War in Heaven (5 page)

‘Papa Neon! When the devil comes will you fight?’ Mudge shouted over the roar of the copter’s engines.

I could hear Papa Neon’s deep laughter as the coffin closed and he sank into the back of the truck. Little Baby Neon was already in the cutaway passenger seat, and the vehicle made its way back towards the huge dust cloud that was Crawling Town. The cloud seemed to fill a lot of the horizon. I was sorry to see them go. It would have been nice to have someone as frightening as Little Baby Neon backing us up in a discussion with the inhabitants of the copter.

The three of us spread out. Mudge to my left, Rannu to my right. Our weapons were at the ready, held horizontally against our bodies but not pointing at anything in particular. The dust cloud engulfed us as the aircraft landed. We all switched, I’m guessing, to thermal to look at the copter in the reds, yellows and oranges of its heat signature. This was significantly masked, which suggested it was set up for stealth to a degree.

A door in the centre of the copter opened, stairs extending to the dirt. Three figures came out. We saw them as thermal outlines. They had weapons at their shoulders pointed at us.

Rannu and I had our weapons to our shoulders covering them. We each picked the closest target. I’d been working with him long enough to know that was what he would do. Mudge was a fraction of a second behind us.

‘Drop your weapons!’ they shouted. They were American. We didn’t say anything; we just kept them covered.

‘Drop your weapons or we will shoot!’ The one in the middle was doing all the talking. Still we didn’t reply. We just watched for the tells that they were about to fire. Hoped that we were quicker. Worried about the copter’s weapon systems, which were the biggest threat by far.

This sort of bollocks was typical of some paramilitary types. Had they landed and talked to us we would have talked back to them. Instead they’d probably read in some textbook somewhere the importance of establishing dominance in a power relationship so they could control the situation. The thing is, to us it wasn’t about a power relationship, it was about a threat. If we didn’t respond to having weapons pointed at us this time, then what happened the next time, when someone did actually want to do us harm? People like this never seemed to learn that they could get a lot further by behaving courteously. Would they get scared and back down or would they get scared and do something stupid?

Okay I admit it, part of it was that we just didn’t like being strong-armed. If they were going to do that they should have brought a lot more people.

‘We have you covered! Lower your weapons!’ The vocal one shouted again.

‘Should we threaten them back?’ Mudge sub-vocalised over the comms. ‘I can sound really macho and threatening when I want to.’ I failed to completely stifle a laugh. Rannu grinned. This didn’t help.

‘Put down your guns!’ He sounded shriller now. The dust was settling. The three of them looked almost identical. Boy Scout haircuts, dark glasses, anonymous dark suits, fancy European gauss carbines. They looked exactly like what they were: bad intelligence operatives. They may as well have worn a uniform. The question was: were they going to commit suicide today? The problem was that if they did it meant our imminent death at the hands of the copter’s heavy weapons.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Mudge sub-vocalised. He even managed to sound genuinely peeved. ‘I
am
threatening and intimidating.’

I decided to throw them a bone.

‘Shut up, Mudge,’ I said out loud. ‘You want something from us?’ I called out. ‘Because if you do you’re not going about it very well.’

‘Drop your weapons. You are coming with us,’ the guy in the middle said. All three of them looked nervous. We didn’t.

‘I can’t think of any compelling reason to do that. Why don’t you take your guns off us and tell us what this is about?’

‘Put your guns down!’ he screamed.

‘His shrillness bothers me,’ Mudge said. Rannu remained quiet. I favoured Rannu’s approach more. I’d had enough.

‘Put your guns down,’ I said to Mudge and Rannu.

‘What?!’ Mudge demanded. I lowered my assault shotgun.

‘Are you sure?’ Rannu asked.

‘These guys are dicks. They’re also stupid. If we don’t, they’re going to force us to kill them.’

‘Put your guns down!’ He was sounding more masterful now. I think he thought he was winning. That this was somehow validation for being a dickhead.

‘Shut up!’ I shouted back at him. ‘I just can’t be bothered with it,’ I said to Mudge and Rannu. I also didn’t mention that the result of killing these idiots was death by rotary railgun. Both of them lowered their weapons.

The three idiots rushed up screaming at us to drop our weapons and lie down. Mudge started laughing at them. Rannu seemed to have just the slightest look of contempt on his face, which was unusual for the passive ex-Ghurkha. I was just bemused.

‘Look, what do you want?’ More screaming. ‘You must be here for some reason. If you’d just tell us …’ Yet more screaming and threats. ‘We’re obviously not going to lie down, so what have you got left? Are you going to shoot us?’

The one closest to me produced a shock stick from a pouch on his belt. With a flick of his wrist he extended it. I couldn’t shake the feeling he’d practised that move in the mirror. He triggered the display that sent sparks of electricity surging down the weapon. I wondered if it was supposed to intimidate me. What did he think I’d done for a living? I grabbed his wrist and stabbed him in the face with it. Which had to be embarrassing. I was pleasantly surprised that his internal systems were not sufficiently insulated, like mine, to cope with a shock stick, and he hit the ground a juddering mess.

Rannu stepped past the one closing on him. As he did so, he grabbed the barrel of the gauss carbine and pushed it up over the gunman’s head. The gunman got tangled up in the weapon’s strap and found himself lying on the ground with Rannu kneeling next to him.

Mudge cheated, in my opinion. The guy on him was distracted by the fun that Rannu and I were having. Mudge just sidestepped, drew his sidearm and levelled it at the guy’s head.

I extended the claws on my right arm. Four nine-inch long, hardened ceramic blades slid out of my forearm through slits just behind my knuckles. I reached down to the recently electrocuted gunman, cut the sling off his gauss carbine and tossed it away. Then I walked over to the one that Mudge had covered.

‘Are you more reasonable?’

‘I ain’t telling you shit,’ he said in a manner I think he thought was macho. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. Mudge clattered him on the side of the head with his pistol. I looked reproachfully at Mudge. Not because he’d hit him but because you shouldn’t get so close to your target that they can reach you – as Rannu and I had just demonstrated.

‘What do you want?!’ I screamed. The guy just kept his mouth shut. ‘Do you realise how fucking stupid it is to go to all this effort and not tell us?!’

‘Someone wants to see you,’ the guy that Rannu had taken down shouted.

‘Shut up!’ Mudge’s guy yelled.

‘You’re supposed to tell us that,’ I tried pointing out. I then walked over to Rannu and his prone friend.

‘Who?’ I asked him.

‘Sharcroft,’ he said. The name meant nothing to me. I told him that. Mudge joined us, forcing his prisoner to his knees in front of him. Mudge was sub-vocalising something as he did this.

‘What does he want?’ I asked.

‘He has a proposal,’ the guy said.

‘Funny way of making it. If you’d succeeded then we’d be useless to him. You didn’t, so he should have sent smarter people. Either way I’m not inclined to meet him.’

‘Look, we fucked up.’ He looked over at the guy whose face I’d electrocuted.

‘Trying to prove yourself?’ I asked. The guy said nothing. He just glared resentfully at his unconscious mate.

‘Trying to prove himself, was he?’ I asked. The look on the guy’s face said it all. The arrogant part of me was scornful of them thinking they stood a chance.

‘You need some proper trigger time, sunshine. You are way out of your league,’ Mudge said. I turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. Sometimes I thought that the SAS had been a bad influence on Mudge. Though it could have been the other way around. Mudge shrugged.

‘Simon Sharcroft?’ he asked the talkative one. The guy nodded.

‘Know him?’ I asked.

‘Know of him. So do you,’ Mudge said. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘He’s one of the Cabal.’ I lost my sense of humour and drew my Mastodon from its holster.

‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ Rannu’s prisoner shouted as he got a good look at the massive .454 revolver designed for killing Berserks.

‘You fucking pussy!’ Mudge’s prisoner spat at the guy. ‘Ow!’ Mudge had clouted him round the head with his pistol. I think Mudge was starting to enjoy this sort of thing too much.

‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. Was it starting all over again? Surely the Cabal couldn’t be starting up again – could it?

‘All I know is that he wants a meet, I swear!’ Rannu’s prisoner was begging. A text file appeared in the corner of my IVD sent by Mudge. I opened it and scanned the words superimposed over my vision.

Sharcroft was from some old – meaning pre-FHC – money family, America’s answer to Britain’s aristocracy. Right schools, right fraternities, probably got his arse whipped with rolled-up towels in the right secret societies. Sharcroft was a Pentagon II insider. He was an intelligence and government powerbroker and acted as a liaison between the multitudes of compartmentalised intelligence agencies that confused the American government and military. He’d made a name for himself early in his career by running very black ops for the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Department. He was described as someone not afraid to make hard decisions. Or, from the perspective of people on the ground, he was a cunt who didn’t care how many people he got killed to make himself look good.

No war record – he was too old, well over a hundred. He had of course been implicated when we revealed the Cabal to everyone. He’d been neck deep in their nasty shit but, according to the info Mudge had gleamed from God, had disappeared very quickly after the big reveal.

Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.

‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.

‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.

‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.

‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.

‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.

‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.

‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.

‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.

Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.

We sat on the benches of the black copter opposite the three walking bruised egos that took the form of lower-echelon spooks. They’d optimistically asked for our weapons as we’d boarded the copter. We’d politely refused, Mudge had hit one, but I’d promised they could have their guns back at the end of the trip.

They’d also been more than a little annoyed when we’d loaded the four-wheel-drive muscle car and the dirt bike into the back of the copter. I mean cars and bikes don’t grow on trees. We’d taken the time and the effort to steal them so we wanted to hold on to them. So the gunmen had spent most of the trip staring at us resentfully.

It was my first trip to America. Or rather my first trip over the border into the America controlled by the American government. I didn’t get much of a chance to see it. Being in the back of some kind of military transport vehicle usually meant I was on my way somewhere to do something stupid, wasteful and dangerous. The journeys to and from said stupid, wasteful and dangerous things were often my only downtime. It had taken me a long time to learn the skill, but I could sleep anywhere, even in the back of these often noisy and always uncomfortable vehicles. I drifted off quite quickly. Careless perhaps, but I knew Rannu and Mudge had my back. They’d wake me when one of them wanted some rest.

Heaven appeared to glow a blue-white colour. It reminded me of something, something dangerous. I wasn’t sure about opening my eyes but I felt good. In fact I felt the best I had in a very, very long time, presumably because I was no longer dying but was in fact dead. On the other hand, I remembered that I’d done an awful lot of bad things in my life, from stealing money from my parents to buy cigarettes when I was ten to killing a lot of people. Some in cold blood and some after I’d tortured them – those were the ones I felt most bad about
.