and starting to penetrate my cybernetic arm’s armour. I extended all four blades on that arm. All four of the razor- sharp, carbon-fibre blades extended into her brain. She shook, juddered and then slid to one side. Her claws tore out of my stomach and I screamed some more.
Mudge was riding another of the Vucari as it rampaged around the room killing nearly everything it reached out and touched with its claws. A gunman near me lifted his SMG to fire. He was going to hit Mudge. Somehow I had the energy to kick the gun out of his hand. Mudge was punching the Vucari wolf cyborg in the head with his bare hand. I wondered if the Vucari even knew he was there. Cat had the laser and was manoeuvring for a shot, but Mudge and the Yakuza were getting in the way.
I saw the gauss carbine I’d given Mudge lying on the ground. I dived towards it, grabbed the weapon and rolled up.
‘Mudge, get off!’ I screamed. Mudge slid off the Vucari and curled up in a defensive ball close to its feet. I fired the gauss carbine. Cat fired the laser. The armour-piercing, electromagnetically propelled darts tore into the monstrous cyborg but they weren’t doing enough damage. Cat was hitting the Vucari and superheating armour and flesh, blowing bits off it, but the thing was withstanding the fire, its animal-like howls of pain matching the screams coming from the net feed on the thinscreen.
The Vucari bolted, sprinting out into the street through the wreckage of the armoured shutters. Cat chased it. She was insane. I followed her. I think her actions shamed me into it. Cat was firing burst after burst at the thing as it climbed up a stack of street bunks. The metal frames of the bunks bent and buckled with the Vucari’s weight as it sprang up. I raised the gauss rifle to my shoulder. The smartlink showed me the grenades in the carbine’s underslung launcher. The Vucari weren’t screwing around with stun batons. Fortunately the smartlink translated from Russian to English.
I fired the first grenade. Its velocity took it through the bunks to the rock wall and the fragmentation grenade exploded. Wreckage rained down on Cat and I as the force of the explosion blew the wolf cyborg across the street and into the opposite wall. It bounced off the rock and landed in the street ahead of us.
It tried to get up. I was angry now. Why had they done this? Why were they forcing us to kill friends? This was exactly what I had never wanted to do. These were good people – I mean they were all borderline psychos, but they were good people. Actually there was nothing borderline about them. I fired a second grenade. The flechettes tore into it, most of the needles sparking off now severely compromised armour. It tumbled back into the sand. It was still moving. I fired the third grenade from the hip. The cross hairs on my smartlink told me where it was going to hit. The thirty-millimetre, high-explosive, armour-piercing grenade went through its chest cavity and exploded. I was too close. The force of the explosion knocked me on my arse, battered my teeth together and a bit of Vucari shrapnel tore the side of my head open and almost took my ear off.
Cat came to stand by where I was sitting on a Belt zombie’s corpse. She was looking all around.
‘You getting up?’ she asked.
Cat and I stepped back into the brothel. Mudge was leaning on the bar. He had the M-19 in one hand and a bottle of vodka in the other. It looked like something had hit him hard enough in the side of the head to stove in part of his subcutaneous armour and he had a ragged tear in his chest.
‘ Na zdorovye,’ he said bitterly.
He took a long swig from the bottle, winced and then spat out a tooth. I glanced over at the Vucari I’d killed. I remembered her name now. It was Andrea. When we’d taken them to get drunk after they’d saved our arses she’d swapped oral sex jokes with Bibs. These people had gone toe to toe with Them when nearly out of ammunition to save us and this was the thanks they got. Why the fuck had they done this?
I’d almost forgotten Pagan. I glanced up at the thinscreen. The wolf-demon was still. It seemed suspended from a tree of thorns that had grown through its flesh. I caught a momentary glimpse of Pagan’s icon on the screen, which looked ragged and half torn apart. I briefly wondered why they had to make the virtual damage look so gory in their fake world. Pagan’s icon disappeared. Tendrils covered in black fire swamped the place where he’d been. The white glow that I’d come to connect with God seemed to recede and disappear.
‘Jesus, that hurts. When’d I get shot?’ Pagan asked. Pain filled his voice. Real Pagan didn’t look much better than virtual Pagan. He was lying on the ground. Railgun fire had destroyed his chair. He was lucky it hadn’t torn him apart. There was blood all down his chin and beard from where it had drooled out his mouth and nose. Blood was also running out of his ears. I knew that you had to take a serious amount of biofeedback for that to happen. Then he had the bullet wounds on top of that.
‘Has Demiurge taken the station?’ I asked. My voice sounded dead even to me. As if I didn’t care. I glanced over at Morag. She was still unconscious.
Pagan shook his head. ‘Not yet, but it will,’ he said and then started speaking rapidly in Japanese to the Yakuza. The surgical clones looked to their boss. He hesitated as long as face dictated and then nodded. The gunmen went running from the brothel.
‘You speak Japanese?’ Pagan ignored my stupid question. Later he would tell me that he’d worked extensively with the Japanese Special Forces Group on Barney’s. ‘Where’s it getting all its processing power and memory from?’
Pagan turned to look up at me. He look tired and in pain.
‘Good question. They came on a long-range strike craft. There’s only so much Demiurge that could fit into the systems of a craft like that. God here in the camp should have easily outbid it in terms of power. As soon as it kicked in all the docked ships switched off their net links to the station. All the in-system ships will be carrying God. If they add their memory and processing power then we should be able to beat Demiurge.’
‘“Should”?’ He shrugged. ‘Won’t most of them have left as soon as they realised something was wrong?’
‘Several tried. One of the first things Demiurge went for was the camp’s external weaponry. Two tramp freighters and a factory ship were blown apart.’
I tried, I really tried, but this news did nothing except make me feel increasingly numb.
‘Those ships’ captains have got a lot to lose if they switch on their comms and Demiurge wins.’
‘That’s why Itaki’s people -’ he nodded towards the Yakuza boss, who was standing in the middle of the carnage trying to make sense of it ‘- will be doing the persuading, at gunpoint if necessary.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’ I asked.
He started to shake his head but winced at the pain.
‘No. I can’t fight that thing and neither can Morag.’ Then there was a look of momentary panic. ‘Where’s Morag?’ I pointed at where she was lying on the ground among the metal kindling that had once been a makeshift barricade.
‘She all right?’ he asked.
Not really, but I nodded.
Cat joined us. She had succeeded in removing the railgun harness Andrea had been wearing. The railgun had folded up snug along her back when Andrea had fought like an animal. Cat had linked to it, run diagnostics and was now putting the harness on.
‘What now?’ Cat asked.
‘Back to the ship,’ I said.
‘I know where your brother is,’ Pagan told Cat.
Bollocks. Cat turned to look at me. I sighed and glanced down at Pagan.
‘It’s what we came here for,’ he said.
Mudge joined us, catching the gist of the conversation. ‘Look at all the free stuff we got,’ he said, grinning.
‘Be a shame to come all this way and not get him,’ Pagan said.
‘With their weapons we’re hunting them,’ Cat said.
Pain cut my bitter laugh short.
‘Dream on. These guys lived for fighting Them hand-to-hand. One at a time nearly killed us, and we only got away with it because they seem to have gone fucking mad.’
‘Four down though,’ Cat said.
‘Five,’ Pagan corrected her. ‘There was no way their hacker walked away from that.’
‘He could already be dead,’ I pointed out. Meaning Merle.
‘Scared?’ Mudge asked. He was goading me.
‘Mudge, will you just fuck off,’ I snapped. ‘The adrenalin combat junkie act is wearing a bit fucking thin.’
