and stabbed it through the top of its head. The crack of armoured chitin breaking under the bowie knife-like point of the machete was fiercely audible. The thing shook for a moment and then dropped to the ground.
The others were having less luck. They were all carrying knives that weren’t really up to dealing with things like this in hand-to-hand. Of the three of them only Pagan really had the training for this sort of fight. That left them with their handguns and the 10mm rounds were no match for the chitinous armour.
Superheated air exploded as one of the remaining mutated Berserks fired its black light projector from its spiked and twisted weapons gauntlet. I heard Morag cry out and felt a moment of panic. I kicked out at the Berserk’s knee joint. I heard a satisfying crack and the thing lurched down on one knee and I drove the four knuckle blades on my right hand into its face, warping its horrible facial features further. I twisted the blades and then pulled them out. Letting it slump to the ground.
There was a burst of laser fire and one of the two remaining Berserks hit the ground, its head transformed into dirty black steam. A longer burst of gauss-boosted fire from Mudge’s converted AK-47. The final Berserk shook with every hit as it staggered back and then hit the ground.
We were now well and truly compromised.
Red steam floated into the air through Morag’s reactive camouflage.
‘You okay?’ I sub-vocalised over the tac net.
‘Fine. We need to move,’ she snapped.
We ran forward, stealth abandoned in favour of speed. Weapons sweeping left, right, up and down as we went. Anything moving got shot. We didn’t stay to see whether or not our fire was successful.
Where C amp;C should have been we found a solid wall of what we thought was new growth. We were taking shard and black beam hits on our backs. My shoulder laser was out searching for targets. Occasionally its red beam would stab out but mostly they were staying hidden.
We took cover behind the rib supports in the corridor and laid down suppressing fire. It was a waiting game now. Waiting for Rolleston to turn up and kill us, or more likely turn up, hurt us, torture us for a long time and then possess us so we could become part of his brave new world. I was firing the SAW and the shoulder laser. The corridor shuddered as white plasma fire ate away part of it. Morag caught the Black Squadron guy who’d fired with a three-beam burst from her laser carbine. Part of his superheated flesh was blown off but he ducked back around a corner leaving black steam hanging in the air behind him.
‘Jakob!’ Pagan snapped at me. He was a series of fractal images as his malfunctioning reactive camouflage tried to make him blend. Angrily he pulled the gillie suit off. He was hunkered down over by the new-growth wall gesturing at me to join him. I knew what he wanted.
‘I’m not a fucking jack!’ I snapped. It was just fear and selfishness.
‘Do it!’ Morag demanded.
Mudge glanced over at me and then returned to firing.
I fired a long burst up the corridor as I moved sideways towards Pagan. The return fire intensified and a beam and two shards tagged me. Part of my inertial armour was a blackened and smoking mess and the shards spun me around. I landed by Pagan’s feet. He just pushed a jack into one of my plugs. I felt the flesh on my face become something else. A foreign body moved inside me. The flailing tendrils of transformed flesh grew out of my face. I would never get use to this. It still horrified me. I had to fight against the panic. I wanted to throw myself away from them but of course they were part of me.
I touched the flesh of the new-growth wall. I felt the tendrils burrow into the warm moist membrane, like maggots through dead flesh. I felt something monstrous notice me and breathe my name. I heard it inside my skull.
The jack came out of the plug in my neck and I pushed myself back from the wall as the tendrils started to grow back into my flesh. The membrane covering the entrance started to dissipate like it was being eaten by invisible parasites. I was vaguely aware of our return fire intensifying as I crawled into the room.
Two grenades exploded behind me as the others bought themselves time and backed into the room. I was trying to get up, trying to deal with the body shock, when Pagan grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me towards a biomechanical, honeycomb-like growth. I’d seen it before. It was the Themtech-derived memory structure.
‘Move!’ Pagan snapped again. He was not being gentle. I was too disoriented to fight him off. I noticed that one of the walls in the room was transparent and supported by a biomechanical skeletal structure. Children floated in liquid behind the wall.
‘What…?’ I managed.
‘They’re children,’ I heard Morag say in horror.
The jack slid into my plug and again my flesh was transformed. It grew out to mate with the honeycomb.
‘Just for a moment,’ Pagan said. I touched the honeycomb. It was like the skin of a blister. Beneath it I felt Demiurge raging, trying to break through and touch me, consume me again. There was black fire and hatred beneath the skin. Then free again.
‘I will fucking kill you if you do that again!’ I screamed at Pagan when my face had the rudiments of a mouth again.
Pagan was standing over me looking cold and angry. Mudge, Merle and Rannu were at the new door I’d made, firing into the corridor.
‘You see that, what you felt? That’s where we’re going,’ Pagan told me. I stared at him. Knowing what they had to do and catching a glimpse of it were two different things.
‘You’ll both die,’ I said. I wasn’t thinking straight – we were all going to die – but they were going to be consumed by hate. They didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t understand that I knew what it was like to drown in the filth of Demiurge, of Rolleston’s mind. What had we been thinking? We should have run. Given him the planet.
I looked over at Morag, who was staring up at the wall-sized fish tank of children. They had no eyes, mouths or nostrils. They were hooked up to IVs and catheters and had wires coming from the plugs in the backs of their necks. Some of them were obviously dead. I guessed from biofeedback.
I tried to take in the room around me. It was an enormous space, like a cathedral made of biomechanical flesh. The domed roof was transparent and looked out into space. It was illuminated by the constant strobing flashes of the ongoing battle outside.
‘That’s the angels,’ Pagan said distractedly. He was studying the two ports he’d had me make in the skin of the honeycombed biological memory structure. He didn’t look happy. I could understand why. They looked more like an orifice than any ports I’d ever seen.
‘Jakob!’ The voice echoed down the corridor. I was only able to pick it up over the gunfire because of the quality of my audio filters. I went cold. Even after all this she still frightened me.
Morag gave me a look I couldn’t read. She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. Pagan was staring at me, grinning. The grin was cold and completely humourless; it looked like a rictus. I realised how gaunt he had become. He was just taut skin stretched across a skeleton. Both of them sat down and then slumped forward as they tranced into hell. They had to. We had no choice. They had to go after Demiurge in here, protected from God in an isolated system. For any of this to work, Rolleston had to be completely shut off from Demiurge.
The gunfire had stopped. I glanced over at the doorway. Rannu and Mudge were on either side of it. Merle had his plasma rifle at his shoulder and was checking all around the cathedral-sized room.
‘Jakob!’ the Grey Lady shouted again.
‘What?’ I found myself asking almost involuntarily.
‘We need you to surrender,’ she said.
Mudge and Rannu took turns to look over at me. Rannu had a raised eyebrow and Mudge was actually smiling.
‘Have you got a fag?’ I demanded.
‘Fucking get your own,’ Mudge told me. Merle was just shaking his head.
‘Oh yeah. I’ll just pop down to McShit’s and get a pack,’ I said. I was a long way from Dundee now.
‘You know it was the smell of cigarettes that gave us away, don’t you?’ Merle told his lover. Mudge just shrugged.
‘Jakob?’ No impatience there. She was calm, just waiting for an answer.
