Because of the way the Mamluks were stacked, on converted long-range missile racks, we had a very little space to crawl into them. Not a problem for the Dog Soldier, which was free-standing but crouched down, which presented its own set of problems for Balor.
I was struggling to get my limbs into their respective control slippers and gloves when we heard the crack! It seemed to echo through the ship. Everyone stopped what they were doing. There then followed an unpleasant organic ripping sound and a clanging noise. Everyone was exchanging questioning looks. The pissed-off feeling at waiting for Gregor to emerge was replaced with anticipation tinged with fear. The clanging was now rhythmic as something large approached us. The big door between the engine room and the bomb bay slid open.
Several of us panicked, myself included. Well not exactly panicked but acted on instinct. Despite the fact that we were racked and none of us properly interfaced to the Mamluks, Mudge, Pagan and I all tried to move the mechs to bring our weapons to bear. I’m not sure whether I thought we’d been compromised and They’d boarded us or it was just some fearful animal response to seeing something that alien. Of course none of us could move the Mamluks yet so there was a moment of clanging, straining and cursing before we all calmed down.
It wasn’t just that it was weird, though it – he – was. It was disturbing that Gregor’s once-human physiology could be transformed into this. The metal and plastic that filled our bodies aside, Gregor’s strange form left me worried about the sanctity of humanity. It seemed that not even that was a constant any more.
‘That’s fucked up,’ Balor said, perhaps hypocritically.
It was made of the smooth, oily black flesh from which all of Them were formed. The flesh formed panels of solid-looking chitinous armour plate. It – he, I had to remember that this was my friend – stood about sixteen feet tall and shared characteristics with their Walkers. He had long and deceptively spindly legs with backward-facing joints. His upper body was thickset and powerful but not out of proportion. Powerful, long, multi-jointed arms ended in six-fingered hands. Each of the long fingers was tipped with a claw that looked capable of tearing through mech armour. His head was almost triangular; the only feature a sort of lattice-like pattern that I assumed were sensors. On either shoulder were honeycomb-like protrusions that formed a kind of collar around the head but did not restrict its movement. It took me a while to realise these were organically grown rocket or missile launchers. On several parts of his body small nozzles mounted on gristly ball-shaped growths seemed to move independently. Again it took me a moment to realise this was a black-light, anti-missile defence system. On his back another larger honeycomb growth glowed with the faint blue light of a Themtech propulsion system. The pale light reminded me of Sirius B. There were other similar but smaller growths on various other parts of his body, all of them glowing with the same pale blue light, presumably for manoeuvring control.
In his massive hands he held a disturbingly organic-looking weapon, a tendril-like power cable connecting the weapon to his main body like an umbilical cord. The weapon had an over and under barrel. I guessed it was a shard cannon combined with a black-light projector. A chain of what looked like black bone ran from the weapon to a hump-like growth on Gregor’s lower back. This was ammunition for the shard cannon. The hump was either ammunition storage or possibly, depending on available energy, even a little biological ammunition factory, I wasn’t sure which.
By far and away the worst thing for me were the tentacles. People shouldn’t have tentacles. They were long and sinuously writhed behind him, backlit by a glow from the engine room. They were thick and powerful, and covered in small scales of chitin that didn’t seem to restrict their movement.
Morag glanced over at me, but I really didn’t have any reassurance for her. Pagan was staring at me pointedly. I ignored him. Morag let out an involuntary scream. I turned back to Gregor and let out my own involuntary cry of surprise. Gregor’s triangular head was splitting in half, pulling itself apart. There were tendrils of slime suspended between the two halves. Inside, nestled among alien gristle, was Gregor’s human head. Somehow it reminded me of a pearl in an opened oyster. The familiar face made it all the more freakish and difficult to deal with. I guessed he’d kept his human head and face to try and cling on to the last vestiges of his humanity but it just made him more alien. Maybe Balor wasn’t being such a hypocrite, I decided. The sad thing was Gregor didn’t really look all that much like one of Them either.
‘It’s still me,’ he said, but his voice sounded odd, slightly modulated.
‘The fact that you have to say that…’ Mudge began, but a look from me silenced him. Nobody else really had anything to say. Gregor looked like he was in pain; he looked like he was going to cry. That was when I realised that his eyes were human again, the cybernetic lenses gone. I zoomed in on his eyes with my own lenses. They were brown. I wanted to ask him what he’d done to himself? Was anything worth this?
‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ I said instead. I needed to force my feelings down, beneath the training, the discipline and Mudge’s drugs.
‘We’re still going ahead with this then?’ Pagan asked, contacting me through a private channel on the tac net rather than asking out loud.
‘This changes nothing,’ I replied to him brusquely and then out loud to the rest of them. ‘Right, you know the drill, run silent, no unnecessary systems, just like the dive. Comms silence unless we’re compromised-’
‘When we’re compromised,’ Pagan corrected me.
‘Until then use sign language only. Gregor-’ I glanced over to the alien form hulking over us all ‘-is going to tow us into the Teeth, because he should be scanning as one of them.’ He nodded. ‘Once in, we use the compressed-air system on the fins to manoeuvre. Do not use your primary system unless we’re compromised.’
‘And then what?’ Pagan asked, though he knew damn well.
‘We find the pod, disable it, use it to send a signal to the other pods and extract back to the ship,’ I said. It sounded so easy.
‘You mean, if we get to the pod we hold Them off as long as possible until we’re eventually overrun,’ Pagan said.
‘That is more likely,’ Gregor said. Even through the modulation I could hear the pain in his voice.
‘Pagan, either stay behind or shut up,’ I said. I didn’t have time for this. ‘Gibby is going to hold here for twelve hours. If we’re not back by then he’s out of here. If he gets compromised he will attempt E amp;E, set sail to put some distance between the Spear and Them, and then meet us at our secondary or tertiary RV points.’
‘And we still don’t know what we’re looking for?’ Mudge asked. I glared at him. ‘I’m just asking.’
‘We know it’s a pod, we have coordinates for it, and we know it will be a human application of Themtech,’ Gregor said.
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Morag?’ Pagan said.
I tried to force down the pain, ignore it and busy myself with other things. Tried not to think that this would be the last time I saw her. I couldn’t help but glance over at Morag as she struggled to get into the Mamluk. She looked like a pale and frightened little girl. I felt I was sending her to her death, though in reality I was doing that to everyone.
‘Morag’s going to be doing her own thing,’ I said.
‘I’ll split with you when we reach the Teeth.’ She sounded both scared and strangely sure of herself.
I looked over at Rannu, expecting an objection from him, insistence that he accompanied her, but he said nothing. I think I was jealous of his confidence in her, his faith? Enough thinking. I finally managed to wriggle into the control slippers and gloves. I was lying down on the padding as the four interface plugs slipped into the ports on the back of my neck. Information from the Mamluk’s systems appeared on my internal visual display. The front panel slid shut over me as the head lowered and clicked into place. I didn’t get the rush and feeling of power I had in the Wraith over the Atlantic. This time I felt like I’d been locked into a cell only slightly bigger than my own body. Still I’d decided to take Mudge’s advice. A mournful-sounding saxophone started up, music piped directly into my ears, as I shut down all nonessential systems on my mech.