‘Defence,’ she said finally.
‘Bollocks.’ I raised the revolver and started to squeeze the trigger. Then I relaxed and gently pushed the hammer down and lowered the gun. I’m still not sure I could tell you why. I just wasn’t in the presence of malevolence, and it was my instinct telling me this. The instinct that had come with the original meat, not the metal and plastic I had become. There was audible relief from the prostitutes.
‘Thank you,’ Morag said.
‘Great, just great,’ I said. What the fuck was I doing? This was treason. I was siding with an enemy I hated and who wanted to destroy me and everyone who looked like me. And why was I doing this? I was doing this because of the say-so of a few cheap rig whores.
I was sure I was being mind-controlled or this was part of some new psychological strategy of Theirs. But the people telling me not to kill the alien were people I had no reason to distrust. The man telling me to kill the alien I neither liked nor trusted. The scale of it was terrifying: it was too big and I couldn’t possibly take responsibility for this.
The touch of the thing on my burnt skin was disgusting. It was like some kind of abrasive vinyl substance just beneath the surface of black water. It was not that it was an unpleasant sensation I was receiving from tactile feedback sensors and the few remaining nerves that hadn’t been burnt, it was just what the thing rippling in my arms represented what I’d seen its brethren do. Colonial township after colonial township, their civilian populations completely butchered regardless of age, nobody spared, their remains displayed in warning. Villages that seemed to be painted in human flesh, fences made of human skin.
I couldn’t explain what I was doing, why I was carrying this thing to the Forbidden Pleasure’s helicopter pad, where MacFarlane’s aircar was parked. I was still assuming it was mind control. Nor did I have the slightest idea of what I was intending to do with it. Morag walked with me.
‘What are you doing?’ I growled.
‘I’m coming with you, Mister.’ I really didn’t have time for this. I turned round to the girl, and she looked up at me, brown eyes wide and wet.
‘A lot of bad people are going to be coming for me-’
‘But they’ll come here first,’ she said. She had a point.
‘I’ll drop you somewhere,’ I said and continued towards the aircar. She had to jog to keep up. The lock burner opened the car and I placed the alien across the back seat. Morag climbed into the passenger seat. The Saab smelt damp and faintly of shit and blood. People had been hurt in it. I overrode its security before starting it up and jacking into the car’s system. I didn’t like some of the diagnostics I was seeing on my internal visual display but the pimp’s car would have to suffice. With a whine the car took roughly to the air. We climbed out above the jumbled superstructure of the Rigs. The sparse and intermittent lights and trash fires winked at us through ancient, corroded and tangled metal.
‘Morag,’ I said to the prostitute who was cradling one of humanity’s enemies on the back seat. She wriggled free and leaned towards me. ‘I need you to reach into the big pocket on my jeans and remove what you find there.’ She looked at me sceptically. ‘Just do it,’ I ordered her brusquely. She did as I asked and pulled out a smooth black rectangle of expensive tech. ‘Jack me in,’ I told her. She pulled on the jack, reeling out the cord and pushing it into one of the four plugs in the back of my neck. I felt it click into place beneath my skin, once a deeply unpleasant sensation, now commonplace.
‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice showing curiosity despite her underlying fear. The nose of the aircar sank as I powered it forward and headed towards the neon of central Dundee.
‘Most soldiers and all special ops people have transponders implanted in them so they can be tracked on the battlefield.’ I nodded towards the black block she’d just jacked me into. ‘That is an electronic countermeasures block. I’m going to jam my signal.’ I left out that the transponders were also of use for when the amount of plastic and metal outweighed your soul and turned you into a machine deep in the grip of psychosis. I also left out that while on active service most special ops types could switch their transponders on and off. For those times when it was important nobody knew where you were or what you were doing.
Everything went white, bright white. My flash compensators tried with little success to damp down the brightness. My audio filters shut down so I felt rather than heard the explosion. They were still letting in the frequencies that allowed me to hear Morag’s terrified scream and the sound of metal being punctured. The aircar was hurled forward as I desperately tried to control the machine. Through the drugs I was dimly aware of the heat and the signals that would normally be pain coming from my leg. I was also dimly aware of wetness on my trouser leg and wetness of a different consistency coating me. I realised I was tasting alien.
As the bright light subsided I managed to piece together what had happened while brutally bringing the car’s backup system online. Morag was sobbing silently; I think she was too scared to make a noise. Foul-smelling steam surrounded the aircar. Debris floated or fell past us, some of it raining down on the car. I could see the outside through a hole in the floor of the car. There was a matching one in the ceiling and in my badly bleeding leg.
Behind us there was a steaming crater where the Forbidden Pleasure used to be. The crater was rapidly being filled with the polluted river water of the Tay. Even after everything I had seen I was still appalled that Rolleston, or his masters, would use an orbital weapon on an Earth-side city. The alien had also been hit, shot through the car. Much of its liquid flesh coated the inside of the car, though there was still a semi-solid, faintly humanoid mass on the terrified Morag’s lap.
It was Bran, it had to be, somewhere on one of the rigs. Probably perilously close to where she’d called in the orbital strike. She had us in the crosshairs of her smartlinked sniper railgun. She’d killed the alien, tidied up the witnesses and given me a warning shot because there was no way she would have missed unless she chose to. Blood was pissing out of my leg, pooling in the footwell and even leaking out of the hole made by Bran’s railgun.
I managed to keep the Saab in the air as I reached into one of the many pockets of my long coat and removed a stim patch and attached it to my neck. It would keep me awake but I needed to do something about the bleeding; my self-repair systems were good but I was losing way too much blood. I cursed myself for not having brought my first-aid kit. The split screen on my internal visual display showed me what was going on around the aircar. I was controlling the vehicle through my interface; this left my hands free to search for an in-car medical kit. I found one but most of its contents were long gone.
Morag was still sobbing quietly. Her world, regardless of how bad it had been, had just disappeared in a moment of light and heat.
‘Morag?’ I said. She ignored me. I could see her fading into shock. ‘Morag!’ Her head jerked around to face me. ‘Can you fly this?’ I asked her. I already knew the answer but I wanted her mind on something else. She shook her head, her lips tight and bloodless, face pale under her make-up. I cracked a smile on the burnt visage of my ruined face. ‘That’s unfortunate.’ She gaped at me before my completely inappropriate humour made her smile and shake her head. I held the wound on my leg closed and headed for the city.
6
I broke into the car’s autopilot systems and gave it illegal instructions. I sent out a heavily coded text, cycling it through the cryptography sub-routines of my ECM block and screaming it to emphasise the urgency. The Rigs were no longer beneath us; we were over dry land now. Beneath us were the huddled makeshift stalls, rafts and junks of the harbour markets. Many of the people were making their way to the riverside to see the aftermath of the explosion. I suspected that many of them thought that They had come and were attacking Earth. After all. They would obviously start with Dundee, I thought, smiling to myself.