‘Working for Rolleston?’ Pagan asked. Rannu said nothing. Pagan looked up at Balor. ‘What about you? You were SBS, you must know what he’s like. You going to do his bidding?’ Balor walked back down the table towards Morag and stood over the box containing Ambassador.
‘Well, that’s why we require a decision-making process.’ He pointed at me. ‘I know that you were once a warrior.’ I shook my head. Warrior creed bullshit. I heard Pagan groan behind me. ‘I know what you did for your brother soldiers. I know that once you weren’t a low man, a worm.’
‘I was trying to fucking survive. I was shit scared,’ I told him, possibly not helping my case.
‘And I worked with Rolleston on Proxima. He is no coward but I know what kind of man he is.’
‘So give us the box and let us go,’ I said.
‘But I also know what’s in the box,’ Balor said. I had a sinking feeling. Without looking I could feel Pagan tense up behind me. Suddenly I was aware of the expressions on the faces of Balor’s men. They were expressions of barely contained anger. ‘You see,’ Balor said, jumping off the table, ‘to some it would seem that you have betrayed your own race.’ He was standing next to me all but whispering in my ear. He smelled of the sea, in a bad way. ‘I will not be a slave but I am no friend to Them.’ There was the smell of meat on his breath. I turned around to face him.
‘You think we are? You think we’re selling us all out? You think our experiences in the war were different to yours? Think They came and made us a brew and gave us some cake?’ I asked.
‘Think about it, Balor. What would make you deal with Them?’ Pagan said. Balor never took his eyes off me. Why me? I wondered.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Balor growled. I was sick of this. What Balor probably thought of as courage was just me deciding I didn’t give a fuck any more.
‘Fuck you!’ I told him. ‘We’re-’ I managed before he grabbed me by my neck. I had seen him begin to move and tried to get out of the way but he was deceptively fast. He picked me up and held me about four feet off the ground. Great in a viz, very intimidating, but my subcutaneous armour went rigid, and I could still breathe, and even if he had crushed my windpipe I still had a small internal air supply.
Instinct overcame intimidation. Suddenly my claws were out and I was punching into him with all eight of my blades. Panic started when I felt my blades sliding off armour and artificial physiology designed to withstand the incredible pressure of oceanic depths. I was flung across the semicircular balcony, sliding through the collected rainwater and coming to a stop when I hit the low wall. I started to get up but a foot stood on my chest and slammed me back into the ground with tremendous force. I looked up. Balor looked angry, really angry.
‘Do not,’ he said, his voice sounding like two mountains grinding together, ‘ever disrespect me in my house.’ I bit back my angry replies. Past Balor I could see Morag on her feet looking over at me, eyes full of fear. Pagan was off to my right, presumably aware of the futility of our current predicament.
‘Listen to me,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘We’re not fucking traitors, and I think you know that. There’s more to this, and I think you’re smart enough to know that as well. But if my only way out of here with the box and my people is through him,’ I said, looking over at Rannu, ‘then I’ll play your stupid fucking game.’ Balor just looked down at me and nodded before taking his foot off my chest. ‘Any chance of a gunfight?’ I asked. ‘I’m not feeling my best today.’
15
It wasn’t going to be a gunfight and I’d taken a battering in the Avenues. There were still a lot of warning icons on my internal visual display. I’d patched myself up with what little I had and my internal repair mechanisms were doing the best they could but I was a broken machine. I needed a doc and some replacement components. My armour had been pierced in several places and the flesh and machinery beneath it damaged, but my biggest concern was my cracked chest plate. One good blow to that could make a real mess of my internal organs and systems.
Rannu on the other hand looked fine and well, fast and dangerous. Everything I didn’t feel like myself at the moment. The platform swayed slightly on its high-tensile cables. Rannu was stripped to the waist and going through some simple exercises. He was obviously heavily augmented but he had no visible prosthetics. He turned his back to me and did some more stretching exercises. Beneath the four plugs in his neck a tattoo covered most of his back. It was a stylised rendering of a black, biomechanical, multi-armed goddess with a weapon in each of her arms. I didn’t know a great deal about religion beyond the conversations I’d had with various signals types, but this was ringing alarm bells in my head.
I recognised the image: it was Kali, a Hindu goddess. I knew there was more to her but the figure was often connected with images of death and destruction. She was the patron goddess of a murder cult called the Thuggees. They had originally existed before the FHC at a time when Britain had apparently ruled India, as difficult as that was to believe today. About twenty or so years ago some vet signalman from Leicester had decided to revive the cult. See, this was the problem with hackers: they were geeks, but you got one with charisma and a bit of imagination and you ended up with a cult. Pagan was a pretty benevolent example of this type. Berham wasn’t. He had perverted Hinduism and recreated the Thuggees using the cult’s tactics of ritualistic murder to take over Leicester’s criminal economy. He was one of the most notorious criminals in Britain. He’d killed police, cor-porates, politicians, and ruled through fear and intimidation. Much of his organisation had been taken down recently in a complex sting operation, but Berham had escaped and several high-ranking policemen, along with members of the Home Office, had been targeted in revenge killings, as had their families.
This kind of made sense. Many Ghurkhas were Hindus; I guessed that Rannu was one who’d gone bad. It explained the weighted monofilament I’d seen him use in Hull. The Thuggees’ signature weapon was a monofilament garrotte that they used to decapitate their victims. I also noticed that his kukri was still at his waist, a curved knife about sixteen inches long, the traditional weapon of the Ghurkha regiments. I’d even heard of Ghurkhas going toe to toe with Berserks with only their knives. I did fleetingly wonder why Rolleston was employing a Thug or why a Thug was working for Rolleston, but I figured that wankers were just naturally drawn together.
The rumbling sound took me by surprise until I realised that it was the cheering of the crowd, and suddenly I was nervous beyond the impending fight.
Rannu moved towards me, closing the distance between us. His purposeful stride became a stepping front kick to my stomach, knocking me back. I did the same to him, neither of us blocking as we exchanged kicks, almost a handshake as we tried to gauge each other. I showed nothing on my face, but I suspect he was kicking me a lot harder than I was kicking him as we forced each other around the old flight deck.
His first sidekick took me by surprise, lifting me off my feet, but I recovered quickly. He was in the air now, spinning to power a kick that looked like it would take my head off. I rolled under him, his foot snapping out and just missing me. I could hear the crowd cheering as I came to my feet. He’d already turned and was in the air again. I stepped hurriedly out of the way, putting myself off balance as he landed crouched low with a powerful elbow strike to where I’d been. I threw a hurried sidekick that caught him on the shoulder. It was like kicking stone. I then moved back out of his way to get my balance and correct my stance.