Gavin Smith - War in Heaven

The dangers aside, I liked it down here. Despite the fact that I was cold as the heat was bled off me in an effort to mask my signature. Despite the fact that I was drenched in sweat, there was something peaceful and tranquil about it. Seen underwater, the rock formations that we had become used to took on a whole new life, driving home how alien the environment was, but in a good way. Once again, everything we saw was in the green of lowlight vision. For a while I even forgot about the threat of the leopard seals. Fighting them would be a ball ache. We’d win, but discovery by the seals meant compromise, which meant scrubbing the mission.

Dinas Emrys, yesterday

The hologrammaitic rendering of the Citadel looked out of place among the rough, sparse, Dark Ages splendour of the great hall of Pagan’s sanctuary.

‘You’re going to have to trust me. I can hack it,’ Black Annis told us.

Mother, Tailgunner and Cat were looking sceptical. Mudge was looking bored. I couldn’t read Merle’s face and Rannu was always difficult to judge, but I think there was eagerness in his expression. Either he wanted a chance to prove himself again, which was fine, or he wanted revenge, which was less fine. I wanted revenge. I badly wanted to fuck Rolleston up and, if I got a chance, kill him.

‘Morag, if you could just tell us a little more about how you think you will do this,’ Pagan said.

‘Same principle as doing the data raid on Demiurge — I’ll stealth it. It’s Themtech, which means it has a mind or rather lots of different tiny minds.’

‘Like Essex,’ Mudge said. We ignored him.

‘Operation Spiral,’ Pagan pointed out.

‘I know how to do the interface and I will have Ambassador helping me.’

‘I’m sold,’ I said.

‘You’re just eager to fuck the Black Squadrons up,’ Merle said. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with him.

‘Look, no offence,’ Cat said, ‘but I don’t want to base this op on optimism and overconfidence.’

‘Cat, we’ve had this conversation with Morag several times. I’ve been in your position and she’s always delivered,’ I said.

Annis looked over at me and smiled. It wasn’t very comforting. I felt like I was about to be eaten.

‘And I’ve hacked Themtech before,’ Annis added.

‘No, you’ve surfed it. There’s a difference,’ Pagan pointed out. My grasp of IT was pretty poor but he was right.

‘We adapt the Pais Badarn Beisrydd, and they’re not even going to know we’re there.’

‘Then why not use it as a way in?’ Merle asked.

‘Because it’s a trick we’re only going to get to play once,’ she told him.

We broke the surface of the water, weapons covering every angle, moving swiftly out of the natural rock pool and onto bloodied ice. This was where the leopard seals lived. Evidence of their handlers feeding them meat was smeared all over the ice. Much of the meat looked human in origin. I tried not to think about it. Human lives had always been tossed away casually, but food for guard fauna? That was taking the piss.

We advanced quickly. We didn’t have a great deal of time. The moment the seals returned, the mission was over. Rannu and Merle had already programmed their dive sheaths to peel off. We’d hide their sheaths with ours. They advanced past our cordon of guns in their reactive camouflage. I could just about make out the movement of them slinging their weapons and pulling ice axes from clips on their webbing. I peeled off my own sheath, moved forward and pointed my SAW up the ice wall, as did Pagan, covering the pair of them as they started to climb the shifting, fragile and unsteady ice. Merle made quick time. Rannu was slower. His capture and possession had taken their toll, just as they must have on me.

At the top I knew Rannu would take a covering position while Merle rigged and dropped three ropes for the rest of us. Cat, Pagan and Morag were the next up, using muffled motorised ascenders to pull them up with only a minimum of falling ice. Finally it was Mudge’s and my turn. With cover from above we attached our ascenders and started up the wall. We’d attached crampons to our boots and were practically walking up the ice trying not to knock any off. We gathered the excess rope with us as we climbed. We wanted to leave as little trace of our progress as possible.

Pagan and Morag were covering our ascent. At least I assumed they were. I could see nothing as they were wearing reactive camouflage and were presumably completely still against the ice. I heard one of the seals flop out of the water and onto the ice below us. I stopped my ascender; a moment later Mudge’s went quiet as well. I stayed very still, hoping that the reactive camouflage would hide us. Hoping that we’d hidden the dive sheaths well enough. I glanced down and I saw one of the huge, sleek, vicious-looking augmented seals flopping around among the blood and food remains. There was nothing to do but wait and hope.

I was getting nervous, almost shaky. Something was different. Everyone gets scared, unless they’re a psycho or have had too much meat replaced with metal, but this was different. I wasn’t handling this reasonably low-stress situation well. I did a mild sedative from my internal drugs reservoir to calm me down. This wasn’t good. How much damage had they done to me? I wished I’d asked Mudge to score me some Slaughter.

There was a splash below. I glanced down to see the pool rippling. The seal had cocked its head and was looking at the water. I think someone had thrown something from above. The seal waddled rapidly to the edge and then slid into the pool, disappearing below the surface. It didn’t seem very bright. Mudge and I quickly and quietly finished our ascent.

Dinas Emrys, yesterday

‘There’s only so far we can stealth. As soon as we’re compromised it’s all over,’ Merle said.

‘Not if they’re worried about other things and not if you’ve got fire support,’ Mother said. Tailgunner, resplendent in his feathered cloak, glanced over at her worriedly.

‘That’s a…’ Cat started. She didn’t say death sentence. The Citadel was basically a minor arcology, or to put it another way, a fortress of ice the size of a small city and very heavily defended. It was designed to withstand a prolonged siege from Them.

‘So don’t fuck it up,’ Mother said grimly. I wondered if this was what I’d seen the whanau talking about.

‘You’re a mech down,’ Merle said.

‘Soloso used to pilot mechs in the mines. We’ve been bringing him up to speed,’ Mother told us. Even on Annis’s horrible face I could see a look of worry. ‘What we’ll need is accurate info, which means good forward observation.’

‘We’ll be comms black,’ I said.

Tailgunner shook his head. ‘No, we’ve got an idea about that.’

‘Rannu and I can FO,’ Pagan said. It made sense, as an ex-RASF combat air controller he had the most experience.

Few things make you feel less like a hardened combat cyborg commando than wearing adult diapers. They may have been made from the latest smart fabric. They may lock all the moisture away from your skin. They may in fact be the very pinnacle of modern nappy technology, but despite the initial warm feeling there’s something deeply pathetic about a grown man pissing himself whatever the reason. It may be part of the discipline of running long-term OPs, sniper stalking or in this case a difficult infiltration. That didn’t make it any better. At least we’d taken something to constipate ourselves and eaten high-energy food sparingly the day before.

The Citadel was ahead of us. It was a flat-topped terraced pyramid. Large though it was, the cavern it was in dwarfed it. This meant a lot of open space all around the arcology, which provided clear fields of fire. There were also only a few ways into the large cavern, which would further bottleneck any attack. We knew that each of the terraces was basically a heavily defended trench made of super-hardened ice. Even from here I could see the various weapon systems — cannon, missile batteries, point-defence systems — bristling from the pyramid-shaped complex. Fully magnifying my lenses, I could make out combat drones circling the fortress as well as patrolling gunships and exo-armour squads.