‘Hey!’ I shouted, moving towards the woman. She looked at me, her face a mask of hate.
‘Fuck him!’ she spat. ‘You know what that was,’ she said, pointing at the floating corpse, then she and the man with her turned and walked away.
‘We need to get out of here,’ Pagan said.
‘And do what?’ I demanded.
‘This has to count for something,’ he replied, gesturing at the destruction all around.
‘You know better!’ I said, stabbing my finger towards him. ‘It never counts, never makes a difference.’
‘Jakob, please,’ Morag said quietly. I relented. I just wanted to lie down.
‘Did Jess get out?’ I asked.
‘We haven’t been able to raise her,’ Pagan said quietly. I looked up. He looked old and wizened, as if he’d shrunk.
‘I’m sorry.’ I said. ‘Ambassador?’ Morag rummaged in her bag and held up the solid-state memory cube.
‘Are you okay?’ I finally got round to asking her. We were on a boat piloted by Pagan, back on the deceptively placid brown plane of liquid that was the Humber. The hacker had produced his staff, folded in two, from his pack and put it back together; it seemed to provide him with a sense of security.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Those people didn’t deserve that.’
‘Nobody deserves it. Well, maybe that’s not true.’
‘What are they going to do?’ Morag asked, turning around to look at Pagan. The hacker shrugged.
‘I don’t know. Maybe leave, maybe hide in other parts of the city; perhaps some will start again.’ He shook his head. ‘We’d come so far; we’d really made something there.’ He lapsed back into silence.
‘I meant in there,’ I said, pointing at her head. She shrugged.
‘I’ve still got the worst headache ever, and my thoughts feel so jumbled I don’t know what’s me and what’s new. Pagan’s teaching me how to write sub-routines to sort it,’ she said.
‘Where’d it go?’ I asked her. She shrugged but Pagan answered.
‘Lots of different places, some innocuous, some not. It seemed to be taking huge random samples of information.’
‘Like where?’ I asked.
‘Everything from literature libraries to major equatorial corporations,’ he said.
‘That the worst it did?’ I asked. Pagan shook his head.
‘No, I’d say that the NSA and GCHQ were the worst of it.’ I felt cold. Even I knew that the National Security Agency and Government Communications Headquarters were supposed to be as near impenetrable as was possible.
‘Oh shit,’ I said. Pagan said nothing. ‘You’ve got some of that info in your head?’ I asked Morag.
She shrugged. ‘I guess.’
‘How well did you cover your trail?’ I asked Pagan.
‘Pretty well, but as you can imagine we’ve got those two organisations on us in the net and they’re both justifiably shitting themselves so they’re probably going to throw a lot of resources at it.’ I felt he’d understated the problem. ‘Rolleston would’ve already had people in the net looking for us, but now everyone will be.’
‘And there will be bounties as well,’ I said. Pagan nodded. I lapsed into silence. This felt pretty hopeless.
‘Did it do any damage?’ I asked. I still wasn’t convinced it wasn’t a strike against Earth’s communications infrastructure by Them.
‘Not as far as I can tell. It just took information.’
‘Was it looking for anything?’ I asked. Pagan looked at me like I was too stupid to understand.
I began to tend to my wounds, trying to keep my mind off the enormity of the events I was caught up in. I did what I could, cleaning and knitting or at least sealing the wounds with the pretty basic med kit I’d managed to find in the Avenues before we’d left. I was a broken machine, and without a good technician I was not going to be operating at what passed for my best these days.
‘What’s with this?’ I asked Morag, pointing at the SMG.
‘Jess gave me some combat skillsofts – small arms, small unit tactics, unarmed stuff,’ she said. At the mention of Jess I could see tears in her eyes. I wondered how long before those stopped. How long before she knew more dead people than she had tears.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Those things are all right as far as they go but they’re no substitute for real skills and experience.’ She nodded, blinking back the tears. ‘You also need to acclimatise to them, break them in.
I’ll run you through it when we have time and space.’ She nodded again. My old prejudices against skillsofts were coming back. I’d used them – you can’t learn everything after all – but I really thought that people should learn to fight properly.
The place was called Fosterton. It was basically a series of large rusting barges secured together on the Humber over what had been part of north-east Lincolnshire before the waters rose. It was a private port, cranes and cargo-handling mechs unloading everything from hydrofoils to small ships and sleds. It was obviously a smugglers’ haven.
Pagan was talking to the owners of the place, three generations of a family that had probably lived round here for hundreds of years. None of them had military ware that I could see, just the cybernetics they’d need to run a place like this. I don’t think any of them had done military service. I felt a pang of envy – a close-knit family, a place to call home. Their lack of military ware notwithstanding, it would’ve been foolish to cause trouble here, as they were obviously capable of controlling a place like this and the people who used it.
Pagan had clearly had dealings with them before but they did not look happy. He was trying to book us passage somewhere, anywhere, but the owners of Fosterton just kept on looking over at where Morag and I were slumped resting against a packing crate. I wondered if they knew. Had they heard about the bounties that were presumably now on our heads?
‘Who’s Howard Mudgie?’ Morag suddenly asked, using a name I never expected to hear from her mouth. I turned to stare at her.
‘Where did you get that name from?’ I asked her.
‘Do you know who the NSA are?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. It was difficult not to know who they were in the line of work I’d been in.
‘Some of the information that Ambassador gave me, it connects your name to this Mudgie.’
‘How?’ I asked.
‘You’re listed as a known associate is all. I think it’s been flagged by someone outside the NSA but I can’t tell who,’ she said. That would mean someone with a lot of pull, I thought.
‘Howard was a member of the Wild Boys-’
‘The Wild Boys?’ She was smirking. I sometimes forgot that the names that had such powerful resonance for us often just sounded silly to the uninitiated.
‘The SAS troop I served with,’ I said, trying to imply that I didn’t want the piss taken out of the name. ‘He wasn’t even army; he was a journalist, but after so long in the field he was as good as any of us and developed a taste for it.’
‘He liked being a soldier?’ she asked incredulously. I gave this some thought.
‘It’s not that simple,’ I finally said. ‘He, a lot of us, we just couldn’t put it down. After a while you get so good at it that it becomes normal…’
‘And you enjoy it?’ she asked. I turned to look at her. She was looking up at me with concern.
‘You worried that I’m some kind of psycho?’ I asked. ‘Do you think I enjoyed it back there?’
‘I may not be some war hero but I know enough about psychos,’ she replied coldly.
‘Yeah, I guess you do,’ I said, nodding. Again I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should apologise to her for the state of things. ‘Look, as bad as it’s been here and in Dundee, this is nothing like being out there. I know this sounds patronising, but until you’ve done it some of the things we think aren’t going to make much sense to you. I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with me – I’m just trying to cope with stuff as it comes – but you don’t have to be afraid of me.’