‘Nothing,’ Rannu said over the comms net. I nodded; the Wraith’s head mimicked my movement.
‘Dismount,’ I said as Balor trotted over to us and went down on one knee, his weapon aimed into the burning storage area. The heads on the battle-scarred Wraiths flipped back and their chest armour split and swung open. I slid both my feet out of the slippers, pulled my hands from the gloves and pushed myself up and out as the plugs snapped out of my neck ports. I almost fell as I rapidly adjusted to being only six feet tall again. It didn’t feel right. Like everyone else I was covered in sweat and panting for breath, but other than me only Balor was grinning.
I stepped into a puddle of blood. I looked at it momentarily, perhaps too long, and then sent the coded order to my Wraith to open both its storage compartments. Panels in either thigh slid open. I was struck by the lack of noise from the wounded. We’d been too thorough for wounded.
I removed the Benelli assault shotgun from the Wraith’s storage compartment and rapidly reassembled it. Then from the other storage compartment I took the carryall and bandoliers with spare ammo. The others were doing the same thing except for Balor, who was covering us, and Morag. She was looking around at the carnage, her face blank. She couldn’t make sense of it or her part in creating it. I’d seen this before. I’d felt this way before but no part of me could empathise with that right now. Who wouldn’t want this? This felt like the ultimate expression of immediate power.
‘Did you send out the biohazard warning?’ I asked her. She ignored me. If they thought there had been some sort of biohazard leak or accident the Spoke authorities would not immediately send forces in. Morag said nothing.
‘Morag?’ I said.
‘No,’ Pagan answered for her. ‘As soon as we breached they shut down all the internal exits and issued their own biohazard warning. I’m guessing that whatever they’ve got in here they don’t want anyone else knowing about.’
‘So all we have to worry about is a rapid reaction force from Rolleston or his masters,’ Mudge said. I nodded. Morag was still looking around at the carnage. She jumped as I reached over and touched her shoulder. Then she turned to look at me questioningly.
‘Get ready,’ I whispered. She nodded numbly and then threw up. I tried to ignore the contempt building in me.
We made our way out of the loading bay and into the facility proper, our weapons shouldered, our gun barrels leading the way, searching for targets, the crosshairs on our smartlink moving across our internal visual displays. We searched for even more people to kill.
Behind us out in the loading bay charges went off destroying the abandoned Wraiths. Their internal systems had already been junked by one of Pagan’s viruses. It was a shame to let them go but even if they were fit to go in the sea again they would never get past the blockade that was building outside. They were destroyed to provide a minimum of evidence.
We clear the facility. We kill everyone we find. We clear offices, sleeping quarters, shower and toilet facilities, kitchens and recreational areas. Balor decides to stop using guns. I see him drag one of the security detail off his feet and run him through with his trident in mid-air.
Suddenly there was nobody else left to kill. I was breathing heavily, standing among the debris of what must have been some very expensive machinery. I was sort of aware of walking past Balor in the corridor outside this lab. He was tearing into somebody with his teeth.
Nobody was shooting at me. I had time to take in my surroundings beyond identifying and neutralising threats. It was an open-plan work area. Against the walls were freezers, fridges and glass-fronted cupboards, many of them broken and smashed. There was what looked like an operating theatre set into a depression on the floor. The table was oversized and had some very sturdy-looking restraints. Looking around I realised that this had been a sealed clean room. One side of the wall was thick plastic glass to allow observation. Past the operating theatre I could see another strong plastic window.
The roaring in my head was beginning to subside now. I had been wrong about there being nobody left to kill. People were emerging from under tables and behind overturned workbenches and from the sunken operating area. Many of them wore lab coats, a few maintenance overalls, several of them just normal casual clothes and two of them wore the uniform of the security detail, which had no insignia.
Somebody wearing a lab coat was approaching me. He was the oldest person there: he looked in his early sixties to me but could have been older. He was speaking to me slowly and carefully until his face turned red and disappeared. I think there was screaming as he dropped to the ground. I heard someone shout ‘No’ from the doorway. As the smoke drifted lazily from the barrel of my shotgun, I turned towards the doorway to see Morag standing there, hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes. I stepped over the corpse I’d made and headed towards the observation window on the other side of the operating area. The staff gave me a wide berth.
It was actually some time later that I remembered the look of horror and fear on their faces. That was the thing: I considered myself largely an all-right guy. I did the same bad things that everyone else did to survive. Maybe I was a bit better at doing the bad things than other people but I was a relatively easy-going person. Someone you could go and enjoy a pint with. That was how I saw myself, but how could I do all this and think I was normal? How could I hurt and kill so many other people and still expect to form a relationship with someone? How could I objectify one person and empathise with another? I could hear Morag crying now, her body racked by sobs. Surely that was the only normal response to this? How had I got to this? When had this become normal? The young man, little more than a boy, who’d shit himself in his first serious firefight with the Paras was a distant memory, another person.
I ejected the empty magazine from my shotgun and put another one in before slinging the weapon. I suddenly felt very tired. I sat down on the operating table, dimly aware that Mudge and Rannu were securing the prisoners behind me. I lit up a cigarette and looked through the observation window into the secure room and considered how much Gregor had changed as he stared back out at me.
He was stalking from one side of the small room to the other like a caged animal. His eyes were black pools with no discernible iris. They looked like they were made of the same liquid that constituted the bodies of Them, like Morag’s had in my dream. He was taller, leaner, yet somehow much more powerful-looking, but his physiology was all wrong. He looked somehow lopsided, like he had too many bones in some places and not enough in others. His fingers were longer, with too many joints, and ending in long nails of what looked like black chitin. What I had initially thought was shoulder-length straight black hair I realised was tendrils of the black alien liquid. I tried to smother my disgust as some of his hair appeared to be moving independently. He kept his eyes on me as he stalked backwards and forwards. If he recognised me at all then he was pissed off.
‘Morag?’ I said. There was just the sound of crying. ‘Morag!’ I said more sharply.
‘Yes?’ she answered, taking heaving breaths.
‘I need you to get into their internal net and get me anything you can.’ Mudge drew up next to me looking through the glass at what had become of his friend. He was quiet for a while.
‘Shit,’ he finally said. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked as Balor, covered in blood, walked past us and up to the clear plastic window, staring at Gregor.
Finally I saw the net feed on my visual display flicker back to life. Black Annis standing in a landscape of blackened glass, obsidian, I think it’s called. Much of it was burning. The hag icon stuck out, her cold blue skin contrasting with the black and red background.