Free Veteran by Gavin Smith Page B

the average squaddie and we could never get hold of one of Them or any of Their tech. It was always destroyed before it got to us. All we knew was They wanted to kill us, that They hated us.’ He frowned, presumably as he received some information on his internal visual display.
    ‘You said they weren’t aliens?’ Morag asked nervously. Vicar turned to look at her. Once he had had an eyeful he started talking again, though still staring at her.
    ‘There is no apparent purpose to Them. They appear to exist only to inflict suffering on humanity. They are here to test us.’ Morag seemed to be drinking in his words.
    ‘So what are They?’ she asked falteringly. I knew what was coming. I’d heard variations of this spiel before.
    ‘Demons,’ Vicar said, as dramatically as he could manage. Morag looked up at me and I shrugged.
    ‘He’s not a demon,’ she muttered quietly and then looked down at her hands. Vicar either didn’t hear her or chose not to respond. He got the Ninja settled into the cradle of the ad hoc medical suite and turned to look at me.
    ‘What’s going on? What are you doing with this?’ he asked, nodding at the creature. I realised I didn’t really have an answer, at least not one that made sense. What was I doing? I was taking the word of a group of rig hookers over my chain of command and committing treason against my entire species at the same time.
    ‘I want to talk to it,’ I said. Vicar’s head jerked around to look at me, his businesslike manner gone.
    ‘Who’re you running from?’ he demanded.
    ‘Rolleston,’ I said. Vicar nodded.
    ‘Understand this,’ he said, pointing at the creature. ‘Those are the servants of the adversary. If They speak They will only offer lies and we have no business communing with Them.’ He turned back to look at the creature.
    ‘That sounds like Rolleston,’ I said, though I didn’t really mean it. Vicar was busy examining his machines, a look of concentration on his face.
    ‘Repent,’ he said, though clearly his mind was on other things as he searched through an old filing cabinet. ‘Or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.’ He found what he was looking for, pulling out a solid-state memory cube, something that could hold an unimaginable amount of information. He placed a couple of jacks into two of the plugs in the back of his skull, plugging the other end of one into the medical suite and the other into the memory block. I stood up.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. Vicar ignored me. His eyes rolled back up into their sockets, an affectation that signalled he was in the net. I took this opportunity to search around Vicar’s workspace until I found what I was looking for. There were a number of different ECM blocks. I picked what I thought was the best one and ran a diagnostic on it. It wasn’t working right so I chose another and another until I found one that was still functioning properly.
    ‘That’ll cost you,’ a disembodied voice said. Morag jumped, but it was Vicar, in the net but presumably still linked up to the internal surveillance systems of the church. The voice came from a speaker on the pulpit.
    ‘How are you intending on paying for all this, by the way?’ Vicar’s tinny disembodied voice asked.
    ‘I’m sure we can work something—’ I began, not really having a good answer. Fortunately the alien lost all cohesion at that moment, distracting us from the topic of money. One second it was solid, the next there was black liquid raining down on the stone floor of the church and soaking through the patched fabric cradle of the medical suite. I looked at it in astonishment, though I don’t know why. I’d seen this happen to the aliens all through the Sirius system, but for some reason here, in my hometown, it still seemed to come as a surprise. Morag let out a little whimpering noise.
    ‘Vicar, what’s going on?’ I demanded.
    ‘It’s all right,’ came the