War in Heaven (55 page)

‘That’s the closest anyone’s come for a while,’ she mused.

I could still hear the gunfight. I guessed my friends were too busy to kill me like we’d agreed. I had the presence of mind to trigger the kill switch on my internal memory. Virtual flames burned away electronic data, hopefully leaving them nothing for the inevitable system violation.

Josephine took me by the hair and pulled my head up. On the wall behind her I could see a peeling thinscreen poster of Mudge. It was a screenshot from when we’d taken over the media node on the Atlantis Spoke. He was grinning, had a spliff in his mouth and was holding his AK at port. Across the poster, written in red, was the word R
ESIST
. The Puppet Show had been disseminating the information we’d given them on the Cabal, the Black Squadrons and what had happened on Earth. I couldn’t help but smile. Mudge was the unacceptable face of the resistance. You had to laugh really, didn’t you?

I tried to move my head so I could see Morag but Josephine held me still. I felt her push the coma jack into one of my plugs. Felt the click as it slid home. The fight my security software put up was depressingly brief. Darkness.

After darkness, hell. Slowly coming to. I could feel the pain through the fugue of painkillers, my IVD red with warnings. Hopelessness accompanied consciousness. Or in other words I knew I was fucked.

Opening my eyes was like tearing off a scab. Light was pain; focusing on my surroundings, making sense of them, wasn’t much better. Calum Laird may have been a cunt but I should have taken the job with him. He was an amateur compared to the other inhabitants of the cell I was in.

I was strapped into some sort of contoured vinyl couch, properly secured despite not having the use of my arms. I could feel a single jack in one of my plugs connecting me to some kind of medical suite. I was covered in medpak-driven medgels.

‘He seems to be healing quickly,’ Josephine said quietly. She was looking at the suite’s monitor.

It looked like your standard cell – stone walls, no windows, thick metal door. I reckoned it would have been quite roomy without the hulking, patchwork presence of Martin Kring. Even through the agony I still managed to find disgust for this murderous, so-called anti-insurgency specialist.

Kring was standing impassively next to an unhappy-looking Vincent Cronin, whose salon looks, smart suit that probably cost more than most made in a year and carefully cultivated corporate duelling scars all looked out of place in this dungeon.

And of course Rolleston. Still in uniform – crisp clean fatigues. Well built, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, every inch the suave officer. He had a patient, almost indulgent smile on his face beneath his pale-blue eyes. I’d seen matt-black plastic lenses with more feeling in them than those eyes. This was a moment of clarity. I wasn’t frightened; all I felt was an overwhelming hatred. It was all I could do not to scream my hatred and anger at him.

‘I don’t really feel that I need to be here for this,’ Cronin said to Rolleston, his annoyance obvious. ‘This is your department.’

‘I thought you might want to meet the man who caused us so much trouble. Besides, he will have information that will be of use to both of us. Don’t you, Jakob? Anyway, Jakob has an important lesson to learn.’

‘I’m not being funny, right, but either torture me or kill me because we’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ I said.

‘I find myself in agreement with him,’ Cronin said with a look of disgust in my direction.

Fuck you, suit. Things would be different if I wasn’t strapped down to this couch. With two broken arms. Surrounded by hard bastards.

‘I want to know why,’ Rolleston said.

Cronin turned to look at the Major. ‘This is a waste of our time.’

‘Leave if you want.’ Rolleston just kept staring at me.

‘Why what?’ I asked.

‘Why are you here? Why do you fight? Why did you try to pull down everything we tried to make?’ I stared at him like he was mad. I hoped he picked that up. ‘When you’re suffering I want you to remember that all you had to do was kill an alien and some whores and then go back to your miserable life a bit richer.’

‘Where do I start?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I mean, you get that you shouldn’t do the things you do, yeah?’

‘Get what you can out of him; we can break him now and get after the others,’ Cronin said. He sounded impatient but there was something else there. Nervousness? Fear?

Others? That meant some of them had got away. Rolleston glared at Cronin, obviously irritated by his indiscretion. Though I couldn’t see how it mattered.

‘You understand that you’re in no position to judge me?’ Rolleston asked.

I looked down at my broken, blackened and bloody body.

‘Well not at the moment, but give me a few days to get back on my feet and I’ll give you a square go.’ It was bravado I didn’t really feel.

Rolleston laughed as if we were two old army buddies sharing a joke. Then he reached down and placed his hand on my stomach wound. I gritted my teeth, rode out the pain, wished I had more drugs. His fingers elongated and burrowed through my flesh like razor-covered worms. I screamed and writhed on the couch. Rolleston tore his bloody fingers out of me. I saw them sway and writhe as they slowly returned to looking like fingers. The medical monitor was begging for attention, bleeping with urgency. I was gasping for breath. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers writhing through my guts. Control yourself.

‘Aaaah!’ Turn it into a laugh. ‘Yes! That’s the spirit! A little more torture, a little less fucking talk!’ Because false bravado was bound to see me through, though there was still no fear, only hatred and resignation.

‘Why?’ he asked again.

‘We’ve talked this to death!’ I shouted at him through a spray of blood and spittle. ‘Just fucking get on with it!’

‘Don’t give me orders, Jakob.’ Danger in his voice. He hadn’t liked that.

‘When did you get to like the sound of your own voice so much? You were always a cunt, but I just thought you were trying to get the job done no matter what. Now you’re a fucking psycho. The Cabal have gone. They’re over, dead. You’re just a broken machine following the programming of people who either don’t exist or have switched sides.’

The twitch on his face was instantly replaced by a calm smile. There was something there he hadn’t liked.

‘Humans are all biological machines. Everyone’s programmed. We call it growing up. All you are is malfunctioning pinkware,’ he said.

‘Fine, justify it how you want. It’s not difficult to work out why I’m here. This is just what people do when people like you try to make us live a certain way.’

It was a lie. I was here because of Morag and to a degree because I hated this guy. Want to rule humanity? Fine. But why did it seem that he was on a mission to make my life such a long bleeding streak of misery?

‘You’re angry you can finally see the strings?’ Josephine surprised me by asking. I don’t think I was the only one who was surprised.

‘As for what happened on Earth, you boxed us in. We were making it up as we went along. Just trying to survive. Can we get on with the torture now?’

Rolleston seemed to be giving what I’d said some consideration. ‘That’s what I thought – the spastic reaction of the frightened animal.’ So he hadn’t been giving what I’d said some thought. He just wanted to spin whatever I said until it suited what he wanted to hear.

‘While we’re having a nice little chat. What. The fuck. Are you doing?! You’re potentially going to kill millions of people. For what? Some abstract sense of accomplishment in the power game?’

I was finding impending death and torture quite liberating.

‘You know what you remind me of?’ Rolleston asked.

‘Someone tired of rhetorical questions?’

‘A Neanderthal. I don’t mean that as an epithet …’

‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘An insult,’ he supplied. ‘But this is an insight into what the Neanderthal must have felt in the face of
Homo sapiens
.’

I was speechless. I had no idea what he was going on about. Or why Cronin was looking so uncomfortable.

‘We have the opportunity to be strong as a species, to move forward as one, to make progress as one, to deal with the threats and opportunities that expansion provides from a position of strength, to actually build something instead of tearing things down and constant petty squabbling. This is an evolutionary point in human history. Do you understand that? Do you see what you’re opposing? What you’re trying to drag down, destroy?’

I tried to think through what he’d said.

‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him. ‘You fucking psycho,’ I added. Liberating.

‘George, that’s enough.’ Cronin did not sound happy at all.

Rolleston turned to him. ‘We have an opportunity here for an insight. Do you not see that? He is effectively an uplifted animal.’

‘What are you talking about?!’ I screamed at him.

Rolleston turned back to me. Again he looked angry.

‘I told you, we’re asking the questions,’ he said.

‘Or fucking what? Threats of pain are a little fucking redundant, don’t you think?’

‘I’m angry, Jakob.’

‘Good!’

‘Do you know why I’m angry, Jakob?’

‘Were you recently strapped into a chair and asked stupid fucking questions?!’

‘Because we’re more alike than not.’

‘Brilliant. Unstrap me and we’ll go for a beer!’

‘Because we’ve both been given a great gift.’

‘What?’ I asked, though I think I knew the answer.

‘Why are you healing so quickly?’ Rolleston asked.

‘Themtech,’ I said quietly.

He nodded. ‘Imagine my disappointment that it has been given to one so undeserving. You were a good if disobedient servant, Jakob, but let’s face facts. You’re little more than a brute beast whose only thought is its own selfish gratification.’

And the thing was, he wasn’t trying to anger me. He probably didn’t even think he was insulting me. He was just describing things as he saw them. He wouldn’t even have understood that I didn’t see myself the same way.

‘Not only so undeserving, but someone who’d never be able to understand what he was, let alone understand what we’re trying to do,’ he explained.

I met his eyes and tried not to flinch away from the cold analytical expression on his face. It was like he was studying an insect.

‘I’m an animal who’s caused you a lot of trouble. You know I’d never join you, right?’ I told him.

Cronin actually laughed. ‘We couldn’t use you.’ I heard Josephine sigh. Rolleston’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘You lack the vision. Though I think you know you’ll serve in the end.’

‘Nobody wants what you want except you,’ I said. Very fucking eloquent, I thought.

‘That’s because people only see the small picture. They fear what they don’t understand and like you think only of gratification. And the people whose power relies on them think only of the illusion of providing that gratification. Everyone’s miserable. Imagine if that could be changed.’

‘This is a waste of time. You’re crazy. Seriously. Move on. Brainwashing, torture, getting killed, whatever.’

‘Not quite yet.’

‘George, let’s just get what we need from him,’ Cronin said. He was looking more and more nervous.

‘As Mr Douglas has pointed out, he is an animal that has caused us a lot of trouble. He needs to be taught an object lesson in power. He needs to understand his place in the scheme of things.’

Suicide implants had always struck me as tools of the religious fanatic but right now I was thinking what a good idea they were. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this shit.

‘We want to know where the deserters are. We also want to know what you know about Earth’s defence plans.’ Rolleston was talking to me now.

I didn’t say anything but I went very cold. Mother and her people would move – it was standard operating procedure for them when people got captured – but I thought back to what the prime minister had told me about fortress Earth’s vulnerability. God was their only real hope against Demiurge, and fear and paranoia were diminishing that hope.

‘You’re going to have to get that the hard way,’ I told him.

‘It may interest you to know that you were betrayed by two of your own people,’ he said.

It made sense, but I tried not to react. I still felt angry. I hoped that whoever had got away would realise that we’d been betrayed and hunt down the traitors. It must have been two of Mother’s people. It was understandable. They had roots here. A lot of pressure could be brought to bear. Then something occurred to me.

‘Hold on a second. If we were betrayed, then why do you want to know where the resistance are?’ I asked.

Rolleston was too experienced an officer to give much away, but there was something there. Something he didn’t understand.

‘You know everyone breaks. You know that people can be broken in a very short amount of time using the variable time effects of a sense booth, and you have enough base cunning to understand that we can now break and slave people almost immediately.’