I wondered if I was going to start wanting to go home. Morag took me somewhere else.
‘So you’re really not coming?’
She was sitting up in the bed, the cover wrapped around her while I stood at the window looking out over the rooftops of wherever we were. The heat haze almost made it look pretty. I turned to look at her.
‘Morag, I know it seems like copping out to you but, as insane as the last three months have been, you weren’t there for the previous twelve years. The crawling through mud, the getting injured, starving, no sleep, bad drugs, fear all the time and seeing people you like die so often you stopped bothering to get to know them. I’ve had enough, and despite what you may think I have no stomach for killing humans.’
‘But it’s all right to kill Them?’ There was no judgement there, just a question.
‘It’s a lot easier, and They were mostly trying to kill me at the time. Look, I don’t know if I’m me or the alien…’ She started to interrupt me. ‘No, wait. But I should be dead, lucky breaks in combat aside.’ Though, thinking about it, none of them seemed lucky; they felt like they’d been won through blood and pain. ‘The radiation poisoning should have killed me. I’ve got a second chance in hopefully a changed world. I think it would be stupid and wasteful to just throw that away.’
She regarded me carefully for a while. I couldn’t work out the expression on her face. Then she smiled. ‘I think you are the alien.’
This confused me. ‘I thought-’
‘It sounds like you’re starting to care about yourself.’
Maybe she was right, but I didn’t want to analyse it too much. ‘I think you may have underestimated how much of a coward I’ve always been.’ I don’t know why I couldn’t look at her as I said it.
She dropped the sheet and climbed off the bed, coming over and wrapping her arms around me. I could feel how much her body had changed. How much tougher she had become. I could remember how fragile I’d thought she was. She kissed me. Brave girl after what I’d been drinking last night.
‘I don’t think you’re a coward. I don’t think you’re copping out. I just wished, you know…’ Now she couldn’t look at me. She laid her head against my chest.
‘That I’d be around?’ She nodded, her hair brushing against me. ‘Look, if you’re serious about this, if you think that we could be together without screaming all the time or trying to kill each other or me not doing anything stupid, then I can hang around. I just don’t want to have anything to do with that prick Sharcroft. Besides, I always fancied being a cowboy.’
She looked confused. ‘A cowboy? Like a cybrid?’ she asked.
I laughed. ‘No, really not.’ Then suddenly she was sad again. ‘What?’
‘It’s just that… being here wouldn’t help…’
I didn’t understand. Slowly it dawned on me what she was talking about.
‘Morag, are you going off-world?’
Any warm feelings I’d had were replaced by a very cold fear crawling through me.
‘We need to stop talking now.’
‘Morag,’ I grabbed her, my metal hand and my real one wrapping around the wiry muscle of her upper arms. ‘Tell me you’re not going to the colonies.’
She looked straight into the black lenses of my eyes. ‘Let me go, now.’ There was steel in her voice. ‘Didn’t take you long to change back, did it?’ I let her go.
‘Morag, it’s-’
‘Too dangerous? Again? What is dangerous is you keep talking about this.’
‘I was going to say a death sentence.’
‘You need to stop now.’
‘You’re right. There’s no need to hang around here because that twisted, evil half-dead bastard is going to get you killed out of pure fucking speculation.’
‘If you don’t with your big mouth.’
She grabbed her clothes and stormed out past a surprised-looking Rannu. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen the normally calm Nepalese look surprised before. I don’t know why he looked surprised. Morag and I were always fighting.
Being naked I decided to climb back into the bed and pull the sheets up. Then I tried looking for any leftover rotting whisky. Rannu stood at the bottom of the bed. He seemed uncomfortable.
‘Sit down, Rannu,’ I told him. I’d finally found a bottle with some tequila left in it. I took a swig and offered it to Rannu. He looked pained.
‘Hangover?’ I asked.
‘Either that or I have severely offended the gods.’
‘It was a good send-off,’ I said, mostly for something to say. It had only been three ex-squaddies, a computer hacker and a journalist getting drunk in whatever shithole this was. I think they deserved parades and celebrations like the sort I’d seen in history vizzes and read about. Rannu nodded anyway, I think to humour me.
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Apparently there’s nothing to stay here for.’ Though I had no idea what I was going to do next. ‘You going home?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You have a family, kids,’ I told him.
‘Which is why I must go.’ I recognised the resolve in his voice.
‘You ever done anything this dumb?’ Being a member of the Regiment he would have done a number of really dumb things under orders. He’d also done some dumb things with us.
‘Not quite,’ he said.
‘It’s a death sentence. This isn’t Them; this is people with near-total surveillance who understand strategy, tactics, tradecraft, who know your training and have superior physical and possibly technological abilities. This is not the way to fight this war.’
‘More than anything we need information.’
That I couldn’t deny. ‘How are you going to get it out?’
He just looked at me.
‘We can’t hide from God; how can you hide from Demiurge?’
‘If I couldn’t hide from God then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,’ he said evenly. He seemed more blase about operational security than Morag had. He must have checked out the place for surveillance first.
‘Are you going to let her go on her own?’ he asked. I had not been so pissed off at him since he’d pulled my arm off and used it to beat me unconscious.
‘Fuck you, Rannu. Fuck you and fuck your emotional blackmail!’ I think he was taken aback by the amount of anger in my response. ‘But as we’re raising the stakes a little, when your body isn’t found what do you want me to tell your kids? Daddy died on a fool’s fucking errand working for exactly the kind of pricks we all nearly died fighting in the first place.’
He looked genuinely hurt by the time I’d finished. Genuinely upset and the most emotional I think I’d ever seen him.
‘Don’t talk about my family again,’ he said and turned and walked out of the room. I felt like shit. Despite one-sided attempts to kill each other early on in our relationship, Rannu had been a rock. He’d dealt with all the shit that had been thrown at him and never complained.
I saw the cigarette smoke in the doorway.
‘Are you recording this?’ I asked Mudge.
‘Yep. Fuck their operational security. You know there were a couple of Sharcroft’s people watching us last night and apparently a surveillance team in the opposite building?’
I’d seen the tails but didn’t know about the team. Made sense though. Problem was, these days your surveillance couldn’t go over the net. Even radio waves were a risk, because the moment God knew then everyone could know if they just asked.
‘Rannu dealt with them?’ I asked.
‘Non-lethally.’ That would explain why he disappeared for half an hour at the beginning of the evening. ‘He then cleared our rooms of bugs. Made sure that there was nothing God-like nearby and set up white noise and other counter-surveillance stuff. Hence the reason your total lack of discretion didn’t kill anyone.’
