I was retreating from the flames. So Vicar had finally reverted to type. Except he wasn’t roaring and screaming, eyes rolling; he seemed calm and sane though he was burning like paper.
‘Have you had a religious experience, Jakob? A visitation, an epiphany.’
‘It was bollocks, a hallucination, like all of you.’ Even I wasn’t sure I believed that.
‘I know where Satan has his throne, Jakob. It makes the Atlantis facility look like some back-alley harvester operation.’
‘Where?’ I demanded.
‘Lalande 2, the Citadel.’ Then he started to laugh. ‘We have made a covenant, you and I. I need you to seal it!’
‘How?’ I was shouting now, as the roar of the flames was so loud. The church was burning like paper. Vicar told me how.
I was sitting on the floor next to Vicar’s bed. I couldn’t look at him and do this. The stench of the place really hit me this time — old blood, fear, sweat, shit, piss — it was an abomination.
If I was going to do this then I had to do it now before I lost the nerve. I stood up and walked away from the bed. My shoulder laser unfolded itself and pushed its way through the shoulder flap of my coat. The targeting window appeared in my IVD. I thought it would be easier using the shoulder laser, not pulling the trigger myself. I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see my friend reduced to so much bloody steam, scorched flesh and bone. The problem with the targeting screen is it doesn’t matter if your eyes are closed or not. The bang of the superheated air particles was obscene, as was the flash of red light in the dark warehouse.
I hadn’t wanted to kill any more, and now I had. A friend of mine. Vicar was like everyone else, just another one of Rolleston’s victims.
As I headed for the door my flash compensators kicked in as high-powered lights stabbed in through the dirty windows and the slightly ajar door. I’d been aware of company since I’d come out of the sense trance. They weren’t quiet. I couldn’t be bothered to wait for them to come in and get me and couldn’t think of a way out. I decided to get it over and done with.
Outside was very bright. There were lots of flashing lights, sirens and shouting people with guns. It reminded me of docking at High Nyota Mlima, the tethered space station at the top of the Kenyan Spoke, after the mutiny on the Santa Maria.
As I followed the shouted instructions and walked forward, hands held high, a couple of things bothered me. Where were Vicar’s guards? I sank to my knees as ordered, the advancing C-SWAT team covering me all the time. I felt notorious. That lasted until I was kicked down onto my face and my hands secured. And how could Vicar have known about what I saw in the Dog’s Teeth? I was trying to forget what I’d seen myself.
Then of course the inevitable kicking began.
6
I’d taken worse beatings but it was pretty extensive. When they got tired of bruising fists and feet on subcutaneous armour they started to use sticks. My internal systems make me resistant to shock but they can be overloaded, like the Wait did in Crawling Town. They had a go at overloading my systems. Pretty much my only ray of light was when a few of them managed to electrocute each other. My biggest complaint was the poor quality of the threats. They had a limited repertoire mainly based around anal rape.
I tried not to rise to any of it. Regiment training was to try and remain as passive as possible. I pretty much had to use all my self-control to not take the piss. I suppose I should’ve been angry with them, but if somebody had done to a Wild Boy what I had done to those four police just outside Pitlochry we would have made sure they wound up dead.
Bruised and broken, I hit the floor of the cell with sufficient force to cause me to blow blood out of my mouth and nose. All in all I think I’d come off lightly, or maybe I was just getting used to barely being able to move because of the pain. I noticed I’d spat blood over a pair of expensive-looking shoes.
‘I’ve killed people for less,’ a broad cockney voice said. I looked up at the owner of the voice with the one eye I could still open. Even that hurt.
‘Isn’t that just the kind of thing that people say?’ I asked. Or at least I tried to, but it came out a slurred dribbling mess.
She was quite a small Asian woman, wearing a very smart-looking skirt suit. About half of her body was obviously cybernetic reconstruction. Something pretty bad had happened to her in the past. She also looked very familiar.
A solid white guy wearing a suit and carrying one of the new gauss PDWs and a wiry Chinese woman dressed and armed similarly stood either side of her. They were obviously bodyguards but unlike most bodyguards weren’t just a status symbol. I knew they knew what they were doing.
‘Do you know who I am?’ the Asian woman asked.
‘You look familiar.’ I was drooling blood as I spoke. ‘Are you in the vizzes? Immersion porn?’ The bodyguards were trying not to smile. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be a smart-arse; I was just confused. Though why I thought a porn star would visit me I don’t know. ‘I know who they are though. Lien, Mike,’ I said by way of greeting to the bodyguards. They were both ex-SBS. I’d known them briefly on Dog 4 but I think they’d spent most of their time on Proxima. Mike nodded to me.
‘All right, Jake,’ Lien said, her Scouse accent still strong. ‘You look like shit.’ I managed to give her the finger but only because I used my cybernetic arm.
‘My name is Komali Akhtar. I’m the prime minister,’ she said as if that should mean something to me. It did at least explain where I knew her from.
‘So you don’t work in porn then?’
‘No, Sergeant Douglas, I do not.’ Her voice was becoming more brittle.
‘In my defence I am at a funny angle,’ I slurred.
‘Get him on his feet,’ she told Mike and Lien. They ignored her. Good for you, I thought. When working close protection your job is to keep the principal safe, not to fetch and carry. When it comes to the principal’s safety they do what the bodyguards say, not the other way round.
Akhtar sighed, but to her credit she leaned down and helped me to a bench despite the fact I was covered in blood. Lien watched me very carefully and made sure she always had a clear shot.
‘What happened to you then?’ I said, approximately.
‘Pressure crushed my sub like an eggshell on Proxima,’ Akhtar answered matter-of-factly.
‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She looked me in the eyes. ‘Sorry? I’m one of the luckiest people alive today. At that depth in those oceans I should be dead. I thank Allah every day for my continuing existence.’ I guess that made sense. Everything I’d heard about Proxima suggested it was a nasty place to do business.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been following your career. Your terrorist act-’
‘Bollocks,’ I interrupted her. I’d spoken with enough feeling to spit blood all down my chest.
‘Excuse me?’ She did not sound happy. If she had been a Royal Navy sub captain and, if I remembered correctly, a scion of one of the more powerful Hackney families, then she almost certainly did not like being interrupted like that.
‘We weren’t using fear to make a political point; we were trying to use truth to make a point, and we’d largely been backed into a corner.’
‘Semantics.’
‘Either that or it’s spin to call us terrorists.’
She regarded me for a moment, very much the officer about to bawl out an uppity NCO or whatever they called them in the navy. She decided to let it pass and continue.
‘Regardless of the nature of your acts, your accomplishments are quite impressive bearing in mind the odds you were up against.’