The bright commercial lights of Dundee’s Ginza were up ahead of us. Flashing neon hologramatic signs simultaneously offering us all the happiness that material goods could offer while warning us of the sacrifices that we all had to make because of the war. There was also news from the front, the duelling strobes of light from yet another space battle above Dog 1, cut with ground action, armoured vehicles, mechs and tired infantry wading through mud in one direction and air ambulances going in the other.
We were on the outskirts of the true Ginza. Scum like us were kept out by heavy police and store security presence. Outside the true Ginza were the knock-off shops and cheap food stalls that the rest of us could afford. All of it hidden beneath the raised toll roads that salary men and women used to get to work and to go shopping. The true Ginza looked like a bright fairy-tale world compared to what the salary men and women called Underside and the rest of us called Dundee.
I nosed the aircar down one of the off ramps into Commercial Street. People eyed the wealth of an aircar suspiciously as we landed. Most of them were just people trying to make a living in Dundee’s non-corporate grey economy, but I could see the usual spatter of ultra-violents and conscientious-objecting gangsters. Some of the more proactive ones made their way towards the car as the door slid open. I turned back to the rear seat.
‘Can you carry it?’ I asked Morag urgently. She nodded, her face a tear-stained mess of cheap make-up. ‘Find something to wrap it in. Nobody can see it, do you understand me?’ She didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Morag!’ I said. She looked up at me.
‘They’ll be tracking us?’ she asked.
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
The bonnet of the car slid back accordion-style at my command and I removed the car interface jack from my plug and began tampering with the aircar’s fuel cell. A little trick insurgency training had taught us.
‘You all right, pal?’ I heard a voice behind me ask. ‘Your leg sore?’ I turned around to find myself looking at an ugly young man with bad cybernetics and even worse skin. He was wearing this year’s iteration of what the street scum around town wore. He took one look at my burnt features and general poor mood and backed off, his hand coming out of his armoured tracksuit top. ‘No problem, pal,’ he said, having decided against robbing us.
I turned back to the car and finished what I was doing as Morag got out. She had wrapped it in the tartan car blanket that seems to come free with every car in Scotland. The blanket was dripping with its ichor. I gave the ECM block its last instruction then removed the jack and dropped it into the footwell of the aircar, praying that Vicar had done what I’d asked.
‘C’mon,’ I said, and we headed towards the corner of Commercial and High Street. There stood an ancient pre-Final Human Conflict stone church. Moving light from within the building backlit the stained-glass windows covered in hundreds of years of city grime. Behind us the aircar took off. Morag watched it head down the High Street beneath the raised roadways. It wouldn’t defeat satellite surveillance but hopefully it would slow Rolleston down enough to buy us some time. The only problem was I had lost my ECM block. I would need another or they would get my transponder.
‘Isn’t that really illegal?’ she asked.
‘Treason, associating with prostitutes.’ I turned to look at her. ‘I think you’re a bad influence on me.’ She managed a weak smile again but I think it may have been for my benefit. Hand inside my long coat, I approached the thick armoured double doors. The fact that they opened as I pushed gave me hope.
‘…the white light was not Them! No! It was not one of their infernal weapons! The white light was from the sky, from heaven, it was judgement! The spear of God, a warning to those who would indulge in unholy couplings!’ To give Vicar his credit he could adapt and improvise to make his sermons topical.
Inside was bare undressed stone. The stained-glass windows had holograms projected onto them. The stylised hellish vistas gave the inside of the church a reddish glow that seemed somehow warm, belying the horrific imagery. There were a number of plastic pews, where the truly wretched and miserable sat being lambasted by Vicar’s sermons. Behind the altar and off to one side I could see Vicar’s work area, various tools and banks of equipment, much of it jury-rigged or built from scratch by himself.
Vicar stood in the pulpit. Presumably it had once been made of wood but that had probably been traded, or burnt for fuel a long time ago. Now it was just a metal and plastic frame.
Vicar himself looked the same, maybe a little older, a little wilder around his already wild eyes. He wore a black vest and dog collar, his powerful frame just beginning to go to seed. He had a long unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, and still-human eyes if you ignored the look in them.
Half his head was covered in long, matted curly hair, the same salt and pepper as his beard. The other half was ugly military tech, a built-in, fast and powerful computer, but as with most military tech it made absolutely no concession to design aesthetics. I could see more elegant add-ons that had presumably been done by Vicar himself in order to keep up with technology and improve his shelf life as a hacker. In his day he’d been one of the best, and as such was drafted into the Signals Corps, and from there he became Green Slime, Military so-called Intelligence. Vicar was still no slouch today, though presumably he had been superseded, like all of us, by the younger, faster and hungrier.
‘Out!’ I barked at Vicar’s ragged congregation as I limped into the church, holding the wound in my leg together.
‘This is a house of God!’ Vicar screamed at me, drool dangling off his beard. The congregation tried to decide who they were most afraid of. My Mastodon being pulled free of its holster gave me the edge, and the desperate-looking congregation scrambled out the door past Morag and me.
‘Lock us down, Vicar,’ I said. ‘Now!’ Vicar ran an appraising glance over the state I was in. His eyes lingered on Morag, still in her worn basque, before finally looking at the car blanket dripping black ichor onto the floor.
‘What kind of party are we having, Jakob?’ he asked.
‘Lock it down,’ I said again, this time more forcefully. Behind me I heard numerous heavy-sounding locks clank into place on the armoured door, now that the last of the congregation had gone. Vicar smiled his mad, wild smile as concertinaed salvaged armour plate unfolded around the walls and roof of the old church.
‘There used to be a castle on this land as far back as AD 80,’ Vicar said.
‘Fascinating. Did you do it?’ I asked. Vicar was staring at Morag, undisguised lust in his eyes as they travelled up her body. He moved closer to her as I grimaced and tried to hold the wound in my leg closed. Morag flinched slightly but held her ground as Vicar reached out and touched her.
‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication,’ he said quietly, as he used his soft fleshy fingers to move her head from one side to the other, his voice low, breathy and excited.
Suddenly he yanked the travel blanket from her, and its contents fell to the ground with a wet thump. Vicar looked furious. I wasn’t sure if it was for show or not. His voice rose until he was shouting furiously into the frightened young girl’s face.