‘You could probably walk in on Pagan as well,’ she said, nodding towards his compartment once she’d managed to control herself.
‘Really? With who? Cat?!’ I asked as I slowly turned into a teenaged girl.
Cat and Pagan seemed an odd mix. Then again there had been Jess back in the Avenues. Besides, Morag was talking to me and I wanted it to last as long as it could.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid,’ Cat said from out in the crates somewhere. She walked forward into the light. She’d obviously been working out. She clearly felt she needed to make her presence known before someone said something she didn’t want to hear.
‘Who then?’ I asked.
Morag looked at me as if I was dumb. ‘Nuiko,’ she said.
‘Wow,’ I said.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that straight away. It was a sense relationship. The technology meant that it would feel virtually the same as the real thing. Given Nuiko’s chimerical nature, it meant that Pagan was to all intents and purposes having a relationship with the ship.
‘Oh,’ I said.
Suddenly I felt very awkward and both Cat and Morag were staring at me. I think I was supposed to be doing something but I had no idea what. I’d killed Berserks in hand-to-hand combat and suddenly I wanted to retreat. With as much dignity as I could manage I headed back to my compartment.
Safe in my room I felt like taking trumpet-based revenge on the rest of them. Also I wanted to practise, but there’s only so far you want to push a group of ex-special forces types, not to mention Mudge and Morag. I decided to have a drink instead. I put some music on my internal systems and called up a book on to my IVD.
Mudge turned up about an hour later. The whisky had been a waste as all I could taste was anti-corrosion coating, so I’d got myself a beer instead. It didn’t taste much better but it was cheaper.
‘Can I get one of those? Assuming my crippling substance-abuse problems won’t derail the mission.’
I glared at him but gave him a beer as he sat down somewhat gingerly on the metal grid of the floor. He lit up a cigarette, just to annoy me, and then set up a white-noise generator. It was pretty much the only way we could have a private conversation short of hard-wiring ourselves together.
‘That is one angry man,’ Mudge said.
‘That why you’re walking funny? Is this adrenalin fucking?’
‘Always.’ He raised his bottle to me and took a long drink.
‘You realise he thinks you’ve just come in here to boast to your mates,’ I said.
Mudge just smiled and shrugged but then suddenly became more serious. ‘Why are you giving me such a hard time?’
‘You know what I said about the drugs was for show, right?’ He nodded. ‘Though they have a point. We could be there for a very long time depending on how long this war goes on.’
‘I’ve never not held up my end and you’ve got no right to question that,’ he said.
This was about as serious as Mudge got. I nodded.
‘I know that. But mate, Trace’s office. I mean, what the fuck were you thinking?’
‘What? The guy was a prick.’
‘Morag shouldn’t have been able to do that hack. We should be dead, and we would be if she hadn’t noticed the wireless link.’
‘Look, nothing’s changed, man,’ he said, but he was looking down. He wouldn’t meet my lenses. We can replace our eyes with bits of glass and electronics, but body language seems to be hard-wired in with the original flesh.
‘Yes, it has. You seem more…’ I searched for the right word. ‘Desperate.’
Mudge shrugged, drank some more beer but still wouldn’t look at me. ‘Mudge, you’re an enormous pain in the arse-’
‘You want to talk about pains in the arse?’ he said, grinning. I realised I’d chosen the wrong words.
‘I mean you’re a difficult guy to be friends with sometimes…’ I started. He looked at me, his face getting angry around his camera eyes.
‘Fuck you, Jakob, you sanctimonious prick! You think it’s easy being your friend? All the fucking whining, hand-wringing, moralising, the fucking sitting in judgement…’
I leaned back on the bed. I tried not to take what he said personally. There was obviously something he needed to get off his chest and we were in the lashing-out part of the conversation.
‘I mean, just try and live a little. It might be a shitty world but try and take what you can from it.’ He’d trailed off a bit towards the end and wouldn’t look at me again.
‘What I like about you is you tell the truth. That’s why we didn’t double-tap you and leave you in a ditch when we met you. Don’t start lying now. Not to yourself.’ I took another beer and watched him.
‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with me.’
‘Are you on a suicide trip?’ I asked. It took him a long time to answer. If he was I couldn’t let him take the rest of us down.
‘No more than normal, I think. My body’s an amusement park, and risks need to be taken, otherwise we might as well be living in a bubble like those Cabal old boys.’
‘Then what?’ I asked.
Again he gave this some thought before answering.
‘You ever think about the things we’ve done?’ he asked.
‘I feel like mostly I’m reacting.’
‘I went from reporting in a war zone to patrolling and raiding with you guys to fronting for God on system- wide viz and netcast…’ Once again he trailed off and drank some more beer.
‘Okay, put like that it sounds pretty intense, but that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’
He looked up at me again. ‘How am I supposed to beat that?’ he asked.
‘You don’t have to,’ I said.
More than ever he sounded like a junkie looking for another fix.
‘The things I’ve done, the way I’ve lived, how am I supposed to go back to a normal life, whatever the fuck that is? I mean, we’ve done whatever the fuck we wanted.’
That wasn’t the way I felt at the time we were doing it.
‘You sound like Balor.’
‘No, it’s different. He wanted to be remembered. He thought he was some ancient hero, or maybe villain. I just want to feel. I need sensation but I think we’ve upped the game so much that I can’t get…’
‘The next fix?’
He looked away.
‘Maybe. I don’t want to die but life without sensation is death to me.’
I was trying to mask my contempt for this. I’d always known that Mudge was a middle-class thrill-seeker. He wasn’t the only one I’d come across when I’d been in the SAS; nearly all the officers were like that to a degree. What I couldn’t rationalise in what Mudge was saying was the disparity. This was a guy who was so bored that he did this for fun. The rest of us had to fight all the time just to eat. It was only my knowledge that he was a moral person that kept me speaking to him. That and what he’d said about sitting in judgement.
‘You don’t fancy the quiet life? Maybe just unwind, take a breather if we survive this?’
‘No, and neither do you.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I told him.
‘See, this is what pisses me off about you. You lie to yourself. You’re no different. Your retirement ended with you being beaten up in police custody and where are you now? Right back here with the rest of us. Why? Because you need it. Why do you think Cat got fired and started canyon surfing? Or Merle tried to rob a precious metal freighter in flight? Because there are easier fucking ways for him to make money.’
If he was right, and maybe he was, then my need was buried deep in my subconscious. I thought I wanted the quiet life. On the other hand, the way I’d gone about my Highland idyll was arguably confrontational, and here I was again. For a while now I’d been wondering if there was some deep-down part of me that was highly masochistic.
‘So where does that leave us?’ I asked him. ‘You can’t go down onto Lalande just to look for bigger and better
