We’d been over the plans so many times I didn’t need to tell anyone what to do. We climbed into our Wraiths. Each of us was wearing inertial armour, as in the Wraith’s cramped confines there was no room for any heavier armour. I leant back and felt the four studs slide into the ports at the back of my neck. With a thought I started the armoured exoskeleton up. It didn’t make a sound but it fed information on its systems straight to my internal visual display. In the cargo bay of the transport, Mudge, Rannu, Pagan and Morag did the same thing.
I strapped myself into the machine, slipped both my feet into the control slippers in the lower thighs of both the slender, twelve-foot-tall mech’s legs. My hands slid into the control gloves at the bottom of the upper arms of the mech. The palm link for my smartgun linked to the Wraith’s primary weapon system, the modified Retributor rail-gun, the oversized pistol grip for which was in the mech’s right hand.
The Retributor was a 20-millimetre, chain-fed railgun that we’d turned into a steel gun. All that really meant was that we’d pressurised the barrel to keep water out, used barrel inserts to reduce the calibre to 12 millimetres and used longer, more hydrodynamic rounds, or harpoons as they were nicknamed.
I calibrated the smartgun. The interface software was turning the Wraith into an extension of my body, making allowances for differences in perception. Suddenly I was twelve feet tall. I missed this, or maybe that was the electrical fire of the Slaughter in my synapses.
I stood up, swaying slightly. It had been a while and we were in heavy air. The normally sleek and elegant lines of the Wraiths were made ridiculous by the EM and heat-retardant foam we’d strapped to them. I switched on the acoustic decoy designed to fool Their scanners into thinking we were some kind of fauna, maybe a small whale or something, I wasn’t sure.
Wind and rain howled into the cargo bay as Buck played a little riff to lower the rear cargo door. We all took hold of one of the support rails and made our way towards the cargo door. Except for Balor, who was pushing the coffin along the floor. He got it close enough to the lip and upended it, spilling a wriggling and angry cybernetically enhanced mako shark out onto the cargo bay floor. Magantu snapped at Rannu’s mech but he lifted his leg out of the way just in time and the mako slid out, falling the remaining twenty feet into the ocean. Balor dived gracefully out after his predatory girlfriend.
Rannu made a ready signal with his mech’s hand. We all replied with an affirmative signal, our comms procedure of silence until contact already in place. I wished I’d said something to Morag. Rannu made the go signal and stepped out into the stormy night, falling towards the ocean. Pagan followed him, then Morag, then Mudge and finally me.
I felt the jarring impact as the mech hit the surface, breaking through it and sinking like the heavy piece of Belt metal and super-hardened plastic it was. We had replaced the normal back-mounted flight system with a hydro-propulsion unit. We’d programmed in the point we wanted to sink to and planned to use the propulsion system as little as possible. It would only power up to make incremental changes in our course. We switched off all systems bar necessary life support and even that we down-powered as much as we dared. I was alone in this armoured suit accompanied only by the sound of my own breathing and the rushing of the Slaughter in my veins. As the first twitches began I was worried I was going to peak too soon.
Balor and his alleged girlfriend were our scouts, our shepherds. They were to make sure we didn’t stray too far. As we quickly lost any surface light I had the unnerving feeling of having to abandon myself to things largely beyond my control. Soon I couldn’t see anyone else and then I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even make out water through the optical interface with the Wraith, only blackness. I didn’t even know which way was up or down and then even that ceased to have any meaning. It got cold quickly. Shaking joined the occasional twitch of combat want. It was the sort of cold that you felt you would never be able to get away from. I became very aware of the blackness pushing against me. Every so often I would hear a creak from the Wraith’s superstructure but all the readouts remained in the green. Then the propulsion system would kick in briefly, causing vertigo and nausea. Once I panicked when I felt something touch and move the Wraith. I was about to turn on all systems when I realised it must have been Balor.
With all the darkness my mind began to play tricks on me. It wasn’t the drugs: none of them were psychotropic, though they didn’t help as the speed, stims and Slaughter made me jittery. It was just my mind wanting to fill in the blanks in the total darkness. There was nothing definite, just dark shapes, or rather slightly lighter shapes in the darkness. I twisted, accidentally turning the Wraith, then again at the next trick of the dark. I was startled again as I felt something grab and move the Wraith. I settled down when I realised it was Balor again and I was risking compromising the mission. I had to ignore my sensory input until it was time not to, going against all my instincts. The Slaughter was making me crave the action to start.
I wondered how Morag was and hoped she was okay. I was thinking this when I saw them. First came the glow and then came the most alien-looking things I’d ever seen. They were like pale, glowing, organic flying saucers trailing tendrils beneath them. They moved by flexing their mushroom-like bodies. They were beautiful in the deep silence. It seemed that I was in the centre of a field of biolumines-cence. It was one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. It was like moving through a floating garden. Through the light they provided I could just about make out the humanoid forms of two of the other Wraiths as dark shapes falling through the water. More disturbing was the predatory shape of Magantu moving around us, awakening some instinctive fear in me.
When they had gone it was easy to dismiss the jellyfish as a hallucination brought on by sickness, drugs and sensory deprivation. There was nothing now. I was trapped in a prison not much bigger than I was. I didn’t understand direction any more. Was I moving, still, or was I inverted? The rushing in my ears was becoming louder, a neural static of loud and discordant music, with no frame of reference but my imagination. I thought of it as the howling of angry angels. I’m not sure if it was panic or just a Slaughter-fuelled requirement for action, where action involves hurting another living being. I wanted to hammer on the reinforced titanium skin and tear it open, but I knew that would make me less – after all, it was my body now. My body creaked, the sound of metal under incredible pressure.
I felt like all the veins on my skin were standing out, as if the pressure outside was inside trying to crush my head. I felt like I had outside the Santa Maria. I was about to blow the mission. I’d peaked too early and there was an abyss howling behind my plastic eyes. Then I saw the light. It seemed to bleed slowly into my periphery. At first I wasn’t sure it was real and I closed my eyes. Opening them again there was a sudden rush of vertigo. It filled my vision as far as I could see up or down, left or right. It was a wall of light. Suddenly directions seemed to make sense. I was looking at part, a small part, of the base of the elevator. It was covered in some kind of biolu-minescent algae that gave it a pale, ghostly glow and for a moment made it look biological in nature, almost like Their technology.
Not for the first time I was overwhelmed by the scale, the sheer arrogance of the engineering. Although Atlantis had been built after the FHC, it was structures like this that had caused the war. During the Neo-Crusades fundamentalists had described them as pillars to heaven. Despite being the cause of the war only one had ever been attacked. The destruction of the first Brazilian Spoke had been the beginning of the end of the war, and the building of the second Brazilian Spoke had been one of the main reasons for the economic downfall of America and north-western Europe. From this perspective it was easy to see where the old-time fundamentalists got their sense of religious awe.