fantastic flesh/prosthetic neural interface; it pretty much felt like part of my body. The tactile sensors were high spec and it had integral sheaths for four new knuckle blades. Best of all it had a smartlinked but independently tracking and firing shoulder-mounted laser.
The new arm had become a thing of wonder among the Wild Boys. Special forces or not, it was very unusual for an NCO to get an arm this good, though Mudge had assured me that it was not as good-quality as his legs. Shaz had dug around and found that the limb had been meant for a high-ranking officer who’d lost his arm in a tank accident .
‘Do you know anyone called Nuada?’ he’d asked me.
‘No. Odd name. Why?’
‘Well it seems that it was Nuada – I’m guessing he’s a signalman somewhere – who had the arm redirected to you.’
‘Nice of him.’ But I was none the wiser. Maybe the officer in question had pissed this Nuada off.
The bottles of vodka were quickly taken from me and distributed. The Spetsnaz were good company but quite scary people. I would not want to get on the wrong side of them, or owe them money. They spent most of their time raiding, only coming back to resupply and cause havoc. They had an even higher level of operational intensity than we did, and that was saying something. Some of the scrapes they got in sounded very hairy and they appeared to be pretty much a law unto themselves.
I was watching one trying to impress Mudge, using his power-assisted steel maw to bite a chunk out of the metal table. Gregor, normally quiet even when drunk, was killing himself laughing at some story one of the Cossacks’ rail-gunners was telling him. I looked around the table. It was amazing the effect the Russians were having. So often our drinking bouts were maudlin because we knew that no matter what happened, how bad things got, we were going to have to go out and do it all over again. The Russians seemed at peace with that and perhaps even to relish it.
‘I have not yet eaten the human beef!’ Vladimir shouted. I think he was trying it on with Bibs, who sprayed vodka all over the table to shouts of derision from the rest of us.
‘I have,’ she announced when she finished choking on her vodka. ‘You’re not missing anything.’ Ash cracked up.
‘You’re a cannibal?’ I asked, surprised. Everyone else started laughing at me. ‘What?’ I demanded.
‘She’s talking about giving head, Jakob,’ Ash said somewhat patronisingly.
‘Surely that’s human pork?’ Mudge asked.
‘All human meat is pork,’ Gregor said. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘Pork-like.’ There was a long pause while we waited for him to qualify what he had said. ‘So I hear.’
‘You have only eaten the human meat if you bite down when you go down,’ one of the Spetsnaz warewolves said. I was pretty sure she was female. Ash, Bibby and the women with the Spetsnaz and Cossacks started laughing to cries of protest from the guys.
‘Andrea swallows,’ one of the other Spetsnaz said.
‘More importantly, I chew before I swallow. You should remember this, Vassily,’ the female Spetsnaz pointed out to more male cries of protest and female laughter. Ash clinked glasses with the woman.
‘Do you chew, Ash?’ I asked, grinning.
Ash looked down at my groin. ‘Chew what?’ she asked innocently. I’d asked for that. I tried not to worry too much that Bibs, who I’d had a one-night stand with a little while ago, was laughing the hardest.
‘You’d only taste cock implant anyway,’ Mudge said, trying to keep a straight face. More laughter.
‘Like you’d know,’ I managed weakly.
‘No!’ Vladimir cried. ‘This is not right!’
‘We have an alternative opinion?’ Mudge asked.
‘The pork, that is only when human flesh is cooked. This I have tasted.’
‘You are a sick motherfucker, Vladimir,’ Ash pointed out. Vladimir was nodding drunkenly.
I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. Cannibalism was reasonably prevalent in some of the worst parts of the poorest cities in western Europe. We’d all heard of it when we were growing up, just people too poor and desperate to find anything else. It had also happened during the war. Vladimir seemed to think it was something cool, but then again Russia’s criminal empire was not nearly as poor as most of western Europe and America, though it was not as wealthy as the equatorial states.
‘Everyone has done this in Russia,’ Vladimir said. He was trying to clear his head to make his point by shaking it. It made him look like a large and grotesque mechanical dog.
‘What did you eat?’ Brownie, our normally near-silent medic, asked .
‘A finger.’
Brownie seemed to be considering this. A frowning Vladimir was watching our Scouse medic carefully. ‘You are such a pussy,’ Brownie finally said.
The Vucari looked between each other and at their commander. I think Kost was holding his breath. Now Brownie chooses to speak? I wondered. We all tensed up wondering if he had gone too far. Vladimir looked furious as he pointed at Brownie’s expressionless face and then burst out laughing.
‘You are not afraid of anything, my funny little friend!’
Brownie smiled and started laughing as well.
‘Nice deadpan delivery, you wanker,’ Shaz told the Scouser.
‘This is why They are not worthy enemies,’ one of the Russians said. He had an Asian look to him. The others had called him Bataar and I was pretty sure he was their signalman, their hacker.
‘Worthy enough for me,’ a pained-looking Gregor said.
‘Because you can’t eat them?’ Bibs asked. Vladimir was nodding. I was starting to think Bibs was taking an unhealthy interest in this.
‘No, well maybe for Vlad and some of the others, but we cannot feed our gods and honour their death without blood,’ Bataar continued .
‘That black shit won’t do you?’ Ash asked.
‘The black shit, as you call it, will not do. Mother Wolf was nurtured on blood. She gives us much bounty, lets us hunt as we please. It is only right we offer something back in return.’
Listening to Bataar it occurred to me how lucky we were with Shaz as our signalman. I watched many of the Spetsnaz nodding at what Bataar said. Vladimir may have been the leader but Bataar was clearly the high priest. Shaz was devout but he wasn’t mad. I’d heard lots of stories from other special forces units of extreme and often bloody religious views and in some instances, as seemed to be the case here, of entire squads becoming religious cults.
On the other hand these guys revelled in the war. It was a point of view I couldn’t get behind, but it was also the reason we were alive. I tried to imagine what would have happened if the positions had been reversed. Would we have come in to help? I didn’t like the answers I was coming up with. We certainly wouldn’t if we’d been out of ammo.
‘It’s fear,’ the more sober Kost told us, returning to the initial point. ‘Working for the Organizatsiya there are so many dangerous people. There has to be something about you that will keep others in line. The longer this goes on the more outrageous that has to be.’
I wasn’t sure I would have been so frank with a man like Vladimir. The Spetsnaz lieutenant seemed to be giving Kost’s explanation some thought.
‘No,’ he said.
Kost raised an eyebrow. ‘No?’
‘No. Or that is not all. Fear is important.’ He held his arms out expansively. ‘We are predators! We hunt and kill! I want to chase a man down, a man who has wronged me or mine!’ His shouting was drawing looks from others in the mess as well as the occasional cry to shut up. All the Wild Boys were looking around a little nervously, making placatory gestures towards the people we knew. ‘I will chase him down! I will make him fear me! Make his heart beat faster so when I sink my teeth into his neck the blood will surge into my mouth again and again with the last beats of his heart, and I will taste his fear and know what I have done to him! How I have changed him!’ By the time he was finished he was standing on the table with many of the mess’s other patrons shouting at him to be quiet.
Vladimir bit his tongue and spat blood into his glass of vodka. All the Vucari did the same. Kost was shaking
