Chapter Five
Papua New Guinea. Present time
The basics of Nephilim psychology were one of the first things Mike had learned during his medic training, soon after awakening outside of the decanting labs. With his corona jack still puffy and sore to touch, the Creche Chaplain uploaded the knowledge in his first lessons, before he’d even been introduced to his squad. He had to know how the men in his care reacted to pain, to fear, to being shot, to the threat of infection or death, and what they were given to counteract these stressors. Monitoring their spiritual strength and their compliance to the Law was one of his solemn duties as a soldier. The stern technician who administered his first GNOSIS sessions was up-front about what was happening to him. “Your mind is being filled with the word of the Lord. You belong to Him. He decides your life, your death. You cannot eat, breathe or speak without Our blessing.”
Operant conditioning, he’d called it. The Host had filled him with the Lord until he was fit to choke, but it was all wrong. He had been given a broken program.
As the morning wore on, Mike lost what little coordination he’d had. He couldn’t turn his head. The muscles of his neck and torso twitched with spasms when he tried to move. Not for the first time, he wondered if it wasn’t more than some mental problem, if it wasn’t just in his head. The damp jungle crawled with every possible kind of poisonous animal. His healswarm could have shut down. He could have tetanus. His body ached with deep, fiery pain, radiating from his pelvis, up through his bowels and through to his back. It was his hope that the organs would soon give out. Even that thought went against everything he had been taught and programmed with. Mike observed from a bewildered distance as the reactionary guilt washed over him in a heavy wave of languor.
The passage of time was marked by the slow crawl of sunlight across the steaming ground. Animal sounds filtered through the humid bush, the whoops and squawks of birds, the chittering of insects. Mike’s vision exploded with color as a huge bird glided through the jungle ahead and alighted clumsily on a palm tree. It was blurry, at first, but when he lifted his eyes and focused, he saw that it was barred red and green, with a huge scarlet beak like a bloody sickle claw. He didn’t know what it was called. From the front and the rear he had been pressured with what the Host wanted him to know and do. But now, he wondered… why hadn’t they told them about His works? God had created these creatures, the birds and the plants and all the insects. Why? And why had he never learned? He’d had the entire Net at his fingertips, but all he’d been taught about birds was that you could eat them, that they were immune to the diseases which made the Earth uninhabitable for the Host, and that they could give away your position to the enemy if you weren’t careful.
Mike squinted. The bird was beautiful, a flash-bomb of color in the endless sea of green, and he watched in mute fascination as it pulled a berry from the tree, held it in a clawed foot, and gnawed the pulp from around the pit. Mike had eaten some of the things that grew in the jungle. There were nuts that came in a huge round shell. He’d gotten the outer layer off, but his knife hadn’t worked on the husk inside. His cauterizer had fried it and made it taste nasty. In the end, Alpha had picked a bunch of them, got in his AEGIS, and stomped them until the shells broke. Mike remembered laughing, crouched with Fora and Twofer around the splintered mess. They picked the shards off the ground and nibbled the creamy flesh, spitting out the papery skins, while Alpha watched indulgently from the cockpit.
His reverie was split by a piercing shriek that jolted him to full alertness. A pulse of white agony shot through his abdomen. Panting for breath, eyes darting, he saw the bird flap its bright wings, screaming with a rasping saw-through-metal cry. It bounced through the trees, and was echoed by a hundred replies. This bird was the advance scout. It had found what they were searching for, and now, it called the others. Mike shrank back as the sky darkened, flinching under the winged shadows. They blew cold over his skin, a flock of soaring, drone-lean silhouettes. The cries grew louder, morphing all too easily into the screams of his squad over his dead corolink. It built higher… and then he could hear the whine of a charging HEO cannon. The Sentry!
Mike’s limbs unlocked with the anticipation of battle. He fumbled his mirror and held it out, trembling, but the Sentry was still motionless. He was sure he had heard it, but the plasma turbine was not spinning.
As his adrenaline ramped down, his body froze in pieces, one traitorous limb at a time. He was like the golem in the stories, only able to move when the Master willed it. Mike searched frantically for something else, something to take his mind off the noise and the pain and his hammering heart. He looked down, and saw a centipede the size of his forearm. It was dabbling its jaws in the trail of tacky, rotting blood that had escaped the AEGIS he hid behind. His tongue thickened with loathing, then disgust, and when he remembered that it was eating some part of his dead brother, maybe even his Alpha… hatred.
“Leave it alone.” He croaked, ears full of screams. The sounds shifted from the sounds of birds to men and then back. Mike jerked against his mental bondage. The centipede kept at its gruesome meal, antennae wiggling around its red, flat head. Mike’s anger built until it was fit to burst, and suddenly, he roared and bought his hand down, hard, splashing the creature with mud. It whirled in a spiral and scuttled away, but not far enough. When it stopped to feed again, Mike snarled, and smashed his fist down on its back. “I said leave it the fuck alone!”
The centipede’s shell cracked under the weight of the blow. The pieces wriggled, one crawling towards him. He flinched away from it with a cry, and then crashed, dizzy and unable to rise. The insect convulsed, pincers waving, and then fell still.
The chattering had cut off, the birds fallen silent. The tree had gone quiet, the leaves shuddering from their sudden freeze. Mike forced himself up, scrabbling against the mud. He was so dizzy. He got half-way before his arms gave out and pitched him back down. No good, his inner doctor chided. Mike lay on his side, teeth locked, his head pounding. Still alive.
“Mike.” A thin, frightened voice called out from the funnel. “M-Mike?”
Oh God. Mike stared at the dirt in front of his nose. His breath stuttered out. For a moment, he thought his heart had, too.
“Mike?” Niner’s voice was hollow, tinny, grinding out from a brittle, aching throat. “Mike, oh God Mike, please.”
Mike’s hands trembled around his gun, still in his hands. His lips parted, but no sound emerged for several long seconds. “Go back to sleep.” To his ears, his own voice sounded no more natural than his brother’s. “Just… go to sleep, Niner.”
He could hear Niner straining to move. “H-Help me up… we have to, we have to get back to b-base.”
“I can’t move.” Mike shook through. If he’d had any hope of rising before, it was gone now. He felt transparent, heavy and cold, like the gas that blew out around them when they jumped from the belly of a troop carrier. Pieces of him peeled off and crumbled, blowing off in the wind, and his voice cracked. “It’s, I… the fucking Grace. The programs. I can’t move.”
Niner slurred off into silence. In the long pause that followed, the birds began to call to each other again. The dead leaves that Mike stared at blurred, the ground swimming into a mass of smeared green and brown.
“Mike… don’t leave me out here. P-please.” He could hear the blood and toxins bubbling in Niner’s throat and chest. “Mike…?”
But Mike couldn’t get up. He was trapped, again, and now, he couldn’t even speak. The full horror of what had been done to them at every meal, every session of Grace, with every GNOSIS upload bore down on him. They uploaded so much, and so little of it was real. He couldn’t stop the waves of anger and self-loathing that washed through him as he struggled up against it. Hating the enemies of God was good. God wanted His enemies destroyed. If he could hate strongly enough, maybe he could move and take the war to them as he was meant to do, one stumbling step at a time.
Mike summoned the memories of Grace, reels that instilled hate of the enemy. Men dying, Raptorines plowing into squads of his own people. Hideous reptilian monsters, man-eaters, demons. But instead, he there was only the hate of God, pressing him face down into the black earth like a huge boot on the back of his neck. With slowly dawning horror, he realized that it wasn’t only God who hated. He hated Grace, the operant conditioning. He hated Alpha for dying. He hated Niner for still being alive. And he hated… he hated…
No. That was the ultimate blaspheme. Frantically, Mike tried to bend himself towards righteousness, away from darkness, but nothing could stop it once it started. He couldn’t say why God was so full of spite. He couldn’t say why nothing he had done in a decade of service had cleansed him of sin. Nothing had saved Alpha, who loved him and his squad and the Host. He hated it. But most of all, he hated Symon.
Rage bubbled up like a living thing, some hidden, bestial symbiont. He roared aloud. Some of his strength returned. It was just enough for him to remember what to do to stay alive so that he could find Symon and kill him—a compulsion even greater than the inability to eat the barrel of his own gun.
The shakes didn’t stop, but the dying embers were stoked with pure, blinding, unadulterated hate. He could live for that.
Mike rolled over, facing the clouds, and opened his mouth to the rain.
