Gregor staggers back to his feet and tears the knife out. Rolleston seems to have made him angry. Gregor hits him with an old-fashioned uppercut. Rolleston tumbles by over my head and hits the external wall. Gregor stomps over to his fallen Retributor and picks it up. He turns to the Major, who is climbing to his feet, and starts firing. I watch in horror as Rolleston, this inhuman thing, is chewed up and almost as quickly rebuilt by the black liquid Themtech.
And Josephine is standing over me. I look up. This is the calmest I have felt. I lie over Morag, covering her.
‘Get out of the way,’ Josephine’s soft voice over the tac net. What the fuck? Why wasn’t she killing me?
I was distracted from this thought by Rolleston apparently deciding things weren’t going his way. The external wall blew out.
I watched the footage of this afterwards. One part of the wall just blew out, sending rubble and the entire landing platform tumbling down. I watched Cat’s security people in their Praetorians kick full burn on their flight fins to get out of the way.
You’re not supposed to be able do this to the external wall of a Spoke. Josephine had been busy. She had used her camouflage system to crawl around on the outside of the Spoke and seed it with programmable concrete-eating microbes. They chewed in deep enough to allow her to set sufficient explosives to blow the wall. That was why Cronin had kept us talking.
Now this kind of damage hadn’t been done to a Spoke since Brazilian I had fallen. Well okay, we’d used microbes on this Spoke after the raid on the lab, but still. Of course, Cat now had no choice but to breach.
All the fun of explosive decompression. Buck and Balor’s bodies were both sucked out. My wired reflexes gave me the chance to register them tumbling into the night sky. Somehow Gibby and Mudge were still alive. They clung onto whatever they could find. Both of them had internal air supplies; if they didn’t get sucked out they’d be okay. Pagan threw himself at the base of the catwalk as bits of the reception desk, the gallery and what was left of the set flew past him. He wrapped himself around it. He held on for dear life.
I felt Morag begin to slip from beneath me. My right hand clamped down. I pushed through the plain white carpet of the set and steel prosthetic fingers dug into the concrete, providing me with a precarious grip.
Rolleston, Josephine and Gregor stayed where they were. Something held them in place as the smoke was sucked out around them. Gregor had stopped firing. He started again when Rolleston’s assault shuttle dropped into view, its rapid firing railguns rotating up to speed, its front ramp down. Rolleston turned and jumped for the ramp.
Josephine looked down at me sadly and didn’t kill me. She turned and ran with the wind towards the assault shuttle. She jumped out into the night sky, still looking graceful. As she jumped, the rotating railguns started firing. They cut through everything in their path. The rounds penetrated the walls and must have hit Cat’s forces in the plaza outside the node. They cut through the stairs to the catwalk, and the gallery ceased to exist, disintegrating under the withering fire. The shots were too high to get most of us and too low to get Rannu, but Gregor stood there and traded shots with the assault shuttle.
Gregor stood his ground, fired and fired as the shuttle’s cannon chewed up everything around him and tore away huge chunks of his flesh – so much there seemed to be a constant stream of flesh coming off him.
Later I would see more footage from the Praetorians as they all fired on Rolleston’s assault shuttle aided by gunships and the Spoke’s own defences. Over the tac net I heard Cat shout ‘British soldiers on the ground now!’ as the Praetorians flew through the reception area and into the media node. Outside in the plaza emergency barriers came down to stop further decompression.
Cat’s exo-armoured troops skimmed through the media node and fired at the assault shuttle. Eventually under a hail of withering fire, the assault shuttle peeled off. The Atlantis security forces gave chase as the assault shuttle headed up at dangerous Gs.
It was Cat herself who picked Morag and me up. She flew us to a gunship; her exo-assisted strength easily taking our weight. Behind me her people were doing the same for Rannu, Pagan, Mudge and Gibby. I wondered how scared the guys who helped Gregor were. Or what they thought. Gregor had stalked to the edge of the node and continued firing after the assault shuttle.
We couldn’t kill them. Any of them. I looked down at the clouds and a trail of my own blood. Then we were in the cramped confines of one of the gunships; a medic was starting to patch me up. One of the crew was administering a sedative to Morag.
‘Her first.’ I told the medic. Unlike us Morag’s body wasn’t outfitted for combat and rapid pressure changes.
‘Triage motherfucker, you’ve got a big hole in your stomach, now shut the fuck up,’ the medic told me. Americans.
‘It’s all right. We’re safe now,’ I lied to Morag over the tac net. I was still trying to make sense of what had just happened to us. They had walked through us. It must be how normal people, that endangered species, felt when they fought us.
An orbital weapon, I thought. That’ll do for them.
‘God?’ I whispered hoarsely into the tac net as the brusque medic tended to me.
‘Yes, Jakob?’ God’s many mellifluous tones answered me.
‘Where are Rolleston and Bran?’ I asked.
‘They are in the assault shuttle making its way up the outside of the Spoke, I believe towards the frigate HMS Vindictive.’
‘Where’s the Vindictive?’
‘HMS Vindictive is docked at High Nyota Mlima,’ God answered. The Kenyan Spoke.
‘Well fucking stop them then,’ I said.
‘I cannot; Major Rolleston has free will,’ God answered. I bit down on my anger. ‘However I believe that the Atlantis authorities are attempting to interdict the assault shuttle and the Kenyan authorities have locked down the HMS Vindictive and are not allowing it to leave.’
‘Yeah? Tell them not to fuck around. Tell them to use one of the orbital platforms.’
‘ I am relaying your suggestion. However, I believe that has been considered and is the reason the assault shuttle is staying so close to the Spoke.’
‘I think your private war has done enough damage to Atlantis,’ Cat’s voice broke in on the tac net. This brilliant God we’d made. Sadly it meant that the bad guys knew what we were doing as well.
‘Do people know?’ I said more to myself.
‘Mudge was broadcasting all the way through,’ God said. I think he was trying to be reassuring but did they know? Had people seen enough? Did they know what Rolleston and Josephine were? Then again I had been there, and I didn’t know, but I recognised the highly advanced application of Themtech. Still there was no way they could get through Earth’s defences.
‘God, can you send visual to my internal display?’ A window appeared, showing an external shot of a docking bay. I could see the Vindictive attached to the docking arm. I had never seen a craft quite like it. I was long and surprisingly sleek for a spacecraft, the shape of a distended teardrop. The normal technological junk that covered the exterior of a spacecraft seemed to have been cut down to a bare minimum. There were no armaments immediately visible and the craft’s thick armour had a biological look to it. For some reason it reminded me of Gregor.
‘Where’s the shuttle?’ I asked God.
‘It has just left the atmosphere, still close to the Spoke. Interception craft have been scrambled.’
‘What is that thing?’ I asked, meaning the Vindictive. Information started appearing on my visual display. It was a recently completed next-generation frigate. What was interesting was that, based on the available information, God thought that Vindictive and a number of other newly completed frigates were utilising technology from Project Blackworm. God had further connected it to something called the Black Squadrons. Was this the Cabal’s private army?