and get their claws wet. I took them anyway, dropping the ones we’d nicked from the guards. We were now slightly better armed.
‘How many?’ Cat asked.
‘Squads of eight. Depends on how many squads,’ I told her. ‘Mudge, carry Morag.’ He protested that he wanted to be a shooter. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me. When you’ve completed special forces selection and training then you can be a shooter.’ He grudgingly picked her up.
We moved quickly. I wanted to get back to the ship and our gear and then look for Pagan, though I didn’t fancy his chances. I wondered if Demiurge had taken over the systems yet. Had God beaten him? God should have had the advantage. He should have had a lot more resources in terms of processing power and memory.
Cat was on point, I was at the back, Mudge was carrying Morag between us. She was better off unconscious the way her leg was hanging down. The side of my face that was hanging off was blissfully numb. We were passing another street that branched off deeper into the asteroid on our right.
‘People in the bar,’ Cat whispered.
I glanced down the street and saw the bar she meant. It had a flickering neon sign of a scantily clad woman done up like a Japanese cartoon character. I guessed this was more a brothel than a bar. Metal shutters covered the windows though several of them had been torn off. I could see numerous heat signatures inside the place.
As we continued towards the dock there was the sound of lots of guns firing long ragged bursts in our general direction. The fire was grossly inaccurate but forced us to take cover as we tried to push corpses up and into the way of the bullets. How can people still miss in the age of the smartlink? I wondered. And long bursts are just lack of self-control. This wasn’t the Vucari. They would be eating us by now.
‘We’re on your side, you stupid bastards!’ I screamed during a relative lull in the hail of fire.
‘Fuck you!’ came the heavily accented reply.
‘We just want to get across to the dock!’ I shouted back.
I was surprised when a man in a suit wearing dark glasses and holding a gun appeared in one of the windows and gestured for us to approach. I shook my head vigorously, hoping his optics would pick it up from there, and then pointed towards the dock. He continued gesturing.
‘Fuck this, let’s just go,’ Cat hissed.
‘Pagan!’ the man shouted.
I glanced between Mudge and Cat. Both of them nodded. We made a run for the brothel. As I was scanning all around us I was sure I saw movement in the pipework that ran above the major thoroughfares.
We leaped the window ledge and came barrelling into the Yakuza brothel. It was a fairly comfortable-looking affair for Freetown but I suspect that was more for the Yakuza who hung out there than the clientele. It had a central stage with a pole so the customers could see which of the desperate-looking male or female prostitutes they wanted. There was a bar and a set of metal stairs that led upstairs to the work booths.
The lights weren’t flickering in here; someone had got pissed off with them and smashed all but the red emergency lighting. The candles didn’t so much provide more light as fuck with the imminent and painful death ambience.
Most of the working boys and girls were sensibly cowering behind a makeshift barricade of overturned tables. I felt like joining them. All the Yak guys were toting guns and looking macho in pre-FHC-style suits, hats and shades. The weird thing was they all looked the same, even the girls. They had all been cut to look the same – like their leader, I supposed. Only which one was their leader? I guessed it was the guy stripped to the waist, all his tattoos on show. It made a degree of sense. He was the fattest. He was carrying a big sub-machine gun. It had a drum magazine and looked like a pre-FHC copy. I hated fashion guns. He also had a short straight-edged sword shoved through a red sash wrapped around his waist.
Mudge lay Morag down behind the barricade and then unslung his near-useless M-19. I passed my slightly less useless gauss carbine to him and he covered us as I knelt down next to Morag.
The fat, half-naked guy with the tattoos was speaking to me in rapid Japanese. I didn’t speak Japanese regardless of the speed.
‘Medpak?’ I asked and then used the universal bridge between cultures of speaking slowly and loudly. ‘First. Aid. Kit,’ I said, pointing at Morag’s wounds. For all the poor guy knew, I was trying to sell him Morag. Fortunately one of the hookers understood and a rudimentary medpak was slid across the floor towards me.
I winced as I heard the crack when I pushed Morag’s leg back into place. Well, roughly into place. I applied medgels to the break and then to her face. I didn’t want to take her out of her armour and check her chest wound unless I had to. I hooked her up to the medpak so it could drive the gels. Her vitals didn’t look great but she wasn’t dying.
‘Jake.’ Even under the circumstances Mudge’s contraction of my name still irritated me. I ignored him as I worked on Morag as quickly as possible. ‘Jake!’
‘What?!’ I swung my head round to look at him. When we’d come in I’d been so focused on seeing to Morag’s wounds I must have walked straight past Pagan.
He was in one of the comfortable chairs. He made it look somehow throne-like. His staff lay diagonally across him. Both he and the chair showed signs of receiving small-arms fire. He was injured but it looked like his subcutaneous armour had taken the brunt of it. However, he was juddering in the chair like he was being beaten, and blood was bubbling from his mouth and nose. I’d only seen this once or twice before. This was damage from biofeedback. He was in the net getting a right kicking from someone.
The Yakuza boss pointed at a thinscreen slowly peeling off the rock above the bar. It took me a few moments to work out what was going on. At first I thought it was some sort of animated Japanese entertainment viz. Then I realised.
It was showing a huge six-armed man/wolf creature surrounded by a nimbus of white fire. I had seen that fire before, when the angelic hacker Ezekiel had burned the net construct of the Warchilde to let Rolleston escape. I guessed the hacker running the demon-wolf icon was Bataar, the Vucari’s signalman. I remembered thinking of him as the high priest of a cult.
The nimbus of white flame acted as a shield against Pagan’s attack programs, which had manifested as a near-constant stream of lightning from the tip of his staff. The nimbus flared where the lightning touched it. The demon-wolf opened its mouth and breathed white fire all over Pagan. A wall of water shot from the rock floor to meet the white flame. The defence program was turned to steam and the white flame licked over Pagan’s screaming icon.
‘Can we get him out?’ I demanded. I wasn’t really sure who I was asking. I wasn’t sure how bad it would be to pull him out of a situation like this. I wasn’t really sure how to do it externally to someone using an internal computer.
Both icons were in a bad way, covered in burns and rendered blood. Surrounding the wolf was a mass of black tendrils that burned with black fire as they reached for Pagan. White light shone from behind Pagan, off- screen. I presumed this was God. Pagan was simultaneously trying to defend himself from the demon-wolf, attack it with lightning and fend off the black tendrils with momentary walls of fire.
The ripping sound of one hypersonic bang running into the next triggered the noise dampeners on my ears and deafened anyone not similarly augmented. This was of less concern than the long burst of railgun fire that tore through the brothel at about chest height. It was like all the furniture in the room had taken flight and was then joined by spinning body parts.
Something wet hit me. The railgun fire stopped just as the flesh of a Yakuza gunman near me split into three and then exploded in superheated chunks as a burst of laser fire hit him.
One of the surviving armoured shutters burst inwards as a Vucari tore into the room. I just about had time to draw attention to myself by firing a short bust from each of my salvaged pistols into its face. My shoulder laser was more effective at charring head armour.
She grabbed me by punching her claws through the subcutaneous armour that protected my stomach, then picked me up, carried me across the bar and rammed me into the back wall. My shoulder laser kept firing point blank into her face, but her heavily armour-plated skull was resisting the beam. It did however burn the dead skin mask she was wearing off. That just showed me her blood-covered, rage-contorted features and her fucking big sharp teeth. She tore a chunk of flesh out of my left forearm. I knew I was going to die so I did something stupid. I grabbed the top of her maw with my left arm and tried to use all my boosted muscle to force her head back. She opened her maw to tear into me and I shoved my right arm into her mouth. She bit down on it, her teeth denting
