spear blow with his shining staff, slid under the angel’s guard and tore a lump out of its flesh. Papa Neon shot into the air above the angel and bit into it. The angel lurched like a puppet. Its own bones pierced its skin. The white flames went out of its eyes.
Elsewhere the fight wasn’t going as well. Few of the hackers were a match for the angels. Columns of black fire joined the plain of glass to the four black suns, burning lines of icons regardless of whose side they were on. Above the plain the sea of fire began to roil and surge angrily.
The fighters from the Barbarossa came into view on heavy burn. One of them came apart and started tumbling as a thick red beam of laser light superheated its hull until it exploded.
The fighters fired their nose railguns in a constant stream of tracers all around us and launched all their missiles as one, as close as they could to the screening drones.
The screen of drones fired back. Space was filled with a grid of red laser light. Missiles burst into multiple submunitions. Warheads exploded in space; some of them even reached their targets. In front of us drones exploded in rapid succession. Now cross hairs appeared on our IVDs as we targeted the survivors.
There were explosions on the hull of the ship as gristle-like point-defence systems were destroyed.
I fell up towards the Bush, firing short bursts from the Retributors at the surviving drones in my path. Some of the drones were burning as plasma fire ate through them. Black light from return fire scored the Hellion’s armour. I launched one of the missiles off my back at a surviving black beam point-defence system. The missile was destroyed before it got close, but one of Morag’s missiles hit the growth-like system.
None of the fighters made it. They were torn apart by the remotes before their first missiles hit.
We were now taking light fire as we plummeted up towards the Bush ’s hull. Through the windows on my IVD I could see Mudge and Pagan firing their Retributors at its hull. I magnified the Hellion’s optics and saw Walker-like biomechanical constructs growing out of the ship’s flesh. I joined the firing. Then I realised I was coming in too fast. I tried a back burn on my flight fin. It slowed me but I hit the hull hard. The impact was hard enough to make me spit blood over the plastic visor of my helmet. I bounced. The Retributor flew out of my hands but it was still connected to the ammo pack on the Hellion’s back by its chain feed.
With the help of the suit’s systems I managed to regain control and make it back to the hull. The six of us grouped together in a rough circle, everyone facing out.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Merle said. ‘The architecture’s all off. The plans we downloaded are meaningless. I didn’t even see an airlock on the way in.’ It was as close to panic as I’d ever heard from Merle. It wasn’t very close but he was less than happy.
‘Plan B?’ Mudge asked.
‘You want to do it?’ I asked as I fired off a burst at something that looked like it was growing out of the hull.
‘I think it’ll have more impact coming from you,’ he said.
‘What’s plan B?’ Pagan asked suspiciously.
‘Wild Boys to Rolleston, over,’ I said over an open comms link.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ a furious Morag demanded. Merle turned to level his Hellion’s light plasma cannon at me.
‘What is it, Jakob? I’m a little busy right now,’ Rolleston asked impatiently. His voice sounded the same but now hatred outweighed fear when I heard it. The others went quiet.
‘Don’t be a cunt. Let us in and let’s get this over and done with.’
There was a long silence. Or at least there would have been if Morag, Pagan and Merle hadn’t started screaming threats and demands for explanations at me again.
‘Okay, Jakob,’ Rolleston finally said.
25
A lot of our plan was based around Rolleston’s arrogance. On the surface this might seem risky but you’ve got to think that if a guy wants to be a god then there’s going to be a degree of arrogance involved.
It looked less like an airlock and more like a blister as it grew out of the hull and enveloped the Hellions, blocking out the dangerous light show below us.
On the other side they were waiting. The Black Squadron troopers weren’t soldiers any more; they were just weapons. They were bent over, covered in thick, overlapping chitinous plates. Reinforced bone pierced their armoured skins; one of their arms was a long sharp curved blade of blackened bone and the other was some kind of ranged weapon. It was their mouths that got me though. They were locked open in a fixed silent scream. You could see the pain etched across their still-human faces. You could read the desperation in their eyes. They were all linked to Rolleston through Demiurge. I think he liked to feel their pain. I think he fed on it. Among the transformed soldiers were twisted and deformed versions of the Berserks, like we’d seen in the Citadel, and with them similarly twisted versions of Their Walkers.
A missile flew from the back tubes of each of the Hellions. Unlike Them, these constructs and mutations screamed when plasma burned flesh and bone. The plasma fire formed a rough circle, a bit of breathing room.
Marching forward firing railguns and plasma cannons at anything that moved, just another target-rich environment. The railguns turned whatever they hit into moist fragments. The plasma cannons left little in their wake but burning puddles of flesh and bone. Rannu’s Hellion and mine took the lead. A corridor was chosen at random. Any movement was met with overwhelming fire. They tried growing through the roof, through the walls, through the floor, but that took them too long. The whole ship was flesh now, writhing all around us.
When their numbers became too much, when they were about to overwhelm us, then missiles were used just to clear a little space. Plasma flame cauterised the flesh of the ship. Each time we could feel the ship react a little beneath us. It was in pain from the fire. The Hellion’s armour started to run as they marched through liquid fire. We couldn’t afford to hang around until the plasma flames burned themselves out.
Targets everywhere. The whole ship seething but the Hellions held their own. Anything that got close was ripped apart by their back tentacles. The armoured suits were soon covered in gore.
Overwhelming firepower or not, there was a limit to our ammunition, and the whole ship was trying to kill us.
Then he came. He didn’t look like the calm and contained professional bastard I’d known from Sirius. He looked like fury. The madness in his mind hadn’t so much leaked as flooded out. He was naked and had transformed himself to look like an ancient Greek statue, like the type Mudge had shown me in a museum in London. As railguns and plasma cannons were pointed towards him, the whole front of his body blackened into what looked like living metal. Surely he couldn’t withstand concentrated plasma cannon fire?
Repeated plasma fire wreathed him in a corona of white flames. The railgun fire hammered into him, blowing chunks out of his flesh, which regrew almost immediately.
It was over quickly. He reached Rannu’s Hellion first and just reached out a burning hand, snapped his plasma cannon and threw the exo-armour into the wall. Root-like tendrils of biomechanical flesh grew around Rannu’s Hellion holding it still. Rolleston turned to my Hellion all but ignoring the constant fire from the railguns. He reached up and his hands grew into claws. He dug into the front of the armour and tore it open.
It was empty. There was a limit to our stupidity – I hoped. Rolleston started to sink into the floor. We triggered the charges in the armour. The feed from the Hellions went down.
It would be nice to think that the charges had taken care of Rolleston, but I just knew we weren’t that lucky. Besides, by that point we were inside. We heard his screams of rage echo through the vein-like corridors.
A few minutes ago
‘Shit,’ I said. There was a conspiracy to force me to relive two of my most unpleasant experiences simultaneously. The technology-transformed-into-flesh of the Bush was forcing us to rethink our entry strategy. Maybe strategy’s a strong word. We had some contingencies but once again we were making this up as we went along.
