She looked down at me. I think I saw pity in her eyes then.
‘But that means you doing your job. Do you understand me?’ I nodded weakly. ‘No, I don’t think you do. Jakob, I love you as much as I hate you right now, and I think the hate will die, but if you put us at risk – if you don’t do your end – then you need to know I’m a witch. I’ll tear your mind out, imprison you in an electronic hell and leave you a mindless husk. Do you understand me now?’
I once went into vacuum unprotected. I wasn’t as afraid then as I was now. She was looking straight into my eyes. I wanted to turn away. She turned away first.
‘Because I need you and I’m frightened of dying,’ she said.
I tried swallowing but it wasn’t really happening. ‘Can you promise me something?’ I eventually managed to say.
I flinched away from her look of fury. ‘I don’t owe you a thing!’ she spat at me.
I nodded, trying to placate her. ‘I know, I know, but please, I need it. Morag, I’m not as strong or as honest as you. I need this, I need it to do what you ask.’ I had nothing but contempt for the person saying this. I heard the weakness and the betrayal that weakness implied in my voice. She’d had more than enough and I needed more. I felt like a parasite.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘If we get through this, if somehow we live and we’re not slaves, then we stop. We make our deal with whatever gods, but we don’t do any more of this dangerous stupid shit. We settle down, we find other ways to help that don’t involve guns and violence. Please promise me.’
I needed this more than I’d ever needed the escape of the booths, the whisky and whatever other crutches I’d relied on in my hollow empty life. It made me realise how little I’d had in my life.
She nodded. She was crying, though somehow she was smiling as well. She reached down to hold me. She held me for a long time. When she was ready she kissed me fiercely. We didn’t make love – that needed trust – we had sex, and she told me that was all right because in here it wasn’t really real.
Later as she seemed to sleep, though I wasn’t sure what that meant in here, I practised the trumpet. I had used the sense environment’s parameters to make the instrument quiet and soft so as not to wake her.
I sat on a chair on the wooden boards of the stage and looked around the club. Smoke and dust eddied in pale beams of light. Our fantasies may have less jagged parts than real life, but we worked hard at them to make them as real as possible. I sometimes wondered if we locked ourselves in prisons of our own entertainment because it was easier than trying to do something, anything. Was this how the Cabal had got us in the first place?
I was going to have to find a place far, far away from the rest of my thoughts to put all this – the hope of some kind of life and the fear of what could happen to Morag. For once, I thought as I played, I needed to not let Morag down. I had to be what she needed. I also needed to try and live for myself.
I finished a slow bluesy piece and looked up. She was awake and watching me. I couldn’t read her expression.
The sex may not have been real, but when we jacked out of the sense simulation she lay in my arms and I held her as she slept. Through the fabric of her T-shirt I could feel the metal of the spinal supports that violated her flesh. They may have been temporary but to me they felt like another little bit of her humanity lost to metal.
I couldn’t sleep. I opened up my internal comms and requested a link.
‘God?’
‘Yes, Jakob.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know, Jakob.’
‘You’ll tell the rest of you.’
‘Of course, Jakob.’
We made God. More to the point we made God tell the truth, and now we spent all our time hiding from him.
11
This was a stupid way to die. I should have accepted Mudge’s offer of drugs.
Nuiko had shown us the star. Lalande 21185 was small, about half the size of our sun, and despite its red colour there was something dead-looking about it. It was like a ghost sun burning weakly. Lalande 2, however, was very large and looked like a black planet with a corona of heat perpetually on its horizon. It was partially eclipsing the star.
Nuiko had triggered a heavy burn as close as she dared to Lalande 2. Systems are nearly impossible to defend because space is big. Planets are much easier to blockade. That was the second most dangerous part of her job. She had to bleed off any residual heat and get the signature of the Tetsuo Chou down as low as possible as we approached what we assumed would be the planetary defences. We were flying blind to an extent and active scans would be suicide. We assumed the planetary defences would take the form of automated sensor and weapons satellites as well as elements of the Lalande fleet. We were hoping that the Orbital Insertion Low Opening pods, if detected – most likely during entry – would be thought of as meteorites. If not then we wouldn’t know much. We’d just cease to exist when the orbital weapons hit us.
The most dangerous part of her job would come when she had to open the cargo airlock and have her remotes throw us out. This would mess with the stealth signature of the ship and make her more susceptible to detection.
Exiting the Tetsuo Chou was going to be the trickiest part for us as well. Not that there was anything that we could do about it in our cocoons of heat-resistant foam and acceleration-resistant gel. It wasn’t just a case of being thrown out of a spaceship; we had to be pushed out at just the right velocity and just the right angle for entry. The maths involved was pretty heady. A mistake and we could burn up on entry or bounce, which would send us skimming over the atmosphere to end up in a low orbit until we ran out of air.
I’d done my fair share of parachute drops, though mostly we were inserted by assault shuttle, gunship or more rarely copters. I had done HALO jumps, mainly out of the back of assault shuttles, but I’d only ever done two OILOs before this and I hadn’t enjoyed them. Wrapped in the scan-absorbent and heat-resistant foam and surrounded by the gel designed to help you cope with the G forces, I could never shake the feeling I was the yolk of an egg being thrown at a stone in a fire.
The G force slammed into me. It was like someone massaging me vigorously with sledgehammers. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough to cause me to black out. I was panicking, which was irrelevant, as I couldn’t move. In the unlikely event I survived, I just wouldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even manage to scream as I entered the atmosphere. It was like hitting a solid wall. I had a moment to think my spine had broken and then, finally, I mercifully blacked out.
I knew I was dead when I came to. Beyond the faceplate of my environment suit I could see the gel bubbling. I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be happening. I was covered in sweat. This was the hottest I’d ever felt. I’d felt cooler when I’d been set on fire in Dundee. We’d fucked up. A stupid, stupid way to die. I should have just put the Mastodon to my temple and saved myself the pain. I’d seen people burn to death. At least that way it would be quick.
When I saw the cocoon burning away and the gel start to drain out I knew it was all over. Prat that I am, I didn’t pay any attention to the altimeter readout on my IVD. I had a jack from the parachute rig plugged into a port on the environment suit, which was in turn jacked into one of the plugs in the back of my neck.
Then the cocoon was gone. The chemical catalyst had started to dissolve the material of the cocoon as soon as we’d hit the atmosphere. I was falling far too fast. I understood everything in terms of flashes of dark ground, fast-moving cloud, a horizon of red light and then the stars again. Occasionally I could see other figures falling like I was.
I had to stop tumbling. Anger replaced panic as I desperately tried to remember my parachute training. I was
