‘Are you just saying that or have you got any evidence?’ Tailgunner asked.
‘It’s a suspicion. Operators sent before us returned brainwashed and you said yourself that when you lose people you get compromised almost immediately.’
‘That’s a reason to hide -’ Mother started.
‘And starve.’ Merle wasn’t getting off that point.
‘- not fight.’
‘Well that’s your choice, isn’t it? You either fight, hide or surrender,’ I said.
Big Henry and Dog Face bristled at the word surrender. These guys might be street-bred scavengers, brawlers, thieves and survivors, but they had pride.
‘I’ve known Rolleston for a long time. You surrender, you’ll get used or killed. You hide, you’ll starve, or if you raid for supplies then sooner or later he’ll get round to hunting you down when you become a big enough pain in the arse. Besides, if you’re going to fight for supplies you may as well just fight. You ask, why fight? Survival. The rest is window dressing to provide a little bit of hope for motivational purposes,’ I said.
Mother stared at me. Finally she gave a humourless laugh.
‘See, that’s a language I understand,’ she told me.
It looked like I’d found a way to motivate her.
Strange walked out of the darkness and lay down next to Mother, her head in the older woman’s lap. Mother started stroking the girl’s long dark hair.
‘So can we see the fragment of Demiurge?’ Pagan asked.
Tailgunner opened his mouth to reply.
‘Not so fast,’ Mother said. ‘What do we get?’
‘What the fuck is wrong with you? Have you not been listening?’ Merle demanded angrily.
I was smiling. I liked this woman. Her survival skills were keenly honed. I could see why they looked to her.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘Help,’ she said. She had not liked saying that.
‘Supplies?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘You’re taking her seriously. We can take this bit of Demiurge any time we-’ Merle started.
I turned on him. ‘That’s enough. If we can take from the enemy, deny them supplies, fuck with their infrastructure, than that’s part of our remit here. We also need more intel. You don’t like that, you think you’re better off on your own, then fuck off.’
It was a gamble. He could just leave, and we needed him, but I couldn’t have him questioning everything like this. Chinese Parliament or not, he was proving disruptive. Not to mention it was fucking wearing. He was angry. I could see that. Bruised pride. Politics was so tiresome. I was a little worried he might try and kill me. There was more than a possibility he was capable of succeeding. I could see his point. We weren’t the well-oiled machine he was used to; also he was a solo act, used to doing things his way. But we were making this up as we went along, out of necessity. The whole thing was a juggling act and he needed to help or leave.
Mudge turned to him. ‘Merle, I think you need to wind your neck in a bit or this just won’t work.’
Merle opened his mouth to respond angrily.
‘Merle,’ Cat said.
I turned round to look at her. She was still on guard, cradling her gyroscopically supported railgun. Merle didn’t say anything. He just nodded and relaxed.
‘You help us; we’ll help you,’ Mother said.
13
The cable car was heavily armoured with a number of weapon systems sticking out of it like spines. Most of them were for point defence. The cable was carbon nanotube in an armoured sheath. Even allowing for this, the cable looked very vulnerable. Tailgunner had confirmed that during the twenty-year-long, on-off siege of Moa City, the cable car normally didn’t last long when They came calling. The locals had only just got this one up and running again.
We were sharing the crowded car with grubby, drawn, exhausted-looking miners coming off shift. I hoped the crowd was enough to hide us from the ever-present surveillance but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we stuck out. We were wearing clean clothes and looked healthy. I could feel the security lens burning into me, scrutinising me. It was as if Demiurge was staring at us. Which it would be as it ran our features through various facial recognition programs.
The cavern that Moa City occupied was the largest yet. It was more like a large alpine valley with a roof of stone. The cavern walls close enough to see were cut into terraces where they’d been extensively mined. This made me uncomfortable. It was like chipping away at the walls of your own house and then wondering why the roof fell on you.
Enormous geothermally powered strip-lighting rigs hung from the cavern roof among the stalactites. It was supposed to be daytime but the harsh light was more institutional than daylight. It wasn’t total either. Many of the lights had been destroyed or damaged. Some hung down from the rock; others flickered on and off intermittently. At ‘night’ the lights would go UV, providing what little modified vegetation was left with the band of light it needed.
The floor of the cavern was supposed to be a lush carpet of vegetation broken up by plantation-style mansions cut out of the rock itself. Big Henry had told me that it had been fashionable to have a seam of precious metal run through the wall of your own house. The problem with the Garden District was that the New Zealand colonial forces hadn’t been able to defend it when They had swarmed in from Nightside.
‘I remember during one of the attacks — the first one I saw — I looked down from the city and it looked like the whole place was crawling. It was like a carpet of insects on a nature viz. You could barely see the ground,’ Tailgunner said as he saw me gazing down at the cavern floor.
We’d used some of the morphic compound to change his features. His tattoos — they were called ta moko apparently and told his story — had been covered with foundation. The whanau were nothing if not pragmatic. A bandanna covered the computer tech protruding from his skull.
‘There’s people down there,’ I said. In some places huge bonfires were burning and by magnifying my optics I could just about make out large groups around the fires. There were large, oddly shaped statuary near some of the people.
‘They call themselves the End,’ Tailgunner said. I could hear the contempt in his voice. ‘They’re deserters. Part of some suicide cult. They use their religious beliefs to justify their cowardice. They moved into the Garden when They moved out.’
I had always been somewhat impressed with conscientious objectors. I was less sure how I felt about deserters. It was too much like running out on your mates when they needed you.
‘Who are the guys in the civvy-looking APCs?’ Cat asked.
There were wheeled armoured vehicles moving around far below us.
‘Probably salvage teams and private bailiffs,’ Tailgunner told us. ‘When They came the first time the Garden was overrun. Those that had the chance evacuated. The thing is, They don’t loot — no interest in what we have, just in killing us. In some of the houses there are still valuables left. Not to mention that some of the ostentatious bastards had veins of precious metals running through their homes. So the old owners, if they still have money, send teams in to clear out the squatters and see what’s left. Others are private concerns, looters.’
Far below us I saw muzzle flashes and the strobe of a laser in the streets. Much of it was already rubble, the abused ghost of a wealthy neighbourhood. The same could be said for almost all of the rest of the cavern. Moa City had been under siege for almost half of the war since Lalande 2 had been invaded fifty-five years ago. The story of the siege was written in craters, scars, gouges, blackened and melted stone almost everywhere you looked. No part of the enormous cavern was more heavily damaged than the city itself.