‘Air Marshal Kaaria, you do not have the authority to countermand that order. Begin firing now,’ Rolleston said. Kaaria’s image turned somewhat, presumably to face the screen that was showing him Rolleston. Rolleston was messing with the hilt of a skull fucker, a vicious old commando dagger designed to penetrate the skull. Despite its age, wielded with enough power it could still make a mess of even a military-grade cyborg.
‘Leaving aside the fact that I will not be ordered around by a mere Major-’
‘My rank is not indicative of my authority-’ Rolleston began.
‘I will not be interrupted! Major, do you think I am insane? Do you think that Kenya wants to be responsible for starting another full-scale, inter-human conflict? Do you not think that we haven’t seen the footage of what happened to the Brazilian Spoke and what happened to America afterwards? In short, do you think we’re out of our minds?’ Rolleston didn’t answer. Mudge and the others looked relieved.
‘Look,’ I said, and was less than pleased to see my face fill the screen. ‘You want us, we’ll surrender peacefully. There’s no need to kill tens of thousands of people. Nobody wants that and we’ve already done what we need to.’
Gregor was glaring at me.
I headed over to him. ‘It’s all right, we’ll get you out of here,’ I said.
‘How?’ he asked, unconvinced.
‘Okay, we’re probably all going to die. Feel better?’
‘A little.’ I saw that Watch Commander Sommerjay’s comms icon was flashing. I opened the channel.
‘I’m a little busy, Cat,’ I said as pleasantly as I could. She didn’t bother with pleasantries.
‘Surrender to us.’ I gave this some thought. In many ways it was a seductive idea.
‘Under normal circumstances-’ all the other times I take over part of a Spoke and release an artificial god into the net ‘-I would, but you’d still have to hand us over to Rolleston. Not going to happen. We know him too well.’ Cat seemed to give this some thought.
‘You want help?’ she asked. Bang, that was her career over. I wondered how many other people were going to get hurt before this finished. Yes, I did want help but I knew she couldn’t give it.
‘You know they’re probably listening?’ She didn’t say anything. ‘Look, thanks, but we’d just get in each other’s way, right?’ She nodded. ‘The best thing you could do is stay out of it.’ Behind me Rolleston and Mudge were still arguing on the viz.
‘I’m standing my people down. Good luck, Sergeant,’ Cat said. Hopefully none of her people would get hurt. Briefly I hoped that Rolleston and the Grey Lady wouldn’t try a two-person breach. After all we had Gregor and Balor in here; Rannu was capable as well. But I knew they would.
‘Mr Mudgie, you have just released a Them virus into the net, why on Earth should anyone believe what you say?’ Rolleston was asking as I returned my attention to the show.
‘God, are you a Them virus?’ Mudge asked.
‘No, Howard, I am not. My programming is almost entirely human, as are the parameters that have been set within which I can act. The operating system I use is based round technology derived from Them but that was purely in terms of information management.’
‘So by your admission you are part Them,’ Rolleston said.
‘You are choosing to focus on that part of my creation in an attempt to force a fallacious point, I believe,’ God said.
‘Everything about God is transparent,’ Pagan began, speaking with the sort of exasperation the technically skilled have for those who are less gifted. ‘We would encourage people to check our proof that God is not-’
‘This "proof" comes from one source, the source that has the most to gain from us believing it. It’s hardly objective,’ Rolleston interrupted.
‘I was designed to be objective,’ God countered.
‘So you say, and even if you are, you were still designed to be objective by subjective people,’ Rolleston said.
‘This argument could just go in circles,’ Mudge said, sounding bored.
‘Fine,’ Rolleston said with a degree of satisfaction. ‘I’m no signalman but as far as I know we do not have AI.’
‘Nor do They. What you think is AI is actual sentience. I am the sum of your culture: I have learnt and developed as human sentience did, albeit much faster.’
‘So you have no trace of your Them origins?’ Rolleston demanded. He was still readying gear on the assault shuttle, working quickly but without hurry. Bran was a study in the economy of movement.
‘Yes, I have maintained enough of Ambassador to behave in total cooperation with all my constituent parts and to reject duplicity as an alien concept. There is only one, that is I, and so I cannot lie.’
‘I see, so the Them part of you is the good part?’ Rolleston said.
‘That is your value judgement of what I said,’ God answered. ‘My constituent parts, the ones that I believe you would consider to be more important, are more human than not.’
‘So you say, and while a lack of duplicity is admirable in those who can afford it, what about what your people have done to the colonies? Murdered non-combatants, including children, mutilated them. Is it not true that you have exterminated humanity wherever you have found it?’ Rolleston asked, as he finished attaching a man-portable plasma weapon to his subsonic Spectre gauss carbine, creating an over/under combination weapon.
‘Of course They hit non-combatants,’ Gregor said, and suddenly his warped alien features were up on the screen. It occurred to me that this might not do us any good.
‘Yes, you would have insights, wouldn’t you, Mr MacDonald, being as you are part alien?’ Rolleston said sarcastically. ‘So please explain how They are actually little, misunderstood kitten-like creatures, and the sixty years of Them murdering humanity wherever They found them, men women and children, didn’t actually happen.’
‘They never knew war before the Cabal-’
‘There is no such thing as the Cabal!’ Rolleston said, angry again.
‘Before your people,’ Gregor continued, ‘ordered their habitation attacked. Their sense of self is different: each cell is an individual that forms their whole so for them it was genocide. Because they had no understanding of what was happening the only response they knew was the one we had taught them, all-out attack. How were they to know that we put arbitrary rules on conflict? Rules that we ourselves have often failed to enforce in the past. In a fight for survival they felt they had to do everything they could to win. It’s what you taught us,’ Gregor said. Then there was silence as what he had just said sank in. Rolleston was smiling.
‘Major, do you deny that you attempted to destroy every peaceful emissary from Them?’ Mudge asked. He was trying to take the attention away from Gregor’s admission, even though he was still looking at the hybrid.
On the screen, footage that God had compiled, presumably requested by Mudge, started playing. We saw craft similar to the kind Ambassador had shown me back in Vicar’s church what seemed like an age ago. As before, it was basically a disposable engine with lots of needle-shaped stealth re-entry pods. We watched as orbital defences and ships destroyed craft after craft of this type. Each piece of footage was accompanied by a recording of the encrypted orders and each of those was sourced to members of the Cabal. There were so many ships.
Then the footage changed. On screens all over the system we saw Them, like Ambassador, being executed. It happened in city streets, in the wilderness, in the sea. There were only a few of these executions but I recognised the killers, or at least what they were. Ex-special forces. This was what the XIs were set up to do: ensure that there was no chance of peace.