‘You want to do it?’ I asked as I fired off a burst at something that looked like it was growing out of the hull.
‘I think it’ll have more impact coming from you,’ he said.
‘What’s plan B?’ Pagan asked suspiciously.
‘Wild Boys to Rolleston, over,’ I said over an open comms link.
‘What the fuck are you doing?!’ a furious Morag demanded. Merle turned to level his Hellion’s light plasma cannon at me.
‘What is it, Jakob? I’m a little busy right now,’ Rolleston asked impatiently. His voice sounded the same but now hatred outweighed fear when I heard it. The others went quiet.
‘Don’t be a cunt. Let us in and let’s get this over and done with.’
There was a long silence. Or at least there would have been if Morag, Pagan and Merle hadn’t started screaming threats and demands for explanations at me again.
‘Okay, Jakob,’ Rolleston finally said.
25
A lot of our plan was based around Rolleston’s arrogance. On the surface this might seem risky but you’ve got to think that if a guy wants to be a god then there’s going to be a degree of arrogance involved.
It looked less like an airlock and more like a blister as it grew out of the hull and enveloped the Hellions, blocking out the dangerous light show below us.
On the other side they were waiting. The Black Squadron troopers weren’t soldiers any more; they were just weapons. They were bent over, covered in thick, overlapping chitinous plates. Reinforced bone pierced their armoured skins; one of their arms was a long sharp curved blade of blackened bone and the other was some kind of ranged weapon. It was their mouths that got me though. They were locked open in a fixed silent scream. You could see the pain etched across their still-human faces. You could read the desperation in their eyes. They were all linked to Rolleston through Demiurge. I think he liked to feel their pain. I think he fed on it. Among the transformed soldiers were twisted and deformed versions of the Berserks, like we’d seen in the Citadel, and with them similarly twisted versions of Their Walkers.
A missile flew from the back tubes of each of the Hellions. Unlike Them, these constructs and mutations screamed when plasma burned flesh and bone. The plasma fire formed a rough circle, a bit of breathing room.
Marching forward firing railguns and plasma cannons at anything that moved, just another target-rich environment. The railguns turned whatever they hit into moist fragments. The plasma cannons left little in their wake but burning puddles of flesh and bone. Rannu’s Hellion and mine took the lead. A corridor was chosen at random. Any movement was met with overwhelming fire. They tried growing through the roof, through the walls, through the floor, but that took them too long. The whole ship was flesh now, writhing all around us.
When their numbers became too much, when they were about to overwhelm us, then missiles were used just to clear a little space. Plasma flame cauterised the flesh of the ship. Each time we could feel the ship react a little beneath us. It was in pain from the fire. The Hellion’s armour started to run as they marched through liquid fire. We couldn’t afford to hang around until the plasma flames burned themselves out.
Targets everywhere. The whole ship seething but the Hellions held their own. Anything that got close was ripped apart by their back tentacles. The armoured suits were soon covered in gore.
Overwhelming firepower or not, there was a limit to our ammunition, and the whole ship was trying to kill us.
Then he came. He didn’t look like the calm and contained professional bastard I’d known from Sirius. He looked like fury. The madness in his mind hadn’t so much leaked as flooded out. He was naked and had transformed himself to look like an ancient Greek statue, like the type Mudge had shown me in a museum in London. As railguns and plasma cannons were pointed towards him, the whole front of his body blackened into what looked like living metal. Surely he couldn’t withstand concentrated plasma cannon fire?
Repeated plasma fire wreathed him in a corona of white flames. The railgun fire hammered into him, blowing chunks out of his flesh, which regrew almost immediately.
It was over quickly. He reached Rannu’s Hellion first and just reached out a burning hand, snapped his plasma cannon and threw the exo-armour into the wall. Root-like tendrils of biomechanical flesh grew around Rannu’s Hellion holding it still. Rolleston turned to my Hellion all but ignoring the constant fire from the railguns. He reached up and his hands grew into claws. He dug into the front of the armour and tore it open.
It was empty. There was a limit to our stupidity — I hoped. Rolleston started to sink into the floor. We triggered the charges in the armour. The feed from the Hellions went down.
It would be nice to think that the charges had taken care of Rolleston, but I just knew we weren’t that lucky. Besides, by that point we were inside. We heard his screams of rage echo through the vein-like corridors.
A few minutes ago
‘Shit,’ I said. There was a conspiracy to force me to relive two of my most unpleasant experiences simultaneously. The technology-transformed-into-flesh of the Bush was forcing us to rethink our entry strategy. Maybe strategy’s a strong word. We had some contingencies but once again we were making this up as we went along.
Only by reconfiguring the flesh insides of the Hellions had we managed to fit the spacesuits inside the exo-armour. Even then it had severely hindered movement and we’d had to use very lightweight suits. They had no armour and I was freezing. God was controlling the Hellions. We had successfully made the first fully functioning robots. God-driven robot devils. They were the diversion but we still had to get in ourselves.
All around us the battle still raged but we were so small compared to it all. We were less than bacteria in the big scheme of things.
I felt Pagan push a jack into one of the plugs in the back of my spacesuit, which in turn fed into one of my plugs.
‘You ready?’ he asked brusquely.
‘No,’ I said. I was shit-scared and hated this plan.
I barely had time to close my eyes and exhale all the air out of my lungs. The tendrils grew through the flesh of my face and cracked the thin plastic visor of the shit spacesuit. Cold. Then burning inside as my blood boiled. I felt my skin stretch and distend as my body swelled. It was agony. The tendrils reached down and touched the skin of the Bush and connected me to something awful. I opened my mouth to scream, except now I had no mouth. We were swallowed.
Flesh, awful and surrounding me. My mind touching it, assaulted, bombarded with information and images either too complex or horrific to process. It passes in a moment. It feels longer.
We fall through the ceiling. I hit the floor with blood running out of my ears. My joints are agony. Frost coats my nostrils. My skin is red from burst blood vessels and despite my internal air supply I’m panting for breath as the tendrils recede back into my flesh and I have a mouth again.
When something approaching conscious thought returns, when the theatre of atrocity that is the images downloaded into my skull stops dancing in front of my eyes, when the pain becomes manageable with the help of a lot of painkillers dumped into my blood, I use what Demiurge taught me when he possessed me. I get the bio-nanites that swarm through my body to heal the damage caused by hypoxia and ebullism. It can’t stop me shaking from the cold. Maybe it’s not just the cold.
Pagan unplugs himself from me and looks down at me with contempt. I resist the urge to shoot him. Then I catch a glimpse of Morag. She’s not quite quick enough to mask the look of concern. The others are down on one knee, weapons at the ready watching all around us.