War in Heaven

by Gavin G. Smith

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

The high-powered sequel to VETERAN sees an unlikely hero make an even more unlikely return to take the reader back into a vividly rendered bleak future. But a bleak future where there are still wonders: man travelling out into the universe, Bladerunneresque cities hanging from the ceilings of vast caverns, aliens that we can barely comprehend. Gavin Smith writes fast-moving, incredibly violent SF thrillers but behind the violence and the thrills lies a carefully thought out story and characters who have far more to them than first meets the eye. Never one to avoid controversy Gavin Smith nevertheless invites you to think beyond the initial shock of what you have just read. But in the meantime? Another fire-fight, another chase another flight of imagination.

Release date: September 15, 2011

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 523

Sample

There’s nothing good about being buried in a pile of bodies for seventy-two hours. Try to ignore the stench. Try to ignore what soggy, rotting flesh feels like against you. Try to ignore the feel of larvae hatching and crawling around, particularly when the maggots make their way under your inertial armour. Try to ignore the creeping cold. Try to ignore the cramp from staying in the same position for that long. Try to ignore the post-mortem movements of the dead guys you’re bunked up with. Three days of speeding and sleep deprivation, try to ignore the obscene urge to giggle.

‘Still, it could be worse – it could be raining.’ Try to ignore Mudge breaking comms silence to highlight the added misery of the driving rain. Rain that was causing us to sink into a soup of mud, flesh and body parts. He only did it because we were close to being compromised. Still fucking irritating. Unprofessional. A grin spread across my face at the thought of being unprofessional and I just managed to stifle the urge to burst out laughing.

Try not to ignore what you’re doing and where you are. That was made easier by Them. They were helping us remember by taking the bodies from the piles They had made and impaling them on spikes of metal cut from the warehouse walls of the overrun supply depot. They were arranging the impaled, mutilated dead in a spiral pattern.

An attractive arrangement, both industrious and difficult to ignore.

However, the more bodies They spiked, the closer They got to finding us, buried under the corpses. This was an issue. Though if I was honest I was more concerned with the tenacious maggot that seemed dead set on crawling up my arse, but then sleep deprivation was making me giddy and the maggot tickled.

It had been a big push as part of a planet-wide offensive. The depot had been twenty-five miles behind our lines. The trenches had buckled and They had surged through and kept going. We were struggling to retreat fast enough.

The depot had been a major one. Over two thousand people had worked here. It had cargo mechs, road and rail links and facilities for heavy cargo shuttles. It had also contained all the food and ammunition for that part of what had been the front. They had walked through it.

Then some bright spark in Command, who I can only assume has no knowledge of special forces and what they are for, tasked us to recce the depot. Before we got there I could have told him that it was overrun with Them. Hell, Command could probably have got a shot of it from orbit if they had tried hard enough.

A hairy gunship ride. A night insertion, in the short night of a planet in a binary system, and then a hard tab to set up an Observation Post. The OP set-up had not gone well, the area was too heavily compromised. Hence the buried in bodies and hiding rather than any form of useful recce. It was just a matter of who was going to be compromised first. I was pretty sure it was going to be me. I felt that lucky.

It wasn’t. It was Gregor.

Shaz, our quiet Sikh signalman from Leicester, brought the tac net up. Immediately windows showing the view from each of the other seven members of the Wild Boys appeared in the Internal Visual Display of my cybernetic eyes. Gregor’s guncam was kind of interesting. It seemed to be pointing down at the mud and corpses as if it was being held off the ground and shaken.

There was an explanation from Mudge’s feed. The odd-looking journalist’s camera eyes showed Gregor being held up by his neck. The Berserk holding him was using a pincer-like appendage on its weapon gauntlet to try to crack open the hard armour breastplate that Gregor was wearing. Attempting to get at the meat. It was like watching someone trying to open a tin can, an angry, struggling tin can.

I don’t know why it surprised me. I had been expecting it. I was still startled when the Berserk pulled away the corpses covering me. Did I hesitate? It felt like it, but time moves differently when your reflexes are boosted as high as mine. Still, it felt like I looked at the Berserk’s off-kilter appearance for a long time. They were mostly humanoid, I guess, a kind of chitinous armour over a smooth black material that looked like some kind of solid liquid. They had heads but no visible features.

It didn’t even have the common courtesy to look startled at finding a heavily armed SAS trooper under the pile of corpses, but then we were already compromised, and if one knows they all know.

I was aware of Mudge firing his converted AK-47 at the Berserk holding Gregor off the ground. The smartlink putting the cross hairs, in theory, where the bullets were going to hit.

‘Watch your fire,’ Gregor sub-vocalised across the tac net. He sounded calmer than I would have with a Berserk trying to peel me and an overexcited junkie journalist firing in my general vicinity. Still, I had my own problems.

I raised the Heckler & Koch Squad Automatic Weapon and pointed it at the Berserk and then made a mistake. I fired the underslung grenade launcher at the alien. The chambered grenade was a thirty-millimetre High Explosive Armour Piercing grenade. At point-blank range, the velocity and the armour-piercing tip of the grenade meant that it punched straight through the Berserk, leaving a hole I could see grey sky through.

I felt that if the Berserk had any sense of humour it could at least have done a double take at the sizeable hole in its chest, but it just kept reaching for me. I pulled the trigger on the weapon again, but the grenade launcher’s unreliable semi-automatic feed system jammed. The Berserk’s long talon-like fingers wrapped around my face, its clawed nails trying to break through my implanted subcutaneous armour. I worked the pump on the grenade launcher, ejecting the jammed round and chambering another.

I started screaming. The Berserk’s nails had penetrated the armour and blood was pissing down my face. It hurt. That was reassuring. It’s nice to still have nerve endings, I guess.

I pulled the trigger again. A flechette grenade. A better choice. In a hail of hundreds of razor-sharp, needle-like penetrators, the Berserk ceased to exist. That was all right – there were a lot more.

I moved into a kneeling firing position. Almost absent-mindedly I started firing. It was a target-rich environment. Or, as we preferred to say, we were surrounded, by fucking thousands of Them.

Squeeze the trigger until that Berserk falls over. Move the weapon, fire some more. Repeat until overrun and you’re sitting on your very own rusty metal spike.

While my hands and smartlink were occupied I tried to get an understanding of the situation. Frankly, it was shit. The rest of the patrol were rising from their piles of bodies covered in viscera and looking like monsters out of some pre-Final Human Conflict horror viz.

Gregor was gamely and repeatedly stabbing the Berserk who had him in the head with his triangular-bladed sword bayonet. Black liquid was spurting out and covering Gregor’s arm with each violent thrust. The Berserk dropped him. Gregor landed on his feet and kicked the Berserk, knocking it back slightly. This gave him just enough room to bring his railgun to bear on its gyroscopic harness. He triggered a short burst at point-blank range into the Berserk. Destroying it. Turning it into a puddle of black liquid junk of whatever passed for DNA with Them.

‘We’re fucked!’ Mudge shouted helpfully. ‘Again!’ He was laughing. I found myself envious of his drugs. Fire, change target, fire again. I was taking multiple hits from black light beams and shards, but the integrity of my armour seemed to be holding.

‘Nobody dies until we’re out of ammo!’ I shouted. Brilliant leadership, I thought.

I could hear Shaz’s voice over the tac net. He’d recorded a request for fire support and evac and put it on repeat, as he was busy. He was slowly backing towards me, firing short burst after short burst from his laser carbine. Each hit, and he couldn’t miss here, turned Berserk flesh into black superheated steam. His voice was like a mantra but it wasn’t very calming. It was an old song we’d sung time and time again. Our request was so futile that Command weren’t even granting it the dignity of a reply. They were just ignoring it.

Mudge’s tactical assessment seemed right on the money. Not bad for someone who was ostensibly non-military. Fucked we were. Most of Their forces were still trying to batter the fuck out of our forces, who couldn’t retreat fast enough and were periodically being overrun.

We had a lot of Berserks doing what Berserks do. They ran at us firing shard and black light weapons with a view to closing with us and tearing us apart. This made Them easy to kill but eventually we’d run out of ammo or they’d overwhelm us. On top of that I could see a couple of Their Walkers, large biomechanical mechs, moving towards us. Even a few of Their ground-effects armoured vehicles wanted in on our imminent deaths. If we were really lucky, then the GE vehicles would be carrying yet more Berserks. All of Them looked like indeterminate shadows in the rain.

We were laying down blistering fire all around us but were slowly being herded into a last-stand situation. I put the cross hairs from my smartlink over one of Their Walkers and used that as lock for both the Light Anti Armour missiles in their tubes on either side of my backpack. The two Laa-Laas launched themselves into the air. I switched to the next target and fired another burst from my SAW.

Something bumped into my back. I didn’t need to look to know it was Bibs – Bibby Sterlin, the patrol’s other railgunner. She was a powerfully built thrill-seeker from a nice middle-class corporate family. Like Mudge she didn’t have to be here.

Bibs let off stuttering burst after stuttering burst from the support weapon. Belt titanium-cored penetrator rounds were propelled at hypersonic speeds by the electromagnetic coil in the heavy weapon’s barrel. When they hit a Berserk it was like watching an angry child tear up paper, only very, very fast.

‘This fucking sucks!’ she shouted, somewhat redundantly, I thought.

‘You sound surprised!’ I shouted back. My sound filters were struggling to deal with the rapid hypersonic bangs from the railgun. ‘Reloading! Aaah fuck!’ My IVD went blank as the black light beam hit me under my helmet, turned my skin to steam and partially melted the subcutaneous armour on my face. A shard round caught me in the leg just below my armoured kneepad. The inertial armour didn’t harden quick enough to stop it and the round pierced my subcutaneous armour as well. I saw actual blood. Again.

Bibs moved around to my side and covered me as I ejected the spent cassette from my SAW and rammed home another two hundred vacuum-packed, caseless, nine-millimetre long, armour-piercing hydrostatic rounds. I was firing again.

Shaz was next to me now. Superheated air exploded as he fired burst after burst from his laser carbine.

‘Reloading!’ he shouted as he ejected the battery. I shifted my field of fire to compensate. He rammed another battery home behind the bullpup-configuration carbine’s handgrip and immediately started firing again.

David ‘Brownie’ Brownsword, the world’s quietest Scouser and our medic, was firing his weapon. He was covering Ashley Broadin, a tough, bald, bullet-headed Brummie and our combat engineer, as she ran to the closest approximation of cover she could find. She then returned the favour. It looked like they were wading through corpses. More Berserks were sprinting towards us.

On the run I watched Brownie raise his SAW and make a lock with the smartlink. Both his Laa-Laas launched, and I was aware of their spiralling contrails as they flew into one of Their GE armoured vehicles and exploded, crippling it. But more Berserks were spilling out of the back.

Mudge skidded in behind me. He and Gregor had been conducting fire-and-manoeuvre fun and games similar to Ash and Brownie’s.

‘Do you know what would be fucking useful?’ he asked. I’m guessing it was rhetorical. He was on one knee firing burst after burst to either side of Gregor, who was wading through corpses as fast as he could to get to us.

‘Watch your field of fire, Mudge,’ Gregor sub-vocalised again over the tac net.

‘If I had Laa-Laas as well. Wouldn’t another two missiles be useful in situation like this?!’

‘Time and place, Mudge!’ I shouted as I fired my last grenade, hoping it was a HEAP. It was fragmentation. I got a couple of Berserks but didn’t dent the Walker that was about to establish firepower superiority all over us.

Mudge was right but it wasn’t my decision. Command were pissed off at us enough for having a civvy around. They weren’t going to encourage him by equipping him with heavy weapons.

Dorcas was the final one to reach us. The loud-mouthed marksman, on exchange from the Australian SAS, skidded in next to me, displacing Bibs. He endeared himself further by showering us with a wash of mud and rotten viscera.

‘I was hoping to stay hidden,’ he said grinning. I knew he didn’t mean it. I was pretty sure that adrenalin, combat drugs and bravado were all that was covering up his pant-shitting fear of imminent death. Just like the rest of us.

Dorcas’s sniper railgun was still disassembled in its sheath across his back. There was no need for finesse here. He had his Steyr carbine and was doing what the rest of us were doing: finding the nearest target in his field of fire, hitting it with burst after burst until it fell over, then moving to the next target. Anything got too close then he fired the underslung grenade launcher to give us a bit more breathing space.

We were bunching up. It meant we were a target for the first area-effect weapon They brought to bear on us, but we didn’t have much of a choice. They were herding us and didn’t care about casualties.

The amount of hot flying metal we were putting into the air was awesome. At the end of the day, however, special forces or not, we were infantry, and there was only so much hardware we could bring to bear.

Gregor was concentrating his fire on the Walker, keeping it off balance, the impacts from his railgun causing ripples all up its strange, almost liquid, biomechanical flesh. He finished it off with both his vertically launched Laa-Laas. Immediately another one strode into view.

We were gone. It was all over now bar getting rid of our ammunition before we died.

Still, it could be worse. It had stopped raining after three days.

Why was I thinking about Dog 4 again? Just another gunfight, though it had been a hairy one. Another fucking last stand. My arm ached. The prosthetic one.

‘It’s the purity!’ Mudge was practically howling at me. ‘I mean, not the purity of the powder. This shit is probably cut with rat poison. But the colour, the whiteness of it, so, so virginal.’ He was very excited about the large pile of coke he had on a piece of plastic on his lap.

‘It’s white because it’s bleached,’ I growled. I was desperately trying to find my way through the sandstorm. For such a large disorganised convoy you’d think that Crawling Town would move slower. Instead I had to rely completely on information from the four-wheel-drive muscle car’s sensors.

The three-dimensional topographic map on my Internal Visual Display told me where all the surrounding vehicles were. Hopefully. They all looked unreasonably close to me. All I could see was a solid-looking wall of airborne dust and dirt. In theory Rannu was out in that shit on a bike. Every so often a huge wheel from one vehicle or another would appear close to our car and cause eddies in the dirt.

Mudge snorted a line of the white powder. Cold turkey had been a bad, bad time for him

‘You really missed that, didn’t you?’ I asked.

‘You’ve no idea, mate. You want to do a line?’

‘No, Mudge. I don’t really feel like switching off my nasal filters in the middle of a huge poisonous dust cloud.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged and did another line up the other nostril.

We’d already seen a number of accidents. Well, less accidents more automotive Darwinism. Mainly smaller vehicles, like ours, misjudging their place in the scheme of things and getting ground up by larger, much heavier vehicles with bigger wheels/tracks. I wasn’t surprised that accidents were the number-one cause of premature death in Crawling Town.

Still, in the body-count stakes car accidents had fearsome competition from the toxic and sometimes irradiated environment of the Dead Roads. I’d found this out the hard way the last time I had visited. The Dead Roads was the blasted and polluted wasteland that ran down the eastern seaboard of the United States. The result of the Final Human Conflict some two hundred and fifty plus years ago and unregulated industrial pollution in the wake of the country’s financial collapse.

Coming in a surprising third for cause of death in Crawling Town was the internecine feuding between the various nomad gangs, while we were here to see if we could increase the number of deaths caused by violence. I had an old and cold reason to do this. A score to settle.

I had been happily enjoying my retirement from getting shot at in the colonies fighting in the never-ending war against Them. No, that’s a lie. I was miserable, but I really didn’t know any better and so was everyone else. Also it was the sort of misery that was easy to cope with. Then my old CO, Major Rolleston, a thoroughgoing bastard of the highest order, had decided to complicate my life by sending me after a Them infiltrator. We had assumed it was a Ninja – squaddie parlance for one of Their stealth killing machines. One had killed most of the Wild Boys, my old SAS squad.

It wasn’t a Ninja. That would have been less complicated, though more fatal. It was an Ambassador. It was being sheltered by a group of prostitutes who worked in the Rigs, the shanty town made up of derelict oil rigs in the Tay River off the shore of Dundee. That was how I met Morag and really, really complicated my life by disobeying Rolleston. Fleeing with Morag to Hull (I only get to see the nicest places, a holdover tradition from my army days) with the downloaded essence of Ambassador, we agreed, sort of, to help Pagan, a computer hacker, create an electronic god out of humanity’s communications network.

Rolleston was of course delighted with my disobedience, betrayal and apparent treason against humanity and dispatched all sorts of interesting people to find and kill us. This included, but was not limited to, Rannu Nagarkoti, a Ghurkha ex-SAS man, who was currently riding through the sandstorm somewhere, and the Grey Lady, Ms Josephine Bran, the scariest operator in the scary world of black ops.

Hull got burned. Pagan, Morag and I fled to New York. I came a close second in my arse-kicking at the hands of Rannu. He then joined us. I’m sure there are easier ways. I met my old friend Howard Mudgie – Mudge to his mates. We also got the support of Balor, the insane pirate king of the ruins of New York, though this had taken some persuasion and, for reasons still unclear, me getting the aforementioned beating at the hands of Rannu. Balor was a heavily augmented cyborg who had had his body sculpted to look like a sea demon from some old mythology. Mudge put us on to two pilots I really wanted to speak to, Gibby and Buck. They’d both worked the same shady world of special ops that I had. They had been Rolleston and the Grey Lady’s taxi drivers, the taxi being a heavily armed and armoured vectored-thrust gunship. Gibby and Buck had been the last to see my best friend Gregor on Dog 4 after he’d been infected by one of Their Ninjas during its death throws. The two pilots were hiding out in Crawling Town. That’s why we’d come here the first time, and some bad shit had happened to me for no good reason I could think of.

Gibby and Buck had told us that they had taken Gregor to the Atlantis Spoke, one of the city-sized orbital elevators that ring the planet on the equator. We found Gregor in a lab deep below the surface of the ocean being experimented on by Rolleston’s employers, the Cabal. The dying Ninja had somehow joined with Gregor, transforming him into a hybrid form of humanity and Them. The Cabal were a shadowy group of upper-echelon corporate execs, military types and intelligence operatives. So we had some of the most powerful people in the world after us, and we were in the company of a human/Them hybrid and wanted for betraying the entire human race.

What we found out was that They had not started the war, as we had always been led to believe. It was us – or rather it was the Cabal. Not only had they started the war, but they had taught Them – who as far as I could make out were some kind of harmless vacuum-living space coral – to fight. They had done this through what Pagan called negative stimulus and what I call blowing the shit out of them.

So we’d been conned for sixty years into fighting a war that was manipulated so as not to end. I’m still a little hazy as to why. I’m guessing it had something to do with power, control, greed and all that good stuff. Mudge, however, claims it was to do with sexual inadequacy on the part of the members of the Cabal. Mudge puts a lot of the problems of people he doesn’t like down to that, though Morag did point out that the majority of the Cabal were male. The Cabal were also working on their own version of God called Demiurge. Only instead of guiding the net to sentience and electronic omniscience (a word I’m sure no self-respecting squaddie should be using as much as I have been) they just wanted to control it.

So as our situation got worse and worse we came up with more and more desperate plans. We decided to program God to always tell the truth but to be under nobody’s control. I know why we did this but often I feel it would be useful if we’d retained control of the electronic deity. We took over a media node in Atlantis at gunpoint and released God into the net. Now suddenly all information was available to everyone. Mudge then used the node to broadcast the evidence of the Cabal’s crimes against humanity and Them.

After a worldwide televised argument with Rolleston and Vincent Cronin, the Cabal’s corporate mouthpiece, the good Major and the Grey Lady made a concerted effort to kill us. In Buck’s case they succeeded. In what felt like a one-sided exchange of violence it also appeared that the Major was somehow augmented with Themtech. He was pretty much walking through railgun fire.

A lot of pissed-off people’s secrets had been revealed. There were also a lot of people baying for the Cabal’s blood. As most of the Cabal were fat old men being kept alive by machinery they weren’t too hard for the vigilante crowds to deal with.

Ambassador had told us that They wanted peace. We wanted peace. Hurray, the war’s over. Except Rolleston and Cronin got away. They escaped in next-generation frigates using Themtech, supported by frighteningly good hackers who we think were using technology derived from Project Demiurge. The frigates, which we’re now apparently calling the Black Squadrons, made for the four colonial systems of Sirius, Lalande, Barnard’s Star and Proxima. We believed they planned to take over the comms networks in each system with Demiurge, which would mean that they controlled the information in them, which would in turn help them take command of humanity’s colonial military. We also thought they were going to try and use a Themtech-derived biological agent developed by Project Crom to infect, subjugate and control Them in the Sirius system. And that is how I ended up going back there, my least favourite place but where my mind kept returning to.

We went to the Sirius system for other reasons. Maybe it was because I was dying of radiation poisoning at the time or maybe it was just because Morag really wanted to go. I was surprised by how it was actually worse this time than all my previous visits. Suited in Mamluk exo-armour we performed extravehicular activity – we exited a perfectly functional spacecraft and infiltrated the Dog’s Teeth. The Dog’s Teeth is an asteroid belt and was home base to the largest concentration of Them in the Sirius system. Our plan was to find the Crom virus/spores and stop them from infecting Them.

Morag had a different plan. With the remnants of Ambassador living in her neural cybernetics, she wanted to communicate with Them. She left us.

What we didn’t know was that when Rolleston attacked us in the Spoke he had infected Gregor with Crom. He had effectively turned Gregor into a slave plague-bearing weapon. We got compromised. The billions of Them there decided to kill us. That I understood. Gregor attempting to assimilate and warp the flesh of Them and infect Them with the Crom virus so they could be controlled by Rolleston and Cronin was more of a surprise.

Balor died. He finally opened his bad old eye. Whatever weapon he had behind the patch nearly succeeded in killing Gregor. Nearly wasn’t enough. Still, the old monster had given himself the warrior’s ending he’d always wanted. It was Gibby who killed Gregor. He was flying the Spear, our ship. He’d forsaken stealth and flown into the Dog’s Teeth taking fire every inch of the way but managed to make it to Gregor and detonate his payload and engines. Sanitising the area. I’d never seen anything like what Balor or Gibby had done. I thought the days of actions like that had long since gone, if they’d ever really been.

So instead of looking at peace we were looking at war between humanity. More than two hundred and fifty years after we swore we’d never do this to ourselves again. After we’d decided that the cost was too great we were looking at one half of humanity fighting the other. And it was our fault. Actually it wasn’t; it was the Cabal’s. It was Rolleston’s and Cronin’s. We were just the catalyst.

Gregor’s betrayal had hurt. A lot. But even though the monster had had his warped features, it had been Rolleston’s demon – he had been programmed. My friend hadn’t done this. My friend had died in the Spoke when Rolleston had stabbed him in the head and injected Crom into his hybrid physiology. Rolleston had tried to kill me so many times. He badly needed to die. It wasn’t so much revenge, though that would be good. It just really needed doing, though not by me.

We’d played long odds and won. Or some of us had. By ‘won’ I mean we were still alive. We were on the eve of a new war between humans, but my fight was over. We’d more than done our bit surely? Someone else’s turn. It wasn’t just that I was tired of it, though I was. It was that I knew I was about one gunfight with someone who knew what they were doing from being dead. I’d never had much luck, none of us had – there wasn’t much around – but I’d pushed what I had way too far.

Morag disagreed. She wanted to see this through to the end. She used words that only the young and terminally optimistic use, like responsibility. Or maybe she wasn’t optimistic. Maybe she wanted to die. After all, she’d been sold into a life of prostitution by her mum for crystal. She’d had even less luck than the rest of us. Why push it? But she did. I couldn’t do it any more. I thought she would cry when I told her that. I didn’t want to make her cry, though God knows I’d done enough of that. It’s just nice to know there’s someone who cares enough, about anything, to still cry. But her eyes were cybernetic now. Like the rest of us, this never-fucking-ending war was making her sell her humanity piece by cybernetic piece.

My war was over.

Well maybe there was just one last bit of business. One of the tribes of Crawling Town were a bunch of pricks called the Wait, a skinhead monastic order originally from Oregon. They followed some bullshit pre-FHC credo to do with racial purity. For some bizarre reason they seemed to think that the white race is different from all the others. As if we didn’t have enough reasons to kill each other – food, money, anger, etc. – we apparently have to go and invent completely spurious ones.

These arseholes were led by a nasty, should-have-been-aborted, piece-of-shit hacker called Messer. He’d decreed that I wasn’t racially pure. I’m a quarter Thai and three-quarters Scots, more proud of both now. His response to my lack of purity was to crucify me on the back of a dune buggy and have me taken for a ride through a high-radiation nuke crater. I caught a big dose. He’d killed me slowly. Left me to die painfully of radiation poisoning.

Morag, Pagan, Mudge and Rannu rescued me with the aid of some of the lords of Crawling Town. One of these was Papa Neon, head of Big Neon Voodoo, the most powerful gang in Crawling Town. The other was Mrs Tillwater, a borderline serial killer and possible cannibal. She ran the First Baptist Church of Austin Texas, which, despite the name, was also a gang or possibly a woman’s auxiliary, maybe both. Because the Wait were a Crawling Town gang the rescue took the form of diplomacy. Well, diplomacy through the medium of gun-pointing and threats. We weren’t allowed to deal with the Wait violently because we were outsiders.

Mudge, Rannu and I were here to remedy their existence. My last battle.

A car appeared out of the dust in front of us. I braked slightly, watching the ghost of the sensor reading of the large truck directly behind me on the topographic map overlaid on my IVD. I didn’t want it to get close. The car in front demonstrated why.

I watched the driver swerve to avoid th