looking glyphs of orange light played over the surface of the obelisks. The landscape was somehow familiar to me. A black sun burned in the sky. I didn’t want to look at it. I couldn’t look at it. There was something terrible about it.
There was movement next to me. I swung around, the sensation of fear an almost welcome return of feeling. I was staring at the hood of a black-robed figure floating above the ground. The figure was moving towards me but didn’t seem to notice me. I stepped to one side and it ignored me as it floated past.
I looked down at myself. I was naked and whole. But naked and whole as the machine I was. All components of the weapon were present and correct. The glyphs from the obelisk seemed to be playing over my pale skin like a projection.
In the distance I could just about make out two flying creatures of some sort, high in the air. It looked like they were circling. Somehow they felt like judgement. I started to walk towards them.
I woke up on the couch. My face distended, pulled forward. Black liquid tendrils, like one of Them. Instinctive hard-wired fear and loathing at this. The tendrils extrude from my flesh, my mouth, my face, piercing part of it, part of me.
I woke for real. Screaming. I was no longer strapped to the couch. I was free. The cell door was open. Rannu was standing over me. He looked awful, gaunt and wasted. Despite having black lenses for eyes there was something haunted about his expression. Something new. He looked afraid.
He was wearing combat trousers but was barefoot. He had on a filthy greying T-shirt and was carrying a gauss carbine in one hand, another slung across his back. In his other hand was a severed hand hooked up to some kind of miniaturised device that pumped warm blood through dead flesh.
‘Did you undo the straps?’ I asked inanely.
He shook his head. Did she do it?
‘Can you stand up?’ he whispered urgently.
If I could betray my dead lover and fuck the Grey Lady then I could stand up. I climbed off the couch and almost collapsed. Maybe I could have stood up in Earth gravity. Rannu helped me stand.
‘She’s dead,’ I told him, feeling my face crumple as if I was about to start sobbing again.
He looked into my lenses. ‘I know.’
Did he? How much? Did he know what I’d done? There’s always time for self-pity. I hugged him and started to sob. He hugged me back, unconcerned that I was naked.
‘We need to go. You’ll have to walk yourself.’ He sounded nervous. I don’t think I’d ever heard Rannu sound nervous before.
I let him go. I could just about stand. I noticed that he was missing the tip of his forefinger on his right hand. It made sense that they’d remove his weighted monofilament garrotte.
‘Can you hold a gun?’ Rannu asked. I nodded.
I wasn’t weak from my incarceration, just numb and not used to being on my feet again. Rannu handed me the gauss carbine and unslung the one across his back. We looked at each other for a while. I was so glad to see him, but maybe dying or even being brainwashed, if it meant forgetting, would have been better.
Selfishly, irrationally, I was suddenly angry at him. Where was he when Rolleston shot Morag? Why didn’t he rescue me before I disgraced myself with Josephine? Then I knew that he couldn’t have done anything about the first and the last was all on me, piece of shit that I am.
He turned and headed out the door, looking like a tired soldier. He moved more slowly and with less grace than before. I followed him out. He closed the cell door and pressed the still-warm severed hand on the biometric lock. The cell door locked behind us.
We played hide and seek in corridors lasered out of the huge stalactite decades ago. He took me up into the vents, also carved out of stone, to an automated machine room for the air-handling equipment. It was full of the detritus of his fugitive life.
He sat down with his head in his hands and shook. In a quivering voice he asked me to go on guard. Only then did I see how much coming to get me had cost him.
Then I noticed the corpse in the corner of the room. A squat, powerfully built man with the endomorphic body type I’d come to connect with Lalande 2 colonists. He had a screwdriver sticking out the back of his skull. One of his hands was missing. Still he had clothes. Getting the clothes off the corpse seemed to require a lot more effort than it should have. I got out of breath quickly and could feel the planet pushing down on me again. I hated this place.
‘I needed to get you out of the cell,’ he said, explaining the corpse.
‘Is he Black Squadron?’ I asked.
Rannu shook his head. His hair was a matted mess.
‘No. Kiwi SAS, I think.’
I was impressed that Rannu, in this state, could take out another special forces operative.
‘Poor bastard.’ There was genuine regret in his voice.
‘What happened?’ I asked. Wondering how bad it must have been to transform the Rannu I knew into this wreck. He shook his head again.
‘I got down fine, made it beneath the surface. I set up observation posts, did recces but I was learning nothing, doing nothing. The whole idea of me going ahead was so that when you guys got here I’d have some solid intel for you.’
‘Knew I was coming, did you?’ I asked.
He smiled and nodded, calmer now. The one good thing about his state was that I was pretty sure he hadn’t been brainwashed. He was in too much of a mess.
‘Morag was coming,’ he said by way of explanation.
‘You couldn’t get close enough to anything because Demiurge controls everything electronic?’ I asked.
Rannu nodded. ‘The priority was the Citadel, and I got close, but getting close is exactly like looking at an arcology made of ice. It didn’t tell me anything, though I got a more up-to-date idea of their external defences. It’s also bigger than we thought.’
‘They’ve added to it using conventional materials?’ I asked. It was better to think about other things.
‘No, it’s all ice.’
‘How’s that work? If it was cut out of a glacier, how could they make it bigger?’ Rannu shrugged. I don’t think it was of a great deal of interest to him.
‘So then I came up to Moa City, see if I could find out anything. Maybe even develop some humint sources…’
‘Stuck out like a sore thumb and got caught?’ Rannu nodded again. ‘I bet you gave them one hell of a fight.’
Rannu didn’t answer. I looked at him questioningly. Had the Grey Lady hopelessly outclassed him as well?
‘They sent some of the Black Squadron guys after me. They’re like Rolleston, maybe not as hard. I had my pistols on me…’ He looked ashamed of himself.
‘Rannu, don’t worry about it. Josephine got me. I didn’t even land a blow on her. She just walked all over me.’
‘I got one of them.’
‘That’s better than the rest of us.’
‘They took my kukri.’
To us it was just a big sharp knife. In my case, one I’d been attacked with. To Rannu it was an important part of his heritage, a connection to his family, his people and their past. It was also a symbol of the achievements of the Ghurkha regiment, one of the most, if not the most effective conventional regiment in the British army.
‘I’m sorry, man.’ Even if it seemed trivial next to Morag’s death. Don’t think about Morag; concentrate on Rannu.
‘I broke,’ Rannu said. Hearing his voice when he said it – the despair, the disgust with himself, the shame – was one of the most frightening things I think I’d ever heard. This was a different person. Those bastards had transformed Rannu, the rock, one of the most competent, reliable and professional soldiers I’d ever met, into this shell. What worried me was that Rannu had been captured before and hadn’t broken. While working undercover for the police in Leicester his cover had been blown. He’d been extensively tortured by the Thuggee crime syndicate
