‘Thank God!’ Mudge shouted dramatically before collapsing face first into the sanitation growth. We all grimaced as he started to throw up the food substitute they’d been giving us. I was trying not to think of it as necro-gruel.
‘It’s astonishing to think that we actually managed to save an entire alien species from assimilation by Crom,’ Pagan mused as he watched Mudge vomit.
‘Is he going to be okay?’ I asked Rannu. The quiet ex-Ghurkha was the closest thing we had to a medic. Mudge was annoying but he was my oldest and closest friend who was not dead. Also he’d never duped me into coming to Sirius to infect Them with the Crom slave virus. Though in fairness to Gregor that was more Rolleston’s fault than his.
Rannu shrugged. He was stripped to the waist, his compact and powerful frame covered in sweat from his near-constant working out. That was probably the real reason he beat me in New York. He never stopped training.
‘It’s withdrawal,’ he said. He still wore his kukri, the curved machete-like fighting knife of the Ghurkhas, at his hip. As he turned to grab a cleaning form to rub himself with I caught a glimpse of the stylised tattoo of Kali on his back. It had been done when he had been working undercover back on Earth.
‘From what?’ I asked. Actually meaning which drug. Rannu gave this some thought.
‘Everything, I think. It shouldn’t kill him because of his enhancements but he is going to be in a lot of discomfort.’
Knowing Mudge, that meant that the rest of us were going to be in a lot of discomfort as well. I still wanted a smoke.
‘So I’m a hybrid like Gregor?’ I asked. Morag opened her mouth to answer but Rannu surprised me by beating her to it.
‘More like Rolleston.’
‘Nice,’ I said grimly. It made sense though. I felt stronger, faster and healthier than I ever had. Hell, I was looking forward to sparring with Rannu. I’d had so much of my flesh cut away and replaced with machinery and now what flesh I had left had been replaced.
Maybe I had died. Maybe all that was left was a sophisticated, or not, Themtech simulacrum that felt a little like me.
‘So let me see if I understand this properly…’
Even Rannu sighed and shifted to make himself more comfortable.
Mudge nudged me awake. I could hear the whine of the copter’s engines straining. I looked out of one of the windows. We seemed to be sinking into some huge vertical tube of concrete and metal. It looked old. Maybe even pre-FHC.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I think it’s an old missile silo,’ Rannu said. ‘For nukes.’ That woke me up. I looked for confirmation from the three bruised egos in suits in front of us. They just glowered.
‘You know it could just be a coincidence. Our invitation to New Mexico and God thinking that Morag is here, I mean,’ Mudge said. I ignored him. He lit a cigarette to spite me.
‘My comms is down,’ Rannu said quietly. I tried mine. Nothing. Not even short-range person-to-person between the three of us.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded from the three spooks. They said nothing. ‘You wanted us here. Do we have to fucking beat it out of you?’ These were truly exasperating people.
‘Have you got any religion?’ the one in the middle asked. I just gaped at him.
‘Are you asking if we’ve got anything with God on it?’ Mudge enquired.
He nodded.
‘What if we have?’ I asked.
‘You can’t go in,’ the middle one answered. I was beginning to see what was going on here.
‘It’s a comms quarantine. You’re trying to keep God out.’ Rannu voiced my suspicions.
‘And how’re you going to stop us?’ born-again-hard Mudge asked.
‘They probably just won’t let us in,’ Rannu suggested.
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ I muttered.
We didn’t have much on us as most of our comms stuff was internal and one of God’s parameters was to be non-invasive as far as people’s personnel cyberware went. I had nothing. I just contacted God through my internal comms when I wanted to speak to him. Rannu had some kind of medium-range comms booster and Mudge had bits and pieces of media tech. They had to leave all of this behind in the copter.
‘And no pictures,’ one of the failed gunmen told Mudge.
‘Of course not,’ Mudge said with false sincerity. We stepped out of the copter.
If I hadn’t seen Spokes or fleet carriers or the Dog’s Teeth the scale of the place would have been quite impressive. As it was, it was a big concrete hole in the ground.
We walked across the landing pad towards a set of blast doors. There were more suited types with guns waiting for us. One was walking towards us, his arm outstretched.
‘Hold it right there, gentleman,’ he said. Mudge grabbed his outstretched arm, twisted it round and wrist-locked him so painfully the guy sank to the ground. I shook my head as the rest of the security contingent raised their weapons and started shouting.
‘Mudge,’ I said over the shouting, ‘he was being polite.’
‘I didn’t like his tone.’
‘He called us gentlemen. Let him go.’ Mudge gave this some thought but relented. The guy stood up, glaring at us and rubbing his wrist.
‘Are you a reasonable person?’ I asked him.
‘I was until about thirty seconds ago,’ he muttered, but he was gesturing at his security detail to calm down.
‘You want our weapons?’ I asked.
‘Obviously.’
‘It’s not going to happen. Besides which, you can’t disarm cybernetic weapons systems, and it would be no problem for us to take your weapons from you inside if we wanted to and use them. So you want us here, or Sharcroft does?’ He nodded. ‘Well, it depends on how much he wants to see us.’ He gave this some thought, or more likely he was receiving instructions.
‘We need to check you for information contamination,’ he said, relenting. I nodded. His tech guys approached and started waving various sensors at us.
‘Are you going to kill him?’ the security guy asked.
‘Not sure yet,’ I mused.
Through the blast doors was a large chamber with a low ceiling. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in some kind of metal mesh. We were walking on a raised wooden platform. The room was full of what I recognised as servers in liquid coolant tanks, a lot of them. I did not know a lot about IT but even I knew that there were vast amounts of processing power in here. There was also a lot of solid-state memory.
Interspersed among all the hardware were various bits of institutional office furniture. People in one-piece suits were sat at desks, many of them tranced in, most with some form of visible integral computer system and all hard-wired into the hardware. None of them were using wireless links.
Many of the available surfaces had liquid-crystal thinscreens stuck to them. Though not the walls or the ceilings, I noticed. They, along with several detailed holographic displays, were showing information about the colonies. Or at least that’s what it looked like to me.
Mudge made a whistling noise as he blew air through his teeth.
‘This whole room is a Faraday cage,’ he said. It was a big room. ‘It’s designed to keep all surveillance out.’
It wasn’t just the mesh; I saw jamming and various other electronic countermeasures and counter-surveillance tech strategically placed around the room.
‘Lot of trouble to go to, to be free of God,’ Rannu commented.
‘Welcome to Limbo, gentlemen.’ It was the sort of voice that I associated with energetic old people. I knew this from old vizzes as I didn’t know any old people. It also sounded amplified.