‘So Crom’s on the Vindictive?’ Gregor asked.
‘I believe that is the case,’ God said. I did not like how vague that sounded.
‘Why just Sirius?’ I asked. Surprisingly it was Gregor who answered.
‘That was the plan. Crom was less evolved than Demiurge – it was little more than a side project really – and Sirius is the greatest concentration of Them.’
‘What’s the worst-case scenario here?’ I said, sounding hollow and pointless even to myself.
‘What do you think?’ Gregor snapped uncharacteristically. ‘They take control of all four colonial fleets and Them forces in the Sirius system and then come back here.’
‘The worst-case scenario is more war,’ Rannu said quietly.
‘Between humans,’ Pagan said. He sounded broken. How had it gone wrong so quickly?
30
It was pity. That was the conclusion I came to as another fit of coughing racked my body and I coughed and spat up blood, nausea rolling over me in waves. Morag lay next me on the bunk, holding me and trying to avoid getting blood on her. I didn’t have very much longer to go. I felt like all my flesh had rotted off and I only existed as drugs and a machine now. They hadn’t wanted me going with them, but I knew I’d last that long and Mudge, the alchemist, had assured me he had just the right cocktail of chemicals to see me through. On the way back I was going into an automed. They intended to place me in chemical stasis to slow the progression of the radiation sickness. It wasn’t so I could see the Earth again. I had little false sentimentality for that shit hole. I just wanted to make sure that Messer and the Wait didn’t live too much longer than I did. In fact, if they didn’t live as long as me that would be better.
Morag was looking after me on the trip out. Like I said, pity. I think revulsion at the pathetic nature of my current physical state, along with memories of me being an arsehole in the ruins of Trenton, had washed away any attraction she may have felt for me. Mudge would come in every so often, take the piss out of me and give me drink, fags and drugs that my system didn’t cope with very well. I couldn’t deal with the others. They weren’t as good at keeping the pity out of their eyes as Mudge and Morag. Not that I saw Gregor though; he was in a fucking cocoon.
The thing was, I’d take pity. I needed her. Pretty selfish thing to do, I guess, especially after what I’d said to her, but I couldn’t handle it on my own. If I’d been on my own and hadn’t had this thing to do I would’ve put the Tyler to my head long ago. Besides, I couldn’t really see Mudge doing such a good job of looking after me.
The butcher bill wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been. I’d seen Balor’s wound: the plasma had eaten through his armour plate and cooked a lot of his systems. He’d actually blacked out, which he was furious with himself about. As far as I knew he was one of a very select few who’d ever survived multiple direct hits from a plasma weapon. It should’ve burnt straight through him. I guess he was very well engineered. Still, he’d seemed a bit more subdued since Rolleston had put him down and he’d been sucked out of the Spoke. It was good for peace and quiet but bad for morale. Not that we really had any. I don’t think Balor liked it now he wasn’t top of the food chain.
Rannu had had most of his face blown off. The Spectre had cracked the armour on his skull, killed a lot of brain cells, but he’d recover. The medpak that covered most of his face was slowly rebuilding it. He was lucky. We all were. Well, except Buck.
Gregor had healed himself. Just after the fight on Atlantis I’d seen him. There was still an angry wound in his head made by Rolleston’s skull fucker that the Themtech was trying to heal. He was fine once that had happened.
Pagan had only taken a few rounds from Rolleston’s Spectre and was pretty much fine but terrified, like the rest of us. Except Gregor, I think Gregor was just angry.
Gibby had only been saved because he had upgraded the armour implanted on his skull to provide better protection against impact from crashing. Josephine’s kick had split his armoured skull but he’d live. Other than that, he was missing lumps of flesh from the laser wounds on his chest. He’d heal, physically anyway. We were all used to losing people in combat, but Buck and Gibby had been together since they were kids growing up in Austin. Gibby told me that they’d done everything together. Raced the same cars and bikes, got in the same fights, worked together, lost their virginity together, which I had to admit was a little odd, and signed up together. Gibby said he felt like half of him was dead. Although I hadn’t grown up with Gregor, I had felt similarly when his loss finally sank in after Dog 4. We’d managed to get him back though, but after what I’d seen him do in the Spoke he just scared me.
Like Gibby, Mudge had lost some weight courtesy of it being superheated and blown off by the Grey Lady. He’d also needed a new leg, but other than that he’d got off lightly. Mudge was tough and his enhancements were pretty good. He came close to holding his own but at the end of the day he wasn’t built like us. That and his stupid decision not to wear armour over his string vest had led to him going down so quickly.
Morag was a mess. She had been blind, deaf and suffering from hypoxia. They treated the hypoxia. They replaced her eyes and ears. Tried to make them look as natural as possible, not like our black lenses. Augmented them so her eyes and ears had capabilities similar to ours. Better than the real ones, but every time I looked at the angry scars I thought how another bit of her humanity had been cut away, how with each surgery she became a little bit more like me. What the fuck were we thinking letting her come along?
They rebuilt my internal organs, put me back together, sewed flesh and replaced broken components. They couldn’t see the point and neither could I, as I was still dying of radiation poisoning. They tried to keep me from going. There was talk of making my final days as comfortable as possible in the medical facilities of Atlantis. And miss committing suicide in the Sirius system? Not a chance.
Our little stunt had worked to a degree. The referendum results came back heavily in favour of ending the war and removing the Cabal. Which wasn’t much of a surprise. Of course, there had been riots, lynchings and various other examples of vigilante justice, but humanity did all right. Governments didn’t topple, though they got stripped down very quickly, as did militaries, intelligence agencies and many corporations. Some very junior people ended up in positions of power. There was a degree of chaos. People were promoted one minute and gone the next as something new was uncovered about them. I guessed it was going to take some adjustment on the part of those who would be our leaders to realise the degree of integrity that was now expected of them. Or perhaps had always been expected of them but was now being enforced. Human society didn’t collapse, it abided. The governments and the corporations saw the tide and decided to go with it, to use it to their best advantage, which normally meant they had to play nicely.
Many of the Cabal had been put under house arrest. Some of them had their funds confiscated and as a result their medical care could not continue. They didn’t so much die as get turned off. Others had the security at their facilities overwhelmed and were killed by vigilante mobs. I suspect some of those mobs contained well-trained, ex-military personnel.
Of course, Cronin escaped. His escape is going to be talked about by space pilots for the next thousand years. Already it’s considered one of the most audacious bits of flying ever done. Just a shame it was done for such a poor reason. One of the Black Squadron’s new generation of frigates, USS Hatteras, managed to dock with the elevator that Cronin was on while it was still in transit, before it had reached High Brazilia. Once the elevator cleared the atmosphere, the frigate matched its speed and trajectory, then they cut their way into the elevator’s emergency airlock and evacuated Cronin and his people.