Gavin Smith - War in Heaven

The scout mech’s twin rotary railguns destroyed any significant resistance. Strange swivelled the mech with economical grace, located points of enemy fire and tore them apart with short, disciplined bursts. She targeted the more heavily protected points. The short-range missile battery on her right shoulder fired its payload in one go. The missiles shot off in different directions and protected firing points and heavy-weapons emplacements exploded.

A burning light mech strode out of the plasma fire on our left. As one, Mudge, Pagan, Rannu and I triggered vertically launched Laa-Laas from one of the twin tubes attached to our packs. Four missiles hit the mech, exploding all over its already weakened body. The long-legged war machine toppled backwards and plasma flames consumed it.

Ahead of me Mudge was firing on the run, aiming his converted AK-47 at the catwalks that surrounded the vehicle bay. As Rannu reached the closed blast door he pulled the smart frame off his chest webbing. At a command sent through his palm link, the frame expanded. He attached the frame to the door and then turned, weapon at the ready. The rest of us reached the door and did the same.

This was the tricky part — the waiting while the microbes ate at the armour plate of the blast door, making us a man-sized hole to get through. When I looked behind me everything was fire. The main blast door entrance to the bay was about to shut. Through the crack I could just make out the Apakura. They had begun to counter-attack. It looked like every inch of the Apakura was either exploding or burning. It was wreathed in fire. Yet its belly guns were still firing; the huge impacts of its mass driver could still be felt. Chunks of ice fell from the ceiling with every hit. I watched it fire the rest of its missiles. Then the doors closed. Moments later we felt the missiles’ impacts. I glanced up at the scout mech next to me firing burst after burst. I’m not sure what response I expected from the composite and metal shell of the mech.

‘We’re through,’ Rannu shouted. As soon as the hole appeared we’d started taking fire from the corridor on the other side. Cat poked her railgun round the corner and fired but quickly had to take cover.

‘Strange!’ Cat shouted. The mech turned and knelt, putting one of its rotary railgun arms through the hole. I heard the rip as one hypersonic bang mixed with the next and I saw Strange move the arm about. When she’d withdrawn Rannu poked his head around the corner.

‘Clear!’ he shouted.

Strange was trapped in the vehicle bay. Atua Kahukahu was way too large to get through the hole and the external doors were shut.

‘Exit the mech! Come with us!’ Morag shouted. I could hear the desperation in her voice. The mech shook its head-shaped sensor array. I knew that the girl had had a short and tragic life. Now with the rest of her family almost certainly dead, it looked like it was going to come to a short and violent end. ‘Please!’ Morag begged. Strange’s sprint had been incredible. She’d made this part of the operation so much easier. She may have been a murderous disturbed mess, but she did not lack courage. Or maybe she wanted to die. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t leaving the mech.

‘We don’t have time for this. Move!’ Cat screamed at Morag.

We were through into the corridor. Advancing at a fast walk in two lines, Alpha team and then Bravo. Anyone who showed their face got shot. We passed the remains of the defenders that Strange had subdued. They were a sticky carpet and wallpaper. Humans reduced to their constituent parts at hypersonic speed. Pagan and Morag used their laser carbines to burn out any security lenses we saw.

We reached a second blast door. Merle used his smart frame with the microbes we’d taken from the Cemetery Wind caches. The rest of us covered our rear as the microbes did their job, exchanging shots with those defenders brave enough to poke their heads out of cover. Mudge’s leg was bleeding badly and he was moving with a limp. He’d taken a shard of ice in the initial bombardment. We covered Rannu while he rapidly applied an anti-coagulant/septic spray to the wound and affixed medgels and a pak.

As soon as the microbes had cut through, the defenders on the other side of the blast door and those behind us decided to mount a two-pronged attack.

Morag fired a frag grenade from the underslung grenade launcher on her laser carbine through the door and then ducked back into cover. Cat took hits as she stepped through the hole in the blast door, firing her railgun in a long burst. Merle followed her through and then Morag, firing three-beam bursts from her laser. Rannu fired a grenade at the defenders behind us and then Mudge and I laid down a withering hail of fire as Rannu and Pagan stepped through the hole. I snatched a frag off the front of my webbing, primed it by hand and threw it back down the corridor before stepping through the hole. Mudge backed through the hole firing.

In the next corridor Cat, Merle and Morag were already advancing in line, firing short bursts and single shots at anything that moved in front of them. Pagan, Rannu, Mudge and I followed, frequently checking behind us.

Two blast doors in, we were well and truly trapped in a huge building full of thousands of angry, frightened, well-armed people and probably members of the Black Squadrons too.

The isolated system had to be well defended, which meant going deep into the building. Which meant going through secure points like the blast doors. The microbes were the only things that could be trusted to go through them reliably but they took time. Presumably guided by Demiurge, the defenders soon caught on to this. They would be waiting for us every time we reached a door, and every time we got through. At each door we met more resistance as they became more organised.

We were starting to see individual members of the Black Squadrons now. We could recognise them by the way they carried themselves and their gear. Despite their reputed healing abilities they seemed as reluctant to get hit as any other soldier. Particularly when they had rail or plasma weapons fired at them.

All of us were wounded now. Cat, always first through to suppress the opposition, was bleeding badly from multiple wounds but still up and fighting. For once I hadn’t been hit too badly and adrenalin and drugs kept me soaring above the pain.

We found it when we got through the final blast door and into the central protected area of the Citadel. At first I thought the ice was black, but it was transparent. On the other side of the ice were what looked like veins, arteries and other body parts all connected to form some massive organism. It was unmistakably Themtech but transformed into what looked like a warped version of some kind of Earth biology. The warm wind blowing through the corridors made me feel like I was being breathed on. The organs behind the ice seemed to move and beat with some kind of inner pulse. Despite the fact that we were in a combat situation all of us slowed.

‘What the fuck?’ Cat wondered.

‘It’s processing machinery for the raw materials that the roots gather — air, heat, sewage, etcetera,’ Pagan told us.

‘We need to keep moving!’ Merle snapped.

‘Trippy,’ Mudge said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. He sounded subdued. I glanced over him. He did not look happy.

We were close to the conference room now. We moved through more corridors surrounded by the organic machinery. I wondered how people could even think of this mockery as life, let alone make it work on such a scale. But none of what I had seen prepared me for what was round the next corner.

We rounded the corridor and this time, sunk into the ice, we saw people. All of them looked like they had once been hackers. All of them had been shorn of their hair and were naked. All of them were inside the ice of the walls and ceiling and connected through their plugs, and more obvious violations of their flesh, via tendrils to the machinery.