She was sitting atop me, leg still crossed over my neck. The only real option I had left was to try and buck her off. She was too far forward to hook with my legs, and I knew that would be ineffective and only cause me pain. I knew when I was beat, or maybe I didn’t, but I was beat now. She’d walked all over me. I hadn’t even landed a blow. Being beaten by a better opponent is one thing, but I felt helpless. She still wouldn’t look at me directly.
‘I don’t suppose you’d kill me?’ I managed through blood, grit and broken teeth.
‘I’m sorry, Jakob.’ She sounded like she meant it.
I was peripherally aware of a firefight and managed to turn my head. Further down the alley I could see Cat, Morag and Mudge firing at opponents who were out of view, their lasers and assault rifles being answered by what sounded like gauss carbines. There was the occasional explosion of a grenade. I watched as Morag went down in a hail of fire. The spray of blood told me that her armour was compromised. She hit the ground but I could see she was still moving. I had to help.
When the Grey Lady had hit me in the shoulder with laser fire and then dug her claws in, she’d torn the combat jacket. There was just about enough room to bring my shoulder laser to bear.
I think when the laser slid out on its servos Josephine was surprised enough to almost have a facial expression. For a moment I had her in the laser’s cross hairs superimposed on my IVD. The red beam stabbed out. Superheated air exploded. She grabbed the laser and shifted it slightly as she moved her head to the side. It missed. Then she tore it off my shoulder.
‘That’s the closest anyone’s come for a while,’ she mused.
I could still hear the gunfight. I guessed my friends were too busy to kill me like we’d agreed. I had the presence of mind to trigger the kill switch on my internal memory. Virtual flames burned away electronic data, hopefully leaving them nothing for the inevitable system violation.
Josephine took me by the hair and pulled my head up. On the wall behind her I could see a peeling thinscreen poster of Mudge. It was a screenshot from when we’d taken over the media node on the Atlantis Spoke. He was grinning, had a spliff in his mouth and was holding his AK at port. Across the poster, written in red, was the word R ESIST. The Puppet Show had been disseminating the information we’d given them on the Cabal, the Black Squadrons and what had happened on Earth. I couldn’t help but smile. Mudge was the unacceptable face of the resistance. You had to laugh really, didn’t you?
I tried to move my head so I could see Morag but Josephine held me still. I felt her push the coma jack into one of my plugs. Felt the click as it slid home. The fight my security software put up was depressingly brief. Darkness.
15
After darkness, hell. Slowly coming to. I could feel the pain through the fugue of painkillers, my IVD red with warnings. Hopelessness accompanied consciousness. Or in other words I knew I was fucked.
Opening my eyes was like tearing off a scab. Light was pain; focusing on my surroundings, making sense of them, wasn’t much better. Calum Laird may have been a cunt but I should have taken the job with him. He was an amateur compared to the other inhabitants of the cell I was in.
I was strapped into some sort of contoured vinyl couch, properly secured despite not having the use of my arms. I could feel a single jack in one of my plugs connecting me to some kind of medical suite. I was covered in medpak-driven medgels.
‘He seems to be healing quickly,’ Josephine said quietly. She was looking at the suite’s monitor.
It looked like your standard cell — stone walls, no windows, thick metal door. I reckoned it would have been quite roomy without the hulking, patchwork presence of Martin Kring. Even through the agony I still managed to find disgust for this murderous, so-called anti-insurgency specialist.
Kring was standing impassively next to an unhappy-looking Vincent Cronin, whose salon looks, smart suit that probably cost more than most made in a year and carefully cultivated corporate duelling scars all looked out of place in this dungeon.
And of course Rolleston. Still in uniform — crisp clean fatigues. Well built, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, every inch the suave officer. He had a patient, almost indulgent smile on his face beneath his pale-blue eyes. I’d seen matt-black plastic lenses with more feeling in them than those eyes. This was a moment of clarity. I wasn’t frightened; all I felt was an overwhelming hatred. It was all I could do not to scream my hatred and anger at him.
‘I don’t really feel that I need to be here for this,’ Cronin said to Rolleston, his annoyance obvious. ‘This is your department.’
‘I thought you might want to meet the man who caused us so much trouble. Besides, he will have information that will be of use to both of us. Don’t you, Jakob? Anyway, Jakob has an important lesson to learn.’
‘I’m not being funny, right, but either torture me or kill me because we’ve got nothing to say to each other,’ I said.
‘I find myself in agreement with him,’ Cronin said with a look of disgust in my direction.
Fuck you, suit. Things would be different if I wasn’t strapped down to this couch. With two broken arms. Surrounded by hard bastards.
‘I want to know why,’ Rolleston said.
Cronin turned to look at the Major. ‘This is a waste of our time.’
‘Leave if you want.’ Rolleston just kept staring at me.
‘Why what?’ I asked.
‘Why are you here? Why do you fight? Why did you try to pull down everything we tried to make?’ I stared at him like he was mad. I hoped he picked that up. ‘When you’re suffering I want you to remember that all you had to do was kill an alien and some whores and then go back to your miserable life a bit richer.’
‘Where do I start?’ I asked incredulously. ‘I mean, you get that you shouldn’t do the things you do, yeah?’
‘Get what you can out of him; we can break him now and get after the others,’ Cronin said. He sounded impatient but there was something else there. Nervousness? Fear?
Others? That meant some of them had got away. Rolleston glared at Cronin, obviously irritated by his indiscretion. Though I couldn’t see how it mattered.
‘You understand that you’re in no position to judge me?’ Rolleston asked.
I looked down at my broken, blackened and bloody body.
‘Well not at the moment, but give me a few days to get back on my feet and I’ll give you a square go.’ It was bravado I didn’t really feel.
Rolleston laughed as if we were two old army buddies sharing a joke. Then he reached down and placed his hand on my stomach wound. I gritted my teeth, rode out the pain, wished I had more drugs. His fingers elongated and burrowed through my flesh like razor-covered worms. I screamed and writhed on the couch. Rolleston tore his bloody fingers out of me. I saw them sway and writhe as they slowly returned to looking like fingers. The medical monitor was begging for attention, bleeping with urgency. I was gasping for breath. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers writhing through my guts. Control yourself.
‘Aaaah!’ Turn it into a laugh. ‘Yes! That’s the spirit! A little more torture, a little less fucking talk!’ Because false bravado was bound to see me through, though there was still no fear, only hatred and resignation.
‘Why?’ he asked again.
‘We’ve talked this to death!’ I shouted at him through a spray of blood and spittle. ‘Just fucking get on with it!’
‘Don’t give me orders, Jakob.’ Danger in his voice. He hadn’t liked that.
‘When did you get to like the sound of your own voice so much? You were always a cunt, but I just thought you were trying to get the job done no matter what. Now you’re a fucking psycho. The Cabal have gone. They’re over, dead. You’re just a broken machine following the programming of people who either don’t exist or have switched sides.’