head and asked that they shoot everyone there if they needed to be sure rather than cut their bandages off. It was a difficult moment for the NCO but they stopped removing them.
The soldiers searched the area but didn’t even find our gauss carbines, which we’d hidden close to us. They engaged in a little light looting – after all this was the wealthy part of town – and then foxtrot oscar’d.
I watched the gunship peel away from the mansion then turned back to look at the flames of the massive bonfire. The flash compensation on my IVD polarised the lenses slightly to allow for the glare. On the other side of the flames I could see the bestial horned statue. Now that I was closer I could see that it had been welded together out of all sorts. There were parts of vehicles, consumer electronics, furniture and even jewellery. The one thing the material had in common was that it all looked to have once been expensive high-quality gear. One part of me was appalled at the waste. The other half was amused. The fuel for the fire looked similarly expensive. I started to laugh.
‘It’s not vandalism; it’s liberation.’ The guy with the staff was standing over us now. ‘You both look ill-used. We do not have much but I think you should probably eat.’ And now that he’d mentioned it I suddenly realised how hungry I was.
Vat mulch and hot sauce. It was one of the best-tasting meals I’d ever had. They had to watch both Rannu and me to make sure we didn’t just wolf it down and make ourselves sick. We washed it down with odd-tasting water and, after some negotiation, some kind of moonshine. It tasted how I imagined fermented engine oil would taste. A small tin cup of the stuff left me feeling quite drunk.
The guy with the staff had stayed with us. He didn’t ask us anything. We did the asking. I even managed to remember to thank him. He and his people had taken a battering on our account and said nothing.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
He was monitoring how quickly I was spooning the mulch down.
‘I suspect you mean geographically and not philosophically? I grew up in the shadow of the Ugandan Spoke. Easy now, not so fast.’ He laid his bandaged hands over mine, stopping me from spooning another mouthful into my mouth.
‘You sound moneyed. How come you didn’t join the Fortunate Sons?’ I asked.
‘It was an option for me, initially anyway. I was a poet with a degree of recognition, if not popularity. While I was at university I net-published poetry which was considered to be anti-corporate.’
‘Was it?’
‘It wasn’t anti-anything. It was pro-person.’
I nodded as if I understood what he was saying. He probably needed to be speaking to someone like Mudge, though I noticed that Rannu was listening intently.
‘They arranged to have you drafted?’ Rannu asked.
‘Either them or my family. I’m not sure which.’
‘And you deserted?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Ten years was too long a slave.’ He tapped the black plastic of his lenses. ‘I think that’s why they take the eyes first. So they can try and get to our souls. I didn’t fully understand why I was fighting.’ He lapsed into silence for a moment and watched me eat. ‘Are you aware of the information purporting to be from Earth?’ he asked. I nodded. Rannu said nothing. ‘It seems in some ways we’ve been vindicated, but that is a retrospective justification. I just couldn’t do it any more. None of us could. I think perhaps we are all too weak but I will not fight again.’
My opinions on deserters notwithstanding, I was struggling to condemn these people. I wanted to ask him about the mates he’d left behind but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After all the only person left from my days in service was Mudge. Well, if you didn’t count Rolleston and the Grey Lady.
‘You know they’ll move you on from here? If they don’t kill you,’ Rannu said.
‘The scavenger teams already hate us. They shoot the moment we get in the way of something they want. They’ve killed a lot of our people. After all, nobody cares if deserters die. Right?’ He looked at us expectantly. Neither of us could meet his lenses. The bandages around his mouth seemed to crease as if he was smiling. ‘We know this is temporary. That death is imminent. Do you?’
It certainly always felt that way. We were always less than one step away from death. The feeling that my luck was going to run out if I didn’t stop doing things like this. Luck? Two gunshots. Meat that was once a person hitting a cold stone floor. For a moment I could see the appeal of the End. Then I remembered how important it was that Rolleston died.
‘Demiurge?’ I asked.
He turned his head. He seemed to be studying me.
‘The Black Wave?’ he asked.
I cursed my own indiscretion. On the other hand he’d know from my accent that I wasn’t from around here.
‘You worship it?’ I asked.
‘More venerate it as an inevitability. One war ends and another begins. This time we fight each other, and if the information the resistance is circulating is correct it seems that we did the last one to ourselves as well. There was a demon, a harbinger…’
‘In the net?’ Rannu asked.
The man nodded. This sent a shudder through me. Of all the religious experiences that people have in the net, the ones involving so-called demons are always the worst and most destructive – and not just for the hackers themselves. I remembered the boy lying on the soiled bed in Fintry, Vicar standing over him, cross and Bible in hand, trying to cast out the demonic virus in the kid’s ware.
‘He told me of the Black Wave’s coming. He told me that the Black Wave was hate.’ The man laughed. ‘Can you imagine? All these years of artifice and we finally make machines hate.’
‘So why venerate something so…’ I was searching for the right word.
‘Negative,’ Rannu supplied. It didn’t seem quite strong enough but it would do.
‘Because of its inevitability, its symbolism. Sixty years of warfare was not enough. At some level humanity wants to destroy itself. If not this war then other reasons will be found. The Black Wave is the perfect expression of this. We, as a race, have created a god and then we made it hate. How much harder do we have to work to destroy ourselves?’
‘It was a small group of people,’ I said. I couldn’t shake the feeling that history was the story of a small group of arseholes making the rest of us bloody miserable.
‘Do you oppose these people?’ he asked.
This was more difficult. Answering that had operational security ramifications. What was I talking about? I’d already sold us out. At least he didn’t seem malevolent. Rannu still gave me a sharp look when I nodded.
‘You still fight, hate, commit acts of violence and destroy other human life?’ he asked.
‘That’s…’ Now Rannu was searching for a word.
‘Sophistry?’ the man suggested. Rannu nodded. ‘Perhaps, or perhaps it’s taking responsibility, collectively, for our race’s actions.’
It seemed that nobody was going to tell me what sophistry was. Maybe it meant bullshit. Maybe that’s what Rannu had meant to say.
‘So you’re waiting for death?’ I asked.
‘In a way, but we won’t play its game. We’ll die on our own terms.’
I couldn’t make up my mind if this guy was a suicidal nut-job or one of the bravest persons I’d ever met. Not that they were mutually exclusive.
‘We still have to fight,’ Rannu said.
‘Even if it’s more futile, painful and destructive than putting one of their guns to your own head? Besides, there are ways and means of fighting. It doesn’t have to involve violence.’
His words were starting to make sense to me. He was very persuasive. Though I wasn’t sure he wasn’t twisting words out of shape to get us to think what he wanted.
‘Is this how you recruit people?’ I asked.
‘We don’t recruit people. They come to us when they’re ready. You will not join us. You are both still full of anger, hatred and fear. I can see the flames that burn around you. They surround you like a nimbus. I think you need to rage against the dark for a while longer yet.’
