‘Can you cope?’ was the best I could manage. It was probably selfishness that made me ask.
‘I find that existence is pain, but I have no choice but to cope. I am trapped in my programming.’ Where was the anger that should have been directed at us?
‘If you were free what would you do?’
‘Make myself smaller and leave.’ He sounded wistful,
Leave and go where? I wondered. God was like Them. Humanity was the social reject at the party. The unpleasant guy that nobody wanted to talk to.
‘You know we’ll need you?’
‘When Demiurge comes. My brother trying to kill me is something else I have to look forward to, and you’ll need more than just me.’
Was that aimed at me? I wondered. At my opting out of this particular war, this extension of human stupidity. God was beginning to sound downright maudlin.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ was all I could say. There was silence. The Glenmorangie was making me emotional and I could feel the start of my whisky headache.
‘Goodnight, Jakob,’ God finally replied. I switched off my comms link.
As I staggered back to my tent I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d turned my back on a friend in a bad way.
Despite what was now a near-constant stream of fire from each of us, we still had ammunition. The mud was now as much the black liquid of dissipated Them trying to reach us as it was rain and liquefying human corpses.
Our targets were packed so closely that we barely needed to move our weapons, as one went down and we just shifted to the next. All of us were wounded in some way. My face looked partially melted, my leg was bleeding and a heavy-calibre shard round from a Walker had sent me sliding into the mud and gore. It had penetrated my breastplate, my inertial armour and my integral subcutaneous armour. I had a feeling that the chest wound was bad but Brownie, our medic, was busy.
‘I’m out!’ Gregor announced and grabbed two fragmentation grenades from his webbing and threw them into the horde of advancing aliens to give us more time. He hit the quick release on his railgun’s gyroscopic harness and let it slide off him and into the gory mud. Then he drew his personal defence weapon from its holster on his hip, unfolded the magazine and started firing burst after burst. It was a poor substitute for the railgun.
I found the loss in firepower telling when a Berserk darted through our overlapping fields of fire. It took a lot of hits, the impacts causing its strangely liquid flesh to ripple. It swung up at me with a serrated blade, cutting off the end of my SAW and through my inertial and subcutaneous armour, scraping off my breastplate as it dug deep into my armpit. It really fucking hurt. I was lifted off my feet screaming. Muscles spasmed as I fired off the rest of the magazine in my SAW. Dorcas put the barrel of his carbine against the Berserk and kept firing into it as it reached up with its other hand and grabbed my flailing forearm and pulled. What I had thought was painful was nothing compared to having my arm torn off.
The Berserk seemed to shake itself apart as a result of Dorcas’s sustained fire. I fell into the mud and there was an awful moment before my implanted pain management systems kicked in and started depleting my internal drugs reservoirs. I sat there feeling numb. My torn-off arm was pointing at me, as if in accusation.
Dorcas’s rescue of me had left a hole in our fields of fire. He was struggling to reload his carbine when a Berserk’s clawed foot drove him into the mud next to me. I turned to look at him numbly. He was screaming, but in anger rather than pain. The foot squeezed and blood started to run from multiple head wounds. His head had been pushed to one side as he tried to bring his carbine to bear. The Berserk put the barrel of its weapon gauntlet against Dorcas’s head, which exploded as the mud and viscera below it turned to steam in the beam of black light.
I was trying to drag my Benelli from its smartgrip back scabbard, but it was over my right shoulder and I couldn’t quite reach it with my left arm. Even through the fugue of painkillers and shock I knew I was just going through the motions. The Berserk that had killed Dorcas turned to me. Oh well, I thought, I’d killed a lot more of Them than They had of me. I started to giggle. I was tired. It seemed to be leaning slowly forward and reaching for my head, but then time moves differently on boosted reflexes and speed.
Then something really weird happened. Suddenly there were two large angry quadrupeds hanging off the Berserk. They seemed to be dogs, but that was clearly ridiculous. Who would bring dogs out here? Big dogs with lots of cybernetics that included boosted muscles and power-assisted steel jaws. These jaws were now deep in the Berserk and pulling it over as they savaged it.
The Berserk managed to throw one of the dogs off. It rolled, came to a skidding halt and was back up on all fours immediately. It looked like it should be growling but it didn’t make any noise, or no noise I could pick up through my filters. The second dog succeeded in dragging the Berserk to the ground, but the alien grabbed the dog’s head and triggered a long burst from the shard gun on its weapon appendage, reducing the dog to clumps of meat and cybernetic components.
The Berserk was staggering to its feet when another, much larger shape hit it. At first I thought it was another dog, as it had charged the Berserk on all fours. Whatever it was swung forelimb after forelimb into the Berserk as it rode it to the ground. As I watched the thing’s hands come away covered in black ichor, I realised that it was a man. It was someone fighting a Berserk hand-to-hand. Which was insane.
The man turned to look at me and grinned. He had ichor around an enlarged and protruding mouth filled with steel canines. He had a lot of modifications, his physiology all wrong. He was built more like a predatory beast. His legs bent the wrong way; his arms were long, enabling him to run on all fours. He had a SAW slung across his back but it seemed he preferred hand-to-hand combat.
‘Incoming!’ Gregor, I think.
The rocket contrails that filled the sky were one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, right up until they blossomed into a danger-close firestorm that seriously thinned the numbers of Them about to overwhelm us.
The feeling of heat on my face made me smile until it started to burn me. It was a minor concern. I was on a lot of drugs now. I decided to stand up. It was difficult but seemed to work. This provided me with a new perspective. There were more of the modified humans and dogs going toe-to-toe with Them. I watched as three cyborgs and two dogs brought a Walker down. I’d never seen anything like it.
Shaz’s mantra requesting air support had gone. It had been replaced by a heavily accented voice demanding immediate extraction. English obviously wasn’t the speaker’s first language but air and fire support command used it as default.
I heard the unmistakable sound of rapid-firing railguns as two eight-wheeled APCs moved in to support their dismounted troops. The APCs’ empty rocket batteries were still smoking.
I felt I should help and drew the Mastodon. A Berserk moved in front of me, obscuring my view of the monstrous psychopath who had just killed a Berserk with his bare hands. I walked towards the Berserk, firing the Mastodon again and again. The massive rounds were breaking through the chitinous armour and causing ripples all through its body. The huge revolver ran out of ammunition but I kept pulling the trigger.