Free Veteran by Gavin Smith

jack and dropped it into the footwell of the aircar, praying that Vicar had done what I’d asked.
    ‘C’mon,’ I said, and we headed towards the corner of Commercial and High Street. There stood an ancient pre-Final Human Conflict stone church. Moving light from within the building backlit the stained-glass windows covered in hundreds of years of city grime. Behind us the aircar took off. Morag watched it head down the High Street beneath the raised roadways. It wouldn’t defeat satellite surveillance but hopefully it would slow Rolleston down enough to buy us some time. The only problem was I had lost my ECM block. I would need another or they would get my transponder.
    ‘Isn’t that really illegal?’ she asked.
    ‘Treason, associating with prostitutes.’ I turned to look at her. ‘I think you’re a bad influence on me.’ She managed a weak smile again but I think it may have been for my benefit. Hand inside my long coat, I approached the thick armoured double doors. The fact that they opened as I pushed gave me hope.

    ‘... the white light was not Them! No! It was not one of their infernal weapons! The white light was from the sky, from heaven, it was judgement! The spear of God, a warning to those who would indulge in unholy couplings!’ To give Vicar his credit he could adapt and improvise to make his sermons topical.
    Inside was bare undressed stone. The stained-glass windows had holograms projected onto them. The stylised hellish vistas gave the inside of the church a reddish glow that seemed somehow warm, belying the horrific imagery. There were a number of plastic pews, where the truly wretched and miserable sat being lambasted by Vicar’s sermons. Behind the altar and off to one side I could see Vicar’s work area, various tools and banks of equipment, much of it jury-rigged or built from scratch by himself.
    Vicar stood in the pulpit. Presumably it had once been made of wood but that had probably been traded, or burnt for fuel a long time ago. Now it was just a metal and plastic frame.
    Vicar himself looked the same, maybe a little older, a little wilder around his already wild eyes. He wore a black vest and dog collar, his powerful frame just beginning to go to seed. He had a long unkempt salt-and-pepper beard, and still-human eyes if you ignored the look in them.
    Half his head was covered in long, matted curly hair, the same salt and pepper as his beard. The other half was ugly military tech, a built-in, fast and powerful computer, but as with most military tech it made absolutely no concession to design aesthetics. I could see more elegant add-ons that had presumably been done by Vicar himself in order to keep up with technology and improve his shelf life as a hacker. In his day he’d been one of the best, and as such was drafted into the Signals Corps, and from there he became Green Slime, Military so-called Intelligence. Vicar was still no slouch today, though presumably he had been superseded, like all of us, by the younger, faster and hungrier.
    ‘Out!’ I barked at Vicar’s ragged congregation as I limped into the church, holding the wound in my leg together.
    ‘This is a house of God!’ Vicar screamed at me, drool dangling off his beard. The congregation tried to decide who they were most afraid of. My Mastodon being pulled free of its holster gave me the edge, and the desperate-looking congregation scrambled out the door past Morag and me.
    ‘Lock us down, Vicar,’ I said. ‘Now!’ Vicar ran an appraising glance over the state I was in. His eyes lingered on Morag, still in her worn basque, before finally looking at the car blanket dripping black ichor onto the floor.
    ‘What kind of party are we having, Jakob?’ he asked.
    ‘Lock it down,’ I said again, this time more forcefully. Behind me I heard numerous heavy-sounding locks clank into place on the armoured door, now that the last of the congregation had gone. Vicar smiled his mad, wild smile as concertinaed salvaged