‘Okay, we surrender. You can come in and get us now!’ Mudge shouted. Even Merle laughed.
The motion sensor strapped to my webbing just behind my left shoulder picked up movement above me. I raised the SAW and saw Merle doing the same. I immediately zoomed in on it, not quite sure what I was seeing. It had a long, chitinous armoured body and six legs ending in sharp sword-like bone blades. The torso of a human woman stuck out of it. Her arms also ended in bone blades. Growing from the back of the thing was a gristly, multi-barrelled, rapid-firing shard gun.
She was descending towards us like a spider dropping down its web. Except the thread was made of flesh and looked something like a long intestine. As it lowered towards us the walls seethed, as all around us things began to grow out of it.
On the guncam feeds from Mudge and Rannu I saw weaponised Black Squadron things sprint at them firing. Their gun arms were either gauss or plasma weapons. Rannu fired his gauss carbine and Mudge his AK-47. They had to hose them down, keep firing at them, let the bullets chip away at their flesh. The mutated Black Squadron guys were still running as they died.
I dived to the side and rolled onto my back as shards impacted all around me. It was suppressing fire. I couldn’t work it out – this thing could have easily killed me. There was no cover. I returned fire, the comforting kick of the SAW against my shoulder. Every third round in the cassette was a tracer. I could tell I wasn’t having any effect on this sword-legged thing because I could see the tracers ricocheting off its carapace and bouncing into the wall.
I switched targets to fire at the things growing out of the wall. Anything that looked well formed got hit. The tracers and the armour-piercing, explosive-tipped, long, nine-millimetre rounds tore them apart. I was finding my targets because they were hitting me with shards or black beams. Pain, track the source and fire till it came apart.
‘Merle, take that spider thing out!’ I said over the tac net. I couldn’t work out why he hadn’t done it. He was taking hits as well. ‘Merle!’ he was ignoring me. Fuck it! I aimed my grenade launcher.
‘Don’t fucking fire!’ Merle shouted at me like he meant it. There was something new in his voice – emotion. On my IVD I could see from the window for Merle’s guncam that it was aimed at me.
‘What are you doing?!’ I shouted at him and staggered forward from more shard fire hitting my back.
‘It’s Cat!’ I looked again. I magnified in on her face. Some of it was new-growth biomechanical flesh over where the Grey Lady had blown Cat’s own flesh off. It was her as a reanimated corpse. Her pallor reminded me of Sharcroft. She didn’t even have the expression of agony on her face that the Black Squadron guys did.
I swung round to fire at more of the things crawling out of the walls as more shard fire hit me. I felt the integrity of my inertial armour start to give. I was knocked back but my subcutaneous armour held.
I caught a glimpse of the net feed. The viral eclipse that was eating the sun was almost done. Then the sun disappeared. God disappeared. Flames surged across heaven. Even though they were just icons, I could see the panic in the vagabond army.
Lying on the honeycombed memory structure, Pagan’s body began to buck and spasm. Smoke was pouring out of his plugs now.
Mudge was spun round as gauss fire from one of the mutated Black Squadron troopers caught him in the side. He hit the ground still firing but the trooper made for Morag and Pagan’s tranced-in bodies. I aimed and kept the SAW on him, pouring fire into him; at the same time my shoulder laser was blowing steaming chunks of superheated meat off him. He hit the ground. Mudge was back up by the door firing into the corridor. More doors were beginning to open in the walls. It was hopeless.
In the net Morag’s icon looked like her. It wasn’t Annis or the Maiden of Flowers, just Morag. She was standing in a circle of skull-topped poles, the ghost fence protection program. All around her Demiurge was like a black storm. Her hair and clothes were whipped around by the fury of it.
In front of the poles ghostly figures appeared: Buck, Gibby, Balor, Vicar, Dog Face, Big Henry, Tailgunner, Mother and Cat. Not vanquished foes, but a manifestation of the program written in by Morag, her tribute to the fallen. They were virtual spirits of the dead to protect her. Even if the body of one of them was here trying to kill us. The ghost fence protected her ritualistic summoning program. Except it wasn’t a summoning program; they came and went as they pleased. It was a series of complex protocols for contact. It had been set up to drive home the mysterious and superior nature of the gods in the net. Morag didn’t want to play that game.
I would have like to have shot and killed Cat’s transformed body, but the new doors appearing in the wall were keeping me a little busy.
‘Mudge, get to one of the other entrances! Rannu, stay were you are. The Grey Lady’s going to be coming through that door any moment!’ I shouted over the tac net.
Mudge ran towards one of the other holes appearing in the biomechanical flesh, firing at anything that moved. Nearly everything moved. I ran towards Morag and Pagan’s prone bodies. They’d both been hit multiple times. Parts of their inertial armour suits were blackened and smoking. But they were still alive, and that was all they needed to do their job.
‘Merle, if you’re not going to fucking shoot her, can you shoot everything else, please!’ I shouted. Brilliant. The ultimate killing machine chooses now to become sentimental and shut down.
As Mudge sprinted towards the other door Cat fired from her position above us. I saw shards tear through Mudge’s back and blow one of his metal legs off from the knee down. He went sprawling across the floor.
‘Listen, you bastards! Listen to me, all you fake-scary frightened cowards who feed us cryptic bollocks in return for worship! Listen to me, gods of the net!’ I heard Morag scream into the storm of Demiurge. She was angry. ‘Join us here! Now! Or we will show Demiurge where you live!’ The resolve in her voice made real the threat.
If they were as powerful as we thought, then they would also know about the experimental array linked to a physics lab on a science ship in orbit on the other side of the planet. She would feed that information to Demiurge if she had to. That would take the fight to them. It had been Salem along with a friend of his, a physics professor at Moa City University, who had worked it out. Salem had been a man of faith. He had never believed in the gods in the net. If I hadn’t been busy I would have been proud. Even in that icon she looked like the high priestess of an ancient and terrible religion. Gods were just another weapon to her.
‘Reloading!’ I shouted. As if anyone had time to care. I ejected the cassette from the SAW. My shoulder laser spun on its servos firing rapidly, but it wasn’t enough. I got shot. A lot. My armour gave up the ghost, and I watched black beams appear through my side and shards impact into my chest and legs. One of them dented my metal right arm as it bounced off. I collapsed to my knees. Red warning icons sang their familiar boring song in my IVD. I closed them down – all they did was tell me the fucking obvious.
I managed to ram the cassette home as weaponised Black Squadron troopers came sprinting into the room through the new doors. I fired, taking them down one after another. Each one was getting a little closer to me. I tried to place my body between them and Pagan and Morag. Absorbing more hits. Concentrating on the ones with the plasma weapons for arms. I couldn’t let one of them hit me.
I didn’t understand their tactics. These guys had been recruited from special forces of every nationality but they were acting like Them.
Cat landed in front of Merle.
In the net there was light in the darkness of Demiurge. I saw Pagan wearing his Druidical icon. Head bowed, stooped gait as he tried to walk against the howling windstorm of Demiurge. The glow was coming from him. Inside him. White and steel blue. It seemed to be engulfing his insides. Then he stood up straight, his clothes and hair torn at by the black wind. Pagan became something else: a holy terror. His eyes became lightning, his mouth became lightning, his internal organs became lightning, shining though his skin and clothes.
‘Cat?’ Merle asked. He sounded like a little boy. Oh for fuck’s sake.
I tried to resist the urge to think, I told you so, when Cat put both her sword-like arms and her two front legs through Merle’s torso and legs. She reared up on her back four legs. The blades piercing the screaming Merle manipulated him like a puppet.
I heard the flat thump of a grenade being launched and then another. Two large holes appeared in Cat’s torso, or possibly thorax, and then exploded. The front part of the Cat hybrid lurched forward. Her skull exploded as a long burst tore through it. I’m pretty sure that a couple of rounds hit Merle as well. What was left of Cat collapsed to the floor, dead. Again. Unfortunately Merle was still impaled on the ground.
‘I got you, lover,’ Mudge said over the tac net as he crawled towards Merle taking hits every inch of the way,
