Gavin Smith - War in Heaven

My head jerked round to stare at her. How fucking bored and jaded was she? She leaned in and kissed me. I tried not to think of Morag as I returned the kiss. Or rather I tried to think about all the things about Morag that angered me.

Anger was the emotion of this fuck. And that’s all it was, a fuck. Watching your partner through thermographics during sex can be beautiful. Looking at the colours and how they shift and change as they become hotter. The internal blush of sex. In this case I did it so I didn’t have to look at her.

She was wild in bed but less than happy when I called her Morag. There was screaming and slamming of doors. I didn’t care. I had the rest of a bottle of Glenmorangie to drink. The bed looked like someone had been murdered in it. I should have got my injuries sorted out but I was so tired.

Of course they were Spetsnaz. Who else could they be? And we owed them big time. Lieutenant Vladimir Skirov and his Vucari. The name was from some ancient Russian werewolf myth. Skirov and his people claimed that they weren’t try-too-hards who wanted to be scary but rather that the idea of warewolves, as they called themselves, made sound tactical sense. Having seen them in action I could see what they meant. The physiological changes that allowed them to run on all fours made them a lot faster. They had heavily augmented arms for the running, which gave them a lot of power in hand-to-hand, particularly with their steel-claw-tipped fingers. Their maws also gave them an edge in hand-to-hand combat. Assuming you didn’t mind getting a mouthful of what you’d bitten, and these guys didn’t.

The thing was, however, that Russian cybernetics and prosthetics, particularly military ones, where built for function and power rather than looks and finesse. They looked less like the sort of werewolves you’d see in horror vizzes, immersions and on street-gang augmentations, and much more like mechanical, faintly canine monstrosities. Mudge had told Skirov this earlier, which had caused Skirov to shoot vodka from his nostrils he was laughing so hard. Russians had an odd sense of humour.

They also drank a lot. Vladimir had told us proudly that, after combat, the biggest cause of casualties in the Russian armed forces was drinking non-beverage alcohol. I think a lot of what they drank was the fuel for alcohol-burning combat vehicles.

We owed the Vucari. This meant that we’d spent a week engaging in a fine tradition of the Regiment. Stealing. In this case every bit of alcohol we could find to say thank you. There was no doubt in any of our minds that without the timely presence of these cheerful Russian psychos we would have been dead.

We’d drunk to Dorcas. We’d drunk to the Spetsnaz who’d died on their patrol. Mudge had even suggested drinking to my arm. We’d drunk a lot.

Saturday night found us in the NCOs’ mess. Fortunately the lieutenant was not too proud to drink with enlisted and NCOs. I suspected he’d drink with the Berserks if they asked. The mess was a partially bombed-out bunker, a twisted labyrinth of tunnels with various chambers used for drinking. The deeper parts belonged to special forces and you took your life in your hands straying into them unless you happened to be a very pretty squaddie on a date with someone hard enough to look after you.

The cybrids weren’t Spetsnaz, they were Cossacks originally from southern Russia. The Cossacks often supported Russian special ops in much the same way the Special Forces Support Group did for British special forces and the Rangers did for the American Delta Force. They were lead by Captain Kost Skoropadsky. He was young and didn’t seem as big a wanker as many officers. He mainly kept quiet, and despite his higher rank tended to defer to Vladimir. The cybrids had removed their horse bodies and had attached cybernetic legs to become bipeds. I think they felt a little uncomfortable.

In the wake of the Organizatsiya’s takeover of the Russian Federation the Cossacks had rebelled and set up their own autonomous state of Cossackia. While Cossack regiments still fought with the Russian army, if they met Spetsnaz on the streets of Moscow there would probably be bloodshed as memories were long in that part of the world. The rebellion had badly bloodied both sides. However, these particular Cossacks were descendants of colonists on Sirius. The plains of Sirius, before the war at least, were close enough to the steppes of their homeland. They had bred horses before They had come, and when They had come the Cossacks did what they always did: they fought.

The cybrid centaur bodies had been developed to aid their horse ranching. They were capable of speeds comparable to many wheeled vehicles and had the ability to go places that wheeled vehicles just couldn’t. The Cossacks had soon found a new use for their cybrid bodies.

Kost told me that he had never even seen a real horse. They had all been killed before he was born. Sometimes he would go to the sense booths and go riding or just stroke one. He wondered if they had got their smell right.

The dogs were called Tosa-Inus, and were extensively modified Japanese fighting dogs. One of them had his head in Vladimir’s lap and he was scratching the animal behind its ears. I liked dogs. We’d been lucky enough to have one as a child. It was a working dog, a Border collie, but these were scary. They followed the Spetsnaz everywhere and were utterly silent. Vladimir explained that they’d had their vocal cords cut. I reached down to rub the back of one of their heads. The dog opened an eye and looked at me. The eye was a matt-black plastic lens, just like mine.

In some ways it was horrible that they were used as weapons but there was something comfortable about their presence here. It was like a parody of normality.

Service in the Spetsnaz practically guaranteed you a high-ranking enforcer position within the Organizatsiya. Many of Vladimir’s people were stripped to the waist and proudly sporting tattoos. Hundred of years ago they would have been prison tattoos, but to go to prison in Russia you have to commit a crime that the Organizatsiya did not approve. Most never made it to prison.

Mudge, who’d had to fight for his place in the mess and had nearly died in doing so, had pulled. Frankly, the huge warewolf Spetsnaz looked terrifying.

‘Won’t it be a bit like bestiality?’ I drunkenly asked him.

‘Yes!’ he shouted with altogether too much enthusiasm. I took this moment to head to the bar with some of my hard-earned back pay. I made my way through the crowd, knowing I was going to have to bargain to get reasonable-quality vodka. I say reasonable-quality — something that wouldn’t make you sterile. It was lucky that our eye implants meant we couldn’t go blind.

I glanced over to the corner and saw Buck and Gibby. They were a mess of dreadlocks and beards. Their dusters and hats were thrown over nearby chairs and girls and boys of the R amp;R regiment were entertaining them. I turned away trying to suppress my distaste. It wasn’t just that the R amp;R regiment made me uncomfortable, though they did. I preferred the full sensory immersion porn of the booths. Buck and Gibby were with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as the Night Stalkers. They were superb pilots who flew missions in support of special operations. Except these two were chauffeurs for our nominal commanding officer Major Rolleston and his pet killer Josephine Bran, the Grey Lady. If Buck and Gibby were here, that meant that Rolleston and Bran were here, which in turn meant something shitty was about to happen to us.

After some bartering, cajoling and threats, I got the drinks and made my way back towards our table, carrying a number of bottles. This was possible because I’d also got my new arm. It was superb. High-spec, fantastic flesh/prosthetic neural interface; it pretty much felt like part of my body. The tactile sensors were high spec and it had integral sheaths for four new knuckle blades. Best of all it had a smartlinked but independently tracking and firing shoulder-mounted laser.