Gavin Smith: Veteran

‘You’ll know when that happens: I’ll have a railgun in my mouth,’ I said jokingly.

Mudge looked confused. ‘As a cock substitute?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to take some drugs now,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘What first?’

Mudge looked at the table, an expression of confusion on his face.

‘Mudge?’ I said uncertainly. Grinning again, he pointed at the pink pills.

‘I’m looking forward to the EVA. The right drugs, spending some quality time with just yourself and the void. Centring yourself. Remembering just how inconsequential you and your whole fucking race is.’

‘I admire your optimism,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I’m dreading it. I hate EVA. I nearly went mental on the Atlantis dive.’

‘Wrong drug, man,’ Mudge said.

‘That’s your answer to everything. What next?’

‘The two patches either side of the neck.’

‘That’s just to make me look stupid, right? They don’t actually do anything?’ I said, sticking the two patches where he’d suggested.

‘I mean Slaughter and then sensory deprivation. What did you think was going to happen?’ he asked.

‘You sold it to me.’

‘What people do with their own frontal lobes is their business. You’re an adult, man.’

‘How’d the others handle the dive?’ I asked as Mudge directed me to take some more pharmaceuticals.

‘Pagan was reading Moby Dick, Morag was listening to music and Rannu was meditating, like me,’ he said.

‘You weren’t meditating, you were high,’ I pointed out. He just shrugged. I gave everyone’s activities on the dive some thought.

‘How come everyone’s smarter than me?’ I finally asked Mudge.

‘You are pretty dumb,’ he agreed.

We took a lot of drugs, enough to almost feel alive. Well enough for me to walk anyway.

I had so much I wanted to say to Morag before we left. Before I died. But I knew when I was face to face with her I would lose the ability to put what I was thinking into words. And then for one reason or another we were never alone. Slowly I realised she was avoiding me. I thought she was still angry with me for trying to stop her from going, but when I finally managed to speak to her the look in her eyes told me otherwise. When I tried to speak she held her hand over my mouth.

‘We’ll talk when we get back,’ she said fiercely. I almost believed her.

I was up and walking. I didn’t feel ill – the drugs were hiding the sickness from me – I felt dissociated. It was nice, but had I felt less dissociated I would’ve been worried about feeling this way just before going into combat. On the other hand, what was there to worry about? I was dead anyway and so was everyone else. I had on my inertial undersuit and was carrying my pistols, more for comfort than anything else. If the Mamluk got breached it was all over. I was making my way towards the converted bomb bay.

Gibby had us running silent and deep, hanging back several hundred miles from the Dog’s Teeth, the huge asteroid belt almost halfway between Sirius A and B. It was theorised that the belt may have once been a planet that was crushed by the gravitational forces of the two stars back when Sirius B was in main sequence and the larger of the two. Gibby was sending us feed from the ship’s external lenses of the neighbourhood. The Dog’s Teeth was a mass of huge static-looking asteroids, many of them the size of small planetoids. Increasing magnification, I could see the organic material forming a connecting web between some of the asteroids. Increasing magnification further, I could see some of Their larger ships. The pale-blue light of Sirius B filtering through the belt illuminated the scene.

I entered Pagan’s cabin. He had stuck a liquid crystal thinscreen to the wall and was running some sophisticated image analysis programs trying to find a quiet place for us to insert. The hacker looked up at me as I entered, his dreadlocks swinging round as he did so. He had seemed old but vital to me when we’d met on the Avenues; now he looked tired and haggard – his age had truly caught up with him.

‘What’ve you got?’ I asked.

‘I’ve picked one route that seems as good as any with two backups, but without active scans I’m pretty much blind. I could be flying us into a death trap.’

I started laughing. ‘If I was you, I’d take that as a given.’

Pagan didn’t seem to find that at all funny. ‘I’m sending the coordinates to everyone now,’ he said, and I saw a message icon appear on my internal visual display. I’d download the information to the Mamluk’s navigation systems when I interfaced with it later.

‘You all right?’ I asked. Stupid question, I know, but it seemed that Pagan had something that he wanted to say.

‘This is bullshit, this whole thing. You know that, right? I mean this is all speculation. We’re running on nothing but Gregor’s say-so and Morag’s blind optimism, and Gregor hasn’t even hatched. We’ve got fuck all to go on and nothing to corroborate what he says.’

‘Where’s your faith?’ I asked, smiling.

Pagan swung round again to glare at me with his black lenses. ‘That’s not funny. Do you trust him? I mean the guy’s in a cocoon!’ He was trying to keep his voice down.

‘Yeah, I trust him,’ I said, not entirely sure I did. Gregor was so alien, so different to the guy who’d often saved my life. ‘What did God say?’ I asked.

Pagan muttered something under his breath and shook his head. God had been pretty low-key through most of our trip, something to do with limited processing power, but he was there in the ship’s systems.

‘What?’

‘God thinks that Gregor’s story is the most probable plan of action for the Cabal based on the information we have to hand,’ he said.

‘Well if God-’ I started.

‘God can be wrong,’ Pagan said flatly.

‘Heresy,’ I said, trying to hide a smile. ‘Your own creation as well.’

‘Why am I talking to you? He’s your best friend and she’s your lover.’

‘I’m not blind to what’s going on. I know this is pretty thin, but I’ve got nothing to lose. If you don’t want to go, don’t go,’ I said.

His head whipped up to glare at me. ‘I’m not going to leave you all in the lurch. I couldn’t live with myself. Besides, it looks like you need a hacker,’ he said, his voice tailing off bitterly.

‘Morag can do it,’ I said.

‘She’ll be too busy communing with the gods or walking on water or whatever,’ he said, not even trying to disguise the bitterness in his voice. Morag’s talent had so far outstripped his skills and years of experience; he felt redundant. I could identify with that.

Pagan had gone back to studying the images of the Teeth. I turned to leave. As I reached the door to his cabin I turned back to him.

‘I don’t want you to die, but I’m glad to have you with us.’

He looked up and seemed like he was about to say something but thought better of it and nodded.

I said, ‘Morag’s good at what she does, very good, and she’s smart, strong, funny and beautiful, and people are drawn to that. Attention may be focused on her at the moment because of those reasons, but we haven’t forgotten who did this, who made this happen, who created God and gave us another chance, even if we might not see the end result.’ I said. We had one of those awkward silences then, the sort of silence that accompanies men trying to be either nice or honest to each other.

Finally he nodded. ‘I’ll see you out there,’ he said.

‘He’s coming,’ Morag announced. The Spear had only been hanging in the sky in the middle of Themspace for two hours now. We were waiting in the converted bomb bay leaning on our mechs, getting more and more pissed off.