Gavin Smith: Veteran

Too much good whisky, the real stuff made in the distilleries out in the National Park, had caused my hangover. I sat up on the cot in the porta-cube, massaging my throbbing temple with my left arm, the one that was still flesh. The matt-black prosthetic right arm reached for my cigarettes. Like the whisky, the cigarettes were the good stuff, hand-made somewhere in the Islamic Protectorate.

I lit the cigarette with my antique trench lighter, a family heirloom, apparently. Family. What were my parents thinking when they had me? The war was already thirty years old then. Why was anyone having children? Mind you, they’d been patriotic, probably thought it was their duty to breed so their offspring could grow up, get recruited, indoctrinated, chopped, augmented, mangled, chewed up and spat out to be a burden on society. I wasn’t on active duty so I liked to consider myself a burden. I inhaled the first pointless lungful of smoke of the day. My internal filters and scrubbers removed all the toxins and anything interesting from the cigarette, turning my expensive vice into little more than an unpleasant affectation. It’s these little luxuries, I thought, that separate me from the rest of the refuse. When it came down to it, the hustling, the leg breaking, scheme racing and pit fighting was just to make enough euros to augment my paltry veteran’s pension. After all, what’re a few bruises and contusions if it means good whisky, cigarettes, drugs, old movies and music, and of course the booths.

I considered starting drinking again as I had little on that day. A quick scan of the cramped plastic cube that I existed in told me that I had drank more than I thought I had last night. Which would explain the constant pain in my skull.

‘Shit,’ I muttered to the morning. I thought about checking my credit rating but decided that would just upset me further. A search of my jeans turned up some good old-fashioned black-economy paper euros. I’d won them for second place at the pit fight in Fintry. I’d been better than the kid who beat me but the kid had been dangerously wired, dangerously boosted and hungrier than me. I reckoned he had maybe another six months before his central nervous system was fried. He’d probably been fighting with the cheap enhancements to feed his family.

I’d just wanted to get drunk. I counted the money, stubbing the cigarette out in the already-full ashtray. I had enough to spend a day in the booths. Almost mustering a smile at this good luck I dragged on my jeans, strapped on my boots and shrugged on the least dirty T-shirt I could find with a cursory search. Finally I pulled on my heavy tan armoured raincoat. I ran a finger through my sandy-coloured shoulder-length hair; it was getting too long. I tied it back into a short ponytail. Sunglasses over the black lenses that used to be my eyes and ready to face another day. Ready to face it because I was going to the booths.

The Rigs were so poor that we didn’t even have advertising. It had started before the last Final Human Conflict over two hundred and fifty years ago. Apparently there had once been fields of fossil fuels in the North Sea and these huge rusting metal skeletons had been platforms designed to harvest the fuel. When their day was done they had been towed into the harbour to be dismantled at the Dundee docks. When they had stopped dismantling them the Tay had just become a dumping ground. More and more had come until they filled the river and you could walk from Dundee to Fife on them. Provided you knew how to look after yourself.

Quickly they had become a squatters’ heaven for people largely considered surplus by the great and the good. This of course included veterans – vets. I stepped out onto the planks of the makeshift scaffolding that ran between the stacked, windowless, hard plastic cubes that signified my middle-class status in the Rigs. Off to my right Dundee was a bright glow in comparison to the sparse lighting on the Rigs.

Lying on the ground by the door to the cube was a young boy, no older than thirteen. He was unconscious. A victim of the intrusion countermeasures that I’d added to the cube to stop myself from getting ripped off any more than was strictly necessary. I sighed and pulled a stim patch out of my coat pocket and placed it on the kid’s arm. Scarring over the boy’s chest told me that he’d already fallen victim to Harvesters once.

‘Wake up,’ I said, shaking the boy. ‘You want to get harvested again?’ I asked him. Startled eyes shot open and the kid backed away from me so quickly he almost went off the scaffolding and into the liquid pollution that passed for the Tay these days. I watched him as he got up and ran off.

‘And don’t try and rip me off again!’ I shouted redundantly, before wasting some more money and lighting up another cigarette.

It was a hot night. Quickly sweat began to stick my clothes to my flesh. I cursed the malfunctioning coolant system in my armoured coat. I could’ve done without the coat but that was an invitation to get rolled. My dermal armour was good but not a patch on the coat. It covered me from neck to ankle with slits in the appropriate places to allow me access to weapons, had they not all been locked down. I could get the coolant system fixed but I only had just enough money for a day in the booth.

I kept my head down as I ran the gauntlet of begging vets. I tried to ignore the staring infected empty eye sockets, the scarred bodies and missing limbs of the decommissioned cyborg vets who did not have the cash to pay for civilian replacements for the enhancements that had been removed. Head down, collar up, I considered turning on my audio dampeners to filter their pleas out.

‘Not today, brothers,’ I muttered to myself as I strode by. It could just as easily have been me there had I not made special forces. The augmentations and the training I’d been given were just too expensive and bespoke to throw away on a human scrap heap like the other vets. I’d been canny enough to arrange a military contract that had not rendered me a lifelong slave, but even after my term was up they still had the right to call me back as a reserve. Despite the dishonourable discharge I was still on the books (though no one ever really came off) as part of the wild-goose-chasing XI units, but they were largely a joke.

There had once been a disastrous attempt at dumping ex-special forces types into space. This was cheaper than paying our paltry pensions and it meant we couldn’t go home and become really well trained and dangerous burdens on society. However, a change in policy meant we were still considered valuable enough to remain whole, even if that whole was mostly plastic and alloy. Of course all the most lethal stuff was locked down until they needed it.

I glanced down at the locks just behind the knuckles on each of my hands. There was another lock on the shoulder of my prosthetic right arm and I could always feel the inhibitor in one of my plugs at the base of my skull that dampened my wired reactions. In many ways the dampener was the worst. Reactions like I’d had when I’d been in the SAS made you feel like you were on a different plane of existence to the rest of pedestrian humanity. Giving that up had been hard. I still felt like I was walking through syrup sometimes.

Hamish looked after the booths. Hamish was revolting. He had a thick curly beard and a mass of naturally grown, curly, dirty, matted hair. He was naked, filthy and fat; eating some kind of greasy processed confectionery in the armoured cage from where he overlooked the sense booths. I tried hard to suppress my disgust at the man, whose foul odour I was managing to smell through armoured mesh. Nobody ever saw Hamish leave or sleep. He always seemed to be here. His bulk was such that he probably couldn’t leave if he wanted to.