I felt something against me and looked down to see Morag hugging me fiercely, laughing, tears in her eyes. I was laughing as well, though my plastic eyes were unable to cry. I held her tightly.
‘Welcome to the first day of the rest of your revolution!’ Mudge screamed at the whole system. I found this even funnier. Gibby and Buck’s music reached a crescendo, washing over me before they cranked it down again. Rannu was smiling serenely. Pagan was hugging Balor, who looked triumphant. Gregor leant against the wall, looking tired and relieved.
We’d done it. Now we had to see just what we had done exactly. Mudge was striding around the studio like the revolutionary degenerate I was suddenly aware he was born to play.
‘Bring up the Cabal,’ he said. On screens across the world, and in orbit milliseconds later, small split-screen windows appeared, showing a variety of ancient white guys being kept alive by machinery in various secured locations around the world and in orbit. I began checking through the windows. Where was he?
One of the studio walls had become a viz screen. I shut down my internal one and concentrated on that. I could still see the astonished-looking comms icon of Cat Sommerjay.
‘Morag, the SWAT commander outside this studio will be getting screamed at by someone to breach and kill us. Can you tap into that?’ I asked.
Morag looked up at me and smiled. ‘You don’t get it do you?’
In the background I could hear Mudge explaining the Cabal to humanity and how they started the war. Text files scrolled down the screen, audio files were played and then viz footage was shown of the attack on Them. Mudge was making it clear that all the evidence was there for review by everyone.
‘Nothing is secret; there is no cryptography. You want to hear it, ask God,’ Morag continued.
No privacy, I suddenly thought. What had we done? I opened the tac net. ‘God?’ I said uncertainly.
‘Yes Jakob?’ A thousand soothing mellifluous but alien voices asked me quietly. It sent a shiver down my spine.
‘Watch Commander Cat Sommerjay will be receiving orders regarding us. I’d like to hear them if I may.’
‘Certainly,’ God said. Mudge was still passionately explaining the intricacies of the conspiracy.
‘Breach! Breach now! That is a direct order! I want every one of them dead seconds from now,’ Rolleston screamed at Cat. I’d never heard him sound so angry.
‘Hello, Major,’ I said, smiling. I also sent the feed to Mudge and requested God for a visual on Major Rolleston. There was a moment’s silence from Rolleston. His icon didn’t register shock, I wonder if he had when he saw my face.
‘Oh, well done, Sergeant. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?’ he said, and I found myself hearing it in stereo. I looked up to see that we had appeared on the big screen; our conversation was now being broadcast to the entire system. I wasn’t overly happy about this. Suddenly I felt very self-conscious and a lot more nervous than I would have had I been just walking into a firefight.
The picture of Rolleston was not his comms image but rather security lens footage of him and the Grey Lady strapping armour on. They were in the hold of what looked like a military assault shuttle. I sent a request to God asking them where they were. The reply was pretty much instantaneous. Rolleston and the Grey Lady were on an assault shuttle, part of HMS Vindictive’s complement. They were skimming across the Atlantic from a ship intercept. They’d been out looking for us. We’d always known that they’d be looking for us, but the imminence of their ETA, now it was a cold hard fact, turned my blood cold.
‘Congratulations on compromising every military operation currently running. I wonder how many people you’ve murdered today?’ he asked. I saw Rannu look over at me. Another ramification I hadn’t considered. I’d just burnt every deep-cover operative in-system. ‘Not to mention opening up our entire defence system to Them. But I’m assuming that’s your intention,’ he continued before addressing Sommerjay. ‘Watch Commander, I believe you have been given an order. Let’s see what we can do to contain this situation before the entire human race has to pay the price.’
‘Sir, I’m afraid in all conscience I cannot follow that order,’ Cat replied. She also appeared on the screen, and like me she looked very self-conscious.
‘What has your conscience got to do with it? You will obey an order given to you by your chain of command.’
‘With all due respect, I am not a lawyer, but if what I’m seeing is true then it would seem that my chain of command is compromised and somebody is going to have to answer for crimes against humanity,’ she said.
‘Yes, and they are in that node,’ he said, sounding irritated. In some ways I was impressed by the way he could continue this discussion while getting kitted up. I saw him strapping on the various different weapons that he would be using against us in the near future. I thought about going over our response plan again but they all knew the score. Besides our comms were compromised just like everyone else’s now.
‘I’m afraid we will have to wait and see what happens when the dust settles,’ Cat replied.
‘The dust settling, as you put it, may be the destruction of our race. They have one of Them in there and they have released a Them virus that has taken control of the net. How much damage are you going to let them do?’
‘God?’ Mudge asked. ‘Have you taken control of the net?’
God’s mellifluous multiple tones seemed to float from every device capable of producing sound. ‘No, Howard, I have not; the capability of the net is still total. All I have done is make access available to every single piece of information there is.’
‘Are Earth’s defences still in place and under the control of humanity?’ Mudge asked.
‘They are indeed,’ God answered.
‘Excellent,’ said Rolleston and then went quiet.
‘I think you should be aware that Major Rolleston has just sent a heavily encrypted message to the Kenyan Orbital Weapons Platform, JuuJuu Nyota, ordering them to fire a particle-beam weapon at your position,’ God said, a little too calmly for my taste. ‘He has the authority to do so,’ he added.
‘Well fucking stop him then!’ Mudge shouted.
‘I am sorry, Howard, but due to the parameters of my programming I cannot interfere with human actions beyond making all information available,’ God said.
Mudge turned on Pagan. ‘See? I fucking told you! Who doesn’t believe in an interventionist God now, you cunt!’ he demanded before turning back to the screen.
‘Humanity must have free will,’ Pagan said somewhat weakly.
‘Do you not think that being destroyed by a particle-beam weapon will impinge on my fucking free will? Not to mention all the people living in this Spoke! Besides,’ he pointed at Rolleston’s image, ‘that prick isn’t fucking human!’
‘Mudge! There are children watching,’ Balor admonished.
Despite the fact I was about to die I took a moment to stop and stare at Balor. Mudge’s face had gone red and veins were popping out on his forehead. I looked over at Pagan and Morag. Morag was already tranced in but Pagan was shaking his head.
‘We don’t have enough time,’ he said. I knew that comms messages from Atlantis to JuuJuu Nyota and Kenya would be shooting backwards and forwards in the net, including threats of reprisal from the Atlantean authorities.
‘This is Air Marshal Kaaria of the Kenyan Orbital Command. Major Rolleston’s order has been countermanded. We will not, repeat not, be firing upon Atlantis, nor does Kenya in any way pose a threat to the Atlantis Spoke, its interests or its people.’ I looked up at the screen to see a solid-looking African in his early sixties looking out of the viz screen at us. The screen split to show Rolleston.