I was receiving an urgent comms message from Cat outside. I opened it to see her comms icon. Did her icon look nervous, unhappy, angry? Or was I just reading that in? Again I was distracted by Cronin.
‘Unfortunately we only have the word of one little girl, a whore no less, who has an alien living in her head, whereas the combined experience of millions of people says otherwise,’ Cronin said. I could see Morag fighting back tears, not at this arsehole’s words but at the thought that after all this we could end up fighting our own people all over again. I knew how she felt. Though I don’t think in her there was the same capacity for hatred of Cronin, Rolleston and their ilk that I felt.
‘Sergeant…’ Cat began.
‘Call me Jakob.’ She looked annoyed at the interruption.
‘In order for there not to be a war all you have to do is stop,’ Mudge said. ‘If you leave it a few minutes you’ll get a mandate from humanity asking you to do just that.’
‘You said when you’d done this you’d come out,’ Cat said.
‘For you, not him. Sorry. Get your people well out of the way,’ I said, then to everyone inside the node, ‘Guys.’ Something in my tone this time – suddenly everyone was alert.
‘"I know thy works. Behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it,’" Cronin said. It made me think of Vicar. Cronin’s face disappeared from the viz screen.
‘God?’ Mudge asked.
‘We’ve lost the feed from the elevator security cameras. I believe Mr Cronin has had them disabled.’
‘You’re the demons,’ I said quietly to myself. Morag looked up at me; she must’ve heard.
‘They’re coming,’ Cat said over the link. She’d be lucky if Rolleston didn’t have her killed. Cronin had been a distraction.
‘ "For thou hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name," ‘ God said, finishing Cronin’s quote for him.
Bang.
28
Why I hate Rolleston.
See, all the stuff that he’d done up to now was bad but you could see it was the kind of bad a prick like him had to do as part of his job. I didn’t like him, would have no objection to him being dead, but I didn’t really hate him yet, largely because I was just really happy to not be dead. The idea of revenge against him for leaving us there was a distant and unrealistic dream.
We were so lucky to be picked up. It was a Congon search and rescue team doing a final sweep. They were looking for some of their own special forces but they found us. When we were evacced it felt like we were the last assault shuttle to leave Dog 4. The sky was lit up by ground-based fire aimed at our fleet in high orbit. It was beautiful and seemed somehow unreal. To the Congons we must have looked like walking corpses. Neither Mudge or I did anything much but stare as the paramedics looked after our wounds. I don’t think we even thanked them.
The Santa Maria was a pre-war freighter out of the High Brazilia shipyards. A civilian ship on what amounted to a permanent military contract. Largely it was a case of hauling equipment and munitions out and ferrying casualties or personnel back for the old freighter. We hated these ships because the cargo holds were modular, basically a self-contained hold with life support attached, completely separated from the rest of the ship and built by the contractor who came in with the cheapest price. They were a prison with cold, thin walls that separated you from vacuum.
A return journey like this was made up of odds and sods, basically survivors, whoever had made it off You weren’t there in your units. The command structure was not intact. The closest thing we had to authority was a couple of MPs. They had an armoured office that they stayed inside because if they stepped outside they’d be killed. Nobody liked MPs and nobody liked the authority that they represented. In our case the MPs were Yanks.
Left to our own devices things got Darwinian very quickly. Victims were designated, scores were settled, the food chain was established and territory was staked out. There was a mixture of nationalities but mainly British, French and American, developing world nations. The Congo forces, I guess, didn’t have to use eighty-year-old, piece-of-shit freighters to take their people home. The Yanks were by far the biggest national group but they were heavily divided internally.
There was also a much higher than normal special forces population on board. This was going to make establishing our place in the food chain a bit more difficult than normal. The drink and drugs would last two, maybe three days at most; after that there was only the rum ration and that was never enough. So I began looking for the sacrifice. The sacrifice was a message to the rest of the inmates; it meant I wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want to be the Daddy, someone who was willing to work for that title could have it, it just meant that I was more trouble than I was worth not to be left alone. The sacrifice had to be a loud-mouthed arsehole with the muscle and the backup to enforce his bullying ways. Somehow it was always a male. In this case he was a borderline cyber psychotic from 2 Para. I killed him for a bottle of whisky. It wasn’t even good whisky. That was my message. We had another eight days to go.
Mudge did his thing; I sat on my bunk and drank. I pretty much ignored what was going on, not really thinking. I remember anger and numbness. It was a weird state of non-feeling. I had conversations with Mudge but he did most of the talking and I don’t remember anything about them. Mudge had to pretty much force me to look after my wounds.
I remembered Vicar though. He’d been wearing a soiled uniform with no insignia or rank. His hair was matted and filthy, as was his beard. He looked insane – there was something wrong with his wild and bloodshot eyes. The ugly but functional military machinery that made up half his head didn’t help his appearance and he would not shut up. He was on something because he needed no sleep, and he preached endlessly. He ranted about God, the end times and of course Them, the demons, until his mouth bled. There had been a number of attempts to beat him into silence but something stopped his attackers from finishing the job each time. Maybe it was religion, maybe they felt it was bad luck to kill someone that mad. Nobody really wanted to get very close to him.
He’d been there when we’d walked into the hold. He’d raised an arm to point at me and begun shouting, drool running down through his black, wiry beard.
‘I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God.’
I pushed past him trying to ignore the smell.
Vicar’s ravings along with the creaking of the hull became the ambient sound track aboard the Santa Maria. Initially the preaching grated on me, like it grated on everyone else. Everyone in the hold had to deal with religious signals types. You needed to have tolerance as communications kept you alive. They called in evacs, air strikes and artillery; they kept you and your people together so you forgave the odd sermon here and there. Vicar was, however, taking the piss. The thing was, I was beginning to find his narratives somehow comforting. I was finding myself listening to them to take my mind off Gregor, Rolleston, the Ninja and my failure to look after my people.
‘Who is he?’ I asked. I think I surprised Mudge by taking interest in something besides whisky and brooding.
‘He’s called Vicar,’ Mudge told me. Mudge knew this, I guessed, because he took an interest in his surroundings.
‘Sounds about right. What’s his story?’
‘Apparently he’s Green Slime, attached to GCHQ. Rumour has it that he was part of Operation Spiral,’ Mudge answered. Operation Spiral was a rumour, a joint project between GCHQ and the NSA to hack Their communications infrastructure. Basically it meant sending hackers into an alien net.