I saw missiles fired from a battery that looked like a cancerous growth on the skin of the Bush. Where it was damaged, the hull swam like bacteria under a microscope as it grew new armoured flesh. This wasn’t a ship, it was a nightmare, some kind of monster.
I ignored the readout on my IVD that told me how fast we were going. It was relative, I told myself, as the Bush got larger and larger until it was all I could see. We were still tens of miles from it. We still had the screening drones to deal with. Whether they thought we were debris or not, they would still detect and fire on us to protect the mother ship, and they would be linked to Demiurge. H would know we were coming.
We sent the signal to fleet. Our prearranged call for help. The closest carrier to us was a German carrier, the Barbarossa. Every carrier had held a squadron back to help us if need be. Now that we had called for air support, all the reserve squadrons were released to join the fight. We saw some of them drop out of docking airlocks, manoeuvring jets moving them away from the carriers before they kicked in their main engines. Many of them didn’t get far.
I knew the Barbarossa. It had once taken on one of Their dreadnoughts in the Proxima system and won. Too old now for front-line service, it had been sent back to Sol for system defence duties. Sadly, Luftwaffe Fortunate Sons now crewed it. Shame. It would have been nice if it had been the Valkyries they launched to help us. I remembered that the Valkyries would be on the other side somewhere and flying better fighters.
Pagan did what he was good at, forward observing for the squadron of fighters that was being torn apart as it headed towards us. He used passive scans, so as not to give our position away, plotting the positions of the screening remotes we needed taken out. He also sent the pilots the locations of point-defence weapons on the hull of the Bush. All the other weapons were too large to be used against us. He then sent the pilots targeting solutions via our, hopefully, masked comms link.
Waiting for the fighters, falling up towards the Bush, I enlarged the net feed in my IVD. The war between God and Demiurge looked like a viral eclipse. As if God’s red sun was slowly being eaten by infection. More and more black spread over it. God’s screaming was a constant ambient noise on all the feeds now. Uncharitably I wished he’d shut up.
Then the best hope we’d had since the start of the fight. They came like a vagabond army — corporate and criminal hackers, amateur savants and signals veterans, sport and illegal-snuff virtual gladiators — the net’s dirty fighters, tricky bastards, chancers and assorted scumbags. Some were ex-military; many were draft dodgers, and I had a horrible feeling that many were still too young to be drafted. They were cloaked in icons that ran the gamut from just about every popular cultural icon to just about every religious icon imaginable. Some just came as themselves.
They were angry and armed with the best attack and defence programs that Morag, Pagan, Salem and Tailgunner, before he died, had managed to develop from what they’d learned of godsware. We’d given them the best software sword and shields we could in the packets that Pagan had sent after the Earth had been hit. It was manipulative. We’d known that Rolleston was going to bombard the Earth, but there had been little we could do about it and there had been no time for the powers that be to evacuate the targets. The packets had contained a heartfelt plea for aid from Mudge. He’d composed it when we’d been in the assault shuttle heading for Rolleston’s ancestral home.
The sun grew and the darkness receded. Slightly. As just about every single isolated computer system left on Earth, in orbit and in the fleet was opened to God.
I watched the vagabond army hit the demons and the angels as an undisciplined mess, trailing their silver cords behind them. There was less than a second’s delay between them thinking something wherever they were jacked in and their icons acting on it. The tiny delay was a result of operating in virtual territory so far away from their bodies. It was small but sometimes it was enough to give their opponents the edge, particularly the angels.
Demons were thrown into the air as the new army joined the fight and nasty tactics were used. Groups of hackers who knew each other ganged up on targets, took one down and moved to another. The vagabond army may not have had the training, discipline or technology of the attacking hackers, but they had the numbers and they’d seen huge parts of the Earth destroyed in the bombardment. They had anger on their side. Anger is always a good motivator.
Pagan sent us feed from the surface of the black glass plain. An angel towered over the vagabond hackers and the remnants of our fleet’s military hackers and signal personnel. It was sweeping multiple hackers aside with every stroke of its spear of white fire, leaving them corpses with smoking plugs back wherever they were tranced in. I saw Papa Neon charge the angel, throwing every dirty little hex program he had at it. He distracted it, parried a spear blow with his shining staff, slid under the angel’s guard and tore a lump out of its flesh. Papa Neon shot into the air above the angel and bit into it. The angel lurched like a puppet. Its own bones pierced its skin. The white flames went out of its eyes.
Elsewhere the fight wasn’t going as well. Few of the hackers were a match for the angels. Columns of black fire joined the plain of glass to the four black suns, burning lines of icons regardless of whose side they were on. Above the plain the sea of fire began to roil and surge angrily.
The fighters from the Barbarossa came into view on heavy burn. One of them came apart and started tumbling as a thick red beam of laser light superheated its hull until it exploded.
The fighters fired their nose railguns in a constant stream of tracers all around us and launched all their missiles as one, as close as they could to the screening drones.
The screen of drones fired back. Space was filled with a grid of red laser light. Missiles burst into multiple submunitions. Warheads exploded in space; some of them even reached their targets. In front of us drones exploded in rapid succession. Now cross hairs appeared on our IVDs as we targeted the survivors.
There were explosions on the hull of the ship as gristle-like point-defence systems were destroyed.
I fell up towards the Bush, firing short bursts from the Retributors at the surviving drones in my path. Some of the drones were burning as plasma fire ate through them. Black light from return fire scored the Hellion’s armour. I launched one of the missiles off my back at a surviving black beam point-defence system. The missile was destroyed before it got close, but one of Morag’s missiles hit the growth-like system.
None of the fighters made it. They were torn apart by the remotes before their first missiles hit.
We were now taking light fire as we plummeted up towards the Bush ’s hull. Through the windows on my IVD I could see Mudge and Pagan firing their Retributors at its hull. I magnified the Hellion’s optics and saw Walker-like biomechanical constructs growing out of the ship’s flesh. I joined the firing. Then I realised I was coming in too fast. I tried a back burn on my flight fin. It slowed me but I hit the hull hard. The impact was hard enough to make me spit blood over the plastic visor of my helmet. I bounced. The Retributor flew out of my hands but it was still connected to the ammo pack on the Hellion’s back by its chain feed.
With the help of the suit’s systems I managed to regain control and make it back to the hull. The six of us grouped together in a rough circle, everyone facing out.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Merle said. ‘The architecture’s all off. The plans we downloaded are meaningless. I didn’t even see an airlock on the way in.’ It was as close to panic as I’d ever heard from Merle. It wasn’t very close but he was less than happy.
‘Plan B?’ Mudge asked.