‘What do you want me to say, Mudge? Look at them. They’re fucking starving and we’re very low on friends here. Besides, I served with some Maori guys on loan from the Kiwi SAS. They were hard bastards.’
Mudge grinned. ‘Everyone seems hard to you.’
They were Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles, or a deserter element of them, an armoured cavalry unit. Mother and Tailgunner seemed to run things, backed by Dog Face and Big Henry. Strange was just local colour, I think. The infantry, tank and artillery crews they had with them, nearly all Maoris as well, called the five of them the Ngati Apakura. It meant the Tribe of the Woman Who Urged Revenge. The Bismarck-class mech was also called Apakura. They called themselves whanau. As far as I could tell it meant family.
The five were close, very tight. They’d grown up on the streets together with no family but each other. They’d run as a gang because they’d had to. It was the street politics of victimise or be a victim. The street ate children who couldn’t find a way to protect themselves. They’d formed their gang, their tribe, and still wore their colours as patches on the back of their cut-off, armoured leather jackets.
Mudge had managed to find all this out while talking to Big Henry and some of the others in the camp who he hadn’t pissed off yet. I suspected he was relying on shared narcotics rather than charisma to make friends.
They’d learned to drive mechs in the mines. They’d piloted stripped-down mining versions — all the best parts had gone to the front to be used on fighting mechs — but the resources had to keep flowing. Big Henry had told Mudge that they’d lost as many people to mine accidents before they got drafted as they had in the war. The five were all that was left of their family. Christ knows how they’d managed to stay in the same platoon together all this time.
The Black/Freedom Squadrons were claiming to be the Earth government in exile. They’d turned up with Cronin at their head. It seems that despite what God had thought, Lalande and not Sirius had been their first stop. They’d laid a false trail for us. This made sense if what we suspected about the Citadel was correct.
The Freedom Squadrons had put out a story that we’d been a Them fifth column and had pulled off propaganda coups by making the Earth believe the war was over and taking control of the net with a Them virus. There’s even been edited footage of us taking Atlantis played on the vizzes. I felt used.
The Freedom Squadron called Demiurge the Freedom Wave. Sadly, calling something the opposite of what it was seemed to work in propaganda. People listened to names. It was much easier than studying actions. Cronin, the spokesperson for the so-called Earth government in exile, described it as the last defence against the Them computer virus, a sort of global comms net inoculation.
Tailgunner called it the Black Wave. He saw it for what it was and had isolated their systems and fled their pa or firebase after an encounter with what sounded like a Themtech-enhanced operator. I was impressed they’d shot down one of the Black Squadron’s next-generation assault shuttles with a mech.
Some other members of their unit had joined them and they had found other stragglers in the caves. Then people on the run from the Black Squadrons came looking for them. All in all, there were about two hundred of them. Mainly infantry, a few support, three tank crews, two of whom actually had tanks, and a self-propelled artillery crew complete with tracked SP gun. They also had almost enough APCs in various states of repair to move everyone if they had to.
It was a lot of mouths to feed. What they’d discovered early on was that if any of them got captured then they were compromised almost immediately. One of their people had gone missing while scouting for supplies. The next thing they knew their pa had been hit by a mixed force of NZ colonial regulars backed by the Black Squadrons. They’d only got away after a vicious firefight because they collapsed a tunnel after they’d managed a fighting retreat. Since then they’d been hiding in the deep caves. They moved every couple of weeks or if someone went missing, even if the poor fucker had just got lost. I figured that they were still alive because they weren’t important enough for Rolleston to deal with yet.
The whanau knew that Demiurge meant total surveillance in the areas that it controlled. This limited their options and meant that they had very little information about what was going on in the more densely populated areas above their heads. And of course it made getting food very difficult.
They’d managed a few raids for supplies but this wasn’t their kind of war. I didn’t doubt for a second that they were all very good in a stand-up fight, which was what they were trained for, but if the Black Squadrons were going to be fought it would mean using guerrilla tactics. Mechs just aren’t all that useful for that kind of thing.
On the other hand, they had wiped out any Black Squadron types they’d found in the deeper levels. Anyone who came looking for them for reasons other than joining was also killed. There was a problem with this tactic, however, a more concentrated form of what I’d been feeling. Anyone of us would kill Rolleston, Cronin or the Grey Lady as soon as look at them. The same went for any of the Themtech-enhanced arse-lickers here, but most of the soldiers were just normal draftees trying to stay alive. I didn’t like the idea of killing them but it was abstract for me. If some poor bastard was pointing an assault rifle at me it was always going to be him in the him-or-me stakes. The people here would know some of the guys they’d have to shoot. They’d recognised some of the people who’d attacked their pa with the Black Squadrons. The rest of the forces on Lalande and in the colonies would buy Cronin’s story — there was no real reason not to. That meant that they’d think that these guys, and us, were the bad guys. Not just the bad guys but species traitors who’d sold out all of mankind. Come to that, I was a bit worried about what would happen when the whanau saw through our disguise and realised that we were the people who’d released God into the net.
‘How come you just didn’t do as you were told? Make things easy on yourselves?’ I asked.
We were sitting in a circle next to the FAVs trying to make sure nobody nicked the rest of our stuff. Cat was actually on guard but she was still close enough to the conversation to join in if she wanted. Mother, Tailgunner, Dog Face and Big Henry were facing us over a camp stove. We were attempting to eat, but the sulphurous atmosphere made everything taste like farts to me. It didn’t seem to bother Merle. He was wolfing his food down.
Strange was standing just outside the circle we’d formed, in shadow between the pools of light provided by two of the portable lamps. Each of us was taking it in turns to be stared at by the girl. It was disconcerting. This wasn’t someone trying to be odd for the sake of it, or for effect like Mudge; this was someone who was damaged in some way. I noticed that Morag was spending a lot of time looking back at her.
‘We’re not very good at doing what we’re told,’ Dog Face growled. I think he was rueing the mess they found themselves in. I knew how he felt.
‘Why were all your mechs’ comms shut down?’ Pagan asked.
I watched them glance between each other uncomfortably. There was obviously something there that they didn’t want to talk about.
‘We were warned,’ Tailgunner finally said.
‘By who?’ I asked.
They didn’t answer. Close to starving or not, we couldn’t strong-arm these people. Normally I’d have been pissed off — after all we were all in the same shit — but I could see their point of view. This was a huge risk for them. For all they knew, we were the bad guys and the rest of our Freedom Squadron friends were on their way. We’d have to work for their trust.