Warm air runs through the corridor of biomechanical flesh we find ourselves in. It’s like something huge breathing on you. We take turns stripping off the shitty spacesuits while the others guard. We’ve got on inertial armour suits, the only armour we could fit under the spacesuits.
‘Well?’ I asked Pagan as we change.
‘I ran the spoof program, snuck it in using the cloak so it would be undetected. It’s adapted from one I’d use on normal tech but I’m unsure of the interface with the biotech,’ he said coldly.
‘Very clever, Pagan. What does that mean?’ I demanded.
He stopped and looked at me.
‘Either we’ll be hidden from whatever detection systems they’re using or we won’t. Shame we couldn’t get Morag to do it.’ In other words, either we’d be hidden from Demiurge and therefore Rolleston or he’d have us torn apart. We needed Rolleston to turn up, just not yet .
‘Drop the attitude,’ Merle said quietly to Pagan.
Pagan glared at him for a moment and then nodded. He was just frightened. Well that and he hated me, which was reasonable. I did after all kill him.
We pulled the reactive camouflage gillie suits on over our inertial armour and moved out.
We’d downloaded the plans for most of the flag-capable ships in the colonial fleet. We’d been pretty sure that Rolleston would choose the Bush because it was the best but it paid to have contingencies. The plans we had for the Bush were very different to the ship/organism we were now presented with, but Pagan quickly adapted an intelligent navigation program he’d used as a combat air controller. It was mapping the terrain and trying to reconcile it with the plans we had.
We were moving quickly through the corridors, hiding if we saw movement and watching the last moments of the Hellions on our IVDs. We could hear the firefight in the distance. We watched Rolleston walk through some of the best firepower that modern weaponry could provide. The footage was not doing much for morale.
Like the boardroom in the Citadel, the ship was diseased human technology, except in the case of the Bush it was total. We didn’t see much in the way of movement initially and quickly found out why. The humans needed to run the ship had become components, stripped of unnecessary parts, formed into more practical, useful shapes — if you were a psycho — and melded into the biomechanics of the craft. Morag had to stop to throw up. I couldn’t blame her. I wished I still had that reaction to atrocity. That said, it was still seriously fucking with my head.
The feed from the Hellions went down. Then we heard the screaming. It seemed to echo through all the corridors. It was rage. It was unmistakably Rolleston. As much as I wanted to think otherwise, there was no way we could have killed him. The floor didn’t so much shake as quiver beneath us.
We were heading deeper into the ship. We needed to find the isolated Demiurge system. We had hoped for a more normal layout but C amp;C was still our best hope. However, Rolleston must know that we were inside and Demiurge was compromised. Now he would start to hunt us. The moment we were found we would be back to fighting the whole ship, except this time without the help of sophisticated exo-armour.
Outside, Rolleston’s fleet had consolidated. Whoever was commanding the colonial fleets knew what they were doing. With most of Earth’s orbital defences down, its fleet stood little chance. Rolleston’s fleet was advancing, concentrating fire on one big ship until it was cracked open and then moving to another. Their fighters and incredibly fast and manoeuvrable frigates were mopping up the smaller vessels. Already Earth ships were fleeing. The Thunderchilde was still there, however. It didn’t look so clean and new; it was a scarred and burned behemoth taking fire all over its armoured hull. All of the Thunderchilde ’s own weapon systems were constantly lit up. A lot of its fire was aimed at the Bush. We weren’t even feeling the impacts.
On the net the battle was going a little better. Through sheer force of numbers the vagabond army of Earth hackers armed with godsware had taken out most of the enemy’s rank and file hackers and some of the angels. However, the four black suns of Demiurge were forcing them back with columns of black fire that turned anything they hit into ribbons of simulated black skin floating in the virtual air.
More than three quarters of the red sun was black now as the viral eclipse continued trying to eat God. I didn’t even notice God screaming any more. It was ambient noise.
We ducked into side corridors and hid behind rib-like supports when we detected movement ahead. We had motion sensors and tiny rotor remotes, also with motion sensors, feeding information to our IVDs, but in an environment like this their range was severely limited. The reactive camouflage helped, as did the heat- and EM-masking properties of the inertial armour suits.
That he couldn’t find us must have been making Rolleston furious. I wondered if he was worried now that he knew Demiurge was compromised. Though he must have had an idea when he saw us waiting for him when he turned up in-system.
We were deep inside the huge ship now. The absence of doors had made this possible. I don’t suppose they mattered so much when you controlled everything on board and you could grow a new wall if you needed to shut areas off. I still sweated. A lot. It was reassuringly human after I’d had the alien part of my flesh driven home again.
I leaned against a corridor wall hoping the reactive camouflage was sufficient cover as a patrol passed. I was desperate for a fag and wished that I’d made Mudge give me one back on the Thunderchilde. The patrol consisted of one of the weaponised Black Squadron members, four mutated Berserk-like bioborgs and something that looked like a cross between one of the Berserks and a praying mantis. It had downward-pointing, sword-like bones for forearms. I’d slowed down my breathing, supplementing it with air from my internal tanks.
The Black Squadron guy stopped. He sniffed the air. You have to be kidding. He turned to look at the wall. Rannu was little more than a pixelated ghost as his reactive camouflage tried to keep up. He looped his new monofilament garrotte around the guy’s neck and pulled it tight. His head popped off.
I was behind one of the Berserks. I pulled its head back with the metal of my right hand. Four blades extended from just behind my knuckles on my left hand and I punched them repeatedly and quickly into the back of its skull. It nearly knocked me over as it fell to the ground.
Another ghost and the praying mantis thing had a long blade sticking out of its skull. Merle had jumped up and stabbed it through the top of its head. The crack of armoured chitin breaking under the bowie knife-like point of the machete was fiercely audible. The thing shook for a moment and then dropped to the ground.
The others were having less luck. They were all carrying knives that weren’t really up to dealing with things like this in hand-to-hand. Of the three of them only Pagan really had the training for this sort of fight. That left them with their handguns and the 10mm rounds were no match for the chitinous armour.
Superheated air exploded as one of the remaining mutated Berserks fired its black light projector from its spiked and twisted weapons gauntlet. I heard Morag cry out and felt a moment of panic. I kicked out at the Berserk’s knee joint. I heard a satisfying crack and the thing lurched down on one knee and I drove the four knuckle blades on my right hand into its face, warping its horrible facial features further. I twisted the blades and then pulled them out. Letting it slump to the ground.
There was a burst of laser fire and one of the two remaining Berserks hit the ground, its head transformed into dirty black steam. A longer burst of gauss-boosted fire from Mudge’s converted AK-47. The final Berserk shook with every hit as it staggered back and then hit the ground.