‘This is Jess,’ Pagan said politely and then looked expectantly at us. While I tried to decide whether we had anything to lose by telling them our real names, Morag introduced us both. Pagan smiled and disappeared into the tiny kitchen and began making tea.
‘Where you been?’ said Jess, asking the standard vet question. She had a thick German accent.
‘Around,’ I said. ‘Spent some time on Dog 4.’
‘Special forces?’ she asked. I told her yes by not saying anything.
‘You?’ I asked.
‘Luftwaffe. Proxima, a little in Barneys.’ Barneys was what the military fraternity called Barnard’s Star.
‘Jess was one of the Valkyries!’ Pagan said from the kitchen, an unmistakeable hint of pride in his voice.
‘That was your crew who took down one of Their dreadnoughts?’ I asked. I’d heard of the Valkyries. They were a hardcore all-female fighter wing that flew off the Barbarossa, one of the German carriers.
‘Lost more than three quarters of the wing doing it,’ she said.
‘You on that?’ I asked. She nodded. She was still looking at me with outright hostility. Pagan bustled out of the kitchen with four radically different steaming mugs of brew.
‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. Morag and I cleared away enough strange debris to sit down together on the slowly exploding settee.
‘Where you been, Pagan?’ I asked.
Pagan smiled. ‘Mostly Barneys.’
‘Signals?’ I assumed. Pagan shook his head, his dreadlocks flailing.
‘RASF, combat air/space controller.’ I was impressed. RASF combat controllers were one of the few units in the British military alongside the SAS, the SBS and one of the intelligence units that got special forces pay. With a similar skill set to signalmen and -women, they tended to be attached to special forces patrols and used as forward observers to call in air and orbital strikes. They also tended to be first on the ground during an assault from orbit to guide in the shuttles. It was a hairy job. I tried to fit what I knew about combat controllers with this oddball in front of me. Of course he could’ve been lying. Some people tried to claim what they saw as the glamour of special forces work for themselves but I didn’t really get that from this guy. I didn’t think he could care less what I or anyone else thought of his war record. I guessed that like most hackers he’d got religion in the end.
‘This Vicar who sent you,’ Jess said. I guessed there were no secrets in the Avenues, which bothered me. ‘He’s in Dundee, yes?’
‘Not any more.’
Pagan looked up sharply from his tea. ‘Dead?’
I nodded. I saw the momentary grief of a soldier who had lost yet another of his friends cross his face before he did what we all had to do, put it to one side and get on with the task in hand.
‘Lot of trouble in Dundee,’ Jess said. I nodded again.
‘Who killed him?’ Pagan asked.
‘He killed himself,’ I said. ‘He didn’t want to fall into Major Rolleston’s hands.’
‘Who is this Rolleston?’ Jess asked.
‘SBS, intelligence, black bag, dirty ops type.’
‘This Rolleston after you?’ Jess asked dangerously.
‘There’s a day at the most before he catches up with us.’ Jess started swearing again. I sat there and let her.
‘The orbital strike, that was to do with you,’ Jess said. I nodded again. More German swearing, then she rounded on Pagan. ‘Christus! An orbital weapon, that’s too much trouble. We cannot have them here.’
‘It’s too late,’ I told them. ‘They’re going to come here whatever. You need to just cooperate and tell them what they want to know.’
‘And what if they just hit us with an orbital weapon?’ she asked.
‘They’ll want to come in and make sure first. They need to confirm we’re here.’
‘Besides,’ said Pagan, ‘the political fallout from the stunt they pulled in Dundee will make it difficult for them to do that again.’ Jess glared at us and stood up.
I held up my hand. ‘Where’re you going?’ I asked her.
‘I’m going to warn people.’ The operational security element of what we were doing was a real mess but I couldn’t find it within myself to stop her. This was after all their place and it was Morag and I that’d brought the trouble. She walked past me.
‘Why is this Rolleston after you?’ Pagan asked. Suddenly I found I was going to have real trouble explaining this, especially to another vet. Like me he’d spent the majority of his adult life fighting Them, and to all intents and purposes I had just betrayed my entire species by aiding one of the things that had probably been responsible for the deaths of many of his mates. For all I knew, I could tell him what I was carrying and he could just shoot me and destroy the memory cube.
Pagan was looking at me expectantly.
‘You may as well tell him,’ Morag said. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose and they deserve to know why we’ve brought all this shit down on them.’
It took over an hour and one more cup of tea, but we told Pagan everything, finishing with Vicar’s message.
‘He actually said that, did he?’ Pagan asked, examining the solid-state memory cube. ‘That this was the path to the one true God?’ I nodded. Pagan smiled to himself.
‘Vicar was always given to the melodramatic,’ he said, sounding slightly sad. ‘Was he still quoting Revelations?’
‘Until the end,’ I told him. Pagan was taking the news that we were carrying a downloaded one of Them, and in doing so committing high treason, quite well.
‘Never quoted another part of the Bible, you know,’ Pagan mused.
‘It’s a big book. Maybe he didn’t memorise anything else,’ I suggested.
‘He had it in his memory; he downloaded it onto his visual display when he was preaching. Probably had sub-routines set up to find appropriate quotes for any given situation.’
I just said nothing.
‘What does it mean?’ Morag asked. Pagan looked at her and smiled benevolently.
‘I’m not sure yet. May I?’ he asked, holding up the cube. I looked at Morag and she shrugged. I nodded. Pagan grabbed his stick.
‘What’s that for?’ Morag asked. To me it just looked like a sturdy dead bit of tree. I’d assumed it was an affectation or possibly for support.
‘I cored it and filled it full of solid-state memory not unlike the cube Vicar gave you,’ Pagan said as he began wiring in his plugs to Vicar’s cube. ‘Lot of memory in there. Some of my more sophisticated software, stuff that would take up too much room up here.’ He tapped the ugly military cyberware that stuck out of his skull in a way that put my teeth on edge. ‘There’s also some backup for some of my other software. I’ve run sensors all the way up and down the staff for an instantaneous link,’ he said, holding up his left hand, which had a palm link embedded in the centre of it. Not too dissimilar to the smartgun links on both my palms. ‘Between that and the upgrades I’ve made to what the RASF have put in my head, I’m just about managing to stay ahead of the game.’
‘Have you got a ware doc here?’ Morag asked. Pagan looked up frowning. I turned to look at her too.
‘Why?’ he asked. I was interested in knowing as well. Morag began to pull items out of the grey canvas bag that Vicar had given her. They were small vacuum-packed items. I recognised them as cyberware: she had plugs, neural interface, CPUs, visual display – everything needed to cut and chop your brain and become a hacker. By the look of it, it was top of the line. Most of it had come from the equator, high-end designer stuff from the Spokes. If she used it her head wouldn’t end up looking like Pagan’s and Vicar’s, with their ugly military tech protruding from their skulls. Pagan looked up at me. I wanted to object. I wanted to stop her from polluting her real flesh, but at the end of the day it wasn’t my decision.