Mudge cheated, in my opinion. The guy on him was distracted by the fun that Rannu and I were having. Mudge just sidestepped, drew his sidearm and levelled it at the guy’s head.
I extended the claws on my right arm. Four nine-inch long, hardened ceramic blades slid out of my forearm through slits just behind my knuckles. I reached down to the recently electrocuted gunman, cut the sling off his gauss carbine and tossed it away. Then I walked over to the one that Mudge had covered.
‘Are you more reasonable?’
‘I ain’t telling you shit,’ he said in a manner I think he thought was macho. I was so frustrated I wanted to cry. Mudge clattered him on the side of the head with his pistol. I looked reproachfully at Mudge. Not because he’d hit him but because you shouldn’t get so close to your target that they can reach you — as Rannu and I had just demonstrated.
‘What do you want?!’ I screamed. The guy just kept his mouth shut. ‘Do you realise how fucking stupid it is to go to all this effort and not tell us?!’
‘Someone wants to see you,’ the guy that Rannu had taken down shouted.
‘Shut up!’ Mudge’s guy yelled.
‘You’re supposed to tell us that,’ I tried pointing out. I then walked over to Rannu and his prone friend.
‘Who?’ I asked him.
‘Sharcroft,’ he said. The name meant nothing to me. I told him that. Mudge joined us, forcing his prisoner to his knees in front of him. Mudge was sub-vocalising something as he did this.
‘What does he want?’ I asked.
‘He has a proposal,’ the guy said.
‘Funny way of making it. If you’d succeeded then we’d be useless to him. You didn’t, so he should have sent smarter people. Either way I’m not inclined to meet him.’
‘Look, we fucked up.’ He looked over at the guy whose face I’d electrocuted.
‘Trying to prove yourself?’ I asked. The guy said nothing. He just glared resentfully at his unconscious mate.
‘Trying to prove himself, was he?’ I asked. The look on the guy’s face said it all. The arrogant part of me was scornful of them thinking they stood a chance.
‘You need some proper trigger time, sunshine. You are way out of your league,’ Mudge said. I turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. Sometimes I thought that the SAS had been a bad influence on Mudge. Though it could have been the other way around. Mudge shrugged.
‘Simon Sharcroft?’ he asked the talkative one. The guy nodded.
‘Know him?’ I asked.
‘Know of him. So do you,’ Mudge said. Then he dropped the bombshell. ‘He’s one of the Cabal.’ I lost my sense of humour and drew my Mastodon from its holster.
‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ Rannu’s prisoner shouted as he got a good look at the massive. 454 revolver designed for killing Berserks.
‘You fucking pussy!’ Mudge’s prisoner spat at the guy. ‘Ow!’ Mudge had clouted him round the head with his pistol. I think Mudge was starting to enjoy this sort of thing too much.
‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. Was it starting all over again? Surely the Cabal couldn’t be starting up again — could it?
‘All I know is that he wants a meet, I swear!’ Rannu’s prisoner was begging. A text file appeared in the corner of my IVD sent by Mudge. I opened it and scanned the words superimposed over my vision.
Sharcroft was from some old — meaning pre-FHC — money family, America’s answer to Britain’s aristocracy. Right schools, right fraternities, probably got his arse whipped with rolled-up towels in the right secret societies. Sharcroft was a Pentagon II insider. He was an intelligence and government powerbroker and acted as a liaison between the multitudes of compartmentalised intelligence agencies that confused the American government and military. He’d made a name for himself early in his career by running very black ops for the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Department. He was described as someone not afraid to make hard decisions. Or, from the perspective of people on the ground, he was a cunt who didn’t care how many people he got killed to make himself look good.
No war record — he was too old, well over a hundred. He had of course been implicated when we revealed the Cabal to everyone. He’d been neck deep in their nasty shit but, according to the info Mudge had gleamed from God, had disappeared very quickly after the big reveal.
Mudge getting that info was not easy. A lot of very sensitive information had been erased from the net shortly after God had made it available to everyone. After all, God couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, stop people doing what they wanted with their own information. However, while the powers that be were erasing their dirty secrets, hackers were racing to find them, copy them and make sure they stayed disseminated.
‘We could go and kill him,’ Mudge suggested. That wasn’t such an unattractive proposal.
‘Mudge, you are remembering your journalistic objectivity?’ I reminded him.
‘Sadly, I’m not a journalist any more; I’m a multimedia sensation,’ he said matter-of-factly. I couldn’t make up my mind if he was joking or not. Certainly all of us were recognised a lot more often after appearing system-wide on every monitor and viz screen capable of displaying an image.
‘We should just go and kill this Sharcroft,’ I told Rannu’s prisoner.
‘I could just tell him you didn’t want to take the meeting?’ he suggested.
‘Where is he?’ Rannu asked.
‘Don’t tell him anything! Ow!’ Mudge’s prisoner shouted as Mudge hit him again.
‘New Mexico,’ the prone gunman answered.
Mudge sighed. ‘Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?’ he muttered.
2
We sat on the benches of the black copter opposite the three walking bruised egos that took the form of lower-echelon spooks. They’d optimistically asked for our weapons as we’d boarded the copter. We’d politely refused, Mudge had hit one, but I’d promised they could have their guns back at the end of the trip.
They’d also been more than a little annoyed when we’d loaded the four-wheel-drive muscle car and the dirt bike into the back of the copter. I mean cars and bikes don’t grow on trees. We’d taken the time and the effort to steal them so we wanted to hold on to them. So the gunmen had spent most of the trip staring at us resentfully.
It was my first trip to America. Or rather my first trip over the border into the America controlled by the American government. I didn’t get much of a chance to see it. Being in the back of some kind of military transport vehicle usually meant I was on my way somewhere to do something stupid, wasteful and dangerous. The journeys to and from said stupid, wasteful and dangerous things were often my only downtime. It had taken me a long time to learn the skill, but I could sleep anywhere, even in the back of these often noisy and always uncomfortable vehicles. I drifted off quite quickly. Careless perhaps, but I knew Rannu and Mudge had my back. They’d wake me when one of them wanted some rest.
Heaven appeared to glow a blue-white colour. It reminded me of something, something dangerous. I wasn’t sure about opening my eyes but I felt good. In fact I felt the best I had in a very, very long time, presumably because I was no longer dying but was in fact dead. On the other hand, I remembered that I’d done an awful lot of bad things in my life, from stealing money from my parents to buy cigarettes when I was ten to killing a lot of people. Some in cold blood and some after I’d tortured them — those were the ones I felt most bad about.
I didn’t feel quite so bad about killing Them. They may have been innocent dupes of the Cabal but they had been trying to kill me at the time, and it’s a lot easier to kill things that look that different from you. Still, it can’t look good on your application for heaven.