, like this is nonsense and she wants to dismiss me. You have to know her well to see how much this is costing her. I think she’s going to refuse but she stand up and unplugs herself.
I move to her and wrap my arms around her. I try not to cry and close my eyes. At first she’s stiff as she holds me, not wanting to give in to the embrace. Then I feel the tenseness go out of her and she hugs me tightly and I hear her start to sob. I hug her tightly as she starts to beat her fist on me.
‘You bastard! You bastard! You bastard!’ she repeats as she hits me. ‘I don’t want to feel like this.’
Neither do I.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper again and then press the air syringe that Rannu swiped from the med bay into the back of her neck. Morag pushes herself away and stares at me, anger and betrayal written all over her face. I catch her as she collapses and carry her to the central bench. Morag isn’t like the rest of us. She doesn’t have internal defences against chemical attacks. She has some pretty high-end cybernetics, mostly hacking stuff, but she hasn’t been augmented for combat.
A while later Pagan, Mudge and Rannu climb up into the observation room. Pagan looks down at Morag and then at me.
‘I like your plan. Force me to violate her,’ he snaps at me.
I can’t look at him.
‘Let’s just get on with this,’ Mudge says. He sounds shaky and he’s smoking a cigarette. I see Rannu looking at him questioningly.
Pagan sits down on the floor and connects one of his plugs to one of Morag’s with a cable. I’ve never been happy with the intimacy of this act, but he’s right, it’s not intimacy. It’s a violation. I feel like shooting myself. Pagan closes his eyes and slumps forward as he trances in.
It takes a long time. Pagan is in there for more than two hours. This is time we can’t afford. Time we should be using for prepping. At times both Morag and Pagan jerk and twitch. At one point Pagan’s eyes open and roll back up into his head showing the whites. At another point Morag bucks up on the bench and screams.
‘I can’t watch this,’ Rannu says and climbs down the ladder. Leaving me with a chain-smoking and very subdued Mudge.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask, more for something to say than anything else. Mudge doesn’t answer and won’t look at me. ‘Mudge?’ I ask, becoming concerned.
‘Do you remember that I wasn’t going to come to the Dog’s Teeth?’ Mudge asks. I think back to the aftermath of releasing God on the net and nod. Mudge had said that he wanted to capitalise on what we’d done. Use his media expertise to try and guide things in the right direction. I nod again. ‘I was too scared.’
I just look at him. Mudge is a lot of things – annoying, obnoxious, offensively truthful, nosey, difficult, almost impossible to be friends with – but frightened he’s not.
‘That doesn’t sound like you. Give me one of those,’ I say as he opens a new pack of cigarettes and takes one out, lighting it up with a shaky hand.
‘No way, man,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You’ve quit.’ He sucks on the fag, searching for a way to put what he’s going to say next. ‘It was the broadcast node on Atlantis. The way that Rolleston and the Grey Lady just walked through us. Like we weren’t even there. Like there was nothing we could do about them. It was the first time I’d really got tagged, you know?’ I nod. ‘I mean, I’d been hit before. Everyone gets hit, there’s just too many shards and beams flying around not to, but never seriously hit, you know. It’s not that though.’ He looks at me now, earnestly. ‘I’m not a coward.’ He needs me to believe this.
‘I know you’re not, man.’
He looks away again.
‘I mean, I threw myself into the shit on Lalande 2. I was in it, man. Loving it.’ Trying to prove something to yourself, I leave unsaid. ‘But it was the same at the Citadel. They just fucking walked through us, man.’ He looks me in the eyes. ‘I just don’t think there’s anything we can do about them.’
I don’t know what to say. He has a point. We just get so used to trying not to think about the odds.
‘Mudge, you’ve got nothing to prove, to yourself or anyone else. You’ve done more than enough. Stay here. Do like Balor asked – tell our story.’ I’m not sure what I’m expecting, but not anger. Not aimed at me anyway.
‘Fuck you, Jakob!’ he snaps. I am taken aback. ‘Don’t fucking condescend to me. Where do you get off making decisions like that? So fucking typical of you -’ taking on the burdens of the world, making everyone’s fucking decisions for them – he points at Morag ‘- so you can use it as an excuse to feel fucking sorry for yourself. How can you fucking say that to me? Go home. Who do you think you’re talking to?!’
‘Okay, man. I’m sorry. Come along and die with the rest of us.’ I’m trying to placate him. He drops his head and takes another drag of the cigarette. The cigarette looks really nice.
‘There’s only so far the drugs will take you,’ he says. ‘I’ll be cool. Screw that. I will be fucking transcendent. Just don’t tell the others, okay.’
I nod. Not really sure what to think. I would be more worried if I wasn’t convinced that we were all dead.
Finally Pagan comes out of his trance and unplugs himself. He looks tired, drawn, like he’s just lost a fight with Balor or something. A wisp of smoke floats out of one of his plugs.
‘Oh yeah, that was just what I needed before a big day,’ he says sarcastically.
‘Is it done?’ I ask. He nods. ‘What took so fucking long?’
‘Oh nothing, Jakob, just a little uncharted territory. Trying to explain to an alien entity that does not understand the concept of individuality why it has to leave its only friend because we value some individuals more than another. That’s after I hacked my friend’s internal defences and her subconscious put up a hell of a fight.’ Then he swayed a bit and had to sit down. He cried out and clutched his head. ‘Ah! This is going to take a bit of getting used to.’ He looks back at me. ‘Good thing we’ve got lots of time.’
‘All right. Can you use your influence down here to get her planet side?’ Pagan looks at me like I’m an idiot.
‘She’s not going anywhere, Jakob. We still need someone to run interference. To handle what I was going to be doing.’
‘Another hacker,’ I say desperately. I haven’t thought this through. This can’t be for nothing as well.
‘Even if we could find someone who was anywhere near as good as her and prepared to come along, they wouldn’t be able to run the software we’ve developed out of the godsware. Sorry, Jakob, she has to come and die like the rest of us. Tell her to get used to it; she’ll be surprised how liberating it is.’
Pagan gets up and heads for the ladder but almost collapses. Mudge has to catch him and, with a final look at me, help him down the ladder. I watch them go.
‘It’s not the violation,’ a drowsy Morag says from behind me. I feel something cold crawl down my spine. I turn round to look at Morag as she pushes herself up. ‘What’s another violation?’ she asks matter-of-factly. ‘It’s the loneliness. You were always a shadow to me compared to him.’ She looks down and then back up at me. No trace of emotion. ‘Cold comfort. Well a girl needs something physical as well.’
She gets up and heads for the ladder. I reach out for her. She flinches away from me.
‘Don’t touch me!’ Here was the anger. It wasn’t rage. This was cold, calculating. ‘It was my choice, Jakob! Mine!’ Then more quietly: ‘Not yours.’
‘Morag…’ What was I going to say?
‘Shut up. I’m going to relearn my job on this mission. You fucking do yours. That’s all.’ Morag left the
