good. We were acting the part of a together, properly functioning unit, even if we were really a mess. Dog guy turned to glare at Cat but said nothing.
‘That’s our Cat,’ I said, trying to break the tension. It fell flat.
The odd girl was next to me now, examining me. I turned to look at her.
‘You SF?’ the hard-faced woman asked. We didn’t answer.
‘They’re SF,’ the big guy said.
‘Well thank fuck. We’re saved,’ dog guy growled.
‘They transmitting?’ the hard-faced woman asked.
‘Not that I can tell. They seem to be running comms dark,’ the big guy answered.
‘Check their vehicles anyway.’
The hacker moved towards the FAVs.
I moved to intercept. ‘Hold on,’ I said, holding up my hand.
‘You’re transmitting, we’re fucked. We’ll have to run again and we always lose people when we run,’ the woman said.
‘We’re running comms dark,’ Pagan said. ‘We’re hiding from the same thing you are.’
The big guy stopped but glanced back at the woman. The pale girl was examining Morag now. Morag was smiling uncomfortably at her.
Mudge climbed to his feet, spitting blood. ‘Ow!’ he announced and lit up a spliff. There seemed to be no visible enmity towards the dog guy. Maybe after being blown up he didn’t care.
‘Couple of things you need to get used to. We are going to check your vehicles and we will be taking your food. You’ll get your fair share if we decide not to kill you and let you stay,’ the woman told me. ‘Big Henry, what’s the score?’
‘They were fighting the good fight when I found them,’ came the amplified reply from the mech.
‘You fighting the Freedom Squadrons?’ the big hacker asked.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Freedom Squadrons? We call them the Black Squadrons,’ I said.
‘Freedom Squadrons is what they call themselves. We mostly call them wankers,’ dog guy growled.
‘She’s really fucking with my calm!’ Mudge said, pointing at the pale girl, whose face was inches away from his as she studied him. Maybe he’d had enough of being kicked around after all.
‘Leave her be,’ the big hacker said. There was a dangerous edge to his voice that didn’t strike me as an affectation. I was pretty sure this guy knew how to look after himself.
‘You guys British?’ the woman asked. I nodded. ‘You in-country when this happened?’ I shook my head. ‘You point on an invasion?’ I shook my head. ‘Didn’t think so. Your food?’
‘Cat, Merle, give them half our ration packs.’
Merle’s head whipped round to look at me. He wanted to say something but was more disciplined. Mudge wasn’t.
‘Half our…’ Somehow he had the presence of mind to shut up when I glared at him. May as well try and keep up the pretence of professionalism.
‘Anyone tries to take more, shoot them,’ I continued.
The hard-faced woman gave this some thought.
‘Just so you know, when we need the other half we’ll take it, and if you don’t like it then we’ve got a long and proud history of cannibalism.’
There was laughter. From us as well. They just didn’t seem that scary after the Vucari.
‘Well, let’s hope we’re friends by then,’ I said. ‘You’re not checking the vehicles. We’re not transmitting. You can work that out yourselves. You’ll just have to trust us. We’ll pay for that trust in food.’
‘We can take-’ dog guy started, but the woman held up her hand and he was quiet.
‘Look, mate, I’m sorry about what he said, but we’ve had a bad time with some people that looked like you recently. We may be the only friends you’ve got down here,’ I said. It was a guess, but they looked in a bad way.
‘And we’re the only friends you’ve got, right?’ the big hacker asked. He had a point.
‘Assuming we don’t eat you,’ the woman said.
The place was called Utu Pa. A pa was some sort of Maori fortification and utu meant something between revenge and reciprocity. I’d done the introductions. They just gave us their call signs. I suspect the call signs had been their nicknames when they’d run as a gang together and were probably more meaningful to them than their real names. The hard-faced woman was Mother. She had been the senior NCO and now appeared to command the entire pa. The big hacker was called Tailgunner and with Mother drove the Bismarck-class mech. Dog guy was called Dog Face. That would be easy to remember. Some piece of shit had had him modified when he was still a kid to act as a human ratter. Apparently they had rats here on Lalande, which sort of impressed me. The pale girl went by the name of Strange. Again I didn’t think I was going to have a problem remembering that.
Big Henry, our saviour, had of course turned out to be very short. It was a typical squaddie naming convention. Not much bigger than a Twist, he moved with a particular waddling gate but was very powerfully built. A battered and ancient-looking bowler hat perched precariously on his mass of thick braided hair, which was pulled into a ponytail. His beard was braided as well and he had tattoos on what little hair-free skin we could see. He’d seemed the least hostile of the lot, but then he’d seen us fighting the bad guys.
After our initial chat Mudge had pulled me aside.
‘Half our fucking food!’ he demanded.
‘There’s more back at the cache, and Merle knows where there are more caches.’
‘Which could be compromised.’ Cat and Merle were acting as armed supervision as Mother’s people removed half our ration packs from the FAVs.
‘What do you want me to say, Mudge? Look at them. They’re fucking starving and we’re very low on friends here. Besides, I served with some Maori guys on loan from the Kiwi SAS. They were hard bastards.’
Mudge grinned. ‘Everyone seems hard to you.’
They were Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles, or a deserter element of them, an armoured cavalry unit. Mother and Tailgunner seemed to run things, backed by Dog Face and Big Henry. Strange was just local colour, I think. The infantry, tank and artillery crews they had with them, nearly all Maoris as well, called the five of them the Ngati Apakura. It meant the Tribe of the Woman Who Urged Revenge. The Bismarck-class mech was also called Apakura. They called themselves whanau. As far as I could tell it meant family.
The five were close, very tight. They’d grown up on the streets together with no family but each other. They’d run as a gang because they’d had to. It was the street politics of victimise or be a victim. The street ate children who couldn’t find a way to protect themselves. They’d formed their gang, their tribe, and still wore their colours as patches on the back of their cut-off, armoured leather jackets.
Mudge had managed to find all this out while talking to Big Henry and some of the others in the camp who he hadn’t pissed off yet. I suspected he was relying on shared narcotics rather than charisma to make friends.
They’d learned to drive mechs in the mines. They’d piloted stripped-down mining versions – all the best parts had gone to the front to be used on fighting mechs – but the resources had to keep flowing. Big Henry had told Mudge that they’d lost as many people to mine accidents before they got drafted as they had in the war. The five were all that was left of their family. Christ knows how they’d managed to stay in the same platoon together all this time.
The Black/Freedom Squadrons were claiming to be the Earth government in exile. They’d turned up with Cronin at their head. It seems that despite what God had thought, Lalande and not Sirius had been their first stop. They’d laid a false trail for us. This made sense if what we suspected about the Citadel was correct.
The Freedom Squadrons had put out a story that we’d been a Them fifth column and had pulled off propaganda coups by making the Earth believe the war was over and taking control of the net with a Them virus. There’s even been edited footage of us taking Atlantis played on the vizzes. I felt used.
The Freedom Squadron called Demiurge the Freedom Wave. Sadly, calling something the opposite of what it was seemed to work in propaganda. People listened to names. It was much easier than studying actions. Cronin, the spokesperson for the so-called Earth government in exile, described it as the last defence against the Them computer virus, a sort of global comms net inoculation.
Tailgunner called it the Black Wave. He saw it for what it was and had isolated their systems and fled their pa or firebase after an encounter with what sounded like a Themtech-enhanced operator. I was impressed they’d
