‘You broke that?’ he asked. His voice sounded small. He was genuinely scared. ‘How could you have broken that?’ he said more to himself than any of us. From what little I knew of hacking, if she had done what Pagan said she’d done then it was possible, hard but possible. The thing was it took a very long time. Morag stood up. She had tears in her eyes.
‘Is she an alien whore?’ Buck asked, pointing at Morag. This time he wasn’t quick enough to get out of her way. I heard his nose break and saw blood squirt down his beard.
‘Fucking bitch!’ he howled.
‘Here we go again,’ I muttered.
Buck reached for one of his revolvers. Rannu had a Glock in each of his hands. One was pointing at Buck, the other wasn’t exactly pointing at Gibby but was close enough for Gibby to get the message.
Morag turned on Rannu. ‘I told you I can look after myself!’ And she stormed off. Rannu let her get a way off and then started to follow at a safe distance, which I had to admit made me feel a little better. Mudge watched them go.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘What you want to do?’ I asked.
‘I want to go and get Gregor but I want to do it on more than the say-so of a teenage whore,’ he said. I felt angry but I felt more tired. I reached into what was left of one of my pockets, removed another stim patch and slapped it onto the wrist of my left arm.
‘Feeling all right?’ Mudge asked.
‘Brilliant. Don’t call her a whore again,’ I told him.
‘Your judgement’s affected. You’re not thinking straight.’
‘Fucking bitch broke my nose,’ Buck whined. We ignored him.
‘That’ll be the radiation sickness,’ I said.
‘No, that’ll be the girl,’ Mudge said. Gibby was watching us intently. ‘Look, even if she’s right and Gregor’s a hybrid, so what? That doesn’t mean he’s benevolent, that doesn’t mean he’s Gregor. It means you’ve got a trained special forces soldier with some of the capabilities of one of Their Ninjas. You want to release that?’
‘No I want to go and see it, him. Look, if that’s the case they’ll have him contained. We’ll put him out of his misery. It won’t be like Dog 4,’ I said. Mudge considered this and pointed after Morag.
‘We don’t even know whose side she’s on,’ he said. I think on some level I knew he was right. I also thought that this was one of the reasons I liked Mudge: he could be a wanker but he did force you to look at the truth.
‘I trust her,’ I said. It sounded false even to me and I wanted to believe it.
‘No, you want to fuck her, which is different.’
‘You fucking pussy,’ Buck said, pinching his nose to stem the blood.
Mudge looked up at the cyberbilly. ‘What?’
‘You go into Atlantis, what’s the worst that happens?’ he asked. ‘You get killed.’
‘No,’ Mudge corrected him. ‘The worst that happens is we get captured, get put into a sense booth and tortured for the next hundred years.’
‘So we shoot ourselves first,’ I said, grinning. ‘We’re not doing anything better.’
Mudge sighed and went to get another beer from Gibby’s cool box. ‘I really, really want to die of liver failure,’ he said as he opened the beer and downed it in one before helping himself to another.
‘You still have your original liver?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. Which would mean his artificial liver would be much more efficient at breaking down alcohol, like mine. It still let you get drunk because if it didn’t the British army would’ve mutinied in its entirety years ago, but it stopped the alcohol from doing permanent damage.
‘So how are you going to die of liver failure?’ I asked him.
‘I’m going to try very hard,’ he said. ‘We’re going to need Balor’s help.’
‘To die of liver failure?’ I asked, momentarily confused. Like I said, I wasn’t feeling the greatest. Mudge stared at me like I was an idiot.
‘We’ll help,’ Gibby said. I looked up at him in surprise, as did Mudge.
‘The hell we will!’ Buck shouted.
‘Oh come on now. Buck, she’s not the first whore who bust your nose,’ Gibby said.
‘Could everyone please stop calling Morag a whore?’ I said angrily.
‘Yeah, thanks for the offer, guys. You were so helpful the last time,’ Mudge said sarcastically.
‘You know we didn’t have a choice. You had to follow Rolleston’s orders when he gave them as well,’ Gibby said.
‘He’s right,’ I said.
‘Can we leave them somewhere dangerous?’ Mudge asked.
‘Fuck them!’ Buck shouted. He looked appalled at Gibby. ‘We ain’t helping them.’
Gibby turned on him. ‘We sold them out, man, you know that.’ Buck said nothing. ‘We have to make this right.’ Buck looked like he was about to argue but didn’t. Gibby had surprised me. I could understand me and Mudge and even Rannu being up for this. Mudge had his loyalty to the Wild Boys and Rannu to the Regiment, and that was something that rightly or wrongly we were indoctrinated with. Presumably Gibby had similar loyalty and indoctrination, but not to us, and that wasn’t what he was talking about anyway. He wanted to help us because he thought it was the right thing to do. He had nothing to gain from it. I wasn’t used to that kind of morality. Most of the time it was every man for himself, and most of the time it had to be that way to survive. The surprising thing was that Buck seemed to agree with Gibby, even though he was pissed off about it. I wondered where these two had picked up their values. Maybe they weren’t quite the arseholes I’d taken them for. We could probably use them if we were going to Atlantis – if nothing else, we’d need taxi drivers. I was beginning to form a plan but I’d need more intel.
‘Mudge?’ I said after thinking for a while.
‘Yeah?’
‘Can you stop trying to piss everyone off?’
‘No,’ he said, smiling. I looked over at Pagan. He was quiet and I assumed he’d been in the net, but he hadn’t. He looked scared.
‘You okay?’ I asked him. He just looked at me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d asked me to burn Morag at the stake.
I found Rannu standing away from one of the fires. Casually concealed.
‘Where is she?’ I asked. He nodded at the fire. Morag was standing by the fire but away from the rest of the people warming themselves. I walked towards her.
‘Jakob?’ Rannu said. I turned on him, assuming he was about to say something about Morag.
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I spat. He was mostly getting my spite from the previous conversation with everyone. Rannu remained as impassive as ever.
‘I was going to say… the sickness,’ he said.
‘What about it?’ I asked.
‘It’s no way for a warrior to die.’ I wasn’t sure: maybe he looked sad or maybe it was the flickering shadows thrown by the fire.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And call me a warrior again and I’ll shoot you in the back just to prove a point.’ Rannu smiled. ‘Can you leave us?’ I asked him. He seemed to ponder my request and maybe he was considering me and the kind of person I was. Whatever he was thinking, it seemed like a long time before he nodded and walked back towards Gibby’s car.
‘Hey,’ I said as I approached the fire. Morag looked up; she’d obviously been crying.
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Come to spend some time with the hybrid whore? Give me five hundred euros and I’ll suck your cock.’ She turned back to the fire blinking away tears. With impact-resistant plastic instead of eyes, I wasn’t able to cry; hearing that I wished I could. I sat down cross-legged next to her and drew a burning stick from the fire, using it to light a cigarette. I thought about what had happened. She was eighteen years old, and a group of men with a combined age of over one hundred and fifty had effectively ganged up on her to give her a hard time. That wasn’t what it had seemed like at the time, but in retrospect that was what had happened. Why would they, why would we, do that?