Mudge looked pissed off and for once didn’t say anything. Still it was a Chinese parliament and I’d been outvoted.
‘Okay, we go and get him,’ I agreed. ‘Mudge, stay here and look after Morag.’
‘What? I piss you off so you go off and play with your soldier mates-’
‘Yes-’ I started.
‘And I get saddled babysitting your ex?’
‘Mudge! Wind your fucking neck in!’ I shouted, finally losing my temper. I don’t think it was Mudge I was angry with. Well not just Mudge. ‘Stay here, look after Morag, and if anything happens to her don’t be around when I get back!’
We stared at each other for a while. The hookers and the Yakuza had turned to see what the commotion was about. Mudge somehow thought better of saying anything and stalked over to where Morag was lying on the ground. I think I’d managed to alienate everyone now.
‘I hope this guy’s worth it,’ I muttered to Cat.
‘He’d best be better than James Bond,’ Pagan said.
‘Who?’ Cat asked. I’d no idea what he was talking about either.
This was bullshit. I did not want to be doing this and we had better things to do, like making sure Morag was okay, if I was honest. Moving deep into the bowels of an asteroid mining camp looking for incredibly dangerous Russian special forces operators was not high on my list of priorities. I respected Cat wanting to help her brother, I really did, and if he was one of ours then it would be right to come and get him. We didn’t know this guy, however, so this wasn’t our problem. Besides, if BPIC took back control of the station we could be right back where we were to begin with. Except the next guy might not want to gloat and be so sloppy with his computer security.
BPIC didn’t have much use for long-term people containment. It was expensive and tied up resources. They had a lock-up for when Belt zombies, usually newcomers who hadn’t had the life sucked out of them, got out of hand. Anything deserving more long-term punishment got dealt with summarily. It normally involved an airlock. After all they were pretty much the law out here.
We found Merle’s cell. It was a laser-cut hole in the stone not much bigger than a man. It had a smaller hole in the bottom of it to drain waste and a very solid, thick titanium hatch at the top. Pagan once again proved how clever he was by calling it an oubliette. It looked like a hole in the ground to me. It was empty.
The lights were still flickering in this part of the station and we hadn’t seen corpses for some time now. We’d just found lots of blood, bits of torn flesh and drag marks. I think we were close to the various life-support systems. The only sound was the loud humming of a lot of machinery.
Cat, armed with Andrea’s railgun, and I covered while Pagan investigated the hole in the ground with the French-sounding name.
‘He’s dead,’ I told Cat. I couldn’t see any way he could get out of that. Someone had to have opened it. That someone was probably a very dangerous, heavily augmented Russian cyborg.
‘Not Merle,’ she said with some conviction.
‘Even if he got out, if he’s been in there for any amount of time then he’ll be in no physical state to help us,’ Pagan told her gently.
‘If he’s high value then BPIC could have moved him,’ Cat said, but I could hear the doubt in her voice.
‘I don’t think he would have been a priority for BPIC today. I don’t think they even have a frame of reference for what happened here,’ Pagan said.
‘This isn’t a good spot for a conversation,’ I hissed. This place was seriously messing with me. As that thought crossed my mind a howl echoed through the rock corridors. All of us froze.
I’d heard wolf calls before, real wolves, when I was growing up. The calls the Vucari had used earlier were most likely for intimidation value. After all, they could probably communicate between themselves via Demiurge’s control of the net. This was different. There was something mournful and desperately sad about the noise.
‘I think we should go,’ Pagan said.
‘He’s here and he’s alive-’ Cat started.
‘Is that just intuition?’ Pagan demanded. ‘There’s taking a risk and then there’s courting trouble.’
I knew they were waiting for me to make a decision. I couldn’t say why I decided to push on. I wanted to leave and wasn’t sure of the advantage of continuing to look for Merle. I don’t think Merle was the reason I decided to push on, however. There was just something about that howling.
‘We go on.’
Pagan didn’t argue; he knew better than to do that in a situation like this.
I don’t know what the stone chamber where we found Vladimir had been used for initially. I think there was some kind of machinery buried under the pile of corpses. We’d been passing when another mournful howl had alerted us to his presence. I’d entered first. I checked all around looking for more of them. There could be some hiding in the corpses but if so thermographics wasn’t picking them up. I pointed the gauss carbine up the mound to the figure sitting on top. Pagan and Cat were in after me. They were too professional to say anything but I could tell they were horrified by what they saw. Pagan still had the presence of mind to turn his back on the atrocity and cover the door. It took a degree of balls to turn your back on something you know to be that dangerous.
‘What are you doing, Vladimir?’ I asked quietly, trying to force down my rising gorge. He was crouched on top of the pile of bodies tearing gobbets of flesh from them and putting them in his mouth and chewing. His expression was pained, like a spoilt middle-class kid forced to eat something he didn’t like. A lot of what he was eating was just tumbling out of his mouth partially chewed. I think it was the noise, the tearing sound of skin and meat, which jarred my already frayed nerves the most.
He turned to look at me, wearing someone else’s face. He was covered from head to foot in other people’s blood. It should have been horrific, and it was, but there was something pathetic and pitiable about him as well. He’d got his wish to feast on human flesh but it didn’t look as if it was to his taste. This was a warewolf reduced to a ghoul, a mere carrion eater. He seemed tired as he took off the face.
‘My friend,’ he said sadly. He continued tearing off lumps of flesh. There was something compulsive about the behaviour. ‘I have betrayed everything.’ He tore off more flesh.
‘Why?’ was the best I could do. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had before Cat tried to waste him. He ripped off another lump of flesh.
‘If he does that one more time…’ Cat growled.
‘This isn’t you,’ I said.
He stopped chewing and looked at me.
‘We both know it is. We are always surprised by what we are capable of…’ Then he tapped his armoured skull with the tip of a bloodied claw. ‘When we serve something bigger than us.’
‘Has something made you do this?’ Pagan asked. He did not look at Vladimir; he was still covering the door.
‘I do not know you that you should address me with such familiarity,’ Vladimir replied, a predatory smile on his face. His mock haughtiness was like a ghost of his old self. ‘I always wanted to be a monster. It’s much easier than trying to be good.’
‘Are you slaved?’ I asked, though I’d seen nothing in any of the Vucari’s plugs.
He stared at me. It was all I could do to return his look.
‘Do you owe me a debt?’ he asked.
I didn’t want to answer that. I couldn’t see any form of repayment of my debt that was going to be good. I swallowed hard, trying to ignore the acid burn of rising bile in the back of my throat.
‘Yes,’ I finally managed.
‘I cannot do it myself,’ he said. He sounded almost solemn.
The glimpse of his face I caught as he pounced was of a mask of hatred and insane rage. We all fired. The railgun kicked up a storm of dead flesh. Despite the ordnance he took a long time dying.
I felt nothing as we probed deeper into the complex. Pagan was freaked but I didn’t care any more. All I could think of was that someone had done this to Vladimir. I wasn’t sure how but I was pretty sure who.
We were crossing a metal bridge over a deep pool of water that had been cut from the stone of the asteroid. The pool was part of the water supply. A thick carpet of algae covered the top of the pool to help with oxygen generation. The flickering lights in this section were ultraviolet to stimulate algae growth.
The UV made the blood-soaked Vucari that dropped from the ceiling wearing someone else’s face seem
