Cronin drags me down with him. He twists in mid-air and lands on me. How the fuck did this happen? I feel like my face caves in when he elbows me. I kick up, hook my leg round his neck and yank him backwards. He throws himself back with the momentum of it, rolling out of the leg lock into a low crouch. I start to roll to my feet but Cronin pushes forward off his legs, plants a hand next to me and the next I know he knees me in the face with his entire body weight. My face feels concave now. My IVD bores me with red warning icons. I may as well have them up permanently now.
It’s an ugly, badly aimed blow but it connects. More luck than judgement but there’s enough force there to punch through armour and reach flesh as I ram the two blades on my left fist into his side. I twist and thrash my hand around inside him trying to do as much damage as I can. For a corp this guy’s hard. He doesn’t scream; instead he steps through me. Pushing my hand out of his flesh and kicking me in the face. Bone and subcutaneous armour crumple on my chin and the back of my skull as it’s battered off the rock.
He’s angry now. Instead of pulling away, his leg goes high into the air. Why has nobody else got involved? He hammers it down in an attempt to scissor-kick me in the face. All he does is ram his leg down onto the four broken blades of my right hand. I twist and yank the leg, hoping to make it useless. I sit up and try and stab him in the groin with the blades on my left hand but he’s gone. He’s rolled out of the way, screaming out as he twists the broken blades out of his leg.
He skips up back onto his feet. I stand up more slowly, grinning at him. His face, side and leg are all pissing blood.
I sense more than see that Rannu is boxing Kring. Kring looks like pulped meat but I watch as he swings a huge fist with surprising speed and almost takes Rannu’s head off, sending the punch-drunk Ghurkha staggering back across the cave.
Everyone else is just watching. They look nervous. I don’t understand why they haven’t just shot me. Cronin didn’t strike me as the type to give someone a sporting chance.
‘I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!’ Cronin spits at me.
I just smile.
‘Don’t kill him,’ someone says. It looks like one of the Black Squadron soldiers. Why is he telling Cronin what to do? Something doesn’t make sense. I put that thought to the back of my mind as Cronin skips forward with surprising speed and kicks me in the knee. The knee snaps, bending the other way. There’s some screaming, quite a lot of screaming. Then I fall over. That hurts as well. Then Cronin is all over me. I get in some good blows but it’s over quickly. Him stamping on my head until I lose consciousness is just a formality now.
Knowing I’m a lost cause, Demiurge decides to show me the truth. As I try to crawl away, and Merle kicks me in the head again, I see that there is no carpet of bodies. There is no Black Squadron presence. Cronin is really Merle. The Black Squadron guy who told Merle not to kill me is Mudge. Kring is Tailgunner. Tailgunner has lifted Rannu off the ground by his neck and is pounding him again and again with a massive fist. Rannu hangs limp like some street kid’s prize rag doll. I don’t know who Rolleston was because he’s spread over a large area of the cave and mixed in with the broken remains of all the others we’ve killed.
Mother, Little Henry and Strange stand in the circle around our beating. Mother wants to kill me. I can tell that. Little Henry looks like he’s in shock. I think Strange wants to cry.
Another jarring kick to the head, another wave of nausea as my brain rattles around in the broken vessel of my skull. Rammed down into the stone, spitting out more blood, leaving a trail as I try to crawl some more. I don’t know where. Towards the Grey Lady’s body? Mudge and Pagan look traumatised by what they’re watching.
Another kick to the head. I’m laughing now, don’t know why, so much pain. Cat is crouching over the Grey Lady, working furiously on the head wound. Why? She’s the enemy. But she’s not. That was a lie. That was what Demiurge made me think. It’s not the Grey Lady. I crawl some more.
‘Motherfucker!’ Merle’s really angry. I fucked up his face. He punctuates the scream with a kick to my side for a bit of variety, which hits me so hard it flips me onto my back.
‘That’s enough.’ Mudge’s voice. Merle wants to kill me. They all want to kill me. I manage to roll back onto my belly, a good place for someone like me. I can see the Grey Lady now. Except it’s not her. I knew it wasn’t. I’m a good shot. There’s only so much you can do when someone who’s as good a shot as me puts three rounds from a gauss carbine into a human head. I look at Morag’s body.
Demiurge has had its fun. It feels like black water washing over my soul. It feels like drowning.
18
It was like being born. There was light and pain and fire. Everything about me that was weak – all the fear, the self-loathing, the crippling reliance on other weaklings – was burned out of me. It was the liberation that comes from surgery of the soul.
I had no idea how long I had been out but they had moved. They had run. Even as deluded as they were, they must have understood the pointlessness of hiding. It was only a matter of time before they were found and either destroyed or healed in the black fire.
I tried my internal comms. Nothing. They’d actually been removed. I glanced down at my side and saw the gel over the surgical scar where they had removed the transponder. I cursed silently.
I was in the inevitable cave. It was small. The mouth of the cave was covered by a tarpaulin that moved slightly in the subterranean wind. I could just about hear water over the sound of Rannu screaming at someone that he was going to cut off their genitals and sew them into their mouth. In Latin. I smiled, hoping that someone had the education to appreciate obscenities screamed in a dead language. I doubted it.
I was lying on a cot stained with dried blood. My knee, face and other wounds were covered by medgels. I felt like peeling them off like scabs. I was healing quickly but I reached out to the alien bio-nanites in my system with a thought and reprogrammed them to heal me faster. They were so primitive without the ingenuity of humanity to upgrade them. The fact that we could render an entire alien species into nothing more than a technology to improve ourselves was a sure sign of our superiority and right to dominate.
I was immobilised with very secure-looking manacles. Heavy chains had been driven into the rock. The manacles had been welded tight over my wrists and ankles. I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. I hoped this wasn’t going to come down to anything as sordid as soiling myself and attempting to hit visitors with projectile vomit.
The tarpaulin was pushed to one side as a worried-looking Pagan and Mudge stepped into the cave. I tried to form a mask of concern and fear.
‘Guys, what’s going on? Where the fuck are we? Who’s that screaming? And why am I chained up?’
‘What’s the last thing you remember, Jakob?’ Pagan asked.
‘The heist.’ I widened my eyes. ‘The Grey Lady… Fuck! What’s going on?!’ I tried to remember what being constantly afraid was like and put it into my voice.
‘You were captured,’ Pagan told me. The look of concern on his face was so pathetic I wanted to spit at him. I saw his empty skin bulge and move. One of the flies that animated his corpse crawled across his face.
‘I don’t…’
‘Remember anything?’ Mudge said, sounding angry.
‘What happened?’
‘You killed a whole lot of the Kiwis including Dog Face,’ Mudge told me.
Shit, only Dog Face. Why had Demiurge made Dog Face look like Rolleston? Perhaps it was something to do with them both using claws.
‘Morag?’ I asked. The anxious, frightened tone I heard in my own voice made me want to vomit. I almost did when I saw the look of sadness on Pagan’s face.
‘I’m sorry, Jakob…’ he said.
I tried to remember what it was like. The pantomime of emotions I should display.
‘No…’ A touch of horror initially, I thought. I mixed it with the denial. It rang false in my own ears, however. I wanted to laugh as I saw blood start to run down the cave wall.
‘Spare us, we’ve already been through this with Rannu. You can start your tasteful ravings about genitalia in
