‘The cannon!’ Cat shouted. She grabbed the barrel of the weapon and practically held it against the creature. I managed to lift the butt off the ground and hold the violently kicking weapon as round after round flew into it until it stopped moving.
I didn’t have time to even look at what we’d killed as another one burst out of the wreckage of a bar to my right. It exploded though a neon sign in a shower of sparks. I heard Mudge firing his M-19 at it and saw the useless rounds spark off its heavy armour. My shoulder laser had time to stab out at it twice before it pounced and tore Morag out of the mech’s cockpit and slammed her into the wall. It landed on top of her and a bloody metal claw powered down into her torso. I was sure she was dead. Ignoring the agony of my dislocated arm I charged the monster, all eight of my nine-inch knuckle blades extended from my forearms. I shoulder-barged it, intent on knocking it off Morag and then dealing with it. It was like shoulder-barging a mech. It didn’t move. I stopped dead. It casually clawed me, tearing off half my face and sending me flying back through the air.
I landed in the sand and scrambled to my feet desperate to get it off Morag. I knew I was too late. I knew she was dead. With a scream Cat drove more than a foot of serrated pickaxe blade on the end of a miner’s multi-tool in through the creature’s cranium and down, deep into its brain. Cat twisted the handle and pulled it off Morag. It was only then she put her burning T-shirt out.
Morag was bloody, her right leg at an odd angle, but she was moving and moaning. Thank God she’d chosen to wear armour like me and unlike Cat.
I staggered to my feet looking around for more of them. My right shoulder was dislocated. That should be difficult when you’re an amputee. It was the join to the cybernetic arm, which was hanging off at an odd angle. The painkillers in my internal drug reservoirs were trying desperately to cope.
‘Er, Jakob?’ I heard Mudge say. I looked over to where he was kneeling by the twitching corpse of the thing that had attacked Morag. I was nauseated to see it wore a mask made of a flayed human face. Mudge was still covering us but he reached down and tore the mask off. I now knew what it was that had attacked us. Actually I knew who it was that had attacked us. They were friends of Mudge’s and mine.
‘Cat?’ I said weakly as I leaned heavily against the mech’s leg.
I was still scanning all around as was my shoulder laser, though the movements of its servos were sending little jolts of pain through my shoulder. Cat walked over to me, grabbed me and pulled the arm back into its socket. I screamed. My scream was answered. Wolf howls echoed through the rock passages.
I went over and knelt by Morag. Her leg was broken, her cheek was hanging off and her chest armour had taken a battering. There was some blood where the armour had been punctured but it looked superficial. She was out cold and there was nothing we could do for her now.
‘You know these guys?’ Cat asked.
‘Yeah,’ I answered.
‘You piss them off?’
‘They’re friends of ours, saved us from getting killed.’
‘So they with the Cabal?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Mudge said. He and Cat were covering as I checked their weapons. One had a laser rifle, which I threw to Cat. She collected the spare batteries and grenades while I covered her with the gauss carbine I took off the other one. ‘This isn’t their style. I mean it is and isn’t. I mean, did Vladimir seem the type to do civvies?’
I glanced over at Mudge and then went back to scanning the area. Vladimir was fun to be around if you were on his right side, but I wouldn’t put anything past him.
‘They call themselves the Vucari,’ I told Cat. ‘They’re Spetsnaz.’
‘Oh perfect,’ Cat said. The Spetsnaz may not have been the best special forces in the world but they were one of the most feared. They were rumoured to recruit out of lunatic asylums. ‘Were they in colonial space when the Black Squadrons got there?’
‘No,’ I said. This had been bothering me. ‘They were sent out there like us.’
‘They changed sides?’ Cat asked.
Now I could see Vladimir happily perpetrating this massacre, particularly if someone owed him money, but changing sides? More than anything the Organizatsiya encouraged loyalty.
I checked their sidearms — more fucking ten millimetres. It figured. These guys liked to close with their prey and get their claws wet. I took them anyway, dropping the ones we’d nicked from the guards. We were now slightly better armed.
‘How many?’ Cat asked.
‘Squads of eight. Depends on how many squads,’ I told her. ‘Mudge, carry Morag.’ He protested that he wanted to be a shooter. ‘Don’t fucking argue with me. When you’ve completed special forces selection and training then you can be a shooter.’ He grudgingly picked her up.
We moved quickly. I wanted to get back to the ship and our gear and then look for Pagan, though I didn’t fancy his chances. I wondered if Demiurge had taken over the systems yet. Had God beaten him? God should have had the advantage. He should have had a lot more resources in terms of processing power and memory.
Cat was on point, I was at the back, Mudge was carrying Morag between us. She was better off unconscious the way her leg was hanging down. The side of my face that was hanging off was blissfully numb. We were passing another street that branched off deeper into the asteroid on our right.
‘People in the bar,’ Cat whispered.
I glanced down the street and saw the bar she meant. It had a flickering neon sign of a scantily clad woman done up like a Japanese cartoon character. I guessed this was more a brothel than a bar. Metal shutters covered the windows though several of them had been torn off. I could see numerous heat signatures inside the place.
As we continued towards the dock there was the sound of lots of guns firing long ragged bursts in our general direction. The fire was grossly inaccurate but forced us to take cover as we tried to push corpses up and into the way of the bullets. How can people still miss in the age of the smartlink? I wondered. And long bursts are just lack of self-control. This wasn’t the Vucari. They would be eating us by now.
‘We’re on your side, you stupid bastards!’ I screamed during a relative lull in the hail of fire.
‘Fuck you!’ came the heavily accented reply.
‘We just want to get across to the dock!’ I shouted back.
I was surprised when a man in a suit wearing dark glasses and holding a gun appeared in one of the windows and gestured for us to approach. I shook my head vigorously, hoping his optics would pick it up from there, and then pointed towards the dock. He continued gesturing.
‘Fuck this, let’s just go,’ Cat hissed.
‘Pagan!’ the man shouted.
I glanced between Mudge and Cat. Both of them nodded. We made a run for the brothel. As I was scanning all around us I was sure I saw movement in the pipework that ran above the major thoroughfares.
We leaped the window ledge and came barrelling into the Yakuza brothel. It was a fairly comfortable-looking affair for Freetown but I suspect that was more for the Yakuza who hung out there than the clientele. It had a central stage with a pole so the customers could see which of the desperate-looking male or female prostitutes they wanted. There was a bar and a set of metal stairs that led upstairs to the work booths.